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“Our Father, Who Art in Congress”:

The Political Beginnings of Father Robert F. Drinan, S.J.

By

Casey Bohlen

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

In the Department of History at Brown University Thesis Advisor: Luther Spoehr

April 14, 2008

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Contents

Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... 3

Preface ............................................................................................................................................ 4

Chapter One: A Chronological Introduction ............................................................................. 7

Chapter Two: The Policy Platforms ......................................................................................... 15

Third District Democrats: The Policy Concerns of 1970 ......................................................... 17

Problematic Peace Campaigns: The National Context ............................................................. 23

Drinan’s Platform: A Dynamic (Peace) Campaign .................................................................. 27

Chapter Three: The Roman Collar ........................................................................................... 36

Catholic Opposition and Drinan’s Reassurances ...................................................................... 39

Non-Catholics, American Legal Theory, and the Issue of Abortion ........................................ 47

The Roman Collar as a Source of Moral Fortitude ................................................................... 52

One Last Speech, at Unknown Date and Location ................................................................... 57

Chapter Four: The Character ................................................................................................... 59

The Logistics: What It Took to Be a “New Politician” ............................................................ 61

The Substance: Grassroots Organizing and the Pursuit of Change .......................................... 65

The General Election: Philbin, McGlennon, and Smear Campaigns........................................ 70

Drinan’s Integrity: A Couple of Letter Exchanges ................................................................... 78

Chapter Five: The First Term and Beyond .............................................................................. 84

What “The Future” Entailed: A Freshman in the House .......................................................... 87

Looking Forward Despite the Past: A Second Campaign for Congress ................................... 96

Concluding Thoughts .............................................................................................................. 103

Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 107

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Spoehr, who has been an exceptional advisor

and intellectual companion throughout this process. He focused my lines of inquiry, pushed me

to sharpen my prose, and always had time to talk about the present if I couldn’t take another

minute of the past.

I would also like to thank the immensely helpful professors, archivists, and librarians that I met

along the way. Holly Snyder, Brown’s wonderfully talented North American History Librarian,

was the first to mention Father Drinan’s name to me – and her off-hand comment quite literally

became the foundation of this paper, for which I will be forever grateful. The helpful folks at

Boston College’s Burns Library helped me navigate the confusion of Drinan’s recently opened

Congressional Archive, and pointed me towards a Faculty Archive that became essential to

understanding my subject’s early life. Professor Kenneth Sacks provided me with indispensable

feedback on my prospectus, and the hours spent discussing historical writing in his seminar were

central to my perspective and approach. And Professor Robert Self deserves more thanks than I

can give – for schooling me in the ways of library research last summer, of course, but also for

getting a directionless college student excited about the field of history just in time to file his

concentration forms.

My roommates and fellow thesis-writers, Matthew Cohen and Alan Gabel, deserve my thanks as

well, for allowing me to blanket our living room with stacks of newspaper articles and for

spending countless hours in their labs, helping to constantly remind me how glad I am to have

chosen the humanities.

Finally, I would like to thank the unceasingly supportive Eliza Congdon. Her presence over the

last year and a half has helped to keep me sane – she knew precisely when to commiserate, when

to make constructive suggestions, and when to lure me away from my work with the latest

episode of Lost. She believed in me throughout this entire process, and I can only hope that the

final product will make her proud.

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Preface

The collective vision that we commonly refer to as our “American History” is, in many

ways, a complex amalgam wrought by expert story-tellers, which informs our present about the

contours of our past in the hope that we may better direct our future. As academic trends ebb

and flow, the characters in these stories also change, and these days scarcely an historical article

can be published without focusing on an underrepresented race, gender, or class. This quest for

diversity is an indisputably positive development, and it enriches and strengthens our portrait of

the past. But it also limits the brush strokes of that portrait to categorical frameworks, and often

assumes that a story is worth the telling simply because of its subject’s ethnic, gendered, or

socioeconomic traits. These pages are thus, in one sense, nothing new: they contain the story of

Congressman Robert F. Drinan, S.J., yet another old, white male, and his first campaign for

political office. But in another sense, one that prioritizes the appeal of an individual story at the

cost of trends and categories, it is quite a bit more –

It is the story of a fiery anti-war crusader, a radical dove who ran for national office

instead of taking his protest to the streets; who united an unusually diverse group of constituents

by persuading them that American militarism contributed to a vast array of societal ills; who

fought back against the rising tide of Nixonian fear-mongering and the thinly-veiled racism of

calls for “law and order”; who was victorious in 1970, a year that was notoriously brutal for

peace candidates across the nation; who strove to transform the idealistic dreams of the nineteen-

sixties into the political realities of the nineteen-seventies; who waged war on war.

It is the story of a Catholic priest, a Jesuit activist whose religious faith compelled him to

help stop American military involvement in Southeast Asia; who was opposed by Protestants

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worried about papist attempts to break down the separation of Church and State; who was

opposed by fellow Catholics concerned about the corruptive and corrosive forces of American

politics; who was nevertheless convinced that America desperately needed new public leaders,

representatives who combined strong advocacy for dramatic social change with a robust respect

for the Constitution; who brought both his Roman collar and his Georgetown law degree to bear

on the pressing issues of his time.

It is the story of a New Politician, a fresh face who ran against the encrusted corruption of

a fourteen-term incumbent; who mounted one of the first genuinely grassroots campaigns, a

massive get-out-the-vote effort that was years ahead of its time; who fought for Congressional

reform and the abolition of the seniority system, seeking to open the door for a politics rooted in

hope and change; who laid claim to an authentic public personality, which he believed would

help him guide America to a brighter future, free of the patronage and personal favors that had

damaged the endeavors of past generations; who was genuinely “new” in a diversity of ways.

It is a story of disappointment, of the depressing steam that spat and hissed when the cold

waters of political reality doused Drinan’s fires; of the obstacles and roadblocks that the

Democratic Party hierarchy threw up in the way of reform; of the 92nd Congress’ failure to stand

up to the war-mongering of the President and the Pentagon; of the transformative effects wrought

by political sea-changes in the early 1970s; of a politician’s re-election on a platform that he had

run explicitly against just two years prior; of the often withering effects of American politics.

And it is a story of a politician’s beginnings; of an idealistic priest’s first public fight to

reform American society; of a hard-nosed lawyer’s first foray into the bitter battles of American

politics; of a character forged in the world of academia, tested by the heat of an electoral

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campaign, and then launched into the complexity of the U.S. Legislature; of the ways in which

Drinan’s early years help to illuminate his later endeavors; of the ways in which those later

endeavors can tell readers much about American politics writ large.

It is, in short, a story that ought to be told.

Chapter One

A Chronological Introduction: Father Drinan, the Third District, and the Citizens Caucus

This story actually begins in 1968, two years prior to Father Drinan’s first campaign.

Although the news cycle was dominated by the Presidential race between political giants Richard

Nixon, Hubert H. Humphrey, and George Wallace at the time, a minor three-way fight for a seat

in the House of Representatives was being waged in the backwaters of Massachusetts as well.

Called “the most exciting of the state’s congressional contests” by the Boston Globe, its front-

runner was Philip J. Philbin, a 70-year old incumbent of thirteen terms who, also according to the

Globe, “assiduously skirt[ed] definitive statements on campaign issues” and “avoided any debate

or confrontation with his opponents.” As the Democratic Party’s candidate in a district where

registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans two-to-one, there might have been little reason

to suppose that the opposition stood a chance. 1

But the Massachusetts Third had been redistricted in 1967, according to Alvin Levin, a

lawyer and political analyst, later explained, and the new demographic dynamic changed the

nature of the race dramatically. Prior to the redistricting, the district had been similar to the

typical voting base of most New Deal Democrats – a working class constituency that focused on

bread-and-butter issues and preferred the security of political seniority to lofty liberal ideals.

The redistricting, however, had tacked on several wealthy, residential, and staunchly anti-war

suburbs of Boston. As Levin later pointed out, it had became “obvious to liberals of both parties

1 Carol Liston, “At stake: 8 seats in the Congress,” The Boston Globe, November 3, 1968.

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that a progressive, peace-oriented candidate could be elected from the new district.”2 As a

consequence, two anti-war platforms soon emerged: that of Republican Laurence Curtis, who

echoed the lines of Richard Nixon and demanded an “honorably negotiated peace in Vietnam,”

and that of Independent Chandler H. Stevens, who called for the “immediate cessation of

bombing in Vietnam.”3

The anti-war bloc went out to the polls in force, and managed to muster 52% of the vote

for peace candidates – but they split those ballots between Curtis and Stevens.4 Philbin walked

away with a plurality, and local peace activists were bitterly disappointed. It was clear that an

electoral upset required unified opposition to Philbin, and peace groups had soon set their sights

on the next Congressional election. In late 1969, they formed an ad hoc committee called the

Third District Citizens’ Caucus and drafted a questionnaire to be sent out to prospective

Congressional candidates from both parties. The widely ranging questions were designed to help

the Caucus find the most “dedicated and trustworthy anti-war candidate,” as reporter James

Higgins later put it. The most electable respondents were to be invited to a district convention in

February 1970. 5

One of these questionnaires was sent to the main subject of this story, Father Robert F.

Drinan. Born in 1920 and raised in the southern suburbs of Boston, Drinan’s spent his late teens,

twenties, and thirties flitting between institutions of higher learning, and he was an exceptionally

well-educated man as a result. He attended Boston College as an undergraduate, stayed on to

pursue a Masters degree, and chose to join the Jesuit order in the same year that he graduated

2 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 21, 1970. 3 Carol Liston, “At stake: 8 seats in the Congress,” The Boston Globe, November 3, 1968. 4 Thomas M. Gannon, “Reverend Father Congressman,” America, November 21, 1970. 5 Account of Caucus formation paraphrased from: James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 21, 1970.

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from the latter program. He then went on to receive both an LL.B. and an LL.M. from

Georgetown Law by 1950, was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1953, and earned a doctorate in

theology from Gregorian University in Rome in 1954. (And as if those degrees were not enough,

he was awarded twenty-one honorary degrees thereafter.) Although the curious reader will

wonder what internal workings motivated Drinan to alternate between the pursuit of a legal

career and a clerical one, almost no documents remain from the early period of Drinan’s life with

which to consider the question. But by 1956, Drinan had accepted a position as Dean of Boston

College Law School, to which he thankfully left many of his papers in a well-preserved faculty

archive.

By all accounts, Drinan was immensely popular among students. After spending a

semester as a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas Law School, for example, students had

been asked to rank his performance based on three criteria: reading material, knowledge of

subject matter, and teaching method. Over 90% of the respondents gave him the highest possible

score in every single category. Said one student, “I wish we had more like him. He had life, and

he put it into this course.”6 Passionate and eloquent, he appears to have been an outstanding

educator whose magnetic personality made him one of the most popular faculty members on

campus. And considering that he had spent the previous two decades of his life on the campuses

of various universities, one would think that he would be quite comfortable spending the rest of

his life in this academic environment.

But after a decade as Dean, Drinan began to chafe at the narrow influence his position in

academia afforded him. In a personal notebook from the late 1960s, he revealed his frustration

in choppy fragments of firm pen strokes, which expressed terse complaints and serious self-

6 DFA, Document Box: University of Texas Student Poll. Italics mine.

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doubt. On April 13, 1968, for example, he filled two pages with a blistering attack on Boston

College, which was a typical entry for this period:

“13 yrs – without a voice!! – no determination re future of B.C.!! – Lies – Mismanagement – Deception – Hypocrisy – Slander behind back – the agonies of the reforms that are needed!! – sweep incompetence out !!! –”7

Although the weaknesses of his institution were not specifically enumerated, the passion

with which he confronted them was evident in the deep impressions his pen made on the paper,

as well as the words that it left behind. And of equal importance was his outrage with his own

impotence, with his inability to successfully pursue reform. By June 13, 1968, these frustrations

had begun to take their toll, and it had become increasingly clear to Drinan that he needed

another outlet for his zeal. Healthy anger with the Boston College administration had given way

to despondency. He no longer called out for change in a righteous, fiery voice; instead, his prose

was dampened by depression and thoughts of suicide:

“Loss of buoyancy & nerve – ? – for 1st time desire – hope – to die!! – to do so by driving off br. – attractive – ? – not really – aloneness deepens”8

Although the notebook ended with that entry, his life did not.

Instead, in the middle of 1968 Drinan began to shift the focus of his pursuits, becoming

preoccupied with political events outside Boston College. This new application of his talents

manifested itself with a newfound interest in authorship – in 1969, Seabury Press published a

book of his entitled Democracy, Dissent, and Disorder. In it, Drinan examined the so-called

“disorder” and “open rebellions” of the late 1960s, concerning himself especially with antiwar

7 DFA, Document Box: Personal Notebook, entry April 13, 1968. 8 Ibid., entry June 13, 1968.

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protests, the “Negro revolution,” and “the general decay and rejection of hitherto accepted moral

standards.”9 The book was essentially a defense of civil disobedience, an argument that

extralegal protest could be both necessary and just – and it relied on potent examples such as

Nazi Germany, where the disobedience of unjust laws might have saved innocent lives, to make

its case. But it was also a rebuke of the rising “law and order” backlash among average

Americans, which it claimed would only worsen America’s plight. “Law does not necessarily

bring order, nor does order in any true sense result from the enforcement of law,” the book

stated, but the blind support of all laws, without considerations of justice, would undoubtedly

result in the riots and disorder that those same laws were designed to prevent. Those who wished

to preserve order needed to acknowledge the injustices of American society, and to then work

within the system in order to address them. Quoting President John F. Kennedy, the book

concluded with an admonition: those who ignore the righteous claims of civil protesters and

“make peaceful revolution impossible” would, in turn, “make violent revolution inevitable.”10

Although these pages revealed how liberal Drinan was, at least insofar as he defended

then-controversial acts of civil disobedience, they also showcased his rhetorical talent and

excellent persuasive skills. The book received decidedly positive reviews as a result. The

Boston Globe was especially laudatory: it compared Drinan’s “seditious tract” to the work of

Samuel Adams and Theodore Parker; it claimed that the book would be particularly important

for “the silent majority, and for those who serve as Summer patriots and sunshine soldiers in the

cause of liberalism;” and it declared that “each [chapter] should be serialized in all the

9 Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Democracy, Dissent, and Disorder: The Issues and the Law (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), 3-4. 10 Ibid., 4-17.

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newspapers of the nation.”11 While other reviews were not quite as enthusiastic, Drinan

nevertheless received a good deal of positive publicity. America called it “a short but amazingly

penetrating commentary,” for example, and Provident Book Reviews pronounced that “the world

needs more Christian, humane, legal yet just minds like Robert F. Drinan.”12 Drinan’s reputation

as a persuasive writer with a decidedly liberal bent was spreading fast.

Simultaneously, Drinan was becoming increasingly vocal about his opposition to U.S.

military involvement in Southeast Asia. On May 25, 1969, he flew to Saigon as part of an eight-

person group whose mission was to investigate political and religious freedom in Vietnam,

including reports of repression and torture. Fellow members included a bishop of the United

Methodist Church, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, the executive director of the

American Civil Liberties Union, and a professor of theology from the Jewish Theological

Seminary.13 Perhaps because of this group’s diversity, or perhaps because their findings were so

damning, the team’s report of widespread human rights violations was soon published in major

newspapers from coast to coast.14

Drinan himself published a four-part editorial in the Washington Post about the trip, in

which he penned a vivid description of political prisoners in South Vietnam, claiming that they

were frequently detained by the U.S. military without being charged and were often subjected to

torture. He noted that his meetings with members of the State Department revealed that they

knew about these abuses, and he then went on to lambast them for lying to the American

11 DFA, Document Box: Boston Globe Sunday Book Review, Dec 7, 1969. 12 DFA, Document Box: America Book Review, February 28, 1970. DFA, Document Box: Provident Book Reviews, April 1970. 13 “Study Unit Leaves to See Saigon Jails,” New York Times, May 26, 1969. 14 See the following: John L. Hess, “8 From U.S. Find Wide ‘Suppression’ In South Vietnam,” The New York Times, June 7, 1969. “Study Team Says Saigon Uses Torture,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1969. “Thieu Rules by Terror, Study Says,” The Washington Post, June 11, 1969.

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public.15 Drinan’s name was again popping up on the cutting edge of liberal politics, with

increasing frequency and with fervent opposition to the war.

So when the Third Congressional Caucus convened on February 21, 1970, in search of a

persuasive speaker with a national reputation and anti-war credentials, Father Drinan’s name was

on the tip of almost everybody’s tongue. More than 2,000 citizens had shown up to consider the

six finalists who had agreed to speak at the convention, and Drinan’s turn on the stage soon

came. He delivered a fiery speech, lamenting the nation’s obsession with anti-communism and

calling for a new approach to foreign policy. It is worth quoting an excerpt of the speech, if only

to gain a sense of the radical, pacifist stance that he took during his first political foray:

“I say, boldly and unequivocally, that the policy of containment has failed and that an entirely new foreign policy for America is the first imperative of a society of free men… I advocate, therefore, not merely the cessation of all hostilities in Vietnam, but an imaginative and massive program to bring about disarmament.”16

This was not the speech of a career politician, tentatively dipping his foot into the

changing waters of public opinion, avoiding extreme language and appealing to the lowest

common denominator. On the contrary, this was a bold call for change from a young and

passionate priest; this was an indictment of the anticommunist position that his own Church had

taken for the last several decades; this was a radical call to pull all troops out immediately and

commence unilateral disarmament; this was incendiary.

By the fourth ballot, his only major challenger had decided to withdraw from the race.

(Interestingly enough, this challenger was John Kerry, who, as the Democratic Party’s

15 See the following: Robert F. Drinan, S.J., “Vietnamese Prison Shocks Study Team,” The Washington Post, June 20, 1969. Robert F. Drinan, S.J., “The U.S. Aid to South Vietnam on ‘Internal Security,’” The Washington Post, June 21, 1969. Robert F. Drinan, S.J., “President Thieu Explains,” The Washington Post, June 24, 1969. Robert F. Drinan, S.J., “Vietnam Justice – and the Pursuit of Truth in Washington,” The Washington Post, June 28, 1969. 16 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 21, 1970.

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unsuccessful Presidential nominee in 2004, campaigned largely against American military

involvement in Iraq, echoing many of the anti-war sentiments that he voiced at this Caucus over

three decades earlier.) Drinan received the two-thirds majority necessary for nomination and

declared triumphantly, “If the incumbent in the Third District can be defeated by anyone in 1970,

that person is myself.”17

The campaign had begun.

17 John H. Fenton, “Massachusetts Politics: A Priestly Hat Is Thrown Into the Ring,” The New York Times, February 23, 1970.

Chapter Two

The Policy Platforms: Antiwar Sentiments and the Pursuit of Peace

Drinan’s caucus speech was an excellent foreshadowing of the next chapter in his story, a

verbal expression of the ideas and style that would come to characterize his campaign. It

focused on specific policy issues and goals, seeking to bring the social concerns of his time to the

forefront of public debate, and to make his candidacy largely about his stances on pressing

political affairs. In this respect, as one writer to the Washington Post put it, he was part of “a

new breed of young, issues-oriented, reform-minded candidates for the House.” And while the

two questions of age and reform eventually became central to Drinan’s campaign rhetoric (see

Chapter Four), his quest for public office began and ended with an explicitly issues-oriented

approach. Any serious exploration of his victory must consequently examine his policy

platforms in depth.1

Ending the Vietnam War, of course, was the most important issue for the Third District

Citizen’s Caucus, as well as for Drinan himself. Official military involvement in Southeast Asia

had begun almost two decades earlier, and the protracted war had escalated significantly under

President Lyndon B. Johnson. Public opposition had increased correspondingly, largely in

response to military conscription, the toll in American lives, and news coverage of the

devastating bombing and chemical warfare waged by the United States. Although the course of

the war had altered under the Nixon administration’s Vietnamization policy and American troop

strength had been reduced by 60,000 by December 1969, from a peak of over 500,000 in 1968,

1 Sanford Gottlieb, “Letter to the Editor: The ‘Peace’ Candidates,” The Washington Post, November 13, 1970.

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anti-war sentiments continued to be strong throughout 1970 – stoked by such events as the trial

of Lieutenant Calley for war crimes in the My Lai Massacre, the widely opposed invasion of

Cambodia in April, and the shootings of four students by National Guardsman at an anti-war

protest at Kent State. Events such as these energized Father Drinan and Third District peace

activists, providing much of the impetus for Drinan’s campaign.2

But there was no guarantee that the rest of the district felt similarly about the issue; the

support of various local peace groups, while certainly inspiring to more liberal observers, would

not win a Congressional election on its own. Drinan needed a plurality of the district to vote for

him in the Democratic primary, he wanted to sway that plurality without compromising his own

values and positions, and he needed a serious strategy in order to for that to happen. This chapter

will attempt to understand that strategy, and to retell the various ways in which it played out over

the course of the campaign season. It will begin with a comprehensive look at the political

preferences of the Third District, in an attempt to understand the playing field that Drinan was

competing on. And although this field might have slightly favored Drinan’s dovish disposition, a

brief survey of post-election news articles will show that single-issue anti-war candidates had

almost no chance to succeed in 1970. Luckily for his political career, however, Drinan was by

no means a single-issue candidate – and the bulk of this chapter will examine the complexity of

his platform and the dynamic approach to politicking that explains, in large part, Drinan’s

victory.

