A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  Five weeks later I appeared at the Democratic Party’s state nominating convention and discovered that democracy was not completely dead in Massachusetts. In the five minutes I was allotted on the podium, I asked the delegates to give me enough votes to put me on the ballot for lieutenant governor. To everyone’s surprise, I received not only the necessary 15 percent but a decisive 24 percent, even though I had, up to that point, been a complete political unknown. After almost a decade of analyzing, teaching, and writing about social change, as well as witnessing it firsthand on the most profound possible level in South Africa, I had set something important in motion—something that had seemed almost impossible, even foolish, when I began the campaign eight months before.

  Over the next four months I rocketed around the state, meeting thousands of people, speaking on topics that moved me, learning the mechanics of elections, defending my views before editorial boards and on television, and working with an exceptional staff and team of volunteers. Eventually I teamed up with a particularly talented driver, Graham Wik, the son of my campaign manager, Lynda. The two of us spent weeks traveling from town to town to town, like two astronauts sent on a distant mission.

  I still needed infusions for my hemophilia, so we occasionally had to pull over by the side of the road to do a quick intravenous injection, and we often speculated about how hard it would be to explain to a police officer why I was shooting up. Politically prominent people increasingly returned my calls, so I found myself talking to congressmen and senators and governors, active and retired, about strategy. On one occasion I picked up the phone and the callers were Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, with whom I had worked years before in New York City on a project for Habitat for Humanity.

  “We just wanted you to know that we’re both thinking of you. We believe that you are a wonderful candidate,” said Carter.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, watching the telephone poles fly by as Graham and I sped down the highway.

  Politics is a strange and often wonderful business, I thought as I hung up.

  As we moved out of the doldrums of summer, I built up steam. Even though my opponent, a hardworking state representative named Marc Draisen, had the official allegiance of 129 of the 130 Democratic state representatives in the State House, I continued to attract support. A month before the primary, a major feature story appeared in Boston magazine. Then the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and a host of other newspapers endorsed me. “I wonder if this is what momentum feels like?” I asked Evelyn Murphy, a former lieutenant governor, at one point.

  “It is, Bob, it is,” she replied.

  On primary day I had nothing to do but go to various polling places to greet people, and when even the workers from other campaigns, including Republican ones, wanted to shake my hand, I sensed that I was doing well. That night I won the primary with just under 53 percent of the vote. After fewer than ten months, starting from nowhere, I was now the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. I was immediately paired with the winner of the gubernatorial primary, Mark Roosevelt (great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt), to form the Democratic ticket against the incumbents, Governor Bill Weld and Lieutenant Governor Paul Cellucci.

  Weld had no primary opposition and had raised millions of dollars, which he spent ridiculing Roosevelt. I was not even considered worthy of criticism. Weld, it turned out, had a secret agenda; he wanted to win by such a devastatingly large margin that he could take on U.S. senator John Kerry in 1996. To do that, he needed to crush the Roosevelt-Massie ticket.

  The White House looked at the race and decided, probably correctly, that with only seven weeks left in the campaign, there was not much that could be done. Nonetheless, President Clinton flew to Massachusetts and spoke on behalf of all the Democratic candidates on a stage in Framingham. I remember arriving early on the stage and seeing pieces of tape on the floor identifying where we should stand. The piece that said “MASSIE” was about eight feet away from a piece of tape that said “POTUS.”

  “Who’s Potus?” I asked a Secret Service man.

  He looked at me as if I were a moron. “The President Of The United States,” he said laconically.

  I bounced around the state with national Democrats. I spoke from the same stage as Hillary Clinton in Springfield and was touched to discover that she had read my parents’ book Journey. I introduced Teddy Kennedy (who was running for reelection against political newcomer Mitt Romney). I learned how to whip up a crowd so that they would greet him with a huge roar as he came chugging up to the stage, with a broad smile and a great slap on the back for me. On one occasion Teddy went out of his way to introduce me. Listening to his resonant baritone talking about this “remarkable young man,” I found myself staring at my shoes in disbelief. Finally, just before the election, Vice President Gore flew to Boston to speak at a major fund-raising lunch. This was a special act of friendship, going back to my grandmother’s strong support for his father, Al Gore, Sr., during his first Senate race in Tennessee. Though the White House political office counseled against it and Gore was on crutches after tearing an Achilles tendon while playing basketball, the vice president overruled his advisers and came anyway.

  All this did not stem the tide, either locally or nationally. The Republican Party had seized on President Clinton’s efforts to establish national health insurance and attempted to tear him limb from limb. Newt Gingrich announced his solemn support of the “Contract for America” and got the Republican members of the House of Representatives to line up to sign it. I debated the incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, Paul Cellucci, and learned what it was like to have a political opponent lean within inches of my face when on television to bellow out his answers. Bill Weld kept up his on-air humiliation of Mark.

