POLITICO ON BERNIE SANDERS’ SECRET
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
JANUARY 1, 2019


THIS SINGLE SUBJECT BLOG FOR TODAY, IS A REPRINT FROM POLITICO ON BERNIE SANDERS AND HIS EARLY LIFE, CALLED “BERNIE SANDERS HAS A SECRET.” IT IS GRIPPINGLY MOVING TO ME BECAUSE IT IS EXACTLY THE SAME TIME PERIOD PLUS FOUR YEARS AS MY EARLY ADULTHOOD, AND A VERY SIMILAR LIFE. BOTH HIS INFIDELITIES AND HIS DEDICATION TO A VIEW OF LIFE ARE SIMILAR TO MINE.

THE DESCRIPTION OF HIS APARTMENT AS HAVING VERY LITTLE FURNITURE, BUT STACKS OF LIBRARY BOOKS AND LEGAL PADS FULL OF SCRIBBLING STACKED UP ON THE FLOOR IS VERY FAMILIAR. WHILE I WON’T TRY TO IMPLY THAT I AM AS NOTEWORTHY AS HE IS, I WAS A VERY SIMILAR SORT OF PERSONALITY AND THINKER, SO I HAVE CONSIDERABLE EMPATHY WITH HIM. WATCHING BERNIE IN ACTION TAKES ME BACK TO MY OWN COLLEGE YEARS.

PEOPLE TALK ABOUT BERNIE AS BEING TOO OLD TO WIN A PRESIDENTIAL RACE, BUT HE ISN’T AS FAR AS I CAN SEE TOO OLD TO SERVE. HE IS ONLY FOUR YEARS OLDER THAN I AM AND CLEARLY STILL PHYSICALLY AND INTELLECTUALLY ACTIVE. HE MAY BE TOO OLD TO CONVINCE THE PUBLIC TO ELECT HIM AS PRESIDENT, BUT HE WILL, I HOPE, CONTINUE ON IN PUBLIC LIFE. THAT COULD BE IN THE SENATE, OR SOMETHING IN THE GREATER WORLD, SUCH AS SOME MORE SERIOUS PERSONAL LEVEL WRITING, A VERY SERIOUS AND ASSERTIVE PROGRESSIVE THIRD PARTY, OR WORKING WITHIN AN ACTIVIST ORGANIZATION HELPING THE POOR TO LIVE AND BREAK FREE FROM THEIR IMPRISONMENT, OR “FATE.”

A BIOGRAPHICAL PIECE THAT I READ A FEW YEARS AGO, PERHAPS THE FOREWORD TO ONE OF HIS BOOKS OR A MAGAZINE ARTICLE, CONCERNED THE GREAT MYSTERY WRITER EARL STANLEY GARDNER. IT WAS ALSO VERY HELPFUL EMOTIONALLY TO ME, BECAUSE IT EXPLAINED MY DEEP UNWILLINGNESS TO SETTLE DOWN AND CONFORM. PARAPHRASING, HE SAID “MOST PEOPLE SPEND THEIR WHOLE LIVES SHADOW-BOXING.” HE GOES ON TO EXPLAIN THAT THEY DO SOMETHING TO MAKE A LIVING WHICH IS NEITHER THEIR GREATEST LOVE AND NOR THEIR GREATEST SKILL. IT ISN’T DEATH, BUT IT ISN’T A FULL LIFE, EITHER. UNTIL I WENT THROUGH CERTAIN LIFE EVENTS, I WAS IN THAT CATEGORY OF PERSONS, AND VERY DISSATISFIED WITH IT.

IN THE LATE 1960S, BERNIE WAS IN VERMONT AND I WAS IN CHAPEL HILL, NC AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA. THE SHOOTING DEATHS OF THE GREATEST LIBERAL LEADERS OF MY LIFE OCCURRED THEN, THE VIETNAM WAR RAGED, THE BEATLES AND A HOST OF OTHER GREAT ROCK MUSICIANS TAUGHT ME HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH MY INNER PAIN, BECOMING THEN AT LEAST A LITTLE WISER AND MUCH STRONGER. STILL, I GRIEVED. AN ASTUTE OLDER MALE FRIEND OF MINE SAID TO ME ONCE WHEN I RHAPSODIZED, HALF HAPPY AND HALF SAD, ABOUT CHAPEL HILL, “IT ISN’T A PLACE. IT’S A TIME OF LIFE.”

