Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism, by William H. Chafe (Basic, 556 pp., $28)
THIS book is as good as its title, which in three words captures what drove this archetypal activist’s life: the need to run both from his psychological tensions and for political office. Lowenstein’s mother died when he was just a year old, something he wouldn’t discover until he was eight or nine. The taboo against mentioning her in his home helped create an emotional wedge between Allard and his remarried father (whose admonitions about neatness and punctuality help account for his son’s trademark untucked shirt-tail and spectacular lateness). By the time Lowenstein was in college he had fashioned a lifestyle of non-stop politics that left little time to reflect on his family or his ambivalence about his Jewishness and his barely repressed homosexuality. Charming and brilliant, Lowenstein ran through every pressing issue of the day; he organized students to fight racism in Mississippi, oppose the war in Vietnam, and, in his most stunning victory, dump Johnson in 1968. That year Lowenstein won his only term in Congress. Thereafter, in a pattern that dogged him all his political life, he perversely chose to run in whatever district he was least likely to win. He died in 1980, shot by a deranged former Stanford student, one of hundreds of friends Lowenstein made in his mad dash through our times. Mr. Chafe’s biography conveys both the thrill and the frustration of a life one can, in the end, only admire: because Lowenstein—who despised Communists and SDS radicals both—sought his solace in affirming, in his own way, the American system he loved.
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