2 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 677-685.

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Third District Democrats: The Policy Concerns of 1970

As a political novice who was swept into his candidacy rather unexpectedly, Drinan

began campaigning with no real idea of how to create his policy platforms. Accordingly, in

April 1970, he commissioned New York pollsters Oliver Quayle & Co. to examine his district

and to provide him with campaign strategy for the Democratic primary.3 Quayle designed and

executed a comprehensive survey that sought to discover the opinions, political preferences, and

past voting patterns of likely Third District voters. The sixty-six page, typewritten document that

he produced is a treasure trove for historians, a proverbial gold mine of insight into the Third

District. Although Drinan did not follow all of Quayle’s recommendations – the fiery Jesuit was

mostly interested in understanding his audience, in order to best persuade them, rather than in the

politically expedient suggestions of pollsters – this report informed most of his campaign

decisions and is crucial to understanding his victory. Most relevant to this particular discussion

was Quayle’s attempt to gauge the voters’ positions on major issues, which he spent a substantial

amount of the report discussing.

He used two types of questions to identify the issues that were most important to the

Third District. The first was open-ended: respondents were asked to volunteer pressing political

concerns, and were then asked to rank each concern in order of importance, and to identify their

personal positions on the issues. The second type of question was indirectly multiple-choice.

Respondents were first asked to rate President Nixon’s performance on a variety of issues, which

were provided in a list. They were then asked to identify the three items on the list that were

most important to them; their answers to this question were doubtlessly influenced by their

3 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #1 (Reports, Polls, Surveys): “A Survey of the Political Climate in Massachusetts’ Third Congressional District,” Study #1321, May 1970. Hereafter referred to as Quayle Survey.

opinion of Nixon, but Quayle maintained that it was an effective method nonetheless. The

results varied slightly between questions,

types is presented in Figure One.

Third District voters identified problems at similar rates in the two

notable exception of taxes and spending,

select as important when provided with a list of other social ills. Almost 60% of respondents

viewed the Vietnam War as important, making it the single most selected issue in both question

types. Drugs and disorder were identified at slightly higher rates than environmental problems,

both of which polled between 30% and 40%, depending on the question type. Cost of living was

selected by just over a quarter of respondents, and poverty came in sixth, polli

20%. After reporting these numbers, which reveal a range of concerns that was rather typical for

1970, Quayle’s report addressed each issue in turn and discussed the voters’ preferences in

greater detail.

4 Open-Ended Results: Quayle Survey, 33

0%10%20%30%40%50%60%

Taxes and

Spending

Quayle Survey : The Issues

18


results varied slightly between questions, and a comparison of the responses to both question

types is presented in Figure One.4

Figure 1

Third District voters identified problems at similar rates in the two questions, with the

notable exception of taxes and spending, which less than half as many people were likely to



nd disorder were identified at slightly higher rates than environmental problems,


selected by just over a quarter of respondents, and poverty came in sixth, polling at just under



Ended Results: Quayle Survey, 33-5. Multiple-Choice Results: Quayle Survey, 36-7.

Taxes

Spending

Vietnam Drugs & Disorder

Ecology &

Pollution

Cost of Living

Poverty

Quayle Survey : The Issues

Open-Ended Multiple-Choice


and a comparison of the responses to both question-

questions, with the

which less than half as many people were likely to



nd disorder were identified at slightly higher rates than environmental problems,


ng at just under



19

It first took up the Third District’s economic concerns, a category into which Quayle

lumped issues of poverty, cost of living, and taxes and spending. Noting the high rates of

identification, he argued that Third District voters were voicing their frustration with the current

state of affairs. They generally opposed hikes in government spending, which were increasingly

seen as wasteful, and they were also worried about rising prices and the effects of inflation on the

larger economy. Quayle pointed out that this would normally work against incumbent

politicians, who are often blamed for the behavior of market forces that they have no direct

control over, but that nearly 60% of voters gave Philbin a vote of confidence on the issue. As a

result, Quayle advised Drinan to avoid the issue while on the stump, arguing that the more

people focused on the economy, the better off Philbin would be.5

Third District voters were also concerned about disorderly conduct, criminal activity and

local drug use; this was to be expected, as these anxieties were commonplace in 1970, a year in

which Republican candidates were often waging campaigns based on the pursuit of “law and

order.” Respondents remained alarmed about the urban riots of the late 1960s, and the suburban

constituency was particularly worried about drug use among their children and within their

communities. Yet despite the fact that these issues generally pushed voters towards more

conservative candidates, Quayle believed that they marked an opportunity for Drinan. His

position at Boston College was seen as an advantage in dealing with these problems, which were

frequently associated with local campus life, and Quayle advised him to stress his ability to relate

to a younger generation by making “them feel they are part of the system without giving up

authority.” He also suggested that Philbin’s age made him rather weak on these issues, which

were seen as modern afflictions. Philbin should be portrayed “as a thoroughly amicable chap,”

5 Ibid., 38-9.

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he advised, “who did quite well with the problems of yesteryear but who is too out of date to deal

with the future.” (In many ways, Drinan followed this suggestion – but this strategy was more

closely related to his New Politics than his policy platforms, and is discussed in depth in Chapter

Four as a result.)6

The Third District was also distinctly concerned about ecological issues, although its

response rate may have been inflated by the timing of the survey, which was conducted in the

wake of the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970. In any case, they named industrial

pollution as one of the biggest problems affecting their district, whose suburban communities

shared a border with the smokestacks of manufacturing complexes. Quayle recommended that

Drinan use this issue in the hopes of obtaining free publicity; he suggested, among other things,

that Drinan designate a day to clean up the city of Newton, find a special campaign vehicle that

emitted little or no pollution, and even make a special effort to pick up garbage when being

followed by reporters. Although Drinan ignored most of this advice, it suggests the importance

of the issue to the Third District, and the positive glow that could surround a candidate who

advocated environmental reform.7

But despite the potential importance of drugs, disorder, and ecology, all three were

“secondary issues” at best, according to Quayle’s final summary.8 Only one concern mattered to

over half of the respondents in both survey questions, and it was also the only issue that Quayle

believed counted as a top priority: the Vietnam War. Drinan was a hard-line anti-war liberal,

who opposed the Vietnam War on the grounds that it was a morally bankrupt quest, the product

of a senselessly hostile form of anti-Communism and the cause of serious domestic unrest.

6 Ibid., 44-5. 7 Ibid., 48. 8 Ibid., 54.

Philbin was a pro-war liberal, who believed that Communism had to be contained and rolled

back where possible and believed in the fundamental rightness of the American cause

Third District’s position was much less clear

among Quayle’s data will be quite informative and revealing.

Upon realizing how important the Vietnam War was to the Third District, Quayle used a

follow-up survey to determine their opinions, while simultaneously gauging their familiarit

the candidates’ positions. He gave respondents the following three statements:

A = “We should go all out and fight an unlimited war (short of using nuclear weapons).”B = “We should do as we are: stay in Vietnam, continue peace negotiations in Parikeep reducing our military commitments as much as possible.”C = “We should get out of Vietnam now, or at least within 18 months.”

They were then asked to identify three things: (1) the statement that they most closely

agreed with, (2) the statement that they thought Philbin most closely agreed with, and (3) the

statement that they thought Drinan most closely agreed with. The results are laid out in Figure

Two.9

9 Ibid., 41-2.

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

A = "We should go all

out."

Quayle Survey : The Vietnam War

(1) Respondent

21

war liberal, who believed that Communism had to be contained and rolled

back where possible and believed in the fundamental rightness of the American cause

was much less clear-cut, however, and spending a bit more time spent

among Quayle’s data will be quite informative and revealing.


up survey to determine their opinions, while simultaneously gauging their familiarit

the candidates’ positions. He gave respondents the following three statements:

A = “We should go all out and fight an unlimited war (short of using nuclear weapons).”B = “We should do as we are: stay in Vietnam, continue peace negotiations in Parikeep reducing our military commitments as much as possible.” C = “We should get out of Vietnam now, or at least within 18 months.”


nt that they thought Philbin most closely agreed with, and (3) the


Figure 2


out."

B = "We should do as we are."

C = "We should get out

now."

Not Sure

Quayle Survey : The Vietnam War

(1) Respondent (2) Philbin (3) Drinan

war liberal, who believed that Communism had to be contained and rolled

back where possible and believed in the fundamental rightness of the American cause. The

t more time spent


up survey to determine their opinions, while simultaneously gauging their familiarity with

A = “We should go all out and fight an unlimited war (short of using nuclear weapons).” B = “We should do as we are: stay in Vietnam, continue peace negotiations in Paris, and


nt that they thought Philbin most closely agreed with, and (3) the


22

Respondents themselves were left-of-center on this issue: over half of Democratic voters

said that they favored complete troop withdrawal by the end of 1971, while a mere 16%

advocated an increase in military commitments. Another 26% favored a moderate course

modeled after Nixon’s so-called “honorable peace,” and only 4% were unsure about where they

stood on the issue. According to Quayle, responses to the open-ended question corroborated and

explained these results; the bulk of the District said that they advocated withdrawal because they

were “either confused and frustrated or dovish.”10

The most striking part of Figure Two, however, is not that most Democratic voters

opposed the war, but that an even greater number of voters were clueless about the candidates’

opinions. Drinan was a newcomer to local politics, so it might be expected that 75% of

respondents were unfamiliar with his position. But it is downright shocking that 62% of

respondents did not know how Philbin, who had represented them for twenty-eight years and

who was Vice-Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, felt about the Third District’s

most important issue. Even more startling is the 10% that mistakenly identified him with

Statement C, apparently under the impression that he was a dove despite his consistent support

for military expansion in Indochina. The Vietnam War was thus the most important issue in the

Third Congressional District and respondents were more closely aligned with Drinan’s position

than Philbin’s, but a whopping 72% of voters were either not familiar with or mistaken about

Philbin’s hawkish disposition.

Quayle’s report according proclaimed Vietnam “the number one issue for Father Drinan.”

Quayle recommended pulling Philbin’s statements about the war from the Congressional record

and vociferously accusing Philbin of being the hawk that he was. In addition, Quayle suggested

10 Ibid., 39.

23

that Drinan publicly and vocally broadcast his pacifism. Even if doing so might alienate a few

moderate voters, the report pointed out, it would also transform the race into a clear-cut choice

between a peace and war candidate. And given the choice, Quayle’s survey indicated that the

majority of voters would side with the pacifist. 11 Although Drinan may not have been

particularly interested in following the prescriptions of pollsters and seasoned politicians, this

recommendation provided him with evidence that passionate anti-war rhetoric like his Caucus

speech could actually bring about electoral victory. He read these recommendations on May 29;

as early as June 17, the New York Times was describing the Third District race as a contest

between an “unthinking rubber stamp… hawk” and a “witty, outspoken dove.”12 The campaign

had almost immediately begun to center on Drinan’s peace platform.

__________

Problematic Peace Campaigns: The National Context

The decision to embrace Quayle’s strategic recommendations, at least on the issue of the

Vietnam War, placed Drinan squarely in the middle of a national trend: young pacifist politicians

were challenging older, hawkish incumbents, and they were making the Vietnam War a central

component of their campaigns. From Bella Abzug of New York to Romano T. Mazzoli of

Kentucky, newcomer doves were running against hawks for seats in both the Senate and the

House in such unexpected numbers that, if newspaper coverage was any indication, it might even

be viewed as a trend.

11 Ibid., 42. 12 R.W. Apple Jr., “Priest in Massachusetts Is Opposed as Politician,” The New York Times, June 17, 1970.

24

A New York Times article from August 21 noted, however, that 1970 “has not been, and

almost certainly will not be, a banner year for antiwar candidates.” It went on to quote an un-

named anti-war Governor as evidence: “The fact is that in most constituencies the war is just not

salable as an issue this year.”13 A Washington Post article from November 5 came to the same

conclusion, listing a series of anti-war politicians whose campaigns had failed and slapping the

following headline on top: “Peace… Candidates Fared Badly With Voters.”14 Historians of the

period have since tended to confirm these assertions: Michael Flamm, for example, spends an

entire book arguing that the Vietnam War was less politically influential during this period than

concerns about law and order, despite the fact that military commitments were consistently

identified as the most important issue by voters.15

This fact raises an important question for this discussion, which focuses on a successful

anti-war candidate in 1970: was the Massachusetts Third District somehow exceptional in its

worry about and opposition to the Vietnam War? Or, to put the question another way, is

Drinan’s story of success, told against a background of defeat for peace candidates nationwide,

best explained by an unusually high number of dovish constituents? A comparison of Quayle’s

survey with national data answers this question in the negative; although the District did differ

slightly from the rest of America, it was not exceptional enough to guarantee a victory for

Drinan.

A national Gallup poll conducted almost one year before the election, for example,

presented respondents with the following question:

13 R.W. Apple Jr., “How to Win as a Dove,” The New York Times, August 21, 1970. 14 Chalmers M. Roberts, “Peace and 3d-Party Candidates Fared Badly With Voters,” The Washington Post, November 5, 1970. 15 Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

Here are four different plans the UniteVietnam. Which one do you prefer?

Plan A: Withdraw all troops from Vietnam immediately.Plan B: Withdraw all troops by end of 1970.Plan C: Withdraw troops but take as many years to do this as are needed toover to the South Vietnamese.Plan D: Send more troops to Vietnam and step up the fighting.

Attentive readers will notice obvious similarities between the Gallup questions and

Quayle’s survey: Plans A and B are comparable to Quayle’s Statem

correspond to Statements B and A, respectively. Rearranging the numbers in this way allows us

to compare the attitudes of Drinan’s district to the mood of the United States as a whole. Figure

Three graphs the two sets of data a

Although the numbers were not an exact match by any means, neither was the Third

District a world apart from the rest of the country. The general trends of the two polls echo each

other, and while 13% more district residents demanded immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, a

not insignificant 5% more district residents called for an increase in troop commitments. In other

16 The Gallup Poll (New York: Random House, 1972), 2232. Survey #795

0%

20%

40%

60%


out."

Figure Three : The Vietnam War

25

Here are four different plans the United States could follow in dealing with the war in Vietnam. Which one do you prefer?

Plan A: Withdraw all troops from Vietnam immediately. Plan B: Withdraw all troops by end of 1970. Plan C: Withdraw troops but take as many years to do this as are needed toover to the South Vietnamese. Plan D: Send more troops to Vietnam and step up the fighting.16


Quayle’s survey: Plans A and B are comparable to Quayle’s Statement C, while Plans C and D



Three graphs the two sets of data against each other.

Figure 3



% more district residents demanded immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, a


andom House, 1972), 2232. Survey #795-K, Question #5.


out."

B = "We should do as we are."

C = "We should get out now."

Not Sure

Figure Three : The Vietnam War

3rd District Nationwide

d States could follow in dealing with the war in

Plan C: Withdraw troops but take as many years to do this as are needed to turn the war


ent C, while Plans C and D





% more district residents demanded immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, a


26

words, Drinan’s target audience was more dovish than the rest of America, but it was also more

hawkish. As a consequence, although he had more support on this issue than he might have had

elsewhere, he also had almost 1.5 times more opposition. As a result, the most significant

difference between the Third District and the nation lay not in respondents’ opinions of the war

per se, but in the breakdown of those who selected Statement B (moderates) and those who

didn’t (either doves or hawks). That is to say, America was, by and large, more moderate than

the Third District – and because neither Drinan nor Philbin was moderate on this issue, the

outcome of their race cannot be said to lie entirely in the attitudes of the district.

Furthermore, and perhaps more convincingly, the Gallup Organization polled Americans

about the Vietnam War throughout 1970 and discovered that there was rapidly increasing

opposition to the Vietnam War, attributable in part to widespread opposition to the spring

invasion of Cambodia. Asking voters across the nation a straightforward question – “Do you

think that the United States should withdraw from Vietnam by the end of 1971?” – revealed that

America was 8% more likely to favor withdrawal in November than the Third District had been

just six months earlier. 17 (Quayle’s survey, unfortunately, was not repeated over the course of

the election cycle, so a comparison to the static date from April 1970 is the best analysis

available.) Even if the numbers for the Massachusetts Third had changed by then, which they

quite possibly had, district voters would have needed to alter their opinions at an astronomical

rate in order to significantly outpace the rest of America.

17 Question is drawn from The Gallup Poll, 2271. Special Survey, Nov 8, Question 1. The other two polls used are The Gallup Poll, 2237. Survey #798, Question #3, and The Gallup Poll, 2266. Survey #813-K, Question #16. Their questions read as follows, respectively: “Some United States senators are saying that we should withdraw all our troops from Vietnam immediately. Would you favor or oppose this?” and “A proposal has been made in Congress to require the United States Government to bring home all United States troops from Vietnam before the end of next year. Would you like to have your congressman vote for or against this proposal?” Quayle’s respondents that agreed with Statement C can reasonably be expected to have answered “yes” to the Gallup question. Those that agreed with Statements A & B are assumed to have answered “no.”

27

And lest it be suggested that the Third District placed more importance on the war than

the rest of the nation, and that American opinion on the war was less relevant to election

outcomes as a result, there is one more Gallup poll to consider. On October 15, 1970,

respondents were asked to identify the most important problem facing this country. Although

no percentages were given in the report issued by Gallup, the Vietnam War came in first.

Following behind were, in order, campus violence, civil rights, high cost of living, and crime.18

This list, of course, is strikingly similar to the Third District’s list of preferences presented earlier

in this chapter – not only did Americans also name Vietnam the number one issue, but both sets

of respondents’ secondary concerns lined up in an almost identical order. At the least, these

comparisons show that the Third District was not different enough from the rest of the nation to

fully explain Drinan’s success against a background of failure for other peace candidates.

__________

Drinan’s Platform: A Dynamic (Peace) Campaign

So if the explanation for Drinan’s success does not lie entirely in the make-up of the

district, we must begin to look elsewhere. And the same New York Times article that declared

peace platforms “not salable as an issue” in August 1970 also provided a clue for this

investigation. In describing the successful primary campaign of peace candidate Rev. Joseph D.

Duffey of Connecticut, the article’s author concluded that Duffey’s success stemmed from his

diverse coalition of “students, antiwar suburbanites, and union members,” which he forged by

drawing connections between secondary concerns, like the failing economy, to American

involvement in Indochina. This tactic, the article asserted, was “far more promising to the peace

18 The Gallup Poll, 2268. Survey #814-B, Question #10a.

28

movement than the usual moralistic, one-issue crusades.” By appealing “to pocketbooks as well

as to ideology,” Duffey found “the best answer to President Nixon’s coalition of middle

Americans.”19

Although the New York Times article did not refer to Drinan, this was his answer as well.

An examination of his campaign advertisements and policy papers, as well as the few remaining

transcripts of speeches, reveals a similarly complex approach. He addressed an enormous

breadth of policy concerns, including the economic problems that Quayle had urged him to

avoid, but he almost always managed to tie the Vietnam War into these various discussions. In

doing so, he sold himself as a respectable politician who could handle the myriad problems of a

national representative, while still stressing the issue on which he could make the most political

gains.

His four-page official position paper on the Vietnam War neatly illustrated this tactic –

while readers might expect this document to chronicle the terrible conditions in Vietnam or to

speak at length of the dangers inherent in a militarized society, it instead focused mostly on

domestic issues. Its opening argument, for example, claimed that “American involvement in the

Indochina War has had deep negative impacts on American politics, the economy, society and

global posture.” The political turmoil that characterized the 1960s, it continued, was caused by

this self-same war, which “fragmented American political structures and divided its people.”

Only “a dramatic reversal” in American foreign policy could “restore faith in the American

political system.”20

19 R.W. Apple Jr., “How to Win as a Dove,” The New York Times, August 21, 1970. 20 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Indochina War.”

29

This line of argument was typical of how Drinan addressed one of the Third District’s

major concerns: domestic disorder. To some extent, he followed Quayle’s recommendations and

argued that he could curb domestic disorder by virtue of his experience as an educator. He often

brought up the fact that he could connect to radical, disillusioned students, the source of much

consternation for the so-called “Silent Majority,” and many of his campaign advertisements

reflected that. Figure 4 is one example of this – its

Beatles reference grounded Drinan’s candidacy in

youth culture, thus helping to attract the younger vote,

but the message expressed by that reference also

stressed a politics of hopeful reconciliation, of

transcending petty generational divisions in mutual

support of (as the satellite picture indicated) an agenda

that aspired to be truly global in nature.21

But Drinan often discussed this issue more

directly, and frequently claimed that the perceived

disorder of 1970 was inextricably linked to engagement

in Vietnam. He argued that the so-called lack of law and order stemmed from a lack of faith in

American politics, which could only be restored by the withdrawal of troops from Southeast

Asia. A fact sheet distributed to campaign workers, for example, provided a list of talking points

to use in conversations with prospective supporters and donors. “The war has had a social cost

in the form of increased conflict between young and old, black and white, students and

authorities,” it claimed, and only rapid withdrawal could repair the social ties of trust that the war

21 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Primary Election Advertisement #26 (“We can work it out.”)

