Chucky and me: At last, I come clean and reveal to the world the full sordid story of my history with New York's power-grasping senior senator

"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty."
--James Madison (pictured at left)

"The most dangerous place on earth is standing between Chuck Schumer and a camera."
--Oscar Wilde (some sources specify "a TV camera," but that seems doubtful; where would Oscar Wilde have heard about TV cameras? this sounds to me like a later embellishment of the great wit's bon mot)


All right already. I give! The hue and cry to once and for all pull the scab off my relationship with Chuck Schumer has become deafening.

Just recently in this space, you may recall Howie reporting his relentless grilling of me regarding my awareness of Chucky while we were all students at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. And not just Chucky himself, but apparently I was supposed to remember all the members of his family. I denied everything.

For the record, Chucky (class of '67) was two years behind Howie and me (class of '65). Which is more significant than the bare number might suggest, because unlike many traditional high schools, Madison had only 10th, 11th, and 12th graders infesting the halls of what was known popularly as "the Main Building," to distinguish it from "the Annex," an eerie isolation ward quarantined on the top floor of an elementary school way the hell out on the other side of Nostrand Avenue. In our district, graduates of K-8 elementary schools were bundled off to the Siberia of the Annex as freshmen, to be joined the following year by graduates of the district's junior highs as sophomores in the Main Building.

I had just moved to New York that September, a fugitive from the Midwest--into a house my grandfather had bought for us in part because it was only a block from Madison! The Main Building, that is. You know, the place where I couldn't go to school for another year.

As fate would have it, only a couple of blocks from our house in the other direction was P.S. 197, which Howie and my other first friends as a transplanted New Yorker had gone there. And it happens that my family has a history with P.S. 197. My mother grew up in more or less this same neighborhood, and her baby brother, my Uncle Ralph, attended P.S. 197 the year it opened! According to family legend, the classrooms weren't ready in time for the first day of school, and so classes began in hastily assembled chicken coops. (Okay, so my family doesn't have the most inspirational legends. If you can do better, who's stopping you?)

Now, to recap: Since Chucky was two years behind us, that means that we were only in the building (i.e., the Main Building) together for one year, while Howie and I were seniors and he was rocketing his way to superstardom in the sophomore class. In addition, New York City public high schools were so overcrowded, at least back then, that we were on three shifts-- admittedly overlapping, but still. What's more, my recollection is that sophomores were in general assigned to the PM shift, while we lordly seniors hunkered down in the early hours.

One thing all Madison students were meant to have in common: a daily burst of inspiration from this stirring quote by our namesake:

"Education is the true foundation of civil liberty."

It was engraved in a long stretch of stone centered above the Main Building's main entrance, stretching a good ways south and north on Bedford Avenue. The only hitch was that, at least in our time, students were never allowed to use the main entrance. Side entrances were designated for that purpose.

So what, you're probably waiting to hear, about me and Chucky? Well, as I tried to point out to Howie while he was grilling me, he may have known people in the classes of '66 and '67, because it's in his nature, wherever he is, to wind up knowing everyone there is to know. I usually wind up knowing hardly anyone, and I don't remember having contact with anyone outside the class of '65, except in gym class, and we're not going there now. (If you've seen the gym-teacher episode of Seinfeld, you have a clue.)

So the complete story of my history with Chucky is, well, zilch.

Well, not quite. Without even knowing of his history-making romp through my old alma mater, I soon enough became aware of him. He was only 23 when, straight out of Harvard Law School, he was first elected to the New York State Assembly ("becoming," according to Wikipedia, "the youngest member of the New York legislature since Theodore Roosevelt. Following what turned out to be a lifelong pattern, he stockpiled campaign cash while be bided his time, waiting for an opportunity, which came when U.S. Rep. Liz Holtzman chose not to run for reelection, but instead to challenge New York's veteran and much-respected liberal Republican U.S. senator, Jacob Javits. The year was 1980, and we will be coming back to this momentous election. For Chucky it was the year he was first elected to Congress, where once again he bided his time.

It took awhile. In part, the path upward was blocked by a startling newcomer to state electoral politics, a right-wing Republican from Long Island named Alfonse D'Amato, who in 1980 stunned a complacent Senator Javits by defeating him in a Republican primary.

Now of course, if you grew up Jewish in New York in those years, Jack Javits was something of a god--he was a man who had risen as high as anyone could imagine a Jewish pol rising. Why, a couple of times his name was even mentioned as a possible vice presidential nominee! He was famous as a man of principle. He had wound up a Republican because he had no wish to deal with the loathsome Tammany political machine that controlled Democratic politics in New York City in those years.

But by 1980, Javits was old and sick. (I don't think we knew yet that he had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, but he was clearly ailing.) He shouldn't even have run for reelection, and when he did, he didn't even see the punk D'Amato coming. And then his pride led him to do something unforgivable.