THAT SIMPLE STATEMENT HELPED ME TO BREAK THE GRIP ON ME OF THE WORST TWO DISAPPOINTMENTS IN MY LIFE. I DIDN’T GET TO HAVE A BABY WITH MY FIRST HUSBAND AND I DIDN’T GET TO KEEP MY SECOND AND MOST INTENSE LOVE. OF COURSE, I DID KEEP HIM IN THE INNER PARTS OF MY SELF. FINALLY, I BROKE AWAY FROM THE PREOCCUPATION WITH IT, BY AN ODD LITTLE TRICK OF THE IMAGINATION. I VISUALIZED MYSELF PUTTING THOSE YEARS INTO A WHITE HATBOX, TIED THEM UP IN A WIDE SATIN CAROLINA BLUE RIBBON, AND THEN MYSTICALLY PUT THE BOX UP ON THE TOP SHELF OF MY CLOSET. IT REMAINS THERE STILL. SOMETIMES, LIKE TODAY, I OPEN IT UP AND GO INSIDE FOR A TIME, THEN I COME BACK TO DAILY LIFE. THIS IS ONE OF THOSE DAYS.

I AM THANKFUL THAT I WAS ABLE TO LIVE THROUGH THOSE EXPERIENCES, WHEN I WAS NO LONGER MARRIED. I LOVED MY FIRST HUSBAND VERY MUCH, BUT AS SOMEONE SAID ABOUT HIS FIRST MARRIAGE, “IT JUST DIDN’T GEL.” WHEN I GOT THAT DIVORCE, I REALIZED THAT I WAS FREE, AND MY SECOND LIFE BEGAN. IN THAT PERIOD, I FOUND MY GYPSY DAVY, AND MY FIRST INTENSE AND COMPLETELY FULFILLING LOVE RELATIONSHIP OCCURRED. WHILE IT TOOK ME ABOUT TEN YEARS TO GET OVER THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF THAT, I’M GRATEFUL FOR THE EXPERIENCE. I’VE BEEN CONTENT TO BE ALIVE SINCE THEN.

THIS IS THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WHICH GIVES A HUGE AMOUNT OF FAIRLY INTIMATE DETAIL, AND IS VERY WELL-WRITTEN. IT’S ENTERTAINING, AND HOPEFULLY TRUTHFUL. IF YOU LIKE QUIRK, YOU’LL LIKE BERNIE, AND I LOVE QUIRK. IT KEEPS ME INTERESTED. HAVE A LOOK AT IT.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927
THE FRIDAY COVER
Bernie Sanders Has a Secret
Vermont, his son and the hungry early years that made him the surging socialist he is today.

By MICHAEL KRUSE July 09, 2015

PHOTOGRAPH -- Erik Borg/The Vermont Freeman

One morning last month in Burlington, Vermont, at the law office of John Franco, one of Bernie Sanders’ best friends since the 1970s, Franco talked to me at length about Sanders’ commitment and his consistency and his charisma. Even at the beginning of Sanders’ career, he said, four decades before he started packing arenas in college towns and liberal havens as a renegade 73-year-old, self-described socialist taking on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment, “People didn’t want him to stop talking.” He talked about how Sanders “completely changed the political culture” in Vermont. He talked about how Sanders’ surprising current surge in national polls is “validation.”

“I’m proud of Bernard,” he said.

All of that was interesting. But I wanted to know not just about what Sanders has done. I wanted to know more about who he has been. So I asked what I thought was an innocuous question about Sanders’ son. How did Sanders juggle aspirations as an eager political activist with his role as a divorced young father?

“That’s out of bounds,” Franco said.

Out of bounds?

“It’s none of your f—-ing business,” he said. He smiled, but he wasn’t joking.

It’s always been that way with Sanders. The issues. The issues. Stick to the issues. The rich are too rich. Those with power have too much. The middle class is withering. Inequality is a crisis, and the system is rigged. With Sanders, what you see is what you get, insist the people who know him best — and that’s almost all you get.

But if his positions are well known, the person, it turns out, is less known. Before Sanders was a U.S. senator, before he was a congressman, before he was mayor of Burlington — before he won one shocking election, then 13 more — he was a radical and an agitator in the ferment of 1960s and '70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion of laborers who didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old.

In his chosen home, a state that at the time was morphing from one of the country’s most resolutely conservative to one of its most reliably liberal, the New York City-raised Sanders found an environment that suited him: a tolerant, loosey-goosey era and place, but with an abiding Yankee sense of privacy. It allowed him to focus on what fueled him without being forced to discuss publicly significant details about his personal life — like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement, and the fact that the mother of his one biological child is not his ex-wife. That’s a surprise to some who have known him for decades. It’s also very much a product of an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters and local reporters who have steered clear rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.