Figure 4

30

had torn.22 As a flyer printed by Students and Faculty for Drinan put it more directly, in

reference to the May shootings at Kent State and the April invasion of Cambodia, “The violence

and death which we have seen… is the natural, inevitable outgrowth of the mood fostered by

President Nixon when he recommitted America to further violence and death in Southeast

Asia.”23 This accusation was also typical of Drinan’s efforts to discuss domestic disorder – as he

put it in one position paper, Nixon “has driven thousands of citizens to noisy protest… By

continually doing in Southeast Asia what he told Congress he would not do, he has destroyed the

possibility of trust.”24 Social unrest and generational conflict could be traced back to Nixon and

the war, these documents suggested, and Drinan’s plan to end military conflict was depicted as

the best way to solve these problems.

Drinan launched similar criticisms when discussing the economy. Despite Quayle’s

recommendation that he avoid the topic, the markets of 1970 were shaky at best and there was

too much public concern over the issues of taxation, unemployment, and inflation for Drinan to

completely ignore it. As with domestic disorder, it was quite easy to link contemporary

problems to the military efforts in Southeast Asia. As one position paper put it, the Vietnam

War’s effect on the economy had been “shattering,” directly resulting in the following changes:

-- owners of large and small businesses have seen profits plummet -- wage-earners have seen wage-increases fail to keep up with inflation; or, increasingly, they have been fired and cannot find employment -- for many, the decline in the stock market in the past year has resulted in cruel losses, reminiscent of the Great Depression of the Hoover Administration.

Yet despite this, the same document noted, Nixon continued to pour almost $20 billion

annually into the war effort, which – according to a quote attributed to the Chairman of the

22 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisement – Print): “Fact Sheet.” 23 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisement – Print): Unidentified Flyer, “What Can You Do About Cambodia?” 24 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Nixon.”

31

Board of the Bank of America – resulted in “uncontrollable inflation and increasing

unemployment” that could only “be cured by a drastic reversal in Vietnam policy.” Citing

conservative business sources and picking on the almost universally disliked Administration

(rather than Philbin), Drinan thus linked the failing economy to the war effort and indirectly

boosted his own economic credentials in the process.25

His position paper on inflation made a similar point. In it, he noted that consumer prices

had risen at a rate of over 6% a year, despite the fact that over 4.8% of working people were

unemployed. And how did this happen? “This disastrous inflation began in 1965 when the

Vietnam War was escalated. Under the Nixon Administration inflation has gone from bad to

worse.” Drinan spent a few paragraphs discussing his actual economic proposals: he mainly

argued for voluntary price and wage restraints, which he hoped would slow inflation without

deepening the recession, and which he claimed had worked during the Kennedy years. But that

would not be enough, the paper went on to say – defense spending was inflationary spending,

and expert investigators agreed “that the Pentagon is spending far more than national security

requires. Many billions” could be safely reinvested, and “spent on housing” and “public

transportation,” among other things.26

A plethora of print ads made similar arguments. Some simply pushed the idea that

Nixon’s economic plan had not been working, and that change was needed to turn the economy

around. One such ad blew up a monochrome photograph of a faceless crowd, ominous in nature,

and slapped the following headline over it: “4,607,000 Americans out of work.” The back

proclaimed that “Robert Drinan Challenges Nixon Economics,” and went on to argue that the

25 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Indochina War." 26 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Inflation.”

32

Administration thought of the economy as numbers and percentages, which was unacceptable in

light of the human cost of the recent downturn. Drinan, on the other hand, “thinks about people

and families – trying to make ends meet.” His populist attitude pushed him to put “people first,”

by fighting for full employment, support for the poor and elderly, and decreasing unnecessary

government expenditures. Without mentioning the war explicitly, ads such as this tied the failing

economy to the legacy of an unpopular wartime president, arguing that the only solution was an

agenda of humanistic change.27

Other advertisements linked inflation to the war more explicitly. One flyer sported a

picture of disgruntled customers in line at the grocery store, and its headline read, “You’re

fighting the Vietnam war at the check-out counter.” (See Figure Five.) The reverse side began

by discussing high prices at “the market,” noted that inflation was “hurting all of us,” and argued

that “the main reason is the Vietnam War.” Putting it more vividly, the ad went on to claim the

following:

Every time the Pentagon over-spends on a project like the preposterous C5-A fiasco, millions of tax dollars are eaten up. Every time the Defense Department over-spends on useless weapons and programs we don’t need, millions of tax dollars are eaten up.

Yet some old-time politicians still believe that war is good for business. Some old-time politicians really believe that war is good for the economy.

But if war is good business, why is business so bad?

Following the established pattern of linking failed policies and economic downturns to

the war effort, this advertisement was an exemplar of Drinan’s attempt to argue that military

spending was the biggest cause of inflation, and that only a dovish priest with the “courage to

27 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): General Election Advertisement #86 (“Robert Drinan Challenges Nixon Economics.”)

33

investigate military spending” and the moral fortitude to

oppose the war on ethical grounds could turn the

economy around, and bring prices back down to

affordable levels.28

Even Drinan’s discussion of the environment

touched extensively on the war: the government was

unable to combat pressing social problems, the argument

went, while it was saddled with a budget dominated by

military spending for Vietnam. His position paper on

ecological reform began by listing ecological policies that Drinan supported – pollution taxes,

modernized sewage plants, a DDT ban, higher fuel efficiency standards, wilderness preservation,

and a long-term vision for sustainable reform. But at the center of all of these measures, the

paper concluded, was Vietnam: “Only when we have returned to a peace-time economy will we

as a nation command the resources and the energy to deal with our environmental problems.

Anyone truly concerned with our environment must make ending the war in Vietnam his first

priority.” Once again, the war was portrayed as the root of America’s problems, and it needed to

be dealt with by a serious dove before other domestic issues could be addressed.29

Drinan’s speeches made the same connections that were drawn in his position papers and

print advertisements. In May 1970, during a speech at the Sheraton Boston, for example, he

outlined his motivation for pursuing public office. Speaking of his trip to Vietnam in 1969, he

claimed that the discovery of “cruelty and barbarism inflicted by the United States” had

28 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Primary Election Advertisement #18L (“You’re fighting the Vietnam war at the check-out counter.”) 29 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Environment.”

Figure 5

34

fundamentally altered his perspective. He “could not live with [him]self or [his] nation merely

by continuing peaceful protests,” and so accepted the invitation of the Citizens Caucus and began

a political campaign. But the “central question of our time,” he said, was not the war per se.

Rather, it was whether “the Congress of the United States [can] wrest away some of the

enormous power which the Executive Branch of government has… usurped from Congress.”

Drinan’s candidacy was not just about war and peace, this speech implied, but about maintaining

the system of checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers – a more conservative

goal designed to attract voters who might otherwise have supported the war effort.30

In another speech, given in Watertown, MA in June 1970, Drinan brought up his moral

opposition to the war by referencing a local radio show: “Their discussion was about the

casualties in the war. This is a terrible game that we play; saying that there were only 92 killed

last week and that we’re supposed to rejoice because the number is small… I say that the basic

element of moral values in this war is to stop the killing.” He argued that Congress could “bring

the tragic war in Indochina to an end without endangering the lives of our men now there or our

national security,” but the speech did not pass by without a reference to the current state of

markets – the need to transition from a military economy to a civilian one was a central theme of

this speech as well.31

Reviewing Drinan’s position papers, print ads, and campaign speeches makes at least one

thing is clear: his policy platforms were most elementally about the pursuit of peace in Vietnam,

but they were presented in a politically dynamic manner. The war was explicitly connected to

30 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “Excerpts from Address of Reverend Robert F. Drinan, S.J…,” May 27, 1970. 31 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4: “Father Drinan at opening of Watertown Campaign Headquarters,” June 27, 1970.

35

bread-and-butter concerns, student unrest, the preservation of democracy, and basic morality,

among many other issues. Philbin was a consistent supporter of Nixon, who was perpetuating

the war and was consequently the villain lurking behind these domestic problems. Drinan

opposed the war, and thus represented the possibility for serious reform. In a district that

identified the Vietnam War as its most pressing concern, this strategy spoke to the concerns of

both moderates and liberals, while also appealing to economic and social conservatives that

might otherwise have favored hawkish policy. Given the similarities between the Third District

and the rest of the nation, Drinan’s success as a peace candidate must be attributed to these deft

political tactics and not the pre-existing dispositions of the voters. He was not an anomalous

candidate who got lucky, but a shrewd politician who anchored a variety of contemporary

concerns to a single, powerful issue. One can’t help but wonder whether other peace candidates

might have fared better if they had taken a page out of Drinan’s playbook.

Chapter Three

The Roman Collar: A Catholic Priest in American Politics

It is tempting to consider Drinan’s campaign entirely from the perspective of issues and

policy platforms – after all, Drinan himself consciously attempted to make his candidacy about

the issues. But while his masterful discussions of these topics were compelling to hear and

fascinating to examine, elections are not entirely about rational

considerations of political proposals. One needs only to look at

a picture of Drinan on the campaign trail – such as that

reproduced in Figure Six, his black garb relieved only by a

flash of white at the base of his neck, his clerical outfit visually

defining his candidacy – to reach the conclusion that other

factors affected the outcome of this election.1

In a telling exchange, the liberal Catholic periodical America ran an editorial discussing

Drinan’s candidacy on March 21, 1970. The article’s author, Fr. Donald R. Campion, was

responding to “a peculiar note of controversy:” namely, “one or two publicists have asked

whether priests should be in politics and have answered their own question with a flat no.”

Arguing instead that the answer should instead be an emphatic yes, Fr. Campion noted that

Catholic leaders had been influential in American politics in the past, if not in such a direct

fashion, and proposed that a run for public office was not much different. Furthermore, he

posited, “we have a right, under our law, to expect that a man will not be elected to office merely

1 Figure Six: R.W. Apple, Jr., “Some Post-Primary Observations,” The New York Times, September 17, 1970.

Figure 6

37

because he is a priest, nor barred from office on the same grounds.” Campion was claiming, in

other words, that the so-called “priest-issue” was a non-issue, and that Drinan should be judged

on the grounds of his personal qualifications and policy positions, rather than his clerical collar.2

A letter-to-the-editor written in response, by one Amelia Marbre of Toledo, Ohio,

however, suggested that Drinan’s religious vocation could not be so easily dismissed.

Conceding that there should be no legal obstacles to a priest’s candidacy, she argued that

Catholic clerics ought not to engage directly in politics, even if allowed to. Noting the

“desperate shortage of priests today,” she claimed that Drinan’s first obligation was to his laity,

and that he could “better fulfill his priestly duties and at the same time his political influence by

confining his activities to the guidance of politicians in the proper moral and prudential values.”3

This attitude was shared by many Catholic voters: they believed that their religious leaders’

primary concern should be spiritual guidance, and often opposed priestly involvement in politics

on principle.

Drinan’s verbose tendencies, of course, guaranteed a lengthy response to Mrs. Marbre’s

letter, also published in America. Noting that he had spent the past dozen years serving on

“countless public advisory committees, blue ribbon commissions, study groups and other

euphemistically named groups,” he argued in his letter that the “influence and impact of all the

recommendations made by myself and other members of these groups can be summed up by the

word ‘insignificant.’” Discouraged by the ineffectiveness of these attempts to influence policy,

yearning to make a difference in the American political scene, and not interested in extralegal

activities, Drinan wrote, he was led “to the conclusion, with full authorization of all my academic

2 Donald R. Campion, “Of Many Things,” America, March 21, 1970. 3 Amelia M. Marbre, “Better Way,” America, May 9, 1970.

38

and ecclesiastical superiors, to seek a voice and a vote in the U.S. Congress, where the public

morality of America and to some extent of the world will be formed and fashioned during the

1970’s.”4

The give-and-take of this correspondence was typical of the problem that religion posed

for Drinan’s campaign. Virtually nobody argued that priests should be legally barred from

politics, and several of Drinan’s ecclesiastical superiors had apparently sanctioned his bid for

office. But Catholic laypeople like Mrs. Marbre opposed priest-candidates for different reasons,

grounded in normative ideas about the role that priests should play in public life. This situation

presented an unusual challenge for Father Drinan. On the one hand, his religious convictions

had played a major role in his decision to run for office and provided him with the moral high

ground on such issues as the Vietnam War. But on the other hand, he risked alienating voters of

his own religious persuasion by flaunting one of the most central parts of his identity on the

campaign trail.

This chapter will examine how Drinan addressed the issues raised by his priesthood, and

will argue that he engaged in a three-part balancing act. First, he sought to convince Catholic

voters that his political foray did not stand in opposition to his religious duties, that his religion

went hand-in-hand with his direct involvement in politics. At the same time, he strove to ground

his policies in American legal thinking rather than religious doctrine, and gave way to the former

when the two conflicted. In this way, he tried to avoid discussion of a church-state conflict and

hoped to retain the votes of non-Catholics. Yet his religion could not be shuffled completely to

the side: despite his separation of Catholic beliefs and American jurisprudence, he still used his

Roman collar to add a moral weight to his campaign that his opponents lacked. Although these

4 Robert F. Drinan, “To Have a Voice and Vote,” America, June 6, 1970.

39

three strategies were in constant tension, Drinan strove to reconcile them with each other – and,

in the process, to reconcile his priesthood with his campaign for political office and to respond to

the religious concerns of Third District voters.

__________

Catholic Opposition and Drinan’s Reassurances

In a telephone interview with the New York Times early in the campaign, Drinan was

asked whether his priesthood would become a controversial issue on the campaign trail. “The

Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” he replied, “which sent the first Catholic to the White House

in John F. Kennedy and the first Negro, Edward W. Brooke, to the Senate, would have no

problem in sending the first Jesuit to Congress.”5

Retrospective demographic analysis suggests just the opposite, however. If Drinan had

run in a different state, or at least in a different district, opposition from Catholic laypeople

would have been largely inconsequential. Surveys from 1970 reveal that Catholics made up only

23% of the nation’s population – and while this is an admittedly significant proportion,

opposition from within this group would not swing the election if Protestant, Jewish, and

religiously unaffiliated voters lined up in support of Drinan. 6 Unfortunately for the campaign,

however, the Third District’s primary voters were remarkably different from the rest of America

in this respect. Nearly 74% of Democrats were Catholic, while Protestants made up only 13% of

voters and Jewish people constituted a mere 9%.7 If the sort of opposition expressed in Mrs.

5 John H. Fenton, “Massachusetts Politics: A Priestly Hat Is Thrown Into the Ring,” The New York Times, February 23, 1970. 6 The Harris Survey Yearbook of Public Opinion (New York: Louis Harris and Associates, 1971), 512. 7 Quayle Survey, 28.

40

Marbre’s letter was widespread among the Massachusetts laity, Drinan would be facing a serious

problem.

Surveys of the district confirmed that this was the case. Pollster Oliver Quayle asked

respondents to identify which candidate they favored, and then broke the results down into

religious groups. As of April 1970, Protestants had no significant difference of opinion; slightly

more of them supported Philbin, but most of them – almost 47% – remained unsure of their

political inclinations. Jewish voters, on the other hand, were solidly behind Drinan – 71%

supported him, and a meager 10% remained undecided. Although the reasons for these

preferences were undoubtedly as diverse as the voters themselves, it is likely that Protestants

knew too little about Drinan to judge him at this point and that Jewish support stemmed from his

vociferous support of the state of Israel. But Protestants and Jews made up only a quarter of

Democratic voters, so they could not have been relied upon to counter Catholic opposition.8

And as Mrs. Marbre’s letter to America implied, Catholic opposition was great indeed:

although 25% of Catholic voters remained undecided, and were theoretically up for grabs, a mere

17% supported Drinan. Quayle summed up this result by concluding that “when only one

Catholic voter in five is behind a Catholic priest, something is wrong.”9 In order to confirm the

reason behind this opposition, Quayle asked respondents whether priests should be allowed to

run for public office at all, rather than asking about Drinan specifically. While a sizeable 32% of

non-Catholics said yes, 53% of Catholics believed that their religious leaders should stay out of

politics.10 A major slice of opposition to Drinan’s candidacy thus came from his own flock, a

majority of which opposed his candidacy on principle. Due to the unique demographics of the

8 Ibid., 28. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 22.

41

district, Quayle correctly concluded that if this issue wasn’t handled properly, “the rest will be of

little importance.”11

Keeping this fact in mind, no doubt, Drinan set out to gain the approval of his

ecclesiastical superiors. Although no personal letters or internal documents remain to prove that

it was ever obtained, and some critics have argued that Drinan was actually faced with intense

opposition from within the Church, it is almost certain that his candidacy was privately blessed

by his immediate superiors within the Jesuit order and the Boston archdiocese.12 At any rate,

when the highest ranking American cardinal challenged Drinan’s political involvement two years

later, the Jesuit superior for New England jumped to his defense, calling the criticism

“completely impertinent” and noting that he was “happy to give his complete approval” to

Drinan’s political aspirations.13 It seems unlikely that this would have occurred if Drinan had

been denied permission previously.

Regardless of whether Drinan gained enough private ecclesiastical support to justify

running for office, however, his campaign certainly sought to convince Catholic voters that he

was running with the blessings of the Church. The issue was officially addressed in a document

entitled “A Clergyman in Congress,” which was sent into Catholic homes through a series of

targeted mailings. It essentially argued that priests could legitimately be candidates in American

politics, and that readers should be focusing on substantive policy issues, rather than Drinan’s

religious calling.

11 Ibid., 18. 12 For a contrary view, see the following: James Hitchcock, “The Strange Political Career of Father Drinan,” The Catholic World Report, July 1996. 13 For more on the Cardinal’s accusations, see the following: William MacKaye, “Krol Thinks Drinan Should Quit,” The Washington Post, January 11, 1972. Quotes from: United Press International, “Priest’s Participation in Politics Approved,” The Hartford Courant, February 5, 1972.

42

The document began with a series of quotations from major Catholic periodicals, all of

which affirmed his right to run for office. “Put in it simplest terms,” it quoted from the Pilot, a

publication of the Archdiocese in Boston, for example, “the fact of being a clergyman in today’s

political climate is a non-issue.” And quoting Fr. Campion’s endorsement in America: “The

notion that involvement in politics somehow compromises the standing of the priesthood is

simply a contradiction of… the role of all Christians in the modern world.” Not wishing to

discount the readers’ views, Drinan acknowledged “the concern about the propriety of a

clergyman in Congress,” but noted that “the real issues to which we must address ourselves are

those of the war abroad, inflation, poverty, drugs and domestic division and turmoil.” The

religious issue was implicitly unreal, or at least relatively unimportant – Drinan was running with

the approval of unnamed “ecclesiastical superiors,” the document concluded, so there was no

need to continue to dwell on the topic. His qualifications with regard to “real issues” took up the

remainder of the page.14

Drinan continued to stress these points in interviews with the press, as reporters

invariably raised the issue of his priesthood. The Associated Press published a transcript of one

such exchange, in which the following question was asked: “As a priest, Father Drinan, do you

think your role in Congress will differ any from the roles of other Congressmen?” He first

responded by pointing out that he was more than just a priest – he was also a lawyer and an

educator. In addition, he noted that three Protestant clergymen were currently serving in the

House of Representatives, and that their roles did not seem to be compromised by their religious

calling. But even if that were not so, he continued, Congressmen were essentially “the moral

architects” of America and their job was to “enunciate those moral convictions which [they] feel

14 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Backside of Several Unidentified Flyers, “A Clergyman In Congress.”

43

should be at the heart of American democracy.” According to Drinan, his Catholic background

would simply be another important perspective that could be put to use “for the good of the

country.” Given these assumptions, the publication of this interview implied to readers, how

could Catholics legitimately oppose a priest’s candidacy without giving their faith short shrift in

the American political process?15

The press reported on similar conversations while covering Drinan’s days on the

campaign trail. On June 17, 1970, for example, the New York Times ran a story about the

Massachusetts Democratic Convention. A female Catholic voter apparently approached Drinan

there, telling him that “she could not vote for him because he was a priest and belonged in a

parish, not in politics.” Drinan responded in his “best pastoral manner,” the reporter claimed,

noting that Protestant clergymen had served in Congress for nearly two-hundred years and

asking if “she, as a Roman Catholic, wanted to exclude clergymen of her faith from politics

while permitting Protestants to take part.” She still needed to think about the issue, but the

author of the article declared that Drinan “had clearly scored a debating point.”16

George Lardner Jr., a staff writer for the Washington Post, wrote a lengthy article that

detailed similar interactions. A nun at the Rosary Academy, he reported, had suggested to

Drinan that his candidacy might force him “into half-truths like other politicians,” and thus

corrupt his moral fortitude. Drinan responded in his typically “rapid-fire style:” too many people

“take a low view of politicians,” he argued, but in truth, “politics is the art of the possible.”

