Randy Kehler, 1944-2024

Lessons in organizing movements from the life of one of America's leading peace, social justice and democracy reform advocates.

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and cross each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

--Senator Robert F. Kennedy, June 6, 1966 speech to black South African students at the University of Capetown

Though The Connector is about organizing and movements, I didn’t write anything about Jane McAlevey, the legendary union organizer and author, when she died a month ago at the far too young age of 59. That’s because I didn’t know her, to my regret. Others who did know her wrote beautiful tributes, like this one from Sarah Jaffe in The Baffler. If you want to dig deeper, by all means look up McAlevey’s work. In the same way I’ve often criticized the Democratic party for only building “sandcastles” in support of their candidates that get washed away after each election cycle, McAlevey criticized the tendency of today’s unions to do “shallow” organizing centered on winning specific contract or unionization fights but not sustaining relationships with workers over the long haul. She exemplified in her work the difference between being an organizer and an activist.

On the other hand, I was lucky to know the veteran movement organizer Randy Kehler, who died on July 21 at the age of 80. The New York Times obituary for Randy ran on August 1 and it focused solely on two of his most important contributions to our world: how, as a Vietnam War draft resister he directly caused Daniel Ellsberg to change his life and decide to leak the Pentagon Papers; and later, how, as war tax resisters he and his wife Betsy Corner had their home in Colrain, Massachusetts, seized by the Internal Revenue Service. That obituary completely missed the fact that Randy was a lifelong organizer who helped build not one but three movements for change over the course of his career, and that he sought to take lessons from each of those fights into the next one. There’s a lot to learn from him.

I’ve written before about how we can never know which of our actions may have the biggest impact. RFK’s “ripple of hope” speech, which I’ve quoted above, expresses well the organizer’s understanding that one can’t know which seeds you plant will grow into mighty oaks. At the same time, we can also try to be strategic as we consider where to focus our efforts. Some stories from Randy’s career demonstrate the importance of both.

Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner, in front of their home in Colrain, MA (from the documentary Act of Conscience)

Randy’s impact on Ellsberg is one of the best examples we have of how a small action can lead to mighty change. If you watch the two men in conversation years later, here in a snippet from the Boys Who Said NO! documentary about the Vietnam draft resistance, you can feel the power of the transformation Randy evoked from Ellsberg. Choosing to make a personal act of conscience, in Randy’s case, by joining his brothers from the War Resisters League in going to jail rather than into the war machine, convinced Ellsberg to abandon his old (and secure) life as a top defense analyst and start secretly copying the Pentagon Papers. President Nixon’s response to Ellsberg’s leaking of the papers—to send the White House plumbers to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—ultimately contributed directly to his impeachment and fall from power.

I have another (more modest) story about Randy that also illustrates how one small action can produce a massive effect. In 1984, I was a young staffer at The Nation magazine when I managed to finagle an assignment to go cover the annual convention of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in St. Louis. I remember a massive ballroom with dozens of tables filled with delegates from all over the country, who had all been organizing in support of local initiatives calling on the US and USSR to adopt a “freeze” in the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons in order to halt the nuclear arms race and then negotiate deep cuts in their arsenals. At some point, I was either getting into or out of an elevator when I ran into Randy who was standing with an older couple, Nick and Jo Seidita from California.

Randy saw The Nation on my name-tag and blurted out, “If it wasn’t for The Nation, the Freeze might never have taken off.” As he explained, back in 1980, along with some other colleagues, he had helped put a version of Randall Forsberg’s “Call for a Halt to the Nuclear Arms Race” on local ballots in 62 cities and towns in Western Massachusetts. And while Ronald Reagan won a majority of votes in those towns (and narrowly carried the state as part of his overall landslide), these local resolutions did even better. Randy stayed up late that night calling news outlets around the country, but the only one that covered their success was The Nation. An intern wrote a short piece about it, noting that the nuclear freeze was more popular in rural Massachusetts than Reagan. Then Randy turned to the Seiditas and told me that because they had read that article, they had decided to start financing a California ballot initiative which helped kickstart the Freeze into national prominence and passed as part of a wave of similar initiatives in nine states and 36 cities in 1982.