  The night of the election was sobering. I knew that we were going to lose, so I spent a long time preparing my very brief concession speech. We met in the Copley Plaza Hotel, just down the hall from the ballroom where Teddy Kennedy was celebrating his election to a sixth term in the United States Senate. As the numbers rolled, it was clear that we had lost by a large margin: 40 points (70 percent to 30 percent).

  To my immense surprise, Rosalynn Carter appeared in person to thank me for my race and to urge me to run again. John Kerry, a long-time friend, came to the room with Teresa Heinz and took me aside. His long face looked worried.

  “I’m sorry about your loss,” he said. “You did a great job. But this was a super-tough year. The Republicans are winning across the country.”

  “Did we lose the Senate?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “and the House.” That came as a profound surprise and far outweighed my own anticipated loss. He was describing the arrival of what became the 104th Congress, the first House of Representatives controlled by the Republican Party since the 1950s.

  When it came time to speak, I delivered my carefully worded critique of the grotesque financial and media carpet-bombing that Bill Weld had inflicted on Mark Roosevelt.

  “Just as there is no honor in a mercenary victory,” I said, “there is no shame in a principled defeat.”

  The party ended and I went home.

  Though I enjoyed myself greatly in politics, the previous few months had been marked by the shock of a completely unexpected action by Dana, to whom I had been married for nearly eleven years. In South Africa we had divided up our time and the care of the children so that we could each make research trips, and she had disappeared for many weekends. She worried more and more intensely that at any moment I would begin my inevitable slide toward AIDS and death. Every cold or cough became in her mind a sign of impending doom. I later learned that at one point, when we both fell ill for several days with a bronchial infection, she was sending secret e-mail messages to my family and friends to say that I was failing and they should prepare for the worst.

  We increasingly lived in two worlds, one in which I was happily pursuing my life with my family, whom I loved very much, and the other, in which Dana felt i
solated and sorry for me that I was in denial about my fate. At the time there was little in the way of support services for spouses of people with HIV, and our rare efforts to talk about these different experiences of life failed. We stopped trying. I became more outgoing and energetic while she withdrew into a cocoon of loneliness and fear. Eventually she found others from whom she could find support, including someone she came to care about deeply. I knew nothing of all this.

  One night in 1994, after my campaign had been well launched, Dana came to me and announced that she had made an irrevocable decision to divorce me. I had no idea that this was coming. My first thought was that somehow she was reacting to the campaign, and I offered to end it instantly, the next day if necessary. She made it clear at that moment and over the following weeks that the campaign had nothing to do with it. Indeed, she said bluntly, she didn’t want me around the house trying to persuade her to reconsider. Her decision was final, though she would wait until the campaign was over to announce it. Together we went through many hard months while I did everything I could think of to find another solution. She listened, and she sometimes talked, but from the moment of her announcement she never showed a single sign of changing her mind.

  She had been preparing for another life for years, and now she wanted to live it. Her emotional connection to me had been cauterized by my health problems. For years she felt that she had no one to talk to and no one who understood. Originally she had thought that our marriage would end with my death and that she would endure a period of widowhood before moving on. Now, given that I appeared to be so well, the only alternative in her mind was divorce. During the months after the campaign we moved toward this outcome, which finally took place in early 1996. A few weeks after our divorce became final, Dana married the South African professor and missionary whom she had known for more than twelve years.

  I went back to Harvard Divinity School and started teaching and planning the development of the Project on Business, Values, and the Economy into something bigger and more university-wide. After my experience in politics, my courses focused not just on what should be done but on how. It was perfectly acceptable to oppose a company’s policies on infant formula or South Africa, I pointed out to my students, but how could you transform that opposition into real improvements? What combination of power and persuasion could be applied to get people to change their minds and their actions?

  In approaching these problems I was influenced by the intensive course on negotiation that I took at Harvard Law School. Taught by the illustrious professor Roger Fisher and a team of talented faculty, the course was built on the groundbreaking insights of Fisher’s book with William Ury, Getting to Yes. The book revealed the inner structure of most disagreements—for example, that while most people argue about positions, they are governed more directly by their unarticulated and underlying interests. It swiftly occurred to me that the Divinity School, which tended to focus on the psychological tensions between two people, was missing a major opportunity to talk about how to manage and resolve conflict at the community level. I went back to my dean and proposed that I create a course called “Advocacy, Negotiation, and Reconciliation,” which would consist of two hours of theory and two hours of practice every week. He approved it, and suddenly I was teaching the skills that I had only just mastered.

