Nuclear Freeze Activists Warm to Task Ahead

Wally Marks went door-to-door, block-to-block in the Brentwood Glen area, where he lives, distributing 300 invitations for a neighborhood get-together. He and his wife Suzy were inviting everyone to come by from 5 to 8 on a recent Sunday evening to get acquainted with each other, have cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, stay for the casserole buffet and hear about the Freeze Voter’s “Nuclear Freeze Election Countdown” campaign. The Markses were asking their neighbors to contribute $12.50 to the campaign.

About 50 people came that Sunday to the house with the cluster of balloons on the front doorknob. Dorothy Mattson arrived early from just around the block, introduced herself to Suzy, who was running late in the kitchen, (“we’ve both lived here 25 years!”) and set to work arranging the raw vegetables around the dip.

As the others began arriving, they signed in, picked up a handful of literature, met many of their neighbors, including the Markses, for the first time, and, over drinks, talked about the local schools, Charles and Diana, the game they were missing on TV and what line of work they were in.

In between that and the Mexican dishes waiting on the buffet, they listened while Wally and Suzy stood in front of the bookcases at one end of the living room and told them why they were gathered.

During November, 100 countdown parties have been scheduled in the Los Angeles area, not all of them neighborhood get-togethers. Members of Architects, Designers, Planners for Social Responsibility, for example, invited about 25 of their colleagues to a champagne, caviar and smoked salmon reception one Saturday evening in the common room of the Champagne Towers building on Ocean Avenue. And next Sunday about 100 people have accepted invitations to a square dance at Victoria Station.

The parties resemble each other, not in style but content. The message remains the same. As Wally Marks told his guests, “In 1986, it is important to elect congressmen and senators who will support arms control. There are a lot of people in the Administration who do not believe in arms control.” Thus the countdown party. Thus Freeze Voter ’86.

Whatever the outcome of the summit, Suzy Marks said later, their work remained the same. If the summit had resulted in the best of all their possible dreams--a comprehensive test ban treaty--the treaty would still have to be ratified by the Senate. That meant a different lineup in the Senate than there is now.

And in the absence of serious arms control agreements coming from Geneva, then they would have to work to elect a Congress that would produce the legislation for a bilateral, verifiable nuclear weapons freeze.

Concerned About Arms Race

In bringing the message to the neighbors, Wally Marks, who manages a family real estate business, made his remarks about as grass roots as it is possible to be: They’d lived in this neighborhood for 25 years, raised four kids. And then, in 1979, he and Suzy had become concerned about the arms race and had gotten involved. First through the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race, then “in the Prop. 12 days of the freeze movement in 1981-82,” and, since then, through the days when the momentum sort of leveled and there was a hiatus. Until now.

Outlining his concern about the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the hopes being raised around the Geneva Summit for a comprehensive test ban treaty and the possibility of a 50% reduction of offensive nuclear weapons, he told everyone he had acquired a lot of books on the topics and offered to lend them out.

The bottom line about the need to stop the arms race, he observed, was his belief that, “We really have enough weapons on both sides.”

It was up to Suzy to fill in the details. As chairperson of Southern California Freeze Voter she has been delivering the message at many parties other than her own, as has Montgomery Ellington, the newly hired director.

A Net Gain in Senate Seats

She wanted to make the message as clear and simple as possible: Freeze Voter was a political action committee and the people in it were out to get a net gain of four pro-freeze, or pro-arms control, seats in the Senate in the ’86 election.

There are 34 Senate seats up for reelection in 1986. Twenty-two of them are occupied by senators who, in the monitoring of Senate voting done by Freeze Voter, have been judged to oppose arms control. Freeze Voter, of which Southern California is the largest of 41 affiliates around the nation, was targeting five of them. Later, next spring, they would target a number of key races in the House in both parties.

They were supporting Rep. Bob Edgar’s (D-Pa.) run against his likely opponent, the incumbent GOP Sen. Arlen Specter; Rep. Tom Daschle’s (D-S.D.) run against incumbent GOP Sen. James Abdnor; Missouri’s Lt. Gov. Harriett Woods’ run for the seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Tom Eagleton; Idaho’s Democratic Gov. John Evans’ campaign against incumbent GOP Sen. Steve Symms, and the reelection of California’s Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston.

A bigger margin would be better, money permitting, but, she reminded them the MX missile vote had been tied at 38 to 38. Vice President George Bush had to break the tie and did so with his pro-MX vote. It could be that close.

The countdown parties were to raise early start-up money for those Senate campaigns, to raise concern and to identify potential freeze supporters and workers, she said.

Operating independently of the candidates’ official campaigns, they would go into those states and conduct their own campaign, linking up with local people, matching the local efforts on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Freeze Voter would rent an office, put in a phone bank and identify supporters who would go door to door encouraging people to register and to vote for the pro-freeze candidate.

“You can’t find the kind of money to get people to do the kind of work the freeze workers will do,” Suzy Marks told her guests, offering as an example the effort they had made to reelect George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton) to the House in 1984.

They had succeeded in placing 1,000 yard signs for him, they had walked and talked the area . . . and George Brown attributed his reelection to Freeze Voter. They had also played a role in the election of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.).

“If you haven’t given us money, you will,” she joked, urging them to give a countdown party themselves. The parties were being extended through the New Year because response had been so positive. Each party, they were finding, was generating at least one other.

The parties had been designed to bring in a minimum of $250 each, Monty Ellington said. Instead they were averaging $500, most in small donations. Major donors were not heavily involved through the countdown parties.

The give and take with the Markses neighbors was somewhat predictable concern about the Soviets taking precedence. One man hoped they weren’t supporting candidates who would support arms control on a one-sided, or unilateral basis.

Bilateral and verifiable only, Wally Marks repeated.

“The Russians really thought they had us before this Administration,” one man said. “I really believe this Administration, by threatening and hanging tough, has gotten the Russian attention.”

That observation has sometimes been posed as an either-or situation with the nuclear freeze campaign itself, Suzy Marks said later.

Recently people have been asking if the Freeze Campaign, which started in 1981, is responsible for the summit talks, she said. (The Freeze Campaign is an educational, lobbying organization and is not involved in electoral politics. Freeze Voter, composed of many of the same people, started in 1983.)

“Of course, I feel a connection she said. Of course the proponents feel they have induced this. And then, on the other side, people say it’s only because of this buildup we have now, that we’ve scared them (the Soviets). I guess I think both sides have played a part in it. Nothing was happening regarding arms control when the freeze movement started. We were certainly a catalyst. The constant concern of the majority of citizens has obviously had its effect on Ronald Reagan.”