Former Sen. Harris Wofford, a Pennsylvania Democrat who served from 1991 until he was defeated by Rick Santorum in the 1994 GOP wave, died Monday at the age of 92.
Wofford, whom the New Republic dubbed “The Man Who Was Everywhere” in a must-read 2014 profile by Jason Zengerle, had a very long career in public service despite only spending a few years in elected office. Among many other things, he was an early supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and an aide on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. He even helped convince JFK to defy his campaign advisors and call Coretta Scott King after her husband was arrested, a politically risky move that probably tipped the election towards Kennedy.
Wofford was born in upstate New York into a wealthy family of transplanted Southerners, and at the age of 11, he accompanied his grandmother on a six-month tour around the world. In perhaps the first example of Wofford’s Forrest Gump-like presence at major historical events, he personally witnessed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini declaring that he was withdrawing Italy from the League of Nations, an announcement that Wofford later recounted was followed by “a fascist torchlight parade.” However, it was his stop in India, where Wofford saw and became fascinated by Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolence movement, that would most impact his future.
Wofford would later say that he returned from the trip as a “know-it-all foreign policy expert.” In high school, Wofford founded a group called Student Federalists that called for united world government. The organization would grow to include 30 chapters, and when he was only 18, Newsweek published an article predicting he would be president. The Student Federalists would later transform into the group that is now known as Citizens for Global Solutions.
Wofford went on to serve stateside in the Army Air Corps during World War II and later enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago. In 1948, he married fellow student Clare Lindgren, and the two traveled throughout India and Pakistan, which had just gained their independence from the British Empire and where Wofford studied the recently murdered Gandhi and civil disobedience. Wofford would later recount that Gandhi’s disciples asked him about the nascent civil rights movement back in America, a movement that he would soon become immersed in.
After he returned to the United States, Wofford became the first white student in decades to enroll at the historically black Howard University Law School, which he would describe in his memoir as “the center of the civil rights law I intended to practice.” In 1951, Wofford hosted Gandhi disciple Ram Manohar Lohia on a tour of the South, including a stop at a civil rights training academy called Highlander Folk School. Lohia was surprised to see that Highlander didn’t teach civil disobedience, and his visit helped change that. Just four years later, Montgomery seamstress Rosa Parks would attend Highlander. Soon thereafter, Parks legendarily refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, a move that kicked off the Montgomery bus boycott.
That struggle brought Wofford into contact with King, to whom he wrote letters encouraging “some straight Gandhian civil disobedience.” He also attended King’s speaking engagements to try to get his attention. Eventually, Wofford convinced King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, to travel to India to learn about Gandhi and meet with his confidants, a trip Wofford helped arrange and underwrite. King would say in a radio address on the final night of his journey, “Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.”
Wofford also got to know John F. Kennedy during his early years in politics. As Zengerle recounted in his New Republic profile, the two met in 1947, and neither was very impressed by the other. Wofford would recall that Kennedy, then a freshman congressman from Massachusetts, “had a beautiful woman on each arm,” saying, “He listened to me for about two minutes maybe and then he said, ‘Right now I’ve got my eyes on tennis,’ and departed.”
However, Kennedy would end up listening to Wofford a whole lot more 13 years later during his presidential bid. Kennedy sought out Wofford, who had been appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower to the United States Commission on Civil Rights to help him to court the “Negro vote.” Wofford responded, and he arranged a meeting between Kennedy and King.
In 1960, Kennedy sought to win over black voters, who were a critical constituency in several competitive states, at the same time that he was working to keep pro-segregationist Southern white voters in the Democratic column. It wasn’t easy, and Kennedy’s task got more difficult just before Election Day when King was arrested in Georgia. Coretta Scott King feared for her husband’s life, and a King ally named Louis Martin and Wofford came up with the idea that JFK should call her and express his sympathy.
However, campaign advisors for both Kennedy and his Republican rival, Richard Nixon, believed it was best to stay silent to avoid risking their white Southern support. Nixon followed this advice. However, Wofford and Kennedy’s brother in-law, Sargent Shriver, convinced JFK to privately call Coretta Scott King and personally express his concern. Kennedy’s brother and campaign manager, Robert Kennedy, was furious when he learned what had happened, personally berating Wofford and Martin and telling them, “Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”
The election was indeed razor-close, but Wofford’s advice may well have won it for JFK. Despite his initial reaction, Robert Kennedy contacted the judge who’d sentenced King and secured the civil rights leader’s release. King himself told reporters right afterwards that he understood “from very reliable sources that Sen. Kennedy served as a great force in making the release possible.” He added, “For him to be that courageous shows that he is really acting upon principle and not expediency.”
