Norman Sherman - From Nowhere to Somewhere: My Political Journey

Copyright 2016 by Norman Sherman

All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

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Cover photo: At work in flight aboard Air Force Two, 1965

Back cover photo by Emily McDermott

Design by Zach Marell

Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.

Typeface provided by Linotype AG.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sherman, Norman, 1927

From nowhere to somewhere : my political journey : a memoir of sorts / by Norman Sherman.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-5124-0404-3 (pb : alk. paper)

1. Sherman, Norman, 1927 2. Political consultantsUnited StatesBiography.

3. Humphrey, Hubert H. (Hubert Horatio), 19111978Friends and associates. 4. United StatesPolitics and government19631969. 5. Democratic Party (U.S.)Biography. 6. Political activistsMinnesotaBiography. 7. Democratic Farmer Labor PartyBiography. 8. MinnesotaPolitics and government1951 9. MinnesotaBiography.

I. Title.

E840.8.S5325A3 2016

977.6'053092dc23

[B]

2015020757

Manufactured in the United States of America
1 BP 12/31/15
eISBN: xxx-x-xxxxx-xxx-x (pdf)
eISBN: 978-1-51240-406-7 (ePub)
eISBN: 978-1-51240-405-0 (mobi)

To Ginny with love and appreciation

and

To the memory of Hubert H. Humphrey

who changed my life as well as the nations

1. Who Am I?

Writing accurately and honestly about your own life is hard. Memories fade. The urge to make things neat and positive takes over. Leaving out overwhelms putting in at the slightest doubt of how what you say may appear next year or 10 years from now if anyone reads your story.

William James, the American philosopher, wrote over 100 years ago, The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such acts we almost always make more simple and more interesting than the truth.... Our wishes, hopes, and sometime fears are the controlling factors.

I have tried to avoid the dangers James describes as I recount my life of 87 years, most of them pleasant and fulfilling. I think I have done reasonably well in my life both personally and professionally, and I have tried to tell my story accurately in the pages that follow.

I have also written here about others, some of whom I admired, some of whom invited mixed feelings, and some I just didnt like. I have tried for accuracy and fairness as I describe each of them. Most of those I write about are people I met in my work in liberal politics since I was in my early twenties.

One person, Hubert H. Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis, U.S. senator from Minnesota, vice president of the United States, influenced much of my life. In some ways, he is more important in my story than I am myself, as odd as that sounds. That is not humility, but history.

What he did, and what I watched close-by for unforgettable years, made the lives of millions of people here and abroad better, safer, and healthier. I dont pretend he was perfect, but he stood alone as a man of intellect, heart, and decency among all the powerful and famous folks I have known.

Now, as one of my kids said in a family discussion, Lets get back to me. In the interest of honesty, and keeping William James in mind, heres part of a New York Times article that described our Humphrey staff as the presidential election of 1968 was about to begin with Humphrey as the Democratic candidate: Mr. Sherman, 40, a self-described political hack who made good, threatens occasionally to break out of anonymity through wit and irrepressibility. He comes as close to an eccentric as anyone of the Humphrey staff. Modesty prevents me from denying it all. Or any of it.

Making good as a political creature was not inevitable, or even likely. It was not so much a chosen career as happenstance. Politics became a consuming interest of mine before I was old enough to vote. I dont know quite why. My parents were poor immigrants who had come to the United States from the same area of Romania. The hostile and threatening acts against Jews in the last decades of the 19th century and the atmosphere leading up to the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 drove them and their families out.

If my folks had political views about government, elections, or candidates when I was growing up, or even when I was an adult, I dont remember any conversations or pronouncements of the sort. There may have been some, but my mother and father were focused on family and getting by, their condition most of the time after they got off their boats, and certainly in the years after their children were born. I also dont know precisely when my focus on the political and social world began, but a neighbor friend tried to get me to read Das Kapital when I was about 14. I must have, in my pre-adolescent way, expressed interest in making life better for all mankind. My introduction to Karl Marx was a flop. I read a page or two and gave it up as boring and beyond me. Yet, looking back, whatever brought me to it must also have nurtured my growing interest in political matters and activity in my later years. No one else in the family got the bug.

I think my near-fixation was, in fact, latent in the atmosphere of poverty. Being poor, having parents uncertain about food for tomorrow or rent for the next month may be beyond a childs total understanding, but the feeling, at least in my case, got through in an unsettling and lasting way. You may be too young to fully comprehend, but I think you are never too young to feel the anxiety that surrounds you. I cant be sure, but my urge to remake the nation, and maybe the world, likely grew out of that fertile soil.

Politics, for whatever reason, has been a chronic condition for a long time. It has been my drug of choice. It is a condition for which there is no political penicillin. There was no escape, and Im glad. In a bizarre pattern of starts and stops, it has made my life fun and interesting and satisfying for about 65 years. It was short of an obsession, but a good deal more than a hobby. None of what took place was likely considering my early work life.

As a teenager, I worked as a soda jerk in our neighborhood drug store. I dug ditches for the Minneapolis Gas Company to run pipes from the main to new houses being built after World War II. My foreman, a Pole from northeast Minneapolis who had never met someone like me, used to repeat, with a headshake, Im working with a Jewisher. It seemed less prejudice than novelty, but I had to restrain myself from repeating a bit of learned wisdom available for use with a number of folks: My people already had diabetes when your people were still painting themselves blue.

I never stayed long at anything. I taught briefly as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. Over the years since, I ran a bookstore and a small publishing company. I worked for a major farm co-op and a municipal bond company. I wrote the narration for a film on safely refueling nuclear submarines.