The Lessons of the Nuclear Freeze

Of course, the Freeze movement probably would have taken off without that Nation article, because Reagan and other members of his administration were scaring the bejesus out of people with talk of “winnable” nuclear wars. In the fall of 1981, there were massive demonstrations in major cities across Europe, which also helped to raise attention in the US. Speaking a few years later to a reporter from WGBH, Randy recalled what it was like to be the first paid staffer of the National Freeze Campaign at that time:

I remember the early days in, at the end of 1981, early '82, when we couldn't possibly keep track of the number of groups calling themselves "freeze groups," at the state and the local level, springing up all over the country. Somewhere people had the notion that there was a group of us, probably led by the, or influenced by the, directed by the KGB, who was creating these groups. Not only were we not creating them, we couldn't even keep track of them. We could never have a list that was up to date enough of all the groups. We would get the list to press, and 15, 20, you know, 100 more groups would make themselves known to us by the time our list started to get out. And it was the same way with raising money. I mean it was the only time in my life when we would have people calling us, both individuals and foundations saying, "To whom do we write a check?" And I would say, "Well, don't you want a proposal? Do you need a letter of, do you need a fund appeal?" "No, no, no.", they said, "Don't bother with that. We like so much what you're doing; just tell us where to send money." I mean, and this was the period when Ronald Reagan was making all these rash statements. So I can't hook it to a particular statement, but it just kept happening like that. It was an unbelievable phenomenon that I may never see again as long as I live.

In fact, it was what organizers now call “a moment of the whirlwind.” It was Randy’s idea to locate the headquarters of the National Freeze in St. Louis, seeking deliberately to give the movement a heartlan” tone and to allow it to focus on grassroots organizing around the country rather than inside-the-Beltway lobbying. By 1983, pollster Patrick Caddell said the freeze movement was "the most significant citizens' movement of the last century... In sheer numbers the freeze movement is awesome," for there existed "no comparable national cause or combination of causes ... that can match ... the legions that have been activated."

But the movement never got to really develop the kind of deep roots that might have allowed it to really shift America’s addiction to militarism. What short-circuited things? A combination of intense national media attention starting in early 1982 and well-intentioned efforts by leading Democrats in Congress, who rushed forward a freeze resolution that summer well before the movement was ready to win it. As Randy told WGBH, “We came within one vote of winning a Freeze Resolution in the House of Representatives, with virtually no preparation. I mean we hadn't even begun to set up a real lobbying network around the country, as we did in later years. So the whole agenda, the schedule sort of leapt ahead of us, faster than we had ever imagined.”

The big anti-nuke rally that took place in Central Park in June 1982, where close to a million people (including your humble scribe) came together for a call to “Freeze and reverse the nuclear arms race” was another false high point, in Randy’s view. “Looking back on it, I think it gave people the false impression, as the referenda that would follow also did, that we were on the verge of victory,” he told WGBH. “There were many points. In fact, you could mark them: whether it was that immediate explosion in early '82 or the June 12th march and rally in New York City, or the largest referendum in US history in the Fall of '82, where a third of the electorate had a chance to vote for the freeze, and voted overwhelmingly for it, or the passage of the passage of the Freeze Resolution, finally, after one of the longest debates in Congressional history in the late winter or early spring of 1983. At each of these points, I think many freeze enthusiasts, particularly those who were newer in this whole business, new to political campaigning, in general, felt, "Aha, we surely must be on the verge of victory. The Administration cannot, much longer, hold out against such an enormous popular expression of the public will."

In fact, the Reagan Administration did respond to this shift in public opinion by cooking up its “Strategic Defense Initiative,” a far-fetched plan to place interceptors in space that would somehow be able to shoot down Soviet nuclear missiles before they hit the US. Reagan had the audacity to claim that with his “Star Wars” plan, he could go further than the Freeze by making nuclear weapons “obsolete” thus ending the “suicide pact” of mutually assured destruction. Even though Star Wars was wildly expensive and technically unfeasible, it totally confused the public debate and took the air out of the Freeze movement’s sails, even allowing Reagan to sound like a “peace” advocate.  

Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, Randy realized that the Freeze movement had been a victim of its own rapid growth:

Many of us said, who were more experienced organizing organizers, said at the very beginning, "You can't stop 40 years of nuclear arms racing, institutionalized arms racing, with powerful vested interests which have been created to keeping this thing going forward, you can't stop all that in a few years." And yet, our very success and all the attention that had been given to signs of success tended to fool even some of the most experienced of us, myself included, so that we thought, "Well, maybe this time we are going to sort of defy history and we'll make it happen faster." By '84, however, I think we were coming to our senses again, those of us who understood the longer perspective in the first place, and the newer people were beginning to change their perspective. And there really has been, I think, an increasing sense of, "No, it takes much longer to make the kind of profound change that we're talking about." This isn't a minor adjustment, stopping the nuclear arms race, in American foreign or military policy. This is the centerpiece, in many ways, of not only our foreign and military policy but of domestic policy. If you look at the military budget and the way we've structured our economy around producing weapons, it's even the centerpiece of the way we think about the world, in terms of the US/Soviet relationship, the relationship to the Third World, the way we use resources, our role as the world's global cop. All of that is bound up in the notion of the nuclear arms race. So I think as we became more and more aware of the enormous implications of just stopping, let along nuclear disarmament -- just stopping that 40 years of momentum, we ourselves realized that it's going to take longer than we had thought.