Wofford also made sure that in the final weekend of the race, blue pamphlets (dubbed “the blue bomb”) were distributed to black churches contrasting the “Candidate With a Heart” with “No-Comment Nixon”―an effort he also undertook behind the backs of campaign leaders. Black voters turned out on Election Day in surprising numbers and broke hard for Kennedy. Nixon even acknowledged that this episode had probably made all the difference.
In the new Kennedy administration, Wofford served as a special assistant for civil rights and again joined with Shriver, this time to found the Peace Corps. Wofford later marched with King at Selma in 1965 and was arrested for protesting police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Wofford went on to lead two colleges and serve as Pennsylvania's secretary of labor and Industry under Democratic Gov. Robert Casey, his old law partner.
During his long years of associating with politicians, Wofford had considered running for elective office but had never gone for it. However, he unexpectedly made it to the Senate in 1991. That year, Republican Sen. John Heinz died in a plane crash, and it was up to Casey to appoint a new senator.
U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, a popular former GOP governor, was ready to run in the special election, and with President George H.W. Bush’s numbers at an all-time high after the Gulf War, few Democrats were eager to take him on. A number of prominent Democrats declined to accept an appointment to a Senate seat they thought they’d quickly lose, and Casey went so far as to fly to Detroit to offer the job to Chrysler chair Lee Iacocca, who hadn’t lived in Pennsylvania in decades. Iacocca unsurprisingly said no.
The appointment eventually went to Wofford, who became the Keystone State’s first Democratic senator since 1968. Few politicos thought he’d be there long, and Wofford’s own polls even reportedly showed him trailing Thornburgh by an astonishing 47 points. However, Bush’s imposing numbers fell back to earth as memories of Operation Desert Storm faded and a recession set in.
Wofford gained ground by emphasizing the state of the economy and blaming Thornburgh, who was chair of Bush’s Domestic Policy Council, for the nation’s woes. Wofford also notably called for national health insurance during the campaign; Thornburgh’s own message calling himself familiar “with the corridors of power” in Washington wasn’t an especially compelling counterpoint.
Wofford wound up defying the pundits and won 55-45, an early sign that 1992 would be a very tough year for the GOP. The next day, presidential candidate Bill Clinton called Wofford to congratulate him and asked about hiring two little-known political consultants who’d worked for the senator, James Carville and Paul Begala. The next year, Wofford was one of the finalists to become Clinton’s running mate (an honor that wound up going to Al Gore).
Wofford ran for his first full term in 1994, and he faced a challenging race against GOP Rep. Rick Santorum, who represented a heavily Democratic seat around Pittsburgh. Clinton’s drive for universal health coverage had ended in failure, and this time, Wofford’s focus on health care hurt him. Santorum also attacked Wofford as a relic of the 1960s era of “Big Government.”
However, Santorum had already earned a reputation as a hard-edged social conservative, which turned off many voters. Wofford also hit his opponent over Social Security, making use of video in which the Republican said it was “ridiculous” for retirees to expect to receive payouts at 65. Still, that year’s GOP wave helped propel Santorum to a narrow 49-47 win. Pennsylvania would not elect another Democratic senator until 2006, when Bob Casey, the son of the governor who’d appointed Wofford, defeated Santorum.
Wofford would never again run for office, but he wasn’t done with politics. In 1996, Clinton picked him to head AmeriCorps, an organization he’d helped create in the Senate. Wofford later worked with future Secretary of State Colin Powell on a group promoting volunteerism, and in 2005, he became friends with freshman Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who occupied his old Senate desk.
In 2008, when Obama’s presidential campaign was in danger after provocative sermons from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, surfaced, the senator chose to give a speech focused on race in the city of Philadelphia. Wofford introduced him at the event, and Obama proceeded to give perhaps the most important address of his entire career.
Wofford would make history one last time in 2016. Wofford’s wife, Clare Wofford, had died in 1996, and the former senator later met a man named Matthew Charlton. The two wed in 2016, making Wofford the first, and to date only, past or present U.S. senator to marry someone of the same sex.