Corruption was a product of the politician, not the process, and his faith would help to keep him

safely above the fray. At a coffee-hour in Waltham, Lardner mentioned later in the article, the

15 Associated Press, “Jesuit Urges Reoriented U.S.,” The Hartford Courant, September 20, 1970. 16 R.W. Apple Jr., “Priest in Massachusetts Is Opposed as Politician,” The New York Times, June 17, 1970.

44

topic of Drinan’s priesthood came up once again. This time a local citizen forcefully informed

the candidate that a priest’s place was in the Church, not the political sphere. “This is a cop-

out,” Drinan fired back. “The Church is in the world… [and] a Christian should be involved in

the secular order to make a more compassionate and just society.”17

Stories such as these reveal the variety of ways in which Drinan sought to convince

Catholic voters to consider his candidacy despite his priesthood. Sometimes he stressed the need

for their faith to be represented in Congress, and sometimes he argued that his beliefs could help

him transcend the dirty nature of American politics. On other occasions, he linked his

Catholicism to a sense of political responsibility and implied that it was actually his duty to seek

public office. All of these arguments were aimed at winning over the Catholic majority of his

district, or at least to convince them that he should be judged by his policies, rather than his

collar. The direct reporting of his talking points in the press helped Drinan reach voters that he

could not speak to directly, bringing his arguments to their doorsteps in rolled-up bundles of

newsprint.

The press was helping Drinan’s effort in indirect ways as well. An unprecedented

number of clerical candidates were seeking public office during this period, and reporters were

not slow to catch on. Headlines such as “More Clerics Delving Into National Politics,” “As

Clergymen Enter Politics – The New Trend,” and “Clergymen Put Feet in Political Torrent”

were frequent throughout 1970, and undoubtedly helped to make Drinan’s candidacy seem more

normal, or at least less exceptional. By U.S News and World Report’s count in August 1970,

sixteen ministers and priests were running for either national or gubernatorial positions, five of

whom were Catholic. In addition, seven clerical candidates had “fallen by the wayside” and

17 George Lardner Jr., “Priest-Candidates Upset Catholics,” The Washington Post, September 15, 1970.

45

“scores” of others were running for lower offices. (The same article noted that Drinan

“exemplified” a successful religious candidate.) Although these columns were not necessarily

supportive of these candidacies, they probably made Drinan’s run for office more palatable to

Catholic voters: if so many priests and clergymen were involved in politics, readers might think,

perhaps it was not too objectionable of a decision.18

Editorials on the subject frequently made a case similar to Drinan’s, although they

usually did so without explicitly mentioning his name. An article about church-state conflict that

was published in the Los Angeles Times, for example, quoted James Madison as a definitive

authority on the issue: “Does not the exclusion of ministers of the Gospel as such violate a

fundamental principle of liberty by punishing a religious profession with the deprivation of a

civil right?” Statements such as these appealed to a sense of civic duty, and may have suggested

to readers that Catholic notions about the role of priests in public life should not trump

Constitutional concepts of political rights. 19 Other articles were more explicit. An editorial in

Christianity Today, for example, claimed that a priest taking a seat in Congress would be “no

more anomalous than for a physician or actor or farmer to do so.” As long as his legislative

initiatives were based on “grounds of national rather than sectarian interest,” this particular

writer saw no more conflict in priest candidacies than in any others. Ultimately, although “the

Scriptures teach that the Church collectively is to be greatly restricted… the role of the

18 See, for example: “As Clergymen Enter Politics – The New Trend,” U.S. News & World Report, August 10, 1970. “More Clerics Delving Into National Politics,” The Washington Post, March 14, 1970. “Clergymen Put Feet in Political Torrent,” The Hartford Courant, May 30, 1970. George B. Merry, “N.E. clergymen trade pulpits for hustings,” The Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 1970. Douglas Robinson, “Clergymen, Citing War and Poverty as Issues, Seek State and National Offices,” The New York Times, April 26, 1970. “The Clerical Candidates,” Time, June 8, 1970. 19 Robert Mullin, “Debate Over Clergymen in Congress,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1970.

46

individual layman or clergyman is much broader, and can include active participation in partisan

politics as a legitimate vocation.”20

Still more articles, such as one in the Hartford Courant, quoted influential figures to

suggest that priest-candidates were not violating their religious calling. Martin Marty, a

professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, was cited in one article as saying that

“many of these clergymen look at political office – seeking a chance to enlarge their ministry…

They are seeking the satisfaction of doing something about the social and political problems that

are directly related to national morality – war, poverty, the youth question and others.” Reverend

Joe Duffey, a fellow clergymen and political candidate, further noted that “clergymen are

concerned about values and human life… [and] today a candidate must not only sound

knowledgeable, but also show he is concerned.” Statements such as these, widely publicized in

both local and national publications, advanced the idea that clergymen could become involved in

politics without sacrificing their religious commitments – and, in fact, that they were often

fulfilling them.21

It is important to note just why so many religious leaders were suddenly becoming

involved in politics – why, in the words of U.S. News & World Report, more “men of the cloth”

were aspiring to high political office that at any other time in America’s history. Although a few

candidates were conservative ministers running for local office, usually in Southern states, most

were liberals (both Catholic and Protestant) calling for an end to the Vietnam War. The same

article noted that “the war seems to be the major cause” of priest-candidacies, that clergymen

“tend to be idealistic” and that most of them hoped to “have a solid impact on the nation’s policy

20 “Is There a Priest in the House?,” Christianity Today, December 4, 1970. 21 “More Clergymen Enter Politics,” The Hartford Courant, August 15, 1970.

47

makers” whether or not they were successful. This trend was, it concluded, partly a result of the

civil-rights movement, which fought against social and racial injustice, was deeply connected to

black religious traditions, and was, of course, led by such clergymen as the Rev. Martin Luther

King, Jr. White religious leaders were apparently moved by these often spiritual protests, and

were beginning to speak out themselves, albeit in a rather different manner. Drinan’s candidacy

was, at least in the eyes of this particular journalist, part and parcel of this wider trend.22

Ultimately, it cannot be determined how much of an effect these articles had, ubiquitous

as they might have been. Coverage of Catholic opposition to Drinan’s candidacy continued

throughout his first term, suggesting that a sizeable group of Catholic voters continued to oppose

Drinan on the grounds that priests should remain out of politics. Nevertheless, the sheer weight

of newspaper articles and editorials, of direct mailings and interviews, reveal that the concerns of

provincial Catholics were at least being addressed. Those who agreed with his policy platforms,

in any case, were probably swayed by Drinan’s argument that a priest could pursue political

office without forsaking his religious duties.

__________

Non-Catholics, American Legal Theory, and the Issue of Abortion

The plethora of headlines that stressed Drinan’s priesthood may have been helpful in

securing Catholic votes, but it must also have been a bit troubling for non-Catholics. After all, if

Drinan saw political office as an extension of his faith, as he occasionally argued, what did that

imply for constituents who did not share his religious beliefs? Swaying the Catholic vote was

crucial for Drinan’s success, but he could not afford to lose Protestant or Jewish support in the

22 “As Clergymen Enter Politics – The New Trend,” U.S. News & World Report, August 10, 1970.

48

process. In order to prevent this from happening, he frequently grounded his policy platforms in

American legal theory and stressed his background as a lawyer, rather than his religious calling,

when discussing his future in Congress. His faith was central to his personal opinions, he

suggested, but it was not sufficient to justify public legislation. For that, he would also need

legal precedents and a non-religious viewpoint.

Perhaps the most illustrative, controversial, and interesting instance of this sort of

argument came in the form of Drinan’s support for abortion rights. As most people are aware,

the Catholic Church was, and remains, an exceptionally outspoken opponent of abortion.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune on the issue, published in April 1970, the Church

had argued since at least 1869 “that ‘ensoulment’ begins at conception, making abortion

homicide.” Pope Paul VI reaffirmed that position in July 1968, two years before Drinan ran for

office, stating, “We must once again declare that the direct interruption of the generative process

already begun and, above all, directly willed and procured abortion, even if for therapeutic

reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as licit means of regulating birth.”23 Convoluted as his

syntax may have been, the Pope’s position, at least, was clear: abortion was unacceptable for

practicing Catholics.

In keeping with Church doctrine, Drinan frequently expressed personal opposition to

abortion on moral grounds. In a particularly striking encounter, he was approached by a nun

while on the campaign trail. She “had heard some of Father Drinan’s critics condemning him for

having seemed to favor abortions… ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘That’s against the teaching

of the Catholic Church.’” Drinan, of course, rushed to agree with her. “The taking of a fetus

from a healthy mother is always wrong,” he replied, and her relief was palpable. The only

23 Sheila Wolfe, “Even the Clergy Can’t Agree on Abortion Issue,” Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1970.

49

reason that she even approached him, it appears, was to “hear [him] say that.”24 On this issue,

one of major concern for Catholics, Drinan reassured his laity and fellow clergy that his personal

beliefs lined up with theirs. A mass mailing on abortion confirmed his views for Catholics who

had similar concerns, but had not taken the time to ask him about the issue themselves: “Robert

F. Drinan believes, as do millions of Americans of all faiths, that the abortion of a fetus is not

morally justified,” it unequivocally declared.25

The next sentence in that same mailing, however, revealed the complex stance that

Drinan was choosing to take: “However, a pluralistic society should not necessarily make into

law the moral views of a minority or even of a majority.”26 As he argued elsewhere, although

there was a clear Catholic teaching on the morality of abortion, “there is no such thing as a

‘Catholic position’ on the jurisprudence of abortion laws.” Put another way, “The civil law of a

pluralistic and morally diverse nation such as America should not perpetuate a law based on

moral concepts with which a significant number of persons disagree.”27 Drinan’s mailing

explicitly admitted that there was a deep, and sometimes impassable, divide between his personal

faith and his policy proposals. Although the two were frequently in agreement – as in the case of

the Vietnam War, which Drinan viewed as both immoral and illegal – the issue of abortion was a

clear-cut case in which they were not. Drinan ultimately implied to non-Catholic voters that he

would not turn his particular and personal values into legislation in such situations; his

appreciation for the American legal system would trump his Catholic beliefs if the two came into

conflict.

24 George Lardner, Jr., “Priest-Candidates Upset Catholics,” The Washington Post, September 15, 1970. 25 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Abortion and the Law.” 26 Ibid. 27 Sheila Wolfe, “Even the Clergy Can’t Agree on Abortion Issue,” Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1970.

50

In order to avoid alienating Catholics, of course, he consistently tried to build bridges

between his faith and his policies, even in such difficult cases as the issue of abortion rights. He

penned a lengthy article for the liberal Catholic periodical Commonweal, for example, in which

he argued that the Church implicitly taught that abortions ought to remain a personal and moral

decision, rather than a public and legal one. Citing the Second Ecumenical Council of the

Vatican, he pointed to the Church’s declaration that “in spreading religious faith and in

introducing religious practices, everyone ought at all times to refrain from any manner of

coercion which might seem to carry a hint of coercion or of a kind of persuasion that would be

dishonorable or unworthy.” Arguing that Catholic opposition to abortion was a “de facto

religious belief,” he pointed out that outlawing abortion would carry more than a hint of

coercion.28 Drinan thus took the position that abortion was morally wrong, but that both

Catholic doctrine and American civil liberties would prevent him from supporting that view in

the halls of Congress.

These arguments may feel a bit slippery to the modern reader, and contemporary critics

had a similar reaction. John P. Roche, a prominent pundit working for the Washington Post at

the time, was quick to criticize Drinan for this stance. In one editorial, Roche quoted Drinan as

having said that he does not “personally approve of abortion but would not let (his) personal

attitude influence (his) voting on the issue,” and noted that Drinan “supports federal aid to birth

control programs.” Rather than viewing this as an acceptable legal-moral compromise, as

Drinan was trying to portray it, Roche claimed that it should be appalling to liberals everywhere

28 Robert F. Drinan, “The State of the Abortion Question,” Commonweal, April 17, 1970.

51

and derisively called him “a candidate who promises to disregard his conscience.” He concluded

by comparing Drinan to Machiavelli.29

Drinan penned a personal response to Roche the next day. In this letter, he politely

suggested that Roche was overstating the situation, and attempted to clear up any confusion on

the issue. “No person or group in the United States should seek to impose its own particular

sectarian view of a moral question upon the entire electorate,” he wrote. The Protestant push for

Prohibition was a good example of the problems that doing so would entail, he suggested, and he

went so far as to attach an article that he had written on Catholic jurisprudence in case Roche still

failed to understand his position. He requested an immediate response if a “clarification is still

in order.”30 Roche, not surprisingly, never wrote back.

It is not necessary, however, to judge Drinan’s position in order to appreciate its political

usefulness. The maxims that arose throughout his discussion of abortion rights – specifically,

that a sectarian moral view cannot be imposed through law on a pluralistic society –

characterized his response to a variety of issues. His religious beliefs had helped to forge his

opposition to the war and his concern for the impoverished, for example, but he would not turn

these positions into legislation unless there was good legal precedent for doing so. Through this

avenue of argument, he sought to convince non-Catholic voters that his collar would not

determine his legislative initiatives, and that they could trust him to avoid imposing sectarian

views in Congress. Although this position seems to have conflicted with arguments that he was

simultaneously using to woo Catholics – namely, that priests should participate in politics in

order to ensure specifically Catholic representation – it was a decidedly successful method of

29 John P. Roche, “A Misfit Liberal,” The Washington Post, October 8, 1970. 30 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #7 (Correspondence – General): Letter from Robert F. Drinan, S.J. to Professor John Roche, Brandeis University, October 9, 1970.

52

dispelling non-Catholic concerns over the conflict between Church and state that his candidacy

might otherwise have raised.

__________

The Roman Collar as a Source of Moral Fortitude

Despite the fact that many Catholics believed priests should stay out of politics, and the

concurrent fact that many non-Catholics worried about a church-state conflict, Drinan wore his

clerical garb for the entirety of his campaign. The vast majority of newspaper articles that

covered his candidacy included a picture of him, and not one of these photographs showed him

without his Roman collar. Considering the difficulties that Drinan’s religious calling raised

during his run for office, it might surprise readers to hear that he displayed it so publicly. But

this seemingly puzzling decision is easily explained when one considers the third manner in

which Drinan used his Catholicism: to add a sense of moral righteousness to his campaign. He

said as much when interviewed by U.S. News & World Report in August 1970, stating that he

would wear his collar despite anti-clerical sentiment because his “idea is to bring moral

convictions into office.”31

These convictions played a powerful role in his campaign rhetoric, but it is often difficult

to identify ways in which his priesthood specifically reinforced his moral arguments. There are

very few instances where this connection is explicitly mentioned in the press or in Drinan’s

campaign files, and it is virtually impossible to estimate retrospectively how much of an impact

the image of his collar had on voters’ sense of Drinan’s moral fortitude. Nevertheless, there are

a few examples that reveal a direct connection between Drinan’s ethical rhetoric and his

31 “As Clergymen Enter Politics – The New Trend,” U.S News & World Report, August 10, 1970. Italics mine.

53

priesthood, and they suggest the function that his clerical garb might have implicitly performed

in other areas as well.

Drinan often struck a populist tone when discussing the economy, and it is from this bit

of dialogue that our first example derives. The Third District had a substantial working class

population: 34% of voters were classified as “blue-collar,” according to pollster Oliver Quayle,

and a significant 30% were union members.32 These workers were the core of Philbin’s base; his

New Deal-style liberalism spoke to their bread-and-butter issues, rather than the larger social

issues that they often chose to ignore. Drinan formed a Labor Committee to draw away this bloc

of voters, and they managed to obtain the endorsements of the United Auto Workers, the

Chemical Workers Union, the Communication Workers of America, and the International Ladies

Garment Workers, among others.33 But union members did not always cast their votes in the

direction that their leaders wanted them to, and Drinan needed more than endorsements to pull

this crucial constituency into his camp.

It was within this context that Drinan turned towards the rhetoric of economic populism,

in which his status as a Catholic priest played a large part. Only fragments of speeches remain in

which he spoke of the economy without spinning his discussion back to the war, but those few

documents reveal an unabashedly progressive stance. When asked about the shortcomings of

American capitalism in an interview on September 9, 1970, for example, Drinan turned to the

issue of Detroit: “Why should the auto industry be able to make all these glamorous automobiles

without demonstrating responsibility to anyone but the shareholders, so all the fat-cat people can

clip their coupons and get an 8 per cent return on their money plus a growth investment, while

32 Quayle Survey, 28. 33 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #9 (Campaign Endorsements): Unidentified Advertisement, “Labor Supports Drinan.”

54

the poor and the blacks outside the plants in Detroit grow poorer?” Bringing the issue closer to

home, Drinan continued, “Why, for example, should Goodyear Rubber be able to pick up and

leave Watertown, in this district where I’m running, and leave a thousand men unemployed

while it goes off to South Carolina? Is it free to migrate this way and just leave these people

without any benefits? We have to do something about the fact that today the growth and

economic health of the corporations takes precedence over every human value and interest

involved.” (This fiery language, humorously enough, was met with the enthusiastic reporter’s

“right on!”)

The final sentence of this statement, with its references to human values, revealed the

backbone of Drinan’s critique of the economy: it was primarily a moral issue, demanding a

response from an equally moral representative. His solution called for “a code of ethics” that

could force a “moral obligation” onto this “monster in American life,” this “entity that can

escape personal liability” in a way that was ethically unacceptable given the human cost of

economic dislocation. And if readers accepted the moral implications of this dilemma, their

solution was inset into the upper left corner of the interview’s text: a photograph of the

thoughtful Father Drinan calmly articulating a point, dressed entirely in a stately black except for

the thin strip of white at the base of his neck, practically radiating the moral fortitude necessary

to challenge big business. If the editors had wished to put a subtitle under this picture, they

could easily have lifted a phrase from one of Drinan’s many advertisements: “A Jesuit priest

doesn’t need big business friends.”34

34 Interview/Photograph: Charles E. Fager, “Priest, Law School Dean, Candidate for Congress,” The Christian Century, September 9, 1970. Big Business Quote: DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Primary Election Advertisement #18L (“You’re fighting the Vietnam war at the check-out counter.”)

55

This example reveals the important role that Drinan’s religious background often played

in his campaign. On issues that were loaded with moral implications, such as the status of

corporations in the American economy, Drinan could speak of ethical reform without a

backwards glance, confident that his clerical collar would bring an (often visual) depth of moral

fortitude to his assertions that could not be matched by the back-scratching, favor-driven, good-

ol’-boy networks of his opponents.

This tactic was also employed in the more obvious example of his opposition to the

Vietnam War. His statements on this issue have already been covered extensively (see Chapter

Two), but it is worthwhile to briefly highlight the specifically moral aspects of his position.

Drinan’s most in-depth writing on the subject appeared in his book Vietnam and Armageddon,

which was largely a criticism of the Catholic response to the Vietnam War and a rousing call for

thoughtful Americans to actively oppose it. Written the year before Drinan ran for office, its

closing pages contained a statement that lends important insight into this campaign. Christians

must “define and refine the wealth of their theological and political traditions, and articulate and

act upon them in sociopolitical ways,” he asserted in reference to Vietnam, in order to persuade

“the nation that it has a moral commitment to mankind which it should observe, not only because

it is useful to America, but – more importantly – because it is right.”35

There was perhaps no better summation of Drinan’s position, and for those who had

similar moral qualms about the war there was perhaps no better candidate to oppose it. On those

occasions when Drinan grounded his opposition in moral language – such as when he

characterized Vietnam as a set of “inhuman policies and practices” in a speech at the Boston

Sheraton; when he declared that the most basic element of the war was the destruction of “moral

35 Drinan, Vietnam and Armageddon, 167.

56

values” in a speech at the opening of his campaign headquarters; or when he declared that a

“timetable for peace is a timetable for death” in a recruitment poster – the distinction between the

priest and his opponent was all too obvious.36 The former fought for basic human decency, using

his collar as a weapon against war itself, while the latter was a corruptible relic of an earlier age,

who had “made the Pentagon his most favored constituent.”37 (And who, it might be mentioned,

issued nary a response to Drinan’s campaign – for more on how little Philbin bestirred himself

during the campaign season, see Chapter Four.)

The moral fortitude that Drinan wielded by virtue of his religious background is evident

in this case, as well as in the case of his economic populism. The connections between his

Catholic morals and his political stances were rarely made as explicit in other examples, but it is

nevertheless clear why he allowed himself to be photographed in his clerical garb so frequently.

Drinan sought to be more than just another politician; he sought to elevate American politics to a

higher moral plane, and he self-consciously used his priesthood and Roman collar as visual

evidence that he could do so. This was the third way in which religion affected Drinan’s

candidacy – as with the other two, it is quite difficult to measure the impact that his religious

tactics ultimately had, but the conclusion that he attempted to use his Catholicism constructively

in this fashion is unavoidable.

