Gardner’s Eclectic Life and Career

Nearly 35 years after helping launch the Public Broadcasting System, activist extraordinaire John Gardner is the subject of a PBS special Sunday (KCET, 9 p.m.) that wonders why the distinction was so long in coming.

Where do you begin with a man who in a single year--1968--was being considered as a possible running mate for Republican presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon and was offered the remaining Senate term of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy after his assassination?

How do you come to grips with the career of a man who helped forge the Great Society vision as a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Cabinet, only to leave in opposition to LBJ’s handling of the Vietnam War? That decision would have seemed to align him with 1968 antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, but McCarthy instead emerges in the special as one of Gardner’s harshest critics.

There are no pat answers, but the hourlong program, narrated by actor Richard Dreyfuss, does a credible job at tracking the far-ranging journey demanded by Gardner’s restless intellect.

Gardner, 89, battling prostate cancer and serving as a consulting professor at Stanford, reminds one at times of the fictional subject of Woody Allen’s “Zelig,” a figure never far from history’s spotlight.

“John Gardner: Uncommon American” maintains a brisk pace to cover the man’s influential work as author, founder of the political watchdog group Common Cause (which eventually landed him on Nixon’s infamous enemies list), his involvement on racial and social issues with the Urban Coalition and so much more. What you’ll take away is Gardner’s unflagging optimism on what this country and the world can be.