Javits was used to running with the cross-endorsement of the state's Liberal Party (I wish we had time to get into that strange entity, of which it was often quipped that it was neither liberal nor a party), and when he lost the Republican nomination for reelection, he still had the Liberal line available. At this point his pride wouldn't allow him to bow out more or less gracefully. As I recall, he deeply resented the Democratic nominee, Liz Holtzman (remember her?), for having the termerity to run against him and declare him obsolete. So he ran, and predictably siphoned off enough liberal votes from Holtzman (a great public servant who would have made a spectacular senator--and has racked up a distinguished career in public service anyway) to elect the unknown and unspeakable D'Amato.

Finally in 1998 our Chucky saw the opening he'd waited so long for. Al D'Amato was by now an entrenched three-term senator, and with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, he was at the height of his power, using his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs (and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which his committee controlled) as not just a power base but a personal piggy bank. And yet Chucky sensed that the great man was vulnerable. Or perhaps he thought that after waiting 18 years he couldn't afford to wait any longer. He went for it, and he won. [comment: no thanks to the gay "civil rights" group, HRC, which endorses insiders and endorsed D'Amato over Chuckie. Schumer has owned them ever since and they routinely do his bidding-- endorsing insider hacks. Sometimes everything works out perfectly.]

In fact, Chucky clobbered D'Amato, 54 percent to 44 percent. Ding-dong, the witch was dead. I for one couldn't have been prouder or happier. I even thought Chucky was going to be the liberal adornment to the Senate that Liz Holtzman should have been 18 years earlier. Judging from his House record, and the liberal causes he chose to champion, it seemed a reasonable hope. And as for his embarrassingly naked ambition, well, for once I could forgive it. Without it, could he have brought the odious Al D'Amato down?

So you see, in a sense I do have a history with Chucky. It's a long time since I lived in that congressional district, but it's hard not to be mindful of political developments there, and of course that eerie and indefatigable homing instinct for a camera for which he has become famous has made him hard not to keep in view.

I don't think I have to tell DWT readers that Chucky's Senate tenure has been, to put it mildly, a disappointment. And the reason I have taken this stroll down Memory Lane is that this history seems to have played a role in shaping the 2008-model Chucky. Oh, power-grasping instinct was probably all there, but as he made his slow-but-steady ride up the electoral on-ramp, he seems to have learned by example--negative example. He watched Liz Holtzman, to whose House seat he succeeded, stick to her liberal guns and find herself chased out of electoral politics.

But even more--and here I am totally speculating--he learned from Jack Javits that you can't let yourself be marginalized, and nothing will marginalize you more inescapably than an unwavering commitment to political principle. My guess is that Chucky admires Javits as much as anyone does, but that he also knows that Javits, for all the popularity and admiration he commanded in New York State, and even in the Senate itself, was a schnook, a nobody.

Even while Javits was being regularly reelected easily to his seat, he had risen as high as he was ever going to. Even within the Senate Republican caucus, in those years the perennial minority, he had no clout. I think Javits not only knew this but in some ways felt liberated by it. With nothing to lose, he could afford to stand on principle, and to say things and take positions that would have been unthinkable if he harbored any further political ambition. He knew that that vice presidential talk in his younger years had been just talk. That wasn't going to happen. Not for a traditionally liberal, bald New York Jew.

No schnook is our Chucky. No, Chucky always meant to be a macher--a "doer," a mover-and-shaker, what we might now call a "player." And as soon as he finally made it to the Senate, he set to work on the two paths necessary to get him where he wanted to be: insinuating himself into the Senate Democratic leadership, and working--as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee--to make Senate Democrats the majority party.

I still have the feeling that if Chucky and I were to sit down and talk politics, there wouldn't be much difference in our views. But I think principle means something different to him, as a matter of both natural inclination and historical observation. Principle must never be allowed to stand in the way of ambition or power.

And so when Chucky is trawling for Democratic Senate candidates, as with his upwardly mobile House counterpart "Master Rahm" Emanuel (also very much a macher, not a schnook), nothing seems to matter more to him than finding "our kind" of guy: the kind of "centrist" (meaning, as Howie never tires of pointing out, right-wing) who appeals to people of wealth (of which he's apt to have a nice pile himself) and the custodians of the inside-the-Beltway establishment.

You know what my fantasy is. I dream of someday, just once, hearing our Chucky present his latest senatorial "find," a candidate he's promoting, with a pitch something like:

"We have here a candidate of such clear vision and unshakable visionary principle that he/she can't help but excite not just traditional Democrats but independents and nonvoters who have felt shut out of the political system. And we're betting that the excitement his/her candidacy generates will make him/her one of our most successful fund-raisers, especially at the grass-roots level."

Or is he just too scared that his beloved TV cameras wouldn't show up for, or look favorably upon, a presentation like that?

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