36 Boston Sheraton: DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “Excerpts from Address of Reverend Robert F. Drinan, S.J…,” May 27, 1970. Campaign Headquarters: DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “Father Drinan at opening of Watertown Campaign Headquarters,” June 27, 1970. Recruitment Poster: DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Unidentified Flyer, “The Timetable for Peace Is a Timetable for Death.” 37 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Defense Spending.”

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One Last Speech, at Unknown Date and Location

The role that religion played in Drinan’s candidacy was complex and occasionally

contradictory. His priesthood was both a problem and a solution, simultaneously an obstacle to

be transcended and the wellspring of his campaign. Catholics had to be convinced that his

candidacy was another way to fulfill his clerical duties; non-Catholics had to be convinced that

he would not impose personal values on the American public; and members of every

denomination had to be convinced of the moral credibility that his priesthood lent to his political

efforts. The tensions generated by striking all three positions suffused his endeavor, and it was

often difficult for him to synthesize them into a coherent whole. But a handwritten copy of one

of Drinan’s speeches, given at an unknown location on an unknown date, speaks eloquently

about this dilemma and succinctly summarizes the position that he ultimately took.

There were “depressing moments & days,” it began, “when it appears that the most two

precious qualities of my life are a hindrance to the work I now desire to do.” Those two qualities

were his priesthood and his membership in the Jesuit order, of course, and the work that he

desired to do was political. The criticisms that Drinan faced for attempting to do both, he

suggested, revealed both “the profound alienation which so many apparently have for politics

and politicians,” and the fact that “some people feel that moral values are not at the heart of

policies which the nation formulates and pursues.” But both of these assumptions are false, he

continued, his fiery, combative voice doubtlessly rising with the passion of his words,

commensurate with the increasingly fervent stroke of his pen:

The role of the politician is one of the noblest known to man. And the policies which our nation as the leader of the free world adopts in the next decade obviously should and will determine the public morality of the entire world for the foreseeable future. I cannot believe that my seven years of training in all of

58

the religious and moral theologies of the world is a disadvantage to the task of reformulating a morality by which America and the family of men can produce a just and a compassionate moral order.38

We may never be able to recreate the moment in which Drinan delivered these eloquent

words, or even to determine the precise context in which they were written. But perhaps we are

better off for that. This nameless, dateless oration precisely articulates the role that religion

played in Drinan’s life, and in his campaign, in an almost timeless, transcendent manner. The

concrete ways in which he publicly addressed the issue were myriad and complex, and often

difficult to understand as a coherent whole – but this one statement, at least, is the ideal

abstraction of the central role that religion played in Drinan’s campaign, of the intricate and

overlapping connections between his religious calling and his political ambitions.

38 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “I want to talk with you…,” n.d.

Chapter Four

The Character: The New Politics and the Issue of Authenticity

On September 20, 1970, journalist William V. Shannon declared victory in the

Democratic primaries – not for any particular candidate, but for a larger phenomenon that he

referred to as the “New Politics.” This particular type of politicking, he argued, originated in

bipartisan opposition to the Vietnam War, and marked a distinct shift away from the traditional

campaigning of New Deal liberals. It disdained political favors and patronage, and stressed

social issues rather than economic benefits. As Shannon put it, “the appeal is to the voter’s

conscience rather than his wallet, to his judgment rather than his self-interest.” And while the

Vietnam War was by and large the major issue for New Politicians, such problems as pollution

and education were increasingly important to their campaigns as well.

Old Politicians, by contrast, hailed from an earlier generation of the Democratic Party

and relied upon ethnic loyalties and personal favors to win the support of voters. They generally

chose to avoid issues and ideals in their stump speeches, recognizing how divisive they could be

to their broad coalition of working class interests. Instead, they focused on the bread-and-butter

initiatives that put dinner on their constituent’s tables, earning reelection by remaining on the

good side of the major economic interest groups in their districts. The only attribute that these

two sorts of politicians shared, Shannon contended, was their effective organization – they both

believed that the “candidates whose workers pass out more literature, knock on more doors and

60

see to it that their own supporters get to the polls usually win.”1 The reader will immediately

recognize why a photograph of Drinan was inset into Shannon’s article: the primary race in the

Third District was a model clash between the Old and New Politics, with Drinan crusading on

social issues and Philbin complacently relying upon his economic record for support.

This chapter will examine the details of Drinan’s New Politics in greater depth; for, as

recognition in a national edition of the New York Times might suggest, this aspect of his

campaign is of the utmost importance to understanding his victory. It will begin by examining

his organizing tactics, which were revolutionary in their own right, and will then discuss his self-

perception as a harbinger of change, a reformer of corrupt backroom dealings and a standard-

bearer of this new sort of politics. His posture on this issue stemmed in large part from his self-

perception as a man of good character, which leads into another point: Drinan often highlighted

his integrity as a reason to win votes in and of itself, regardless of his stances on policy or

religion. Pointing to the smear campaigns of his opponents and his own forthright, honest

conduct, he often argued that he was the sort of authentic politician America was desperately in

need of. And the final part of this chapter will briefly consider a related topic of interest –

whether he was actually as authentic a person as his campaign claimed. In these inextricably

interconnected ways, Drinan constructed the third major aspect of his campaign: an image of

himself as the New Politician and a man of good character.

1 William V. Shannon, “‘New Politics’ Score Gains in Primaries,” The New York Times, September 20, 1970.

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The Logistics: What It Took to Be a “New Politician”

In his survey of the Third District, pollster Oliver Quayle stressed the importance of

organizing tactics to the campaign’s future success. In April 1970, he noted that only 37% of the

electorate even recognized Drinan’s name, and pointed out that this fact was both a curse and a

blessing. On the one hand, as discussed in Chapter Two, it gave Drinan “room to move” on

issues, allowing him to spin his opposition to the Vietnam War into a statement on the economy,

for example, without fighting against voters’ preconceptions of his views. But on the other hand,

residents of the Third District were not going to pull the electoral lever for a candidate that they

did not know – and so it was of the utmost importance for Drinan to get his name into people’s

homes and onto their minds.2

In order to do so, Drinan developed what he later called “one hell of a model,” one that

the New York Times argued “should change what has been the conventional wisdom” of the

Democratic Party.3 Of course, the campaign began with, and included, many of the usual

political tactics: with money raised by the Citizens Caucus, according to Time Magazine, Drinan

“conducted an expensive television campaign” and managed to get himself “photographed with

prominent personalities;” hired John Martilla, a disillusioned former employee of the Republican

National Committee, to raise funds from wealthy supporters in a traditional fashion; and gave

stump speeches frequently, according to America, talking “on college campuses, at factory gates,

in supermarkets, on radio talk shows,” and virtually any other place that people might listen.4

2 Quayle Survey, 9-17. 3 Bill Kovach, “Liberal Shift Detected in Massachusetts Vote,” The New York Times, September 17, 1970. 4 “New Politics and Old,” Time, September 20, 1970. Thomas M. Gannon, “Reverend Father Congressman,” America, November 21, 1970.

62

But these traditional forms of politicking were only a small portion of Drinan’s overall

plan. As journalist James Higgins later noted, the campaign had “no bumper stickers, no

billboards, no buttons, few newspaper ads, not much television, no large meetings, no ‘prominent

Democrat’ or labor union endorsements.” Instead, it relied on a truly ground-breaking set of

methods, which set it apart from the Democratic Party’s more old-fashioned tactics, marking it

off as a part of the New Politics.

This mainstay of this strategy was an army of volunteers, many of which were recruited

from the large college population of the Third District. As campaign manager John Martilla later

recalled, Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State had energized local

students, and “volunteers poured into our office… The initial onrush gave us 1,000 volunteers

who did the first necessary thing: a mostly door-to-door but some telephone canvass of 85,000

voters out of about 200,000 registered.”5 A group of approximately 40 volunteers stayed on

permanently, and the door-to-door canvassing that they performed eventually reached the homes

of nearly 75% of Democratic voters.6

But although the media certainly bought into Martilla’s depiction of the Drinan campaign

as a massive student army, the reality was far more complex than that. These volunteers

contributed their time and efforts to Drinan’s campaign for many reasons, which should not be

collapsed into a single generalization about Kent State and student radicalism. As Anne Marie

Goggin, a student worker, put it, although she certainly became more deeply involved in politics

after the invasion of Cambodia, she did not see herself as “radicalized” by the event. Instead, it

was but one in a series of incidents that pointed her towards Drinan’s campaign. In her own

5 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 20, 1970. 6 “New Politics and Old,” Time, September 20, 1970.

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words, working for the campaign “helped me to find myself, to find out what I want to do with

my life. I always wanted to go to law school. Now I know why. Now I can see the law as a tool

for the service of the people. So the campaign is both goal and discovery for me.” Energized by

world events, this particular volunteer turned to political organizing in order to make a

difference, choosing to work within the system in order to effect change.7

Another volunteer was more directly affected by those world events: Tom Vallely was a

Vietnam veteran, recipient of the Silver Star and member of the India Company, Third Battalion,

Fifth Marine Regiment. He had heard about Drinan while in the field, and had dismissed the

Third Caucus as yet another “phony, white liberal caucus.” But upon returning to the United

States in the summer of 1970, he eventually spurned more typical avenues of employment and

took on a job as a full-time canvasser for the Drinan campaign. When asked why, he mulled

over his experience in the war:

“You just start thinking about these things. You look at the over-all situation… You ask yourself: ‘Why do I have to kill these people? Why do my friends have to die? Why are we here?’ Well, our two governments sent us… Then you read about the statistics – about the political prisoners, the government, the deaths. So I thought I’d do something about it, I suppose. Maybe I owe something to the friends I left there.”8

Congress, he believed, needed to reassert its authority in the field of foreign policy,

instead of docilely proceeding with the escalation of military efforts advocated by the executive

branch and the Pentagon. Candidates like Drinan were necessary to bring about that sort of

change, he believed, and it was this line of thinking that brought him to the campaign. Stories

like these two illustrate the diversity of Drinan’s volunteers – although many of them were

energized by the events of 1970, they were not a stereotypical group of long-haired student

7 Thomas M. Gannon, “Reverend Father Congressman,” America, November 21, 1970. 8 Ibid.

64

radicals hailing from Ivy League campuses or U.C. Berkeley. According to one reporter, in fact,

over half of the volunteers were actually over the age of thirty; Drinan’s campaign was thus

staffed by a complex group of passionate, thoughtful people, who were working to create change

within the system in their electoral district.9

These canvassers were not initially aiming to persuade voters of the importance of

electing Drinan, however; their opening assignment was to gather information from Third

District households through a series of survey questions, thus beginning a ground-breaking form

of political organization. The respondents’ potential for supporting Father Drinan was

subsequently ranked on a five-point scale, ranging from “very favorable” to “negative,” and all

voters ranked “neutral” or better were subsequently quizzed about their stances on a variety of

important issues. The results were then transferred to coded IBM cards, and computers rented

from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were used to process the information and sort

respondents into various batches based on their answers to the questions.10

This process may not seem particularly impressive to readers looking back from the

comfort of our current digital age, but it was an absolutely revolutionary method in 1970. For

one of the first times in campaign history, a candidate did not have to rely on generic mass

mailings to reach voters. The survey results allowed Drinan to pinpoint specific households with

specific messages, each focusing on their particular concerns and preoccupations. Anti-war

suburbanites could receive issues-oriented pamphlets that would have turned off blue-collar

laborers, who instead received leaflets linking the Vietnam War to job losses in Massachusetts.

This sort of specificity was of the utmost importance in allowing Drinan to spin his various

9 Ibid. 10 “Boston’s Jesuit Nominee – ‘A Model for New Politics,’” The Washington Post, September 17, 1970.

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messages on various issues, and the campaign relied on it to an astounding extent: according to

The Nation, over half of the $50,000 spent by the campaign for the Democratic primary actually

went towards postage stamps.11

The benefits of these new methods did not stop there, either. When the primary finally

rolled around, heavy rain came with it. Bad weather notoriously keeps voters away from the

polls, but the Drinan campaign had a conveniently categorized list of likely supporters complete

with phone numbers and addresses. Two-hundred-and-fifty volunteers were pulled in at the last

minute and put to work at a phone bank, from which they urged citizens to get out and vote, and

offered free transportation to the polls if needed.12 The primary turnout was uncharacteristically

high, even when compared to Election Days that had good weather – a total of 50,744 votes were

cast, about 6,000 more than the most recent midterm elections of 1966. More importantly for

Drinan, the results put him ahead of Philbin by a solid twelve percentage points.13 His new

mobilization methods, coupled with effective messages that stressed policy proposals and

addressed concerns about his priesthood, help to explain why reporters looked to him as a

champion of the New Politics.

__________

The Substance: Grassroots Organizing and the Pursuit of Change

It is important to note that Drinan’s grassroots organizing was not the typical ward

“pulling” practiced by the older generation of politicians. It was distinct in its message and tone,

in its call for change and the stress that it placed on the importance of voters playing a more

11 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 20, 1970. 12 Ibid. 13 “New Politics and Old,” Time, September 20, 1970.

66

active role in the selection of their representatives. As one reporter noted, “it is one of Drinan’s

convictions that it there is a duty to inform, alert and remind the people – but that the

responsibility of democratic action lies with the people themselves.”14 Or, as Drinan put it

himself, “We have the issues, the organization and the manpower. They call it democracy.”15

Ultimately, Drinan did not ask for the support of voters because he would do them personal

favors, or because his volunteers had placed the most telephone calls to their households; he

asked for their support because he believed that he could tackle the important issues of the time

and bring about genuine change in the halls of Congress.

This argument resonated throughout his campaign advertisements, distributed to the

homes of potential supporters via the system detailed in the previous section. One pamphlet

released for the general election focused almost exclusively on Drinan’s ability to voice the

concerns of his district; it began by claiming that “many people feel the government is leaving

them out. More than ever, we need men in Congress who will speak for all the people; who will

restore their share in democracy. Robert Drinan is that kind of man.” Speaking to a growing

disillusionment with the American government’s ability to bring about change, this ad argued

that the problem lay in representatives who were deaf to their constituent’s concerns. And the

series of quotes that followed suggested that Drinan would be far more responsive than the

incumbent, Philbin, had been. Harry Stevens, an Independent candidate for Congress in 1968,

was cited as saying that “Robert Drinan cares about the people. He is the only candidate

listening to their concerns and responding.” The Weston Town Crier is quoted as arguing that

Drinan “would be the most effective voice for the people of the Third District,” and Senator

Edmund Muskie claimed that “he will be an effective and responsive voice for the Third

14 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 20, 1970. 15 UPI, “Priest Moves Toward Congress,” The Hartford Courant, September 17, 1970.

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Congressional District.” Arguing for a form of representation that stressed responsiveness and

relied upon the trope of listening to constituents, this advertisement was tolling the bell of the

New Politics and arguing for change through democratic processes. Its conclusion summed up

the broader argument that it was making: “When men in Congress listen to the people, they will

speak for the people. Robert Drinan listens. In Congress, his vote will be your voice.”16

Another advertisement made similar claims, focusing extensively on the war at first, but

then relocating the issue within the context of representation. It began by pointing out Philbin’s

consistent support for the war effort, and argued that a vote for Philbin would be a vote for more

of the same. By contrast, it argued, Drinan was willing and able to “turn around our national

priorities,” working towards a government that could create “a just and compassionate society.”

And after a series of policy statements that collectively marked Drinan’s plan for a “new

direction,” the advertisement steered the reader towards the larger issue of representation: “On

September 15, you’re not just voting for a Congressman, you’re voting for a chance to see our

way out of Vietnam. And into a government geared to the people. To get that kind of

government, we need Robert Drinan in Congress.”17 Mailings such as these stressed issues, to be

sure, but they also self-consciously defined Drinan’s campaign as a grassroots upwelling for a

more representative politician that could bring about genuine change, and a democratic eviction

of the complacent Congressman who had been ignoring voters’ views on pressing social issues

for years.

Crucial to this overall argument was that latter claim: that Philbin was unrepresentative

of the district, and that his lengthy time as an incumbent had made him deaf to the demands of

16 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): General Election Advertisement #86. 17 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Primary Election Advertisement #18L (“On September 15 there’s a chance for you to vote on the Vietnam War.”)

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his constituents. Drinan hammered this argument home in his discussion of the war, and his

repeated claims that Philbin was no more than a rubber-stamp hawk representing a district that

wanted change and opposed further engagement in Vietnam (for more on this, see Chapter Two).

But he also made the point in a less specific context, pointing to Philbin’s rising age and lending

new meaning to the term “Old” Politics.

The beginning of a position paper on Drinan’s opponent pointed this out unabashedly.

“Born in the last century,” the paper began, “Congressman Philip Philbin is now 72 years old.

He formed his ideas of the world before most of his constituents were born.” Philbin’s age,

which was almost a quarter-century greater than Drinan’s, was supposedly dividing him from

most of his district and preventing him from adequately representing their views and interests in

Congress. As a result, Philbin had not “initiated a single major, innovative piece of legislation”

in his twenty-eight years of public service, the position paper went on to state; and the Third

District deserved “better representation.”18 Private pollster Oliver Quayle noted how effective of

a tactic this could be – “Voters already feel that he is behind the times, and lacks the… qualities

needed to deal with the problems of today and tomorrow” – and the Drinan campaign did not

hesitate to drive the point home.19 As a result, Philbin’s name was almost invariably followed

by his age and the length of his time in office whenever it was mentioned; the fact that he had

been born in the previous century was brought up quite frequently as well.20 Capitalizing on

18 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Philbin.” 19 Quayle Survey, 58. 20 See, for example, DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Defense Spending,” in which Philbin is first referred to as “your present Congressman, 72 year old, 28 year incumbent Philip Philbin.” Or see DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Primary Election Advertisement #18L (“You’re fighting the Vietnam War at the check-out counter”), in which Philbin is first referred to as “your present Congressman, Philip Philbin, 72,… a ‘yes-man’ for military spending.”

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these sentiments, Drinan ended his position paper on the issue by asking the voters of the Third

District to “retire” old-man Philbin.21

But Drinan’s campaign was not just about provincial concerns like the defeat of the

elderly Philbin; he hoped that his grassroots organizing would take on a sense of national

importance, and critiqued the average age of Congress as often as that of his opponent. In a

speech at the Sheraton Boston, he highlighted this point, noting the electoral system’s tendency

to favor candidates running for re-election:

Under the Constitution the people of this country have the right every two years to vote for their Congressmen. That biennial peaceful revolution contemplated and programmed by the Founding Fathers has not been occurring because Congressmen have fashioned the election laws to protect the status quo of their own incumbent position. If the government of this country is to win the faith of the people and particularly of the young it will have to undergo a drastic alteration.22

The people could have no faith in a government more concerned with its own survival

than its constituent’s views, Drinan thus claimed, and a turnover in leadership was essential if the

body politic hoped to accomplish any serious and lasting change. Pointing to the short terms of

Congressmen, he was essentially proposing (as he did explicitly elsewhere) that “representatives

must be frequently replaced. Only this can assure up-to-date, responsive government.”23 In a

position paper focusing on the issue of Congressional seniority, Drinan laid out a more specific

policy proposal that stemmed from these views. Noting that the average age of standing

committee chairmen was over 70, and that many older representatives, “because of chronic

illness, cannot even keep up with the work,” he derisively referred to the seniority system as a

“senility system.” His plan to correct this “subversion of democracy” was to “limit the powers

21 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2: “Philbin.” 22 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “Excerpts from Address of Reverend Robert F. Drinan, S.J…,” May 27, 1970. 23 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Philbin.”

70

of chairmen,” to “set a maximum age for chairmanship,” and to “rule out anyone’s being a

chairman for more than a few terms.”24 While none of these statements may have been the best

survival plan for a long political career, they were part-and-parcel of Drinan’s message of change

and fit well into the generational themes that were common to New Politicians of the time.

Thus, Drinan’s version of the New Politics was about more than simply getting voters to

the polls, although its strategy for accomplishing that goal was certainly new itself. It was also

about bringing new faces into Congress, about providing voters with new representatives that

could handle current issues, and ultimately about a new sort of representation, that gave voice to

constituents’ views on issues instead of using political favors to put extra cash in their

pocketbooks.

__________

The General Election: Philbin, McGlennon, and Smear Campaigns

After Drinan had won the Democratic primary and beating Philbin by 6,398 votes, or

10.4 percentage points, almost every observer assumed that Drinan was headed straight for

Congress. Major news outlets implied that his general election victory was all but assured; Look

magazine, for example, claimed that Democratic “nomination means election” in the Third

District, while the Hartford Courant noted that although he faced a Republican opponent, the

voters were “two-to-one Democratic and Drinan will be favored.”25 Even Drinan himself

asserted this fact, in an advertising pamphlet aimed at independent voters: “Elections are won or

lost in the primaries. For the past 28 years victory in the Democratic primary for Congressman

24 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #2 (Position Papers): “Seniority.” 25 William Kennedy, “Father Runs for Congress,” Look, September 22, 1970. “Priest Moves Toward Congress,” The Hartford Courant, September 17, 1970.

