The Story Of Paul And Rick: An Interview With Rick Kahn On His Friendship With Paul Wellstone
I grew up thinking it wasn’t all that unusual to know a US Senator. That was because my dad, Rick Kahn, was very close friends with Senator Paul Wellstone. As I got older, I began to understand how special it was not just to know him but to be represented by him in Congress, and how special his relationship with my dad was.
I knew a few details of their relationship, mostly the stuff I was around for. They met at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where my dad was a student and Paul was a political studies professor. My dad worked on all of Paul’s political campaigns. Our family visited Paul and his wife Sheila in Washington D.C. during his first term as US Senator. Paul dedicated one of his books, in part, to my dad. At his family’s request, my dad spoke at the memorial service for Paul, Sheila, their daughter Marcia, and three campaign staffers, who died in a plane crash 20 years ago today. That was the extent of my knowledge.
As we commemorate 20 years since we lost Paul and the others, I asked my dad to tell me the story of how he met Paul and how their friendship blossomed. Our conversation is below, slightly edited for length and clarity.
Paul Wellstone, Bobby Kahn, and Rick Kahn at Bobby’s Bar Mitzvah - May 10, 1997
Can you describe the first time you heard of Paul and/or met him?
I started at Carleton in September 1969, and Paul Wellstone started teaching at Carleton that year, I was a Freshman. So at the very beginning of the year, I had never heard of Paul, none of my friends had, but once classes started, a few of my friends had an introductory Political Science course taught by Paul. I took the same course but it was taught by a different professor, and that was just by random chance. The entering first-year students didn't get to make those decisions for the first quarter. Carleton had a quarter system, so there were three academic quarters during the year and by the end of that second quarter that first year, a bunch of my friends had now taken the introductory course taught by Paul and raved about him as a teacher and a person. But I had already taken the one class he was teaching.
I had decided that I wanted to be an Urban Studies major, which, there was no department, there was no particular structured program. Paul was identified as the faculty advisor to Urban Studies majors, and so I made an appointment to go see him to talk to him about that. That was early in that third quarter of my freshman year. It would have been in early April 1970. Now, to set the stage, I skipped eighth grade, so I was 17 when I started college, so April of 1970 was a month before my 18th birthday, and I have a scheduled appointment with Paul to talk about being an Urban Studies major. We have a long talk, and from my perspective, it was a very good helpful conversation. it confirmed to me that I wanted to be an Urban Studies major.
Paul would say two things about that meeting for years afterwards. One, that he was pissed off that this young punk kid scheduled appointment nonetheless, comes in and tells him what he wants to do and where Paul's going to fit into that. And then he would always add that what made him even angrier is that I went on and did exactly what I said In that first meeting I wanted to do with my life. He would always say that with a big smile and laugh.
That was also a very eventful time. Kent State, if you’re familiar with that, happens not long after. There was already a campus strike and the unrest had already started, and so it was a very tumultuous time. But after the meeting, I was certain this was going to be my path. Paul said nothing whatsoever other than words of complete encouragement and affirmation.
I should note, Paul was only eight years older than I was. I was young but he was very young too. So he was, as a teacher and in that meeting, he didn’t create some artificial construct of some kind of barrier. No you're here, I’m up there. It was very much a discussion where he was trying to be helpful as possible. Encouraging me to do what I wanted to do.
So was he pretty young for a teacher?
He was very young for a teacher. Carleton was then, as it is now, one of the top liberal arts colleges. Paul had been a champion wrestler in high school, and devoted himself to wrestling and not to his studies and so when he applied to college he had poor grades. And he, on academics, was not accepted anywhere. The University of North Carolina offered him a scholarship as a wrestler, and then he got injured and he couldn't wrestle anymore and discovered learning and academics for the first time in his life. So he finished his undergraduate degree at University of North Carolina, which is an excellent school, in two and a half years, and at the time was one of the youngest PhDs at the University of North Carolina.
Carleton would have been considered for a young PhD in Political Science, then and now, a hugely desirable place to teach. Dave was already born, Marcia had just been born, so he had two kids moving to Minnesota where they never lived or had family or friends or anything, that was really a big deal. It was an exciting opportunity. He was very excited to come to Carleton.
There was certainly no one telling him what you have to teach, this is what your curriculum needs to be, these are the books we teach from. So the version of Introduction to Government is the course that I took from this other professor, who was the chairman of the department. Another professor I loved, who was a fantastic teacher. And I learned so much from him, not just in that class but other classes to. But Paul had a very different approach, one of his own. Nobody at this school was telling him you can't or shouldn't do that.
So I meet him in April of 1970. He's going to be my faculty advisor for my Urban Studies major, then Sophomore year, I took this class that this other professor and Paul co-taught on the legislature. It was a course that went two whole quarters, which was very unusual at Carleton This class was the entire second and third quarters. We never had any meeting of that class in a classroom setting. Those days before minivans, schools had a small fleet of station wagons and either this other professor, his name is Ralph Fjelstad, or Paul would drive.
