Bearing Witness

Gary Hart and the power of ideas

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

I wanted to share the piece published yesterday by Jim Fallows, who for 25 years has been a national correspondent for the Atlantic, about former Senator Gary Hart for whom I worked for more than a ten years. See link at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/08/gary-hart-on-bombing-iran/61942/.

My sister Debbie who co-founded Share Our Strength worked in his presidential campaigns , as did many of our close friends and current leaders like Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, City Year founder Alan Khazei, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, to name just a few.
Gary’s new memoir, The Thunder and the Sunshine is just being published. Share Our Strength board member Kathy Calvin is co-hosting a book party along with Debbie and I for Senator Hart on Thursday, September 16, at the UN Foundation offices in Washington DC. Details are available from Alice Pennington @ apennington@strength.org.  Please feel welcome to join us. Gary Hart has always been a champion of the power of ideas, a strong support of Share Our Strength and so many of his principles of organizing were instrumental to our early successes. Thanks. 

A brief excerpt from Fallows post follows: “I am biased in favor of Gary Hart. I met him when researching my book National Defense back at the dawn of the Reagan Administration. At the time, as a first-term Senator in his early 40s, he was a genuine pioneer in pushing the concept of “defense reform” — the then-radical idea that we should judge our military policies on grounds more complicated than “spend more” versus “spend less.” Defense reform is a radical idea still, but that’s another topic. Hart took the crucial step of assembling and supporting a team of people to work on this idea — starting with his own staff assistant, William S. Lind, who connected him (and me) to the circle of thinkers around the late Air Force Col. John Boyd.

Presidential campaigns have come and gone since then; so have “hot” and stylish ideas in policy; and of course America’s military involvement outside its borders has only increased. But through those decades Hart has kept writing books and articles about military strategy and its connection to long-term American interests and values.”

Billy