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in the 3rd Congressional District has been tantamount to victory in the General Election… Your

vote does count, and may be far more meaningful in the September Primary than in the

November General Election.”26

But the election became significantly more complicated when Philbin refused to back

down after his primary defeat, undoubtedly shocked at the results and determined not to let his

fourteen-term legacy be cut short by a political upstart. Having lost the race too late to file as an

independent nominee, he finally bestirred himself and launched a “sticker” campaign, asking

supporters to ignore the names on the ballot and paste a sticker with his name on it instead. As

an astute observer for the Nation noted, the result of this effort was to “kill the possibility that

most labor unions would provide financial support and workers for the Drinan campaign” and to

“reopen the opportunity for ‘anti-priest-candidate’ Democrats to vote for [a different]

Democrat.” In effect, largely thanks to a loyal support base that stretched back for fourteen

terms, Philbin’s candidacy in the general election had the potential to split the Democratic

majority and give John McGlennon, the Republican nominee, a possible path to victory.27

The new electoral chemistry did not affect the vast majority of Drinan’s strategy. His

position papers were not rewritten, the priest-issue was not addressed in a different manner, and

the only major change in his official biographical information was the addition of his primary

victory.28 A slight increase in funding resulted from his official status as the Democratic

nominee, which allowed him to expand the scope of his television and radio advertisements, but

26 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Primary Election Advertisement (“Independent Voters.”) 27 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 21, 1970. 28 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #5 (Biographical): “Robert F. Drinan – Biography.”

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he still relied largely on the campaign strategies that had served him well during the primary

season.

What did change, according to the Boston Globe’s political analyst Carol Liston, was the

transformation of the race into “the most scurrilous, nastiest campaign that’s ever been waged in

America.” Philbin was embittered by his primary defeat, she claimed, and attacked this “man of

noted integrity and passion” with accusations of “being a Communist sympathizer” and

encouraging “violence and unrest.” McGlennon was no better, in her estimation: “He is

spreading rumors and running advertising just as vicious as Philbin’s… With very careful

distortion he has lifted Father Drinan’s statements from context and maliciously made the

candidate look like a two-faced man, an extremist, and even a revolutionary.” These smear

tactics were the main focus of news coverage in the month and a half between the primary and

the general election, and Drinan’s response to them was an extension of his New Politics and his

claim to integrity – unlike his “scurrilous opponents,” he focused on the issues and remained

above the fray, listening to the demands of his constituents instead of intimidating them with

scare tactics, moving towards a politics of hope and reconciliation and away from the divisive

attacks of his opponents.29

Documenting the exchanges between the various campaigns is somewhat difficult; the

files of failed candidacies are usually not as well preserved as those of successful ones. But at

least a few heated arguments can be recreated, and they lend valuable insight into the mechanics

of the race during the general election. Philbin’s major line of attack, according to one letter-to-

the-editor printed in the Boston Globe, was to suggest that “outsiders from New York conceived

29 Carol Liston, “Vile campaign against Drinan,” The Boston Globe, October 22, 1970.

73

of the Drinan candidacy, and that it was promoted by the New Left.”30 As Philbin himself put it

in one stump speech, Drinan was supposedly part of “radical, extreme organizations patterned on

Marxist schemes,” and his supporters were “part of a broad conspiracy that could be

international in nature against the principals [sic] of our government, that could enslave the

people and bring them under a totalitarian system.”31 For Drinan, a candidate arguing that he

was the best possible representative of local concerns and who was sometimes perceived as too

liberal, the idea that out-of-state leftists were funding his campaign was potentially quite

dangerous to his chances of election.

But Drinan’s reply was both measured and dismissive. In a speech to his campaign

workers, with a reporter from the Boston Globe in the audience, he referred to Philbin’s vicious

attacks: “I’m sorry that each of you has to participate in a campaign that has degenerated into

irresponsible name-calling, rather than a rational discussion of the issues.” Such slander and

libel, he claimed, were “a serious threat to the American electoral system.” And later that day,

campaign manager John Martilla argued that Philbin’s line of attack was nothing more than “the

wild charges of a man looking for some sort of explanation for his defeat.” Addressing the

concern of funding directly, he pointed out that “only 14 percent of our money in this campaign

came from outside the state. And 50 percent of our funds came from inside the 3d district.”

Philbin’s campaign, he went on, had refused to disclose its current funding records, but the most

complete past data, from 1968, showed that about 50% of his funds had come from out-of-

state.32 Not only was Philbin a hypocrite making baseless claims about the Drinan campaign in

order to discredit it, Martilla said, but he was also detracting from rational discussion of the

30 Arthur S. Obermeyer, “Letter to the Editor: How Drinan got started,” The Boston Globe, October 28, 1970. 31 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Unidentified Flyer (“Campaign Comments of Philip Philbin.”) Quoted from Unidentified Article, Worcester Telegram, Suburban North, October 24, 1970. 32 Carol Liston, “Drinan hits attacks as ‘threat to system’,” The Boston Globe, October 22, 1970.

74

issues and endangering the democratic process – a course of action that Drinan opposed, and

sought to rise above.

John McGlennon attacked Drinan from a slightly different angle: a group called

Democrats-for-McGlennon, for example, released a statement that accused him of encouraging

lawless behavior. It quoted a passage from Vietnam & Armageddon that discussed draft card

burning in a positive light, with reference to the Berrigan brothers, and also lifted a passage from

an unidentified newspaper article in which Drinan asserted that “if the law is unjust, not only

may we, but we must disobey the law.” The statement concluded with the following: “We, as

Democrats, cannot support a man who shoots off intemperate and often extreme statements. We

want a thinking and reasonable Congressman.” Looking back on this document from the

perspective of the 21st Century, a time when civil disobedience in the face of injustice is

considered honorable, this may seem like a curious accusation. In 1970, however, with fears of

domestic disorder especially on the minds of middle and lower-middle class white voters alike, it

was a potent attack.33

Drinan delivered a speech in response on October 26, 1970, at an unrecorded location, in

which he placed his statements in their original context and simultaneously discredited his

opponent. Noting that he had been speaking in reference to aftermath of the Holocaust, he

pointed out that “the judges at the [Nuremberg] trials convicted the Nazi leaders for crimes

against humanity. The Nuremberg Court held that these war criminals should have disobeyed

these immoral laws.” Establishing this as a principle that was “now part of American law,” he

turned the accusation back on McGlennon: “My Republican opponent believes in the Nuremberg

judgements. [sic] And yet his political advertising claims that my support of this principle means

33 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “Quotes of Father Drinan.”

75

that my candidacy teaches disrespect for the law. This distortion of my remarks is unfortunate.”

McGlennon’s original statement, Drinan implied, was nothing more than base political

maneuvering, a twisting of words that sought to trick voters into casting their ballots for

McGlennon out of fear.34

The characterization of McGlennon’s campaign as one of fear-mongering and distortion

was analogous to criticisms of the Red Scare politics of the 1950s, and Drinan did not hesitate to

draw that comparison. Three days after he responded to the Democrats-for-McGlennon, he had

Senator Eugene McCarthy give a speech on his behalf at Faneuil Hall in Boston. The

advertisement for the event ran as follows: “Not since the early 1950’s has the nation been so

overwhelmed by abusive political rhetoric… U.S. SENATOR EUGENE MCCARTHY in

support of FATHER ROBERT F. DRINAN will deliver an address at Faneuil Hall.”35 Another

advertisement, this one a pamphlet for the general election, quoted a newspaper editorialist that

drew the same analogy: “The tactics being used against Fr. Drinan are base. They echo of the

McCarthyism of the ‘50s… trying to destroy a man by false charge and ugly innuendo.”36

Comparing his opponents’ campaigns to the scare tactics of previous decades was an effective

way of discrediting their claims and instilling distaste for their campaigns in voters’ minds, while

simultaneously stressing how much more forthright and genuine Drinan was.

Another advertisement specifically attacked McGlennon along similar lines, while using

his own words to stress his hypocrisy. It began by taking two McGlennon comments from local

papers. In an interview for the Boston Globe on September 20, 1970, the Republican nominee

34 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #4 (Campaign Statements): “Statement of Rev. Robert F. Drinan, S.J.,” October 26, 1970. 35 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Unidentified Flyer (“Not since the early 1950’s…”) 36 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): General Election Advertisement #86 (“Fr. Drinan leads in 3d District race.”)

76

had said, “We have and we are going to continue running a strictly positive campaign, a pro-

McGlennon campaign;” on September 24, 1970, he told the Concord Journal that his “campaign

is based on moderation and reason.” But as Drinan pointed out immediately after presenting

readers with those quotes, “The facts do not substantiate McGlennon’s description of his

campaign.” In fact, “he chose to attack Father Drinan in 34 articles while discussing the

Vietnam War only 10 times, the Middle East 3 times, health care 3 times, the economy twice,

and pollution twice. Name-calling is never a substitute for rational discussion of the campaign

issues. It is the device of a politician who knows he is unable to respond effectively to his

opponent’s positions.” By contrasting the claims to positivity with the actual negative nature of

McGlennon’s campaign, Drinan was pointing out the hypocrisy of his opponent. Furthermore,

he was arguing, McGlennon had not demonstrated the ability to grapple with pressing national

issues – issues that Drinan, by contrast, was continuing to stress in television ads and

personalized mailings to potential supporters.37

This line of argument was apparently convincing to potential endorsers, who often cited

the negative nature of McGlennon and Philbin’s campaigns as reasons to support Drinan. A

WCRB editorial aired on November 2, 1970, for example, endorsed Drinan while attacking

McGlennon for “advertising campaign spots against Drinan [that] distort the real, broad

viewpoint of a man of intergrety [sic].”38 Other endorsements were not as direct in their attacks,

but implicitly criticized the conduct of Drinan’s opponents while praising his forthrightness and

integrity in contrast. Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General under Presidents John F.

Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, argued that “those who preach the politics of

37 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #3 (Advertisements – Print): Unidentified Flyer (“The Campaign of John McGlennon.”) 38 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #9 (Campaign Endorsements): “WCRB Editorial, Air Time Monday 11/2/70, by Station President Ted Jones.”

77

division and hatred will never solve America’s problems, while [Drinan] manifests the humane

commitment to the real issues that America must face.”39 Similarly, Indiana Senator Birch Bayh

called the “irresponsible charges” made against Drinan “an extension of the sort of irresponsible

attacks on men of character and conviction… throughout the nation.” He concluded by arguing

that “the American people want and deserve the sort of leadership that is interested in programs

designed for the people, not in devising slogans to mislead them. That is why I urge you… to

support and vote for Father Robert Drinan.”40 (It should be noted that the interest of national

politicians in this particular district may have been caused by anxieties about losing the

Democratic Party’s majority in the House of Representatives – but the particular ways in which

they chose to involve themselves are still important, and their stress on Drinan’s character are

instructive nonetheless.)

Endorsements, advertisements, and speeches like these were manifestations of Drinan’s

New Politicking and his emphasis on personal integrity. The actions of his opponents in the

general election provided him with the perfect fodder, and neither he nor his supporters hesitated

when criticizing his opponents for their scurrilous attacks. More importantly, these attacks were

virtually the only times when Drinan mentioned their conduct or their character, largely

preferring to stick to the political issues that he believed that voters should truly focus on during

the election season.

39 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #9 (Campaign Endorsements): Western Union Telegram, Ramsey Clark to Robert F. Drinan. 40 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #9 (Campaign Endorsements): Western Union Telegram, Birch Bayh to John Martilla, Drinan for Congress.

78

Drinan’s Integrity: A Couple of Letter Exchanges

After almost three chapters of campaign history, readers might come away from these

pages with an image of Drinan as a political puppeteer, manipulating words and spinning

positions to the various factions of the Third District. This is certainly a plausible reading of the

documents presented thus far. Cynics might view Drinan’s policy platforms as an attempt to

trick voters into thinking that their various concerns – about the economy or the environment, for

example – were related to the only qualification that Drinan could genuinely claim: opposition to

the war. They might also see his discussion of religion, in which contradictions and tensions

abounded, as a self-serving bit of dissembling, designed to hoodwink a coalition of voters that

stood on separate sides of the church-state divide. And even his New Politics might be viewed

as a mere updating of the Old Politics, little more than cynical ward-pulling disguised in the

rhetoric of representation and change.

In a chapter that focuses so extensively on Drinan’s public portrayal of his private

character, it is thus worthwhile to spend a moment determining what that character was actually

like, and whether the cynical view sketched above approximated the truth. Unfortunately, no

personal diaries or letters to close friends survive from this period, and the official documents

that address Drinan’s integrity could all theoretically have ulterior motives. Having spent almost

a year leafing through the documents of the Drinan campaign, it is this author’s opinion that he

was downright genuine when it came to these issues of authenticity – but the faint impressions of

months of research are worth little without hard evidence to back them up.

So interested readers must instead turn to two letter exchanges, both of which have been

filed away in the sizeable campaign archives. They both involve false accusations leveled

79

against Drinan by political pundits, to which the campaign promptly responded with personal

letters instead of a more vocal airing of their grievances, perhaps indicating that these

accusations meant more than their public ramifications. More tellingly, however, the

correspondence continued in both cases even after Drinan saw that no advantage would be

gained from the dispute – he kept contesting the accusations anyways, suggesting that his

concern about his own integrity was a personal issue as much as one of electoral math. And

while this is may not be the best basis on which to declare that Drinan was a man of integrity, the

exchanges are difficult to explain if one accepts the cynical caricature mentioned above.

The first example began on October 25, 1970, when Boston Herald-Traveler columnist

Thomas Gallagher attacked Drinan’s staff and supporters, accusing them of making McGlennon

“the object of the most vicious smear

campaigns in the history of

Massachusetts politics.” Although the

paper was minor at best, and most other

local news outlets had already endorsed

Drinan’s candidacy, he did not simply

let this accusation pass unnoticed –

which is not surprising, considering

that he was being accused of the very

same tactics that he was criticizing his

opponents for using.41

41 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #7 (Correspondence – General): Letter from Daniel B. Payne, Press Secretary, to Mr. Harold E. Clancy, Publisher, October 28, 1970.

Figure 7

80

Drinan’s press secretary, Daniel Payne, apparently called Gallagher soon after the article

was published, in order to determine what evidence was being used to substantiate the

accusations leveled against the campaign. Gallagher’s response was unsatisfactory at best, and

prompted Clancy to write a letter to the newspaper’s publisher, Thomas Clancy, in which he

recounted the conversation. Gallagher had first cited a Boston Globe editorial written by Carol

Liston, which, as Payne promptly pointed out, actually argued that Drinan was the object of a

smear campaign, rather than the perpetrator of one. Gallagher then pointed to a cartoon printed

in the Boston Globe (see Figure Seven), which he believed was libelous and unfair to Drinan’s

opponents; be that as it may, Payne replied, the cartoon was not the work of Drinan or his official

supporters, and the Drinan campaign should not be criticized as a result. Finally, Gallagher

argued that unspecified remarks made by Drinan the night after the column in question was

published proved his charges – but as Payne noted in his letter, columnists must express views

“based upon reasonable interpretation of facts or circumstances,” which Gallagher could not

possibly have had at his disposal until after his views had been expressed. Rather than

demanding a public recanting of the column, however, Payne began by merely requesting a

“response to this letter as soon as possible.42

Five days later, on the eve of the general election, Clancy penned and mailed a strongly

worded defense of Gallagher’s column. Putting aside the cartoon and the Liston column, he

argued that the claims made by Drinan after the article was published were still indicative of

Drinan’s character, and thus (in some sense, albeit one that did not directly address the point

made by Payne) corroborated Gallagher’s claims. Furthermore, he claimed, the Herald-Traveler

had recently obtained evidence of a telephone campaign launched by Drinan supporters that

42 Ibid.

81

supposedly branded McGlennon an anti-Catholic, which fifteen people supposedly verified.

Whether or not Gallagher was correct, he concluded, his view was certainly reasonable based on

the circumstances and must be defended as such.43

At this point, Drinan was apparently so incensed by the publisher’s response that he

penned a letter to Mr. Clancy himself. Although a copy of the letter he produced no longer

exists, Clancy’s response to it quoted Drinan liberally, providing a smattering of Drinan’s

outraged tone. Drinan had apparently called Gallagher’s article “totally unsubstantiated and

vicious” and accused him of making “irresponsible and reckless remarks.” Furthermore, he

characterized Gallagher as a “consistently unfair” writer, who had resorted to “invective” and

“name-calling” because he was “unable or unwilling” to observe the minimum standards of

“decent journalism.” The anger that Drinan poured into this personal letter, without even asking

for a public recanting from the Herald-Traveler, is striking in and of itself. But something else is

even more fascinating about Drinan’s letter – he penned it after he had won the election. With

no immediate public gains to be made, the critical writings of a journalistic nobody still irked

Drinan to an outrageous extent, prompting him to write one of the angriest letters that can be

found amongst his papers – and all of this despite the fact that he had already secured

Congressional office. If Drinan was no more than a Machiavellian politician, outrage would

serve no discernible purpose in this situation – the public damage would already have been

dampened, and he would have been content to let sleeping dogs lie. Yet he did not, and quite

possibly could not.44

43 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #7 (Correspondence – General): Letter from Harold E. Clancy to Mr. Daniel Payne, Press Secretary, November 2, 1970. 44 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #7 (Correspondence – General): Letter from Harold E. Clancy to Robert F. Drinan, Congressman-elect, November 23, 1970.

82

Admittedly, this incident could be interpreted in a variety of ways. U.S. Representatives

are up for election every two years, after all, and it is possible that Drinan was simply looking

ahead to 1972 and the damage that Gallagher’s coverage might cause to his next campaign.

Certainly he was a naturally combative soul, always searching for a good fight and finding an

exciting one on the pages of the Boston Herald-Traveler. It seems most plausible, however, that

Drinan genuinely believed in the policies he was proposing and the grassroots organizing that he

was involved in, and took such offense at Gallagher’s aspersions on his character that he simply

could not let the incident pass without comment.

The second incident traced a similar path. It involved another article by columnist John

P. Roche, published on October 6, 1970, in which a discussion of Drinan’s position on abortion

concluded with a comparison of Drinan to Machiavelli, and the assertion that the liberal priest

was essentially a candidate who promised to disobey his own conscience. As the discussion of

this exchange in Chapter Three revealed, Drinan was outraged at this suggestion, and sent Roche

both a long letter and an article that he wrote for Theological Studies in March explaining the

complexities of his position on abortion. No reply was forthcoming.45

Yet on December 2, 1970, almost a month after Drinan had succeeded in his bid for

public office, and with no further prompting by Roche, Drinan wrote another letter resuming the

abandoned conversation. This one was quite a bit feistier, noting that Drinan was “simply

outraged at the fact that you describe me as a ‘candidate who promises to disregard his

conscience.’” It demanded a reply “within forty-eight hours after receiving this comment,”

apologizing for being so direct by noting that he had “the right and the duty to have an

45 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #7 (Correspondence – General): Letter from Robert F. Drinan, S.J. to Professor John Roche, Brandeis University, October 9, 1970.

83

explanation and an apology” for the original article. Once again, despite the fact that Roche’s

original statement could no longer have any impact on his candidacy, Drinan felt compelled to

continue to discuss the issue of his character and to actually demand a private apology (rather

than a public recanting). If Drinan was no more than a Machiavellian politician, his thirst for

power would already have been slaked. Although this incident could also be interpreted in a

number of ways, it is most plausible and most consistent with Drinan’s public message to

conclude that his claims to authenticity were genuine.46

__________

Ultimately, Drinan’s New Politics pervaded his campaign and shaped the way that he

responded to constituents and opponents alike. His organizing tactics were crucial for

disseminating his views on political issues and for getting supporters out to the polls. His call for

a new style of representation demanded Congressional change, and criticized the elderly Philbin

for failing to listen to the opinions of his district. The forthrightness and honesty that Drinan

used to argue for his own responsiveness spilled over into another arena during the general

election, during which he combated smear campaigns launched by both opponents, cloaking

himself in the rhetoric of hope, reconciliation, and attention to the actual issues. And although

the genuineness of his claims to genuineness cannot be conclusively measured, it certainly

appears as if Drinan was just as authentic as he claimed to be. These various factors wove

through the tapestry of the Drinan campaign, and played a crucial role in his pursuit of

Congressional office.

46 DCA, 1970 Campaign Files, Folder #7 (Correspondence – General): Letter from Robert F. Drinan, Congressman-Elect to Professor John Roche, Brandeis University, December 7, 1970.

