Guest Columns

During the Watergate fiasco, one interview stamped itself on my memory. Larry O’Brien was the national chairman of the Democratic Party, and it was his office that was broken into my Richard Nixon’s “plumbers.” O’Brien had a long political career in Massachusetts which concluded with his appointment as the manager for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaigns. Johnson had rewarded him with an appointment as U. S. Postmaster General.

It’s easy to lose track of how short American history really is in the grander scheme of things. My grandfather was born in 1881 and his father and many of his uncles were Civil War combat veterans. During their childhoods, they, in turn, had met veterans of the American War for Independence. Both these struggles seemed as distant as the Crusades when I was in school. Yet, my grandfather was a very real presence in my life for whom I named my own son. Byron Howard taught me how to play baseball and he continued to play first base himself with an industrial league team in St. Louis well into his 70s.

February 7, 1862 was the originally scheduled execution date for Nathaniel Gordon, a convicted trans-Atlantic slave trader. However, Gordon, the scion of a respectable Presbyterian family from Portland, Maine, had good reason to believe that neither his death sentence nor any other severe punishment would actually be carried out.

What if talk about challenging the status quo was more than talk and the November election saw three presidential contenders running neck and neck? That was the prime question when Americans Elect (AE) held its Regional Delegate Leaders Conference (the first of six) in Omaha. Three dozen people (some committed, some skeptical, all curious) met to plan how to upend the presidential nominating process and take the White House.