The students taking this class were going to the State Capitol to do whatever work we were doing. I worked as an intern for a legislator. So three days a week I went up to the Capitol, and so you know, one to two days a week spending an hour in the car going up, an hour in the car going back, and those are the moments where I really got to know Paul well. They were driving, so they're not lecturing. It's a station wagon, so there might have been three students but never more than that. So there's no lecturing. We're talking about the work we're doing. We're talking about what we’re learning and it's all real world stuff. There’s nothing academic.
Ralph, the chair of the department, approached things from a very real world perspective. Paul did too, in all his classes that was true, and in this class in particular, you're not in the classroom. You're going up to spend the day at the Capitol. And so it was in those trips up and trips back. All those times over that span, that I really, really got to know Paul and he really got to know me.
While we talked, most of the conversation was about things that were then happening and that was a very consequential year here in the Minnesota Legislature, it was a so called Minnesota Miracle year where legislators and the DFL Governor, pushed through successfully, what was considered very revolutionary at the time, this notion that the state would absorb the great majority of K through 12 funding and pay for it with a substantial increase in state income taxes on upper-income people, and also equalize funding. So students who went to school in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, the per capita student spending for that kid was the same as a kid in Edina, which hadn’t been true before.
In 1971, that was a wholly revolutionary concept that required, believe it or not, Republican support because it was a closely divided legislature and enough Republicans supported it. So there's a lot of stuff going on, the war was still going on and it occupied a lot of our attention.
There were a lot of things good and bad happening in the United States. So we talked about all that stuff, it was never chitchat conversation, it was very friendly, and it was, again, never I’m up here, you’re down That’s who he was as a person and as a teacher. He wanted to know what we thought, he would not say, ‘This is what I think. You tell me whether you agree or not.’ It was what do you think, and then let’s talk about it, have you considered this? So he would help bring us along, but never looking for the answer, never looking for agreement, or consensus, he just wanted people to say what they believe and talk about it. Think about it. But he was also always bringing it back to what's happening in the real world versus at some kind of distance or removed from perspective. It was always what's happening in the world and let's try and make sense of it. Make sense of in terms of how we can make it better.
That's my Sophomore year. My first quarter of my Junior year, I did an internship at the Minneapolis Tenants’ Union as part of my Urban Studies program in Minneapolis. I came back and was taking additional classes from Paul. Starting in the middle of the second quarter and throughout the third quarter that year, we did a study of housing conditions for low-income people in Rice County, which had never been done before.
There were 30 students working on this study. I was the student director, he was the faculty director of it. We produced a lengthy report. That report was used by the City of Faribault to win funding from the federal government for public housing which had never existed before, anywhere in Rice County. They were very grateful, it was very well received. It was a big deal.
As part of my role in working on it, I got to meet a bunch of people up in the cities who were involved in affordable housing to give me information and research perspective. Things that would help. And one of those people was a guy by the name of Jim Dlugosch, who had just been hired as the first Executive Director of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, which was just created by the Legislature. He had no staff, he had a one room office as part of another state agency. I met with him, and talked to him a few times on the phone while I was completing the study.
So this study, we finish it at the end of that academic year, my Junior year and then that Summer, between my Junior and Senior years, I stayed in Northfield and Paul found me some faculty houses, faculty that were going to be out of town, on an extended vacation where I would stay and take care of their dogs or whatever, and live there for free. He got me a $400 stipend, which is the only time in the 32 years that I knew Paul Wellstone that I got any money in connection with anything I did with him.
So we spent that summer doing community organizing focused in Faribault, where we would literally drive into low income neighborhoods, and we would just knock on doors, we were just talking to people to ask them about the circumstances of their lives. We did that all Summer with the idea that in the Fall, we would launch a community based organization of low-income people in Rice County to organize collectively for better treatment from government, local county government. So I did that, you know, all day, every day, throughout that Summer with Paul. And it was an amazing experience. Again, this is now outside of the classroom like those car trips up and back to St. Paul. None of this was a classroom study. None of this was academic, I wasn't going to write a paper about it. I wasn't getting credits, I was just helping Paul to accomplish something that he had defined as a goal for himself. He wanted to launch this organization. He knew I was eager to do this work. He thought I would be good at it.
So we were just going door to door, and this one door we knocked on, this woman opened the door. It was a small tiny house in a low income neighborhood in Faribault. She had eight kids, six or maybe eight. The landlord would not rent to them if they had that many kids, so they had to have half the kids hide on the days they expected the landlord to come over. Her husband worked, they weren’t on welfare, they got no public assistance.