Chapter Five

The First Term and Beyond: An Epilogue of Sorts

When the voting booths closed on November 3, 1970, Drinan was far from confident of

victory. Polls leading up to the election showed that he was maintaining a lead, but that it was a

precarious one at best. An article published in the Boston Globe two days before the election

found that Drinan was pulling 32% of the vote, which seemed comfortably ahead of Philbin’s

26% and McGlennon’s 24%. But an unnerving 18% of voters remained undecided and Drinan’s

support among liberals had dropped recently for unclear reasons, shifting the momentum into

Philbin’s camp. Furthermore, as the Globe pointed out, it was unclear how many of Philbin’s

supporters would be able to follow the write-in procedures accurately, which could skew the

results in even more unforeseen ways. Between these unpredictable factors and the general

closeness of the race, the newspaper declined to make any predictions.1

Drinan’s campaign volunteers thus spent all of election day mounting last-ditch efforts to

get voters out of their homes, even going so far as to phone Drinan supporters who had not made

it to the voting booths by the times that they were most likely to cast their votes, apparently in

order to remind them of their democratic duties.2 But despite these efforts, a clear outcome had

not been reached by the time the Globe went to print with its morning edition the next day. Early

returns gave Drinan a marginal lead, but Philbin’s sticker campaign had significantly slowed

down the tallying of votes. Furthermore, members of Drinan’s campaign staff had discovered

minor violations of state election laws and damage to Drinan’s name on several voting machines;

1 Globe Newspaper Co., “Fr. Drinan leads in 3d District,” The Boston Globe, November 1, 1970. 2 Thomas M. Gannon, “Reverend Father Congressman,” America, November 21, 1970.

filing charges in court slowed down ballot

not even be hinted at a whopping three hours after the polls had closed.

By the time the Globe’s evening edition had c

had been reached: the front page sported a picture of Drinan among supporters, one of whom

was holding up a sign that read “Our Father Who Art In Congress.” The photograph’s caption

mentioned the broad smiles on their faces, and triumphantly proclaimed Drinan the “first Roman

Catholic priest ever elected to the US House.”

according to his campaign files, gave him 37.25% of the popular vote

their one-minute spots,” he told one reporter over the phone. “Today I am preaching the politics

of reconciliation. Let’s not talk about this [the election results]

Liston, of the Boston Globe, he sounded a similar note: according to her, he “spurned discussion

of his narrow victory,” instead choosing to talk about “what he will do when he gets to

3 Carol Liston, “Fr. Drinan Has Narrow Lead in 4 “Sign of the Times,” The Boston Evening Globe5 DCA, Campaign Box #1, Folder #12: General Election Results.

Figure 8

85

filing charges in court slowed down ballot-counting even further, and preliminary returns could

not even be hinted at a whopping three hours after the polls had closed.3

’s evening edition had come out, however, a conclusion to this saga



their faces, and triumphantly proclaimed Drinan the “first Roman

Catholic priest ever elected to the US House.”4 (See Figure Eight.) Drinan’s official results,

according to his campaign files, gave him 37.25% of the popular vote – a mere two percentage

points more than McGlennon and only ten

percentage points better than Philbin, who

was not even listed on the ballot. But as

close as the race may have been, it was a

victory nonetheless.5

During an interview the next day,

Drinan was already anxious to

other topics. “Those people (his

opponents) out there had a lot of hatred in

minute spots,” he told one reporter over the phone. “Today I am preaching the politics

of reconciliation. Let’s not talk about this [the election results] anymore.” Speaking to Carol

, he sounded a similar note: according to her, he “spurned discussion


Carol Liston, “Fr. Drinan Has Narrow Lead in 3d,” The Boston Globe, November 4, 1970. The Boston Evening Globe, November 4, 1970, front page.

DCA, Campaign Box #1, Folder #12: General Election Results.

counting even further, and preliminary returns could

ome out, however, a conclusion to this saga



their faces, and triumphantly proclaimed Drinan the “first Roman

(See Figure Eight.) Drinan’s official results,

a mere two percentage

points more than McGlennon and only ten

percentage points better than Philbin, who

was not even listed on the ballot. But as

close as the race may have been, it was a

During an interview the next day,

Drinan was already anxious to move on to

other topics. “Those people (his

opponents) out there had a lot of hatred in

minute spots,” he told one reporter over the phone. “Today I am preaching the politics

anymore.” Speaking to Carol

, he sounded a similar note: according to her, he “spurned discussion


86

Congress.” In fact, Liston appears to have found only two comments about the results worth

sending to print. The first was quote from a press conference earlier that morning, in which

Drinan had declared that his victory “repudiated” at least two things – “the war policies of

President Nixon” and “the campaign tactics of smear and fear by both losers in this race.” The

second was stated directly to Liston: “Maybe my election means people are looking for moral

leadership. I think it’s an undeniable inference.” Between the two statements, Drinan had

mentioned the three themes that were most central to his campaign, and that most decisively

explained his victory: his peace platform, his priesthood, and his new politics.6

He no longer wished to discuss them, however. Instead, Drinan was ready to dive into

the complex world of the U.S. Legislature, and talked mostly about the mechanics of running a

Congressional office and how much he still had to learn. He was also eager to discuss specific

policy proposals – supporting the removal of troops from Vietnam, backing economic

conversion acts designed to help industry adjust to a peacetime economy, reviving the benefits of

the G.I. bill for workers displaced by that transition, encouraging broader federal housing

support, and demanding comprehensive medical coverage, among others.7 As another reporter

put it, this was typical Drinan: a “direct, to the point and accurate description of events,”

followed immediately by an acknowledgment that those events “were already in the past” and

that it was time “to speak of the future.”8

6 Carol Liston, “Fr. Drinan won’t make any ‘grandiose promises’,” The Boston Globe, November 5, 1970. 7 Ibid. 8 James Higgins, “How to Run & Win: Drinan’s Bay State Volunteers,” The Nation, December 20, 1970.

87

What “The Future” Entailed: A Freshman in the House

“The most difficult task a new representative or senator has to face,” declared an

unidentified reporter for the Washington Post in January 1971, “is the grueling three-week ordeal

which follows his swearing in.” For Father Drinan, that time period was filled with receptions,

meet-and-greets, and press conferences, a veritable whirlwind of obligations to be filled and

introductions to be made. As the same writer reported, Drinan “seems to be everywhere these

days… Tonight is the Press Club of Washington’s banquet for new members of Congress,

tomorrow is a reception with ‘ouah leadah,’ said Drinan in his Boston accent, and ‘Sunday I’m

going to the moon.’”9

But the fast-talking priest-politician was at his best in this hectic environment, where his

quick wit could shine and his impassioned oratory could attract the eye of reporters and the

attention that came with national coverage. Major newspapers devoted entire articles to his early

speeches, and Drinan did not hesitate to plug the platforms that he had campaigned on. In his

first press conference, for example, he declared his support for a potential Ted Kennedy

presidential bid, criticized the Nixon Administration for a poorly performing economy, called for

the phasing out of defense industries and the retraining of workers for peace-time jobs,

demanded a bill of rights for senior citizens, and noted that he would continue to wear his

clerical garb because, as he drolly put it, “They’re the only clothes I have.” A shining star of

sorts, Drinan appeared to be settling into his new position with the greatest of ease.10

9 “Congress Welcome,” The Washington Post, January 27, 1971. 10 Coverage of the first press conference paraphrased from: United Press International, “Priest-Legislator Backs Ted for ’72,” The Hartford Courant, January 7, 1971. “Newsmakers – He’ll Wear Clerical Garb on Secular Job,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1971. “Jesuit Set to Be Rep. Rev. Drinan,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1971.

88

But if his policy platforms had not changed significantly, something in the way that he

delivered his speeches most certainly had. Gone was the fiery rhetoric of change that had

suffused Drinan’s New Politics; in its place was a more realistic hedging of his bets. Although

he told the Chicago Tribune that he would still “vote in favor of any modification of the seniority

system,” he was constantly warning reporters (and, as a consequence, his constituents) that

change could not happen overnight. As he put it when speaking to a reporter from the Los

Angeles Times: “I’m not so pretentious as to think that I’m going to save the nation… I’m just a

freshman.” Sentiments such as these were a far cry from the demands for immediate change that

characterized his campaign just several months before.

Was this alteration actually a substantive change in Drinan’s approach to politics, or was

it simply the realistic prediction of a freshman politician? Did Drinan betray one of his core

campaign stances almost immediately after the election, or did he simply anticipate the

difficulties that he would face in the House of Representatives? A comprehensive analysis of

two years worth of Congressional Archives would be necessary to answer this question fully, and

such an endeavor is clearly outside the scope of this paper. But news coverage of Drinan’s first

term is quite illuminating, and paints a picture of a Congressman struggling ineffectually to bring

about change, striving to fulfill his campaign promises but finding himself blocked by the very

seniority system that he so frequently campaigned against.

Part of the problem stemmed from his committee placement: the Democratic Party

assigned him to the House Internal Security Committee, formerly the House Un-American

Activities Committee (HUAC) that had played such a repressive role in the Red Scare of the

1950s. Although the Armed Services Committee would have been a far more preferable stage

for the priest’s anti-war activism, HISC would have been an entirely unremarkable choice for a

89

freshman – if not for the fact that Drinan had introduced a bill to abolish it just one week prior to

his appointment.11 A staunch opponent of HISC, Drinan entered hostile waters with this

assignment, made even more difficult by the fact that the committee was dominated by

conservatives, both Democratic and Republican. As a political analyst later noted when

describing the mechanics of HISC, chairman Richard Ichord (D-Mo.) sought to retain “firm

conservative command,” while Drinan voted “against anything the rest of the committee wants.”

This situation was not helping to pave a path towards reform and national prominence for

Drinan; nor was it providing him with many opportunities to fulfill the promises of his

campaign.12

Of course, Drinan still believed that he was performing an important function by

remaining part of the committee. As he put it, he served on HISC “not because I see any value

whatever in its operations, but because I believe it is desirable for a person of my convictions to

observe this phenomenon at close hand… and to attempt to curb at least some of its gross

abuses.”13 And although his success in this endeavor was debatable, he certainly brought the

attention of the national press to some of these abuses. In late April 1970, for example, Drinan

went on the record as saying that HISC was an “unauthorized secret snooper,” and disclosed the

fact that it maintained 754,000 investigative files on suspected subversives, which he believed

was an unconstitutional extension of Congressional power and a violation of those citizens’ civil

11 Richard L. Lyons, “Drinan Named to House Security Panel,” The Washington Post, January 29, 1971. 12 Carl C. Craft, “Rep. Davis Fills Gap On HISC,” The Washington Post, April 30, 1972. 13 Ibid.

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rights.14 This generated some press coverage, although not enough pressure was brought to bear

on the issue for any changes to occur.15

Drinan was slightly more successful a year later, however, when he battled Ichord on

another HISC issue. Riled up by actress Jane Fonda’s visit to North Vietnam, where she made

antiwar broadcasts over the radio, Ichord had introduced a bill to outlaw trips to nations in armed

conflict with the United States without the approval of the President. It passed the committee

vote unanimously, in large part because Drinan was not informed of the session on the bill in

advance and was thus blocked out of the vote. (Ichord, of course, denied that this was the case –

but it seems quite unlikely that Drinan would have missed a chance to object to any legislation

proposed by Ichord.)16 Moving rapidly to prevent passage, however, Drinan led the floor fight

against the bill, arguing that it would violate freedom of the press and that it was an

unconstitutional expansion of Congressional power. Ultimately, he won the day – the bill came

up 18 votes short of the majority it needed to become law.17

But the Third District did not elect Drinan for the purpose of serving on HISC, whether

or not that entailed symbolically voting against Congressional snooping or blocking legislation

that reeked of paranoid McCarthyism. And although he may have played an important role in

several other pieces of legislation – opposing special tax bills that were used as political favors,

fighting against anti-busing amendments, and advocating lower age eligibility requirements to

14 Marjorie Hunter, “Member Scores Security Panel,” The New York Times, April 30, 1971. 15 See, for example: United Press International, “House Raises Budget of Security Committee,” The Hartford

Courant, April 30, 1971. “Congressional Report: Internal Security Funds Restored,” The Washington Post, April 30, 1971. TRB, “Tax Rates for Giant Oil Firms Run as Low as 1.2%,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1971 (To quote from the last article, “They are raw, hearsay dossiers of unverified gossip culled from right wing or Communist periodicals… Almost anybody’s name may be there; YOUR name may be there… Drinan charges contemptuously that only about 130 of the 435 members of the House believe they can vote against HISC without being charged at the next election with being soft on Communism.”) 16 Associated Press, “Bill Barring Trips to Nations at War With U.S. Gets OK,” Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1972. 17 Philip Warden, “Penalty for Hanoi Visits Barred,” Chicago Tribune, October 3, 1972.

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run for Congress, for example – none of those efforts had been a prominent part of his campaign

rhetoric either.18 His widely publicized opposition to public school prayer on Constitutional

grounds, at least, proved that his discussion of church and state separation was more than mere

pandering, but it did not help him to fulfill any of his trumpeted policy goals.19 The conservative

and critical Wall Street Journal even went so far as to argue that while some freshman

lawmakers had made “a splash,” Drinan seemed content to “limit himself to a few broadsides

against the House Internal Security Committee.”20

This attack, of course, was not entirely fair. As we have just seen, Drinan was

participating in a wide array of legislative activities, and his attacks on the HISC were more than

mere “broadsides.” But what did he do about his central campaign promise, about the one issue

that he cared about more than all others, about the concern that his entire political platform

stemmed from and centered on – the Vietnam War?

In his first year, it turns out, very little of note. When a certain Mrs. Buryn, resident of

the Third District town of Newton, MA, embarked on a 45-day walk to Washington to post five

pacifist “theses” on the Capitol door, Drinan promptly put her five proposals in the

Congressional Record and praised her for her courage and commitment – but nothing except

newspaper articles came out of the ordeal.21 Drinan also gave speeches at anti-war veteran

18 Tax Bills: “Special Tax Bills Fought In House,” The New York Times, February 29, 1972. Anti-Busing: Peter C. Stuart, “Compromise shaping up in Congress: Busing foes doubt amendment action now,” Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 1972. Age Requirements: Warren Weaver, Jr., “Lower Minimum Age for Congress Urged,” The New York Times, November 2, 1971 and Staff Editorial, “Youth and Age on the Hill,” The New York Times, November 6, 1971. 19 For more on this, see the following as examples: “Drinan Against Prayer Law,” Washington Post, July 12, 1971. Richard Philbrick, “Public School Prayers: a Persistent Controversy,” Chicago Tribune, September 19, 1971. Staff Editorial, “Freedom to Worship,” The New York Times, November 5, 1971. 20 “Washington Wire: A Special Weekly Report From The Wall Street Journal’s Capital Bureau,” Wall Street

Journal, May 21, 1971. 21 Bruyn Leaves and Requests Meeting with Drinan: “People in the News: Housewife to Walk 45 Days in Protest,” The Hartford Courant, February 18, 1971. Entering Theses in Congressional Record: Monty Hoyt, “Antiwar

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rallies and memorial services, suggesting that $50 billion in reparations be paid to victims in

Indochina, to be financed through a firearms tax – but the concept gained no political

momentum.22 He even went on a national tour with twenty other Congressmen to build

constituent pressure for immediate troop withdrawal, spoke at the National Convention of

Lawyers to End the War, and was one of many dovish Representatives to give a speech at the so-

called “Lobby of Americans,” a group of professional, religious, and former government leaders

who opposed the war – but he brought no new legislation to the House floor as a result.23

It should not be suggested that Drinan’s first year was a failure for lack of trying; if this

discussion reveals anything, it is an impression of how much time and effort he spent trying to

mobilize anti-war sentiment in and around Congress. But this exertion was largely fruitless – as

he noted early in his term, it was exceptionally difficult to bring about serious change in the

House of Representatives, most especially for a freshman. Drinan admitted this frankly in an

interview with Patricia Stewart, a reporter for the Hartford Courant: “There are 100 ‘very fine’

congressman,” he told her, “and 100 ‘old men’ who hold the power.” As a result, the 92nd

Congress was characterized by “lethargy, or apathy,” rather than the passion needed to stand up

to the Nixon Administration and alter American foreign policy. It made him, in his own words,

“more than a little depressed sometimes.”24

‘theses’ for Capitol: Housewife treks to Washington,” Christian Science Monitor, March 10, 1971. Praising Bruyn: Barbara Carlson, “Peace Theses Taped to Capitol Door,” The Hartford Courant, April 3, 1971. 22 Veteran Rally: “Veterans Discard Medals In War Protest at Capitol,” The New York Times, April 24, 1971. Memorial Service: “People in the News: Asks War Fund,” April 25, 1971. 23 National Tour: R.W. Apple, Jr., “Peace Tour Set By Congressman: 20 Plan Trip to Stimulate Sentiment Against the War,” The New York Times, April 30, 1971. Lawyer Convention: Display Ad 44, “Law Can End the War this Year,” The Washington Post, June 7, 1971. Lobby of Americans: Associated Press, “Antiwar Group Gathers at Congress’ Doorstep,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1971. 24 Patricia Stewart, “Priest-Legislator Battles the System,” The Hartford Courant, April 27, 1971.

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But by his second year as a Congressman, Drinan’s luck had begun to change. On March

23, 1972, with the help of Senators Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) and Walter Mondale (D-Minn.),

Drinan introduced legislation that would immediately stop military involvement in Indochina

outside of Vietnam, and require total withdrawal of U.S. troops and the cessation of all bombing

in Vietnam within thirty days of enactment. (In a concession to more moderate Representatives,

it also contained a provision that would extend the date of withdrawal for an additional thirty

days if North Vietnam refused to release American political prisoners.)25 Although the press

gave it short shrift at first – one New York Times subscriber actually wrote a letter to the editor

complaining about the bill’s lack of front-page coverage – it was still the first serious anti-war

legislation that Drinan had managed to bring to the table.26

And over the course of the ensuing months, the legislation, informally known as the

Gravel-Drinan bill, began to pick up steam. It had been introduced to the House in March by

thirty-four co-sponsors; by April 18, that number had almost doubled to sixty co-sponsors, and

Drinan confidently claimed that “more are coming on every day.” Furthermore, Democratic

doves had pieced together a strategy to move it through Congress – the majority whip planned to

ask the House Democratic caucus to declare (largely symbolic) support for the bill, and also

sought agreement from the House Foreign Affairs Committee to hold a hearing on the bill’s

provisions. Although the House had been very supportive of the military efforts in Indochina

throughout the previous two administrations, the midterm elections had slightly altered its

makeup and the electorate was becoming increasingly dovish. In addition, the Senate half of the

25 Spencer Rich, “41 on Hill Launch New Drive for U.S. Vietnam Pullout,” The Washington Post, March 24, 1971. 26 Amy Clampitt, “Letter to the Editor 5: No Title,” The New York Times, April 16, 1972.

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bill was rapidly gaining enough support to pass without any serious opposition. Drinan’s hopes

were running high.27

He experienced a brief setback on April 19, when the Democratic caucus rejected an

endorsement of the bill by a narrow vote – according to the Washington Post, the final count was

105 to 97. But he quickly shifted support to a milder substitute sponsored by Representative

Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.), hoping to put the caucus on record as favoring a termination

date without actually proposing one, and to thus gain potential support for the Gravel-Drinan bill

in a floor vote.28 This second resolution, which condemned the recent increase in the bombing of

North Vietnam and directed the House Foreign Affairs Committee to report to the House with

legislation providing for the termination of hostilities within thirty days, passed by a vote of 135

to 66. In an attempt to increase support and decrease party hostilities, a provision was added that

condemned the “current military invasion” of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese. This

version passed by an even wider 144-to-58 margin. “The hawks couldn’t believe it was

happening,” Drinan exclaimed, in the aftermath of the vote. “It’s a major revolution.”29

But on August 10, 1972, the House rejected the Gravel-Drinan bill by a vote of 228 to

178. Stunned and dismayed, Drinan penned an editorial for the New York Times in which he

reflected on this outcome, on what he called his “most depressing day as a member of Congress.”

This document sparkles and shines as one of the most poignant, insightful pieces of writing that

Drinan ever committed to paper. It is an eloquent testimony to the herculean efforts that he

27 Robert P. Hey, “Bombing triggers debate: Congress again restive on war,” Christian Science Monitor, April 18, 1972. 28 Spencer Rich and Mary Russell, “Debate Over Bombing Rages on Capitol Hill,” The Washington Post, April 20, 1972. 29 John W. Finney, “House Democrats, 144-58, Uphold End-the-War Move,” The New York Times, April 21, 1970. The provision relating to the House Foreign Affairs Committee could not technically require a report from the committee itself, but it was a binding resolution for House Democrats. Because they formed a majority of the committee, this virtually assured that the resolution would be carried out.

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expended to stop American involvement in Indochina, and a bitter commentary on the tragic

indifference with which Congress responded. In many ways, it encapsulates and embodies

Drinan’s experience as a freshman, the disappointment and frustration that this optimistic

crusader experienced during his first term.

“On Aug. 10,” Drinan wrote, “old men talked while young men died.” And three old

men in particular were culpable. Representative Richard Bolling, a Democrat who had built his

political career on the demand that Congress reassert its power and who could have provided

crucial support for the bill, moved to delete the section that would compel U.S. withdrawal and

refused to yield to Drinan in the floor debate on the issue. He later admitted that he had declined

to do so because he was afraid that he would be asked questions for which he had no answer.

