Marvin Mandel: A Political Hero-May He Rest in Peace

Published with permission of FairandUNbalanced.com:

He has been a hero of mine since I volunteered for his campaign 45 years ago. I was saddened when I heard of his death.

Marvin Mandel became governor of Maryland shortly after Governor Spiro Agnew became Vice President Agnew. During the 1968 election, presidential candidate Richard Nixon is said to have chosen Governor Agnew largely because of his reaction to Baltimore riots.

A day or so after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April, 1968, angry crowds filled the streets. Soon the looting stores began. The burning of buildings followed. The damage was enormous.

Governor Agnew soon caught national attention. He called the mayor of Baltimore and blamed him and his staff for not anticipating the violence sooner than he had. Participants in that conversation recalled the anger, “Agnew told us he didn’t think Martin Luther King was a good American, anyway!”

Black leaders, local ministers and city council members and community activists, had risked their lives during the riots. They had walked the streets through the night and into the following day, urging calm, confronting looters, often putting themselves in harm’s way. They were tired, some still showing soot and ashes and smoke from the fires. They answered the call as the Governor ordered a special meeting in Baltimore.

It was at that meeting that he lectured the worn down, bone tired, group of heroes. He accused them of tolerating the violence out of racial loyalty. They were cowards for not stopping that violence. They were personally responsible for the destruction.

Conservatives across the country were thrilled. Richard Nixon chose Agnew to run as his Vice President.

When Nixon became President and Agnew assumed his new office, the Governorship of Maryland became vacant. The office of Lieutenant Governor did not exist. The state legislature chose Agnew’s successor, and they selected Marvin Mandel.

In 1970, I had volunteered for the re-election campaign of Democratic Senator Joe Tydings. Part of my door-to-door work was for a Democrat running for Congress whose name was Royal Hart, a very good guy who had the misfortune to be named “Royal Hart.” He lost that year. So did Joe Tydings, by 3 percent.

Spiro Agnew, on behalf of Richard Nixon, was campaigning against civil rights liberals and those who finally came to oppose the Vietnam war. Under-the-table racist appeals and public challenges to patriotism made for a tough campaign landscape. It was conservatism at its ugliest, at least for those times.

Some Democrats were scared of being Democrats. They ran almost as independents, downplaying party affiliation to the vanishing point. Not Marvin Mandel. I remember feeling deep gratitude during that harsh electoral year. He stood shoulder to shoulder with what he called his team, including Senator Tydings and a host of other endangered Democrats.

Mandel won big and he saved a few Democratic seats that might otherwise have been lost.

Obituaries now cite major accomplishments. He reorganized state government. He convinced lawmakers to invest a billion dollars in rebuilding rundown schools. He presided over the opening of the first subway in the state. He pushed through reasonable laws dealing with gun safety.

But he went from a politician I admired to an elected hero, in my eyes, as he established the first Shock Trauma unit in the nation.

Shock Trauma was an untested novelty in the United States in those days. An unusual pattern of life and death had been documented in France after World War II. Severely injured people given up for dead would often survive if they were treated within an hour. Helicopter transportation was the key to saving those on the edge of death.

Mandel got interested when a friend survived a serious car accident. The accident happened to be close enough to a hospital to get treatment to him within minutes. He shouldn’t have survived. He did.

When a doctor told Mandel that the incident fit a pattern documented in France, the Governor went to work.

The entire medical establishment joined with insurance companies and business groups in a campaign against Mandel that sometimes became vicious, often personal.

But Mandel won, the new air transport saved lives, and Maryland’s Shock Trauma became the model for new efforts across the nation.

For me, it kind of hurt when Marvin Mandel was accused of corruption. It pretty much broke my heart when the evidence was made public.

He had been slick about it. Those who paid him did so through intermediaries who went through other intermediaries in a game of degrees of separation. He did a favor and a new expensive gift would come from an entirely different direction. Real estate, jewelry, paid vacations were provided by new and unexpected friends.

In one case, he vetoed a bill then worked behind the scenes to get cooperative legislators to overturn the veto. Who would guess?

He was convicted. He served a little over half of a three year sentence before President Ronald Reagan commuted the rest. The Supreme Court later overturned the conviction itself.

An essential part of the conviction had been based on the theft of good government from ordinary citizens. In a similar case, the court ruled that the damage to citizens was too vague to be a real injury. So lower courts applied that ruling to Mandel, and the conviction was overturned.

For the rest of his life, Marvin Mandel insisted the ruling proved he had done nothing wrong. It proved no such thing.

I remain an admirer. As Governor, Marvin Mandel saved more lives, directly and indirectly, than we can calculate. He took risks to get that done. His courage made him a hero, as I see it, courage being a rare thing in politics.

News of his death saddens me a great deal.

The tragedy of that loss is mitigated a little. At 95, he lived a long life. He lived a full life. He showed courage while in office. He accomplished great things.

Above all, he cared enough to save lives. Human life is to be valued.

And he escaped time behind bars he very much deserved for his corrupt betrayal of those of us who believed in him.

I will miss this hero. This thief.

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