Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and American Liberal Activism

Whenever I visit Arlington National Cemetery, I always go to the Kennedy gravesite. There I make three stops. First I go to the eternal flame of JFK, which is by now a national shrine. Then I slide left to the reflecting pool at RFK's site, where I view the simple white cross and read his famous quotation from George Bernard Shaw, ""Some men see things as they are and ask 'Why?' I dream things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'" And then I make my third stop. I cross back in front of JFK's flame and shuffle right to the edge of the plot. Then I step over the low boundary chain and inch over a few steps to the first grave just adjacent. There I fulfill the true purpose of my pilgrimage, to pay the respects that I really came to offer. I stand before a modest tabular tombstone just next to the Kennedy site, one that looks like all the others in Arlington. Simple and uniform though it is, this tombstone among all the others in Arlington is the most personal to me. It is the grave of Allard K. Lowenstein. The final resting place of this activist hero, this catalytic conscience, ironically embodies much of what Al was about, and strived for. Close to power, comfortable in the neighborhood of liberalism, admiring of the Establishment, he nevertheless remained on the margin, a little outside the true fold, never quite as inside as he yearned all his life to be. For the impact he had on the very many touched, he deserves a little more of a monument. Each time I visit his grave, by placing a little stone atop his marker as I offer a prayer of thanksgiving for his connection to my life, I try to make it so. Never Stop Running, a fine biography by William H. Chafe, captures the essence of this man who drew me into his slipstream in May 1972 at the Americans for Democratic Action convention in Washington, DC. Our relationship deepened during the subsequent presidential campaign for George McGovern, for which I took a year off from school to serve. Then, apparently not unlike some others of his acolytes, our relationship unexpectedly soured. At the time Al was running for the Democratic nomination in the 14th Congressional district in Brooklyn against party hack John Rooney. This was his second campaign after winning in the 5th in 1968, but then losing his seat there after only one term. He had lost the primary. Seeking to mobilize his college crusaders, he called to insist that I call the NJ State Democratic Committee to allow Al, now an independent, to have a seat on a podium at a rally featuring George McGovern, now the Democratic nominee for President. The demand befuddled me. Who was I, a county level McGovern campaign worker, to issue such a demand to NJ Democratic boss Sal Bontempo? I couldn't do it. Al and I fell out. We met again in early 1974 when Al visited the Princeton campus while I was a junior. We patched up the rift, and I found myself again working with him, in his third campaign against Norman Wydler in the 5th district on Long Isla

This is a sensitive, beautifully-written biography of a man whose life both shaped the United States in the 1960s and and reflects the promises and contradictions of the country in that tumultuous era. What Chafe does best is to place Lowenstein's complex and hurly-burly personal life amid the confusion and aspiration that marked the period. Never Stop Running is a truly great biogrpahy--a stunning combination of character and context.