The Freeze movement did ultimately get Congress to pass a non-binding resolution in 1983, a fight that caused a lot of division and frustration within its ranks. It also left him with a strong lesson about the pitfalls of inside-the-Beltway lobbying campaigns. As he told WGBH, “We had initially conceived of this campaign as having a fairly unique strategy; unique, because we saw it as an, essentially, grassroots, bottom—up effort. We had no interest in going to Washington with this thing until we felt we had a really solid base of widespread support among the citizenry all around the country. I mean those of us who had involved in political movements before felt that we were going to get creamed in Washington if we didn't have that. So we wanted to take the time to build it; and not, prematurely, have to do battle in an arena where we would surely lose without that kind of local, popular support.”

He noted, however, that things moved far faster than they had planned:

Randy Forsberg and I, for example, were on the telephone with Senator Kennedy the night after our Second Annual Conference in Denver, just after there had been this media explosion about the Vermont town meetings, but before Kennedy and Hatfield had done their press conference. And it was enormously exciting to think that we were talking to Senator Kennedy and that he and Senator Hatfield wanted to jump on board this thing and really give it a legislative expression and bring lots of publicity into it, and endorsers of high credibility from former Government officials to military people, and all this sort of thing. But it was also of concern to us that we were jumping ahead of our own strategy. We were torn about it and in, at the time, the circumstances seemed to dictate that we go ahead. I mean who was going to say no to Senators Kennedy and Hatfield and all this building Congressional support? So we let it go ahead; and we still felt all right about it. And, in retrospect, I'm not sure that we really could have done anything very differently.

I think where we began, in my mind, to be co-opted, if you will, was when we started to confuse the difference between a citizens' campaign and a Congressional lobby. It's when we said, "We'll break the freeze down into little bite-sized pieces that the members of Congress, maybe, will go for because, clearly, they are not ready for the whale freeze," that we began to lose it. I think that's still a problem today. A legislative lobby has to work hand-in-hand with a citizens' movement, but they have very different roles. The citizens' movement has to hold out for the bigger picture, for the more dramatic improvement in the situation, for the more radical shift, whereas the legislative lobby has to work with the day-to—day situation in Congress, as they find it. But if the citizens' movement begins to scale down its own demands to meet the day—to—day necessities of Congressional lobbying, then this powerful force, which frames the issue and keeps defining the alternatives, is absent.

Building a Movement for Fundamental Change

A few years later, Randy took these lessons into his work on campaign finance reform, which is where I really got to know him, as a gentle soul of a colleague at Public Campaign. That was an organization set up in 1996 by Ellen Miller in partnership with grassroots activists across the country aimed at passing “Clean Money Campaign Reform” – full public financing for congressional candidates – in order to fundamentally break big money’s hold on Washington. The fact that robust public matching funds for campaigns is now embedded deep in the Freedom to Vote Act, which Kamala Harris has pledged to pass if she is elected president, can be traced back to the efforts of Public Campaign and the many state partner groups it worked with. But the backstory to that is something called the Working Group on Electoral Democracy, which Randy launched in 1987 along with Phil Stern, Ben Senturia and Marty Jezer. Stern was a fixture of DC’s political reform community and the author of the book The Best Congress Money Can Buy; Senturia a lead organizer with the Freeze; and Jezer a longtime peace and justice activist from the trenches of the antiwar years.

While we worked together at Public Campaign, Randy told me his involvement in the Working Group sprang directly from his past work on the nuclear freeze. The main lesson he took from the failure of the freeze was that we couldn’t win big changes in federal policy without ending the dependence of our elected representatives on private funding for their campaigns. And so, for several years the Working Group developed a vision of “democratically-financed elections” where candidates who could demonstrate a threshold level of public support would be given sufficient funds to run viable campaigns in exchange for taking no private contributions. In 1991, they found a champion for their idea in Paul Wellstone, a populist progressive who had just been elected to the Senate from Minnesota, in part by riding a way of popular disgust with big money politics. But, as a former top Wellstone staffer, Barry “Mike” Caspar, related in his book Lost in Washington, Randy and Ben were insistent that the emerging movement for public financing had to avoid what they called “the Freeze trap.” Instead of sticking to its five-year organizing plan, the Freeze had been sucked into a fight over ineffectual congressional resolutions that ultimately drained its energy.