Said Drinan, “He was correct.” Democratic Majority Leader Hale Boggs opposed the bill

because of the withdrawal date – he did not believe that a final bill could be worked out soon

enough to justify the date because Congress was preparing to adjourn for the summer. But

American soldiers did not stop dying, Drinan noted bitterly, while “Congressman go to

conventions, have vacations, and enjoy recesses.” And Speaker of the House Carl Albert, at

pinnacle of leadership for the Democratic Party in the 92nd Congress, failed to provide any

direction on the legislation, despite the fact that the House Democratic Caucus and Presidential

nominee, Senator George McGovern (whom Albert had endorsed), had urged action on the issue.

The “160 Democrats who voted against their Speaker and majority leader,” Drinan declared,

“can hardly be expected to have much confidence in the leadership of the 92nd Congress which,

on the issue above all issues, failed to lead or even to speak.” He continued, concluding his

emotionally fraught and devastatingly frustrated reflection:

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Aug. 10 ended another chapter in my life. The agony of bearing witness to this war became almost a physical pain… I try not to be ashamed to be a member of Congress. I must confront the fact, however, that history will conclude that the House of Representatives in the 92nd Congress acquiesced in the most brutal war in all of history, abdicated its responsibilities and allowed the Pentagon and the President to perpetuate a war now more cruelly waged from the air than on the land.

My mind cannot yet look forward to the hope which may come with the 93rd Congress. I am still stunned, numbed and dismayed.30

__________

Looking Forward Despite the Past: A Second Campaign for Congress

As difficult as it must have been for Drinan to anticipate the 93rd Congress in mid-August

of 1970, he fully intended to be a member of it. His campaigning had actually begun in an

indirect manner several months earlier, through his participation in the Presidential primaries.

With public sentiment turning rapidly against the war and President Nixon’s rating plummeting

in correspondence, many Democrats saw 1972 as a chance to take back the White House. As

early as January, the networking of various Presidential hopefuls had garnered national press

coverage, and Drinan – although he lacked such high aspirations himself – found his name

floating around the columns of political reporters.

At first, he was simply providing comic relief. At one wine and cheese gathering in

Maine, for example, he told a reporter that he was considering the Vice Presidential nomination

under African-American Representative Shirley Chisholm: “That way, she could call anybody

who didn’t vote for us a religious bigot, and I could call ’em a white racist.”31 But before long,

he had settled on a candidate – Senator McGovern – and begun canvassing and campaigning in

his home state. As he told a reporter from the New York Times, McGovern had opposed the war

30 Robert F. Drinan, “The Longest Day,” The New York Times, August 17, 1972. 31 Jeannette Smyth, “Wine and Cheese Party: For Maine or Muskie?,” The Washington Post, January 20, 1972.

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“without deviation and without faltering,” and had run a campaign “of candor and reason on

behalf of the moral principles on which American democracy is founded.”32 Perhaps seeing

much of his own style in this Presidential hopeful, Drinan committed to McGovern over Edmund

Muskie (a fellow Catholic) and Massachusetts politician Ted Kennedy (for whom, attentive

readers may recall, he had actually issued a potential endorsement one year prior – which, he

claimed, he would “not disavow” should Kennedy decide to run).33

Heading into the Massachusetts primary in late April, the Democratic Party had yet to

select a candidate – and the 102 Bay State delegates up for grabs were thus of the utmost

importance for McGovern, who was then trailing in the polls. But Massachusetts’s Presidential

primary system was an extraordinarily complicated one, and voters were confronted by a

selection process that actually required them to vote three times: once in a binding preference

poll that would secure delegates from Congressional districts, once to select an additional at-

large slate of 20 delegates hand-picked by the respective nominees, and once directly for district

delegates, most of whom had pledged support for a candidate but all of whom would be free to

vote as they wished.34 The two leading candidates, according to the polls, were Muskie and

McGovern. Muskie did very little stumping in the state, relying instead on a slate of delegates

that included many of the state’s most prominent Democrats, including Boston Mayor Kevin H.

White and House Democratic Whip Tip O’Neil. By contrast, McGovern’s slate was headed by

32 Richard D. Lyons, “Dole Urges Panel to Fix War Blame: Calls Democratic Aspirants 2-Faced on Nixon Stand,” The New York Times, January 22, 1972. 33 United Press International, “Photo Standalone – For McGovern,” The Hartford Courant, January 22, 1972. 34 David S. Broder, “McGovern Favored in Mass.,” The Washington Post, April 25, 1972.

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Father Drinan and had almost no other well-known names on it, consisting almost entirely of

social activists rather than entrenched politicians.35

Yet the Bay State broke with the local Democratic hierarchy on April 26, and McGovern

pulled away with all 102 delegates and a majority of the popular vote, despite being faced by

eleven opponents. Rather unexpectedly, as two reporters put it, McGovern found himself

“vaulted into the front-runner’s position” nationally, buoyed by support from both blue-collar

laborers and suburban idealists. Even more unexpectedly, the organization Democrats who had

backed Muskie found themselves without seats at the Democratic convention – and Drinan, by

contrast, found himself with a state delegation chairmanship just a year-and-a-half into his

political career.36

A history of the 1972 Presidential election would take readers well beyond the topic of

this paper, but Drinan’s role in the process had an important impact on his own candidacy

several months later. After an agonizingly divisive convention, the liberal McGovern won the

nomination, leaving the Democratic Party’s more conservative candidates worried about their

chances for re-election. As Indiana governor Matthew Welsh put it, when discussing his strategy

for re-election, McGovern’s “far-out” ideas alienated some moderate voters and were not a

welcome addition to his candidacy: “I don’t see why Sen. McGovern should want to come into

Indiana… Certainly we’re not going to insist that he come more often.” But in Drinan’s district,

moderately altered from 1970 and renamed the Massachusetts Fourth, rather than the Third, the

large youth vote and the heavy anti-war sentiment made his prominent support for McGovern an

35 Frank Starr, “Bay State Primary One of Underdogs,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1972. David S. Broder, “Warming Up to McGovern: Lead Climbs to 2-1 in Massachusetts Poll,” The Washington Post, April 23, 1972. 36 Stephen Isaacs and David S. Broder, “Article 1 – No Title,” The Washington Post, April 27, 1972. United Press International, “Priest to Head Delegation,” The New York Times, May 23, 1972.

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enormous asset. As Drinan understated the situation, when talking to a Wall Street Journal

reporter about the impact of McGovern’s nomination on local contests, “He’ll sure help me.”37

And relying on this help was, in large part, Drinan’s strategy in 1972. His second

campaign leaned heavily on his visibility as the incumbent, his support of the Democratic Party’s

Presidential nominee, and the endorsements of such prominent politicians as Ted Kennedy,

rather than the fiery rhetoric and active campaigning that he had employed in 1970. He did not

even bother to officially announce his candidacy until mid-July, almost seven months after he

had begun campaigning the last time, and he faced no opposition in the Democratic primary.38

In some ways, his strategies during this election cycle bore an eerie resemblance to the tactics

and confidence exhibited by Philbin just two years earlier.

Of course, although the style of Drinan’s 1972 bid may not have been as heated as his

previous campaign, it would be decidedly unjust to overemphasize the comparison to Philbin.

Drinan’s policy platforms remained staunchly dovish, and oftentimes radical, remaining true to

the vision that he had previously espoused. His priesthood was still a contentious issue – only

about one-half of Roman Catholic voters supported Drinan during his second run for Congress,

according to one poll in the Boston Globe.39 And the contest heated up somewhat unexpectedly

with the Republican Party’s nomination of Martin Linsky and the independent bid of

conservative John Collins, forcing Drinan to adopt a more active approach to re-election.

37 Fred Zimmerman and Byron Calames, “George Who?: Many Local Democrats Who Seek Reelection Plan to Shun McGovern,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 1972. United Press International, “4th District Candidate,” The Hartford Courant, May 11, 1972. 38 United Press International, “Drinan to Seek 2d Term,” The New York Times, July 18, 1972. Associated Press, “Bay State Democrats Pick Brooke Rival,” The New York Times, September 20, 1972. 39 “4th District poll: Drinan leads by 10%, McGovern by 3%,” The Boston Globe, October 1, 1972.

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Martin Linsky was a Jewish lawyer and former assistant minority leader in the

Massachusetts House. Despite his affiliation with the Republican Party, he was by all accounts

an outspoken liberal whose policy platforms overlapped with Drinan’s quite frequently.40 When

asked what the most important priorities for the next Congress would be, his laundry list of

proposals could just as easily have been written by Drinan himself: “To restore confidence in

government; end war in Vietnam; curtail influence of money in politics…; providing adequate

health care to all Americans…; preserve environment by adopting strict pollution regulations,

planning for resource use and population growth.”41 Concerns such as these may actually have

placed the Republican nominee to the left of many Democratic Congressmen, but they resonated

amongst the increasing liberal population of the Fourth District. And by aligning many of his

policies with Drinan’s, Linsky effectively stole the priest’s advantage on the issues and made the

race about something else: “effectiveness,” which Linsky portrayed as the ability to achieve

“gradual change” through moderate compromise, rather than “hold[ing] out for ultimate goals”

as Drinan had in the case of the Gravel-Drinan bill.42

John T. Collins, on the other hand, was running the campaign of a self-styled

“independent conservative,” hoping to attract Republicans who were dissatisfied with Linsky’s

nomination. Drawing distinct policy differences between himself and the other candidates,

Collins declared that the economy was the chief issue at stake, but noted that he supported the

bombing of North Vietnam wholeheartedly. (Drinan, by contrast, called it “totally indefensible

by any standards,” and Linsky said that he would have voted for the Brooke Amendment, which

40 See, for example: “State by State: Massachusetts,” The Washington Post, November 5, 1972. 41 The League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, “Election 72: Voters’ Guide for November 7, 1972,” Special Sunday Insert in The Boston Globe, October 24, 1972. 42 Warren Weaver, Jr., “Drinan’s Foe Uses TV Despite ‘Waste:’ Legislator to Spend $25,000 in Massachusetts Race,” The New York Times, October 23, 1972.

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set the return of American prisoners of war as the benchmark for withdrawal.)43 Although he

stood little chance of winning, Collins campaigned largely for the sake of having an impact on

the election: after a poll was released that showed him with 10% of the vote, he admitted that he

would have to move quickly to stand a chance, but that “in any event, a very serious and

important message is going to be put forth to the people of this district.”44

As late as mid-October, Drinan was still active in Washington and was leaving the bulk

of the campaign to his staff on the ground, although he did fly back to Massachusetts on

weekends to deliver speeches and participate in fund-raising events. A poll released on October

30 showed him with a widening 21-point lead over Linsky, indicating that Drinan’s

comparatively lackadaisical approach to the contest was not hurting his chances. It noted that

Collins was drawing votes that would otherwise have gone to Linsky (which was notably similar

to the manner in which Philbin took votes from Drinan in the 1970 general election), and that

Drinan’s visibility played a large role in his high levels of support. Whereas nine in ten voters

claimed that they had a distinct impression of Drinan, a mere three in ten said the same of

Collins. The pollsters determined that this was the central issue of the campaign, that Linsky’s

biggest problem was “still one of visibility” and that Drinan’s hefty lead reflected “his advantage

as the incumbent.”45

These were odd developments for a politician who had fought vociferously against the

advantages given to incumbents just two years prior, readers might note, and it would have been

strange indeed if the story stopped there. But the political dynamic shifted in the last few weeks

43 Jonathan Fuerbringer, “4th District hopefuls discuss war, campaign spending limitations,” The Boston Globe, October 2, 1972. 44 Richard M. Weintraub, “3-way race intensifies in 4th District,” The Boston Globe, October 9, 1972. 45 “Drinan widens margin in 4th District survey,” The Boston Globe, October 30, 1972.

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of the race, as Linsky poured large amounts of money into a television advertising campaign and

a tentative cease-fire agreement in Vietnam led Henry Kissinger to declare that peace was at

hand. A new Boston Globe poll released four days before the race contained promising statistics

for Drinan’s challengers – over the space of six days, Drinan’s lead had dropped by ten points

and Linsky’s support had climbed by five. Linsky had always held a significant lead among

voters who believed the war was reaching an end, which had increased of late thanks to

Kissinger’s announcement, and his favorability rating was rapidly approaching Drinan’s. And

when voters were asked both if they were sure that they were going to vote and whether they

believed that their vote would matter, the latter of which was considered a good indication of

turnout, Drinan’s lead dropped to 42-36.46

The intensity of the race appears to have been stepped up as a consequence, according to

reporter Richard M. Weintraub. Sound trucks now trawled the streets, “proclaiming the virtues

of candidates;” students stood on street corners in torrential downpours, holding up soggy signs

in support of their nominees; supermarkets became recruiting zones, as volunteers confidently

stalked shoppers with clipboards and bumper stickers; and Drinan and Linsky stumped

throughout the district, trudging from town meetings to block parties, “wearily” mounting their

“last attempts to gain the favor of voters.” (Collins, on the other hand, had a law practice that he

still attended to during daylight hours.) The final days of the campaign, in other words, revived a

bit of the grassroots pizzazz that had characterized Drinan’s first run for Congress, albeit more

46 “Massachusetts Poll: Drinan, 46%; Linsky, 35%; Collins, 8%, in 4th District,” The Boston Globe, November 3, 1972.

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because of the competition than because he was continuing to express a staunch belief in the

power of the New Politics.47

The lack of automated voting machines in many of the western Fourth District counties

prevented a rapid return of vote tallies, and the Boston Globe could not name a winner until two

days after the election. But when it did, Drinan was on top with 50.6% of the vote, over five

percentage points more than his nearest opponent, Linsky. Soon after the results were reported,

he confidently declared that “come hell or high water, we will obtain our objective, that supreme

objective of everyone here and everyone in this country: peace in this world.”48 These were

inspiring sentiments, no doubt, but supporters who had been present at his victory speech in 1970

must have been experiencing a little déjà vu. And on December 19, roughly one month later,

Nixon had resumed full-scale bombing of North Vietnam and Drinan offered up a resolution to

set a date for withdrawal, subject to the release of prisoners.49

If not for the dates stamped at the top of the country’s newspapers, readers might have

had difficulty telling whether they were reading the current edition or a copy from two years

prior – it was back to business as usual on Capitol Hill.

___________

Concluding Thoughts

Father Drinan’s 1970 campaign for Congress was a complex confluence of events, and

even the three detailed interpretative frameworks presented here are by no means exhaustive.

47 Richard M. Weintraub, “Sound trucks, handshakes – It’s pre-election weekend in the 4th District,” The Boston Globe, November 5, 1972. 48 Richard M. Weintraub, “Linsky nibbled for votes; Drinan bit chunks and won,” The Boston Globe, November 9, 1972. 49 “Resumption of Bombing Arouses Hill Criticism,” The Washington Post, December 20, 1972.

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Self-consciously styling his efforts as an issue-oriented campaign, Drinan emphasized his

opposition to the Vietnam War first and foremost on the trail, and strove to tie his peace rhetoric

into the economic and social concerns of a broad array of voters. And because his success

cannot be entirely explained by the views of his constituents, who were not overwhelmingly

opposed to the war, his story suggests that more is needed to our understand 1970 election trends

than a national shift in political priorities, that the variations among the individuals who stumped

through their districts were quite influential, perhaps in ways that transcend Gallup polls and the

number crunching of quantitative analysis.

It also suggests that religious liberals had – and perhaps now have – the potential to

influence American politics despite the fact that conservative pastors seem to dominate the

airwaves. By simultaneously dismissing his priesthood as a distraction from the real issues,

making clear his respect for the church-state divide, and relying on his clerical collar for moral

righteousness on the campaign trail, Drinan overcame religious prejudices within his district and

utilized a profoundly ethical rhetoric to advocate a liberal agenda. His story suggests that

religion should not be quite as anathema to politics as the modern Democratic Party often makes

it out to be, that it is possible to merge moral convictions with respect for the Constitution, and

that a spiritual vision is not necessarily incompatible with a secular one.

Drinan’s story was as much about a vision of the New Politics as it was about religion,

however, and this aspect of his campaign is startlingly similar to many political candidacies

today. He employed revolutionary organization methods, using grassroots campaigns to

mobilize support on the ground, and tried to use this groundswell to effect serious, lasting

change, to make the American government far more responsive to the will of the people that it

represented. Fighting against age with youth, against corruption with integrity, Drinan espoused

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a rhetoric of change, hope, and democracy that resonates in today’s political climate as much as

it did in his.

And yet, as powerful as all three of these campaign techniques were, and as effective as

they may have been in securing Drinan a seat in the House of Representatives, they did not

translate into legislative prowess. The grandiose goals evident in Drinan’s campaign

advertisements and stump speeches were not achieved in his first term; the Vietnam War

continued to escalate, while the seniority system confined the hot-headed priest to the House’s

sidelines. By the time November 1972 rolled around, Drinan’s campaign leaned on his

incumbency, endorsements, and connection to Presidential candidate George McGovern, at least

until Linsky forced him to engage more vigorously. This about-face is more than a mere

curiosity; it is a sad commentary on the withering effect that American politics can have on even

the most brilliant campaigner, the most passionate peace advocate, the most motivating orator to

be found.

The story of Congressman Robert F. Drinan, S.J. does not end with these disheartening

sentiments, however. The narrative thread that winds through these pages is only a first chapter

in the much larger tale of Drinan’s political career. An entire book could be written about

Drinan’s crucial role in the Watergate investigations, with at least a chapter devoted to his

attempts to impeach President Nixon for war crimes in Southeast Asia; another two tomes could

be spent chronicling the waves of controversy that he generated among the Catholic Church

hierarchy with his vocal support of abortion rights. And when Pope John Paul II declared that all

priests needed to withdraw from electoral politics in 1980, the inner struggle that Drinan engaged

in must have been fascinating, and an exploration of his decision to comply would touch upon

and expand the themes of Chapter Three in a variety of enlightening ways. Even his post-

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political life was out of the ordinary – he returned to academia, where he taught courses on

human rights and legal ethics at Georgetown Law School, but he also became President of the

liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action, served on the board of Bread for the

World, an organization dedicated to eradicating global hunger, and sponsored human rights trips

to third world countries.50

These grand narratives are out of the scope of this paper – a year’s worth of intensive

research could investigate only a small sliver of that larger tale, and Drinan’s Congressional

Archive alone has another four-hundred-and-seventy linear feet of papers waiting to be explored.

But this small sliver is still worth examining for its own sake: for the insight that it provides into

Drinan’s character, for the manifold ways in which that knowledge can illuminate his later

career, for the way in which campaign promises can reveal connections between a politician and

his constituents, and for the parallels and contrasts that this story raises between Drinan’s success

and American politics writ large. In short, for the many ways in which one small story can shed

light on the many others that make up our complex portrait of American History.

50 Mark Feeney, “Rev. Drinan, first priest elected as voting member of Congress, dies,” Boston Globe, January 28, 2007.

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Bibliography

Archives

DCA: Boston College, Robert F. Drinan Congressional Papers, Burns Library.

DFA: Boston College, Robert F. Drinan Faculty Papers, Burns Library.

Books and Articles

Au, The Cross, the Flag, and the Bomb: American Catholics Debate War and Peace, 1960-1983.

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Curran, Charles E. American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth-Century Approaches. Notre

Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.

Drinan, Robert F. Beyond the Nuclear Freeze. New York: The Seabury Press, 1983.

---. Democracy, Dissent, and Disorder: The Issues and the Law. New York: The Seabury Press,

1969.

---. Religion, the Courts, and Public Policy. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.,

1963.

---. Vietnam and Armageddon: Peace, War, and the Christian Conscience. New York: Sheed and

Ward, 1970.

Fisher, James Terrence. “The Vietnam War and American Catholics.” In The Encyclopedia of

American Catholic History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997, 1435-8.

Flamm, Michael W. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in

the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

The Gallup Poll. New York: Random House, 1972.

The Harris Survey Yearbook of Public Opinion. New York: Louis Harris and Associates, 1971.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Krause, Patricia A., ed. Anatomy of an Undeclared War: Congressional Conference on the

Pentagon Papers. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1972.

Meconis, Charles A. With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic Left, 1961-1975. New York:

The Seabury Press, 1979.

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McNeal, Patricia. Harder Than War: Catholic Peacemaking in Twentieth-Century America. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Perlstein, Rick. “Who Owns the Sixties?: The Opening of a Scholarly Generation Gap.”

LinguaFranca 6, no. 4 (May 1996), 234-46.

Quigley, Thomas E., ed. American Catholics and Vietnam. Grand Rapids, MI: Willian B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968.

Rossinow, Doug. “Mario Savio and the Politics of Authenticity.” In The Free Speech Movement:

Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, edited by Robert Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnick.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

---. The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America. New

York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Newspapers and Periodicals

America

Boston Globe

The Catholic World Report

Chicago Tribune

The Christian Century

The Christian Science Monitor

Christianity Today

Commonweal

Hartford Courant

Look

Los Angeles Times

The Nation

The New York Times

Time

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U.S. News & World Report

The Wall Street Journal

Washington Post

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