They were playing by the rules and were getting nowhere in their lives. This woman, I’m guessing she was in her late 30, she was very candid. You could tell from her demeanor, her body language, the tone of voice, she was defeated by life, she did not have hope, and the kids were there, just playing, they weren’t really listening to us, but I was thinking, and this was years before I become a parent, how's it possible that her kids are not absorbing her sense of despair? And you know there was no public assistance, no welfare, they were hard working people. All these kids who are absorbing a sense of defeat about life, inescapable of the life they had.
I don't remember exactly how long we were there, probably about an hour. For whatever reason, she felt at ease talking to us, it was one of Paul’s skills. Just listening to people and asking them questions so they would open up and talk. When we left, we were burning with anger, both of us. How could this be, this is America? These people were working hard, they were playing by the rules, and they just had to fend for themselves. They weren’t complaining about that, they weren’t bitter about it, they were just defeated by the circumstances of their life.
When Paul and I left, we were both just on fire. We couldn’t not try to do anything we could possibly do to change this. We can’t change it today, we can't change it as fast as we'd like to for this family, which is heartbreaking. It’s something that, if I had to pick one point in time that launched me for the rest of my life, it was that moment, and I would say Paul probably felt the same way, working on these things. It's one thing to read a book about, you know, real life stories and heartbreaking stories, it's quite another to hear from somebody directly, a stranger. It made us feel that it's our duty, it's our obligation to do what we possibly can so that she and her family and people like that don't have to live like that, and can at least have hope and have a clear sense of opportunity versus a clear sense that there's nothing for them. I continued to do that work, all summer.
Were there other students part of this with you when this was happening or was it just you and Paul?
Not at that point, it was just me and Paul. There was another woman who started helping us when she came back when classes started in the Fall.
So too, for much of my Senior year, I did a lot of work with Paul doing community organizing. The organization was formally launched - Organization For A Better Rice County it was called. The first meeting was that Fall in a labor hall in Faribault. This labor hall was packed wall-to-wall with people for this first meeting. It was all angry white people, because that's who lived in Rice County. It’s not because we didn’t try to find others, there were virtually no Black people living in Rice County, at that time there were no Latino people living there. These were angry white people, many of whom might be a Trump supporter today, but they were willing to work with Paul Wellstone and me, they were willing to organize themselves, they were willing to try to find a path to improve their lives in a very organized, constructive fashion, in a way they never had before. We were not feeding their sense of grievance, we were feeding the sense of possibility. There was no guarantee of the outcome, but there was a possibility that we can make things better if we work together.
I will add this historical footnote. So you know, throughout your entire life, I’ve always gone to the gym to lift weights three times a week. I had never lifted weights before in my life, this was at the end of that Summer of 1972, doing all this organizing. Carleton was getting something called a Universal Gym, a contraption that had multiple weight stacks in different stations around a central, large cage so six people could do different things at the same time. Carleton had ordered one, they were going to get one but they didn't have it yet, but St. Olaf had one. Paul had used it and said, ‘Before we do our organizing tomorrow, meet me in the morning at the St Olaf gym, they have a Universal Gym and I’m going to show you how use it.’ So we spent an hour lifting, and I had never touched a barbell and never lifted weight in my life.
The year before that not even 12 full months before that in November of 1971, the draft was still on, the war was still going strong. I was called in for a physical in Chicago, because that was where my address was registered. They had a book and a guide during the physical because I weighed 118 pounds, and if I had at my height weighed 112 I would have been too small. But I passed the physical, so the year before I was only 118 pounds. At this point, I was probably up to 130, but no muscle. So we got to the St. Olaf Gym. We spent an hour or two on this stuff, I’m totally wiped out after we finish. Paul looks at me with a big smile on his face, and to give some perspective, George McGovern had just been nominated two weeks before by the Democrats as their presidential candidate, and it was already certain that he was going to lose in a landslide. There's no question about that whatsoever. And so that had just happened two weeks before this session. So Paul, big smile on his face, he's chuckling he says, ‘Rick, you know I love you but there's a better chance that George McGovern is going to get elected president than you'll ever be in good shape.’ He didn't intend that to be a motivational challenge, and so it's now 50 years later, and as it turns out, that was not correct, I did have a better chance. Anyway, it was one of many life lessons from Paul, to understand the importance of physical strength in a lot of things you do in your life.
Paul Wellstone and Rick Kahn embrace at my Bar Mitzvah - May 10, 1997
And so I spent my Senior year continuing to do that work with Paul and took some more classes from him. I would say we were already at that point, by the time I graduated, very close, dear friends. I was one of the few students who spent time at their house. Sheila had Dave, Marcia was little and Mark was born in that summer of 1972, and I was very much a part of their family. I was very much included and treated as part of their family, not as a student who happened to take a bunch of classes from Paul. So I felt that way, that this