So the Working Group took a different path, taking the time to define its goals clearly and—equally important—creating a benchmark for real reform that could be used to critique the more partial measures that were the favorite of many DC insiders. While at the time there was a partial public financing system for presidential candidates that came out of the Watergate scandals, efforts to reform the funding of congressional races mainly focused on picayune changes in contribution limits and the like. Randy and his colleagues also sought to build their movement first outside Washington, partnering with state-based networks like Citizen Action. And then, like the Freeze, they began to elevate the issue with state-level ballot initiatives like the Clean Money measures that passed in Maine in 1996 and then Massachusetts and Arizona in 1998.

After learning of Randy’s passing, I asked our mutual friend Ellen Miller, who is now happily retired, for her thoughts about Randy’s impact on the campaign finance reform movement. She wrote me, “He changed the game when it came to thinking about campaign finance reform. He saw the big issue: that 'big' money blocked reforms, and candidate access across the board, no matter the issue people cared about. Then he, and his working group (including Senator Paul Wellstone) reimagined a system of public financing that could level the playing field. It was a grand vision and new voices became involved -- environmental and civil rights activists, and activists from the tax reform and health care sectors and others across the policy issue spectrum. It was a hopeful and exciting time.”

It would take me many more posts to delve into what happened with the public financing movement in the wake of those early victories—though I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to trace the passage of the Freedom to Vote Act’s provisions on public financing to the Working Group on Electoral Democracy’s groundbreaking efforts decades earlier. What I want to recall simply is Randy’s impact over so many decades. There are not many people who have organized for so long and so creatively while trying to fundamentally change this country at its roots. Starting around 2000, his health began to decline. He suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome for many years. I sometimes wondered if he had it because he was so exquisitely sensitive to injustice and so unable to tune it out, taking the stress of so many years of fighting war and militarism deep into his own body. Now he is at peace, but his memory continues.

Speaking of Whirlwind Moments

There are now at least 44 different “X for Harris” online groups that have kickstarted themselves into existence since Win With Black Women started the whole wave of solidarity organizing for the Democratic nominee 16 days ago. There are groups centered on identity like White Women for Harris, Latino Men for Kamala, Boricuas Con Kamala Harris, South Asians for Harris and Queers for Kamala; there are groups emphasizing different roles in society like Business Leaders for Harris, VCs for Kamala, Caregivers for Kamala and Women Lawyers for Harris; religious groupings including Christians for Kamala, Latter-day Saints for Harris, and Jewish Americans for Kamala Harris; and a few fandoms like Swifties for Kamala and Dead Heads for Kamala.

You can find (and add to) a growing directory of these groups at ForHarris.org, a quickie site thrown together by Macon Phillips. If that name is familiar to you, dear reader, you are an OG digital hand. But for folks who don’t recognize the name, Macon was the lead blogger for the 2008 Barack Obama campaign and then created and managed the first Office of Digital Strategy in the Obama White House from 2009-2013. I reconnected with him through the White Dudes for Harris effort, and he tells me that he is now living in Warren, Vermont, happily surfing the wave of grassroots enthusiasm for Harris and doing his bit to help make it stronger.

ForHarris.org is very much a work in progress (and looking for help with everything from data viz work to basic research) but you can already see a growing calendar of ongoing events being run by these groups. Each group is evolving its own approach, but a few common threads stand out:

--Regular weekly or monthly meetings to keep onboarding new joiners, build relationships and keep leaders plugged in, like the Women Wednesdays for Harris that Indivisible is hosting.

--Newsletters--Swifties for Kamala already claims more than 3,000 subscribers on Substack.

--Targeted/creative outreach: Win With Black Men is organizing a barbershop tour, for example.

There’s a lot of potential in all these groups—not just to activate more people to get involved with the Harris campaign—but to also build social capital horizontally and vertically. That is, to connect people not just by a common interest, but to also introduce them to each other locally. At the end of the day, we have the most influence on the people nearest to us. And there’s also tons of research that shows that when people make friends with each other through the course of their activism, they are far more likely to stay active. Isolation makes it easier to fade back into the woodwork, or to get discouraged and give up.

So far, I don’t think any of these efforts have shared much information about how many people they’ve signed up and gotten involved, though the cumulative number of attendees at their various mass Zoom meetings is surely close to a half million by now. So it’s not too early for participants to be asking lead organizers how their data is being used and who it is being shared with. In an ideal world, people would be given the option of letting local organizations contact them. Whether Harris wins or Trump wins, the ongoing health of democracy can only be strengthened by these groups building more lateral ties among their members.

End Times

Nick Offerman’s remake of “I’m Proud to Be An American,” which he performed on the Comics for Kamala zoom Monday night is sublime.