That these kinds of basic biographical details could emerge now, almost 44 years after he first ran for office, is a point of sharp contrast with the woman he’s running against, and gaining on. Clinton just might be the most unceasingly scrutinized citizen of her generation — while, of all the 2016 presidential candidates, Sanders, public figure and private person, is a rarity on the national stage: the known unknown.

***

Sanders’ life in electoral politics started on Oct. 23, 1971, in Plainfield, Vermont, in the library of Goddard College, a campus that doubled as a lefty hot spot, when the nascent anti-war Liberty Union Party was looking for someone to run for U.S. Senate. Sanders was barely 30 years old. He had thick-rimmed glasses and dark, curly hair, and his toddler son, Levi (pronounced LEH-vee), was seated in his lap. Sanders raised his hand.

OPTICS: Bernie Sanders, the Early Years | Photos from his college years to his time in Congress. (Click to view gallery.) | Sen. Sanders' office; Rob Swanson; Erik Borg/The Vermont Freeman New Window
OPTICS: Bernie Sanders, the Early Years | Photos from his college years to his time in Congress. (Click to view gallery.) | Sen. Sanders' office; Rob Swanson; Erik Borg/The Vermont Freeman

“We didn’t have a lot of choices, and he was willing to do it,” John Bloch, a party member who was at the meeting, told me on the phone.


“Liberty Union was running anybody and everybody they could find,” Martha Abbott, another party member who was there, said when we met in her office in Burlington.

“Sanders said, ‘You know what? I’ll try it. What do I have to do?’” Peter Diamondstone, one of the party’s founders, told me at his home in the woods in Dummerston, Vermont, near Brattleboro.

Early in his first campaign, Sanders would say later, he was so nervous during a radio interview the microphone picked up the sound of his knees knocking the table. “A strange thumping noise traversed the airwaves,” he would write in 1997 in Outsider in the House, the closest he has come to an autobiography. “And the few calls that came in expressed no doubt that this career was to be short-lived. ‘Who is this guy?’ one of the listeners asked.”

Sanders had grown up in Brooklyn, in Flatbush, in a three-and-a-half-room walkup. He was lower middle class, the son of a housewife and a Polish immigrant who sold paint. He was Jewish. He was, he once said, “very conscious as a kid that my father’s whole family was killed by Hitler.” He was cut from his high school basketball team, which wounded him, but he was good on the track team. He could run and run.

After he graduated from James Madison High School in 1959, he went to Brooklyn College for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he joined the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Peace Union and the Young People’s Socialist League. He read psychology, sociology and history. He read Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. He demonstrated against segregated housing owned by the college and against the city’s segregated schools – the latter getting him arrested and charged with resisting arrest for which he ended up paying a $25 fine. He met a woman who would become his wife. In 1964 he graduated with a degree in political science and got married in Baltimore.

That summer, not quite 23, he and his wife, Deborah Sanders, bought for $2,500 some property in Vermont, near Montpelier in the town of Middlesex off Shady Rill Road, according to property records. He wanted to live in the country, he has said, and had some inheritance money from his father, who had died in 1963. They spent parts of the next few summers on the property, living in what had been a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor. The marriage ended only two years after it began, in 1966.

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

By 1968, he was living in Vermont full time. On March 17, 1969, according to records, Sanders bought another property, in out-of-the-way Stannard, with a population of fewer than 200 people, in the rural area of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. Four days later, Levi Noah Sanders was born, at Brightlook Hospital in St. Johnsbury, Vermont; according to his birth certificate, his mother was a woman named Susan Campbell Mott.

Sanders had met Mott in New York and lived with her there. He lived with her in Stannard, too, but not for long before moving to Burlington, Vermont’s biggest city. Raised in New York, educated in Chicago, Sanders’ deep-woods idyll was over. Burlington, according to Liberty Union archives and campaign finance records, is where he lived when he started running for office.

Sanders was “not a politician,” he said at the start, but he nonetheless possessed characteristics that would make him a successful one. He could be prickly and yet captivating. He had a way of being somehow simultaneously doom-and-gloom and inspirational. Even though he considered his personal life off limits, he still relentlessly solicited attention, sending to newspapers and radio and TV stations onslaughts of typewritten press releases that could read like screeds. And even though he had little appetite for chit-chat, he still loved to campaign, and he did it tirelessly — traipsing around the state in his drab blue, Bondo-bound Volkswagen bug without working windshield wipers, showing up at newspaper offices and asking to be interviewed, visiting prisons and power plants, talking at schools and churches and inside people’s homes, and talking and talking and talking.

