Reply #32: Allard Lowenstein

[welshTerrier2]

source: http://www.commondreams.org/views/032100-106.htm

Activist Allard Lowenstein Changed Many Lives
by John Nichols


America has come a long way since the political revolution of 1968, when Madison's Midge Miller and New York's Allard Lowenstein hatched a scheme that would depose a sitting president, reshape the Democratic Party and bring a generation of young activists into an electoral process that had until then seemed too closed and corrupt to bother with.

Miller and Lowenstein were part of a small band of anti-Vietnam War activists who believed it was possible to challenge President Lyndon Johnson on the issue in that year's Democratic primaries. They convinced then U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., to make the run and by the end of March, just a few days before the Wisconsin primary, Johnson was out. <skip>

Everyone in the room, it seemed, had a story about how Lowenstein, a man who literally demanded that young people commit themselves to a life of activism, had fundamentally changed their life. <skip>

Former U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder, D-Colo., got to know Lowenstein when she served as a member of the Student Senate at the University of Minnesota in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lowenstein, who was passionate about ending colonialism in Africa, drew her into the anti-apartheid movement in the days before®MD-IT¯ Nelson Mandela was jailed. "He had a knack for focusing in on issues that no one else was paying attention to and getting people to understand that these were vital struggles,'' Schroeder said. "That just shows you the energy and the passion of the man.'' <skip>

One after another, people testified to the impact that Lowenstein had on their lives, and to the activist path his memory commands them to follow even now. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., reflected about how he worked on Lowenstein's first congressional campaign. Washington lawyer Abbe Lowell -- the man who grilled Ken Starr during the House impeachment hearings -- recalled organizing an anti-war rally on Long Island in 1967 and inviting Lowenstein to speak.

"I remember his voice to this day -- calling us to do more with our lives, to do better,'' Lowell said. "For me -- as it was for a lot of people in my generation -- Al Lowenstein represented the reason I left a little place called Westbury on Long Island and ended up in a place called the Rayburn Building.''

As she listened to the testaments to her fallen comrade, Pat Schroeder noted that, in a time when Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates is considered a role model: "We don't need another Bill Gates, we need more Al Lowensteins. We really need to remember that this civilization needs a lot more Al Lowensteins.''