  In this course and in all the others I taught I made liberal use of guests from the outside world. During a class on the institutional relationships between churches and corporations, I invited two people to listen to the students make presentations about a particular dispute. One was a senior executive from a major chemical company. The other was Joan Bavaria, the founder of an organization called the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, or Ceres. Because she lived in the Boston area, she came for lunch beforehand at the Harvard Faculty Club. Within minutes we were fast friends, discussing not only all the points of our common history but all the things we wanted to see happen in the future.

  In class, Bavaria did a brilliant job of discussing the challenges of negotiating with large companies about the environment. A few days later she called.

  “I don’t know how much you know about what Ceres is doing these days,” she said, coming straight to the point, “but it has been a board-managed coalition since its inception. We are now ready to bring on a full-time executive director. I would like to sit down with you soon to discuss this job.”

  Ceres had been formed in 1989 out of discussions among major investment leaders and pension funds on how to apply the lessons of the ongoing South African shareholder campaign to the environment. Ceres had become a powerful force in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill that devastated Prince William Sound in Alaska; it had originated the definition of an “environmental ethic”—a code of conduct—for corporations modeled in some ways on the Sullivan Principles introduced in South Africa. Ceres had also pioneered the use of an environmental scorecard that asked companies to measure and report their performance against specific goals, and it used a combination of skillful persuasion and raw shareholder power to move companies to make substantial commitments to new environmental and energy plans.

  Within a few more months I had made the jump, leaving Harvard Divinity School to become the full-time executive director of Ceres. I was the newest and most senior member of a staff of five, tucked away in cubicles in the back of Joan Bavaria’s investment shop. During my first six months, my desk was literally in the stockroom area, so that my phone conversations with foundation program officers and business executives were often interrupted by staff members from the extended company entering the area to get pencils or use the copy machine. I did not even have a computer. I went to work during the day and did my computer work at home at night. To exchange files among our staff, we copied files to a floppy drive and tossed disks over the dividers between our desks.

  Despite the modest resources, I realized that I was the head of an unusually broad coalition with enormous potential power. We were the only entity in the United States that brought together the grassroots power of environmental and union groups and the financial clout of major investors and pension funds. Our board and membership were made up of senior representatives of virtually all of America’s largest environmental groups: the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others. We also included pension funds with hundreds of billions in endowment assets, such as those of both New York City and New York State, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, a large number of Roman Catholic orders and institutions, and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. We had a strong tie to labor through the AFL-CIO. Over time the coalition added even more powerful allies, including the California state public employees and teachers funds, along with funds from Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, and many other denominations and states.

  In addition to the unusual alliance between investors and environmental groups, two things made Ceres unique. The first was that we engaged directly with corporations, asking them to commit to an environmental program, measure their performance, and disclose their results. Second, the size and expanse of the funds around the table meant that someone in our network was bound to hold stock in virtually any publicly traded company in America. Thus, for every issue we wanted to discuss we had a very large shareholder who would join us in ringing the doorbell of the company with a request to talk.

  Corporations were initially hostile to engaging with us. Their lawyers thought that the firm should maintain maximum independence and combat every potentially encroaching force: state governments, federal regulators, private lawsuits, public-interest groups. When they looked at our ten proposed “Ceres Principles,” they saw nothing but trouble. If the principles were in any way binding, they would cause terrible new precedents and problems in the courts. If they were not binding, why go through the exercise of discussing and embracing them?

  The principles are worth re
printing here as they appeared in the early 1990s. To some people these sounded like the bare minimum of environmental responsibility, and to others like an aggressive attack on free enterprise.

  The Ceres Principles

  1) PROTECTION OF THE BIOSPHERE

  We will reduce and make continual progress toward eliminating the release of any substance that may cause environmental damage to the air, water, or the earth or its inhabitants. We will safeguard all habitats affected by our operations and will protect open spaces and wilderness while preserving biodiversity.

  2) SUSTAINABLE USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

  We will make sustainable use of renewable natural resources, such as water, soils, and forests. We will conserve non-renewable natural resources through efficient use and careful planning.

  3) REDUCTION AND DISPOSAL OF WASTES

  We will reduce and where possible eliminate waste through source reduction and recycling. All waste will be handled and disposed of through safe and responsible methods.

  4) ENERGY CONSERVATION

  We will conserve energy and improve the energy efficiency of our internal operations and of the goods and services we sell. We will make every effort to use environmentally safe and sustainable energy sources.

  5) RISK REDUCTION

  We will strive to minimize the environmental, health, and safety risks to our employees and the communities in which we operate through safe technologies, facilities, and operating procedures, and by being prepared for emergencies.

  6) SAFE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

  We will reduce and where possible eliminate the use, manufacture, or sale of products and services that cause environmental damage or health or safety hazards. We will inform our customers of the environmental impacts of our products or services and try to correct unsafe use.