He ran on the Liberty Union ticket for Senate in a special election in early 1972, and for governor later in 1972, and for Senate again in 1974, and for governor again in 1976, never getting more than 6 percent of the vote.

Liberty Union was a ragtag new party — small, anti-war, left-wing — that existed only in Vermont. Some people called it a socialist party, but it had no official affiliation. Sanders and other members had generally egalitarian sensibilities, advocating for the young, the old, the poor and the rights of women and workers. Sanders was more Old Left than New Left, “a 1930s radical, not a 1960s radical,” as Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor, would later put it. He was not a hippie. He did not live in a commune. He considered himself a radical, a third-party independent, but he didn’t call himself a socialist. The Liberty Union, he thought, was “a reason to knock on doors,” “a good way to organize and educate people.”

He had, already, the consistency of a piston.

“In America today,” he told the Bennington Banner in late 1971, “if we wanted to, we could wipe out economic hardship almost overnight. We could have free medical care, excellent schools and decent housing for all. The problem is that the great wealth and potential of this country rests with a handful of people …”

“A handful of people own almost everything … and almost everybody owns nothing,” he wrote in the Liberty Union newsletter called Movement in 1972.

PHOTOGRAPH CAPTION -- From a 1973 radio address by Sanders.

“There are two worlds in America,” he said on a radio show called Vermont Spectrum in 1973.

By 1974, around Vermont, from Rutland to Barre to White River Junction and all the way up to the Canadian border, Sanders was impossible to ignore. His worldview was clear. So was his M.O.

“He’s a unidirectional wind-up — I don’t want to use the word toy, because he’s nobody’s toy, but he’s a growler,” said Denny Morrisseau, an anti-war activist who was a Liberty Union member in the early ‘70s. “Straight ahead, growl. Straight ahead, growl.”

The radio shows. The newspaper quotes. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

“… the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the vast majority in the middle are having a harder and harder time …”

Records from Sanders' Early Years in Vermont

“… and the situation is getting worse …”

“This,” he wrote in one of his releases in 1974,” is the burning and fundamental issue of this campaign.”

Of every campaign.

***

His message was clear and unwavering. His private life, meanwhile, was complicated and less settled.

He shared custody of his son in an informal arrangement with Mott, according to people who knew them. “She was around a lot,” Nancy Barnett, a friend who lived nearby, told me. Barnett called Mott “a pretty quiet, private person.” Sanders rented a small brick duplex at 295 1/2 Maple Street that was filled with not much furniture and not much food in the fridge but stacks of checked-out library books and scribbled-on legal pads. His son, who called his father “Bernard,” had an upstairs bedroom.

“Pretty sparse,” Gene Bergman, an old friend, said about the apartment.

“Stark and dark,” said Darcy Troville, a fellow Liberty Unionite who lived around the corner and shared with Sanders homemade jellies and jams.

“The electricity was turned off a lot,” Barnett said. “I remember him running an extension cord down to the basement. He couldn’t pay his bills.”

He worked some as a carpenter, although “he was a shitty carpenter,” Bloch told me. “His carpentry,” Morrisseau said, “was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

He worked as a freelance writer, putting intermittent pieces in the low-budget Vermont Freeman, a Burlington alternative weekly called the Vanguard Press and a glossy, state-supported magazine called Vermont Life.

The standards of the Freeman were not strict. “It was always fun to see what came through the mail,” said Jennifer Kochman, one of the editors when Sanders was a contributor. The recent uncovering of something he wrote in an issue from February 1972 created a burst of news coverage. It was a jumbled rant about gender roles that mentioned masturbation and rape, but even in Sanders’ commentary on the sexes he reverted to his central theme of injustice: “Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other.”

His writing wasn’t a living. The Vanguard paid as little as the rest. “It would’ve been not more than 50 bucks,” said Greg Guma, a former editor. Vermont Life? “Our rate was 10 cents a word,” said Brian Vachon, a former editor.


INSERT PHOTOGRAPHS --
The old sugar house in the land near Middlesex a quarter of a mile into the woods off Shady Rill Road. The primitive cabin, which had a dirt floor before Sanders installed wood, was the first place he lived in after he moved to Vermont. (Click to view the documents full size.)

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The Middlesex property record from 1964.

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The Stannard property record from 1969.

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Bernie Sanders' son's birth certificate from 1969.

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The Middlesex property record from 1970.

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The property record from 1979.

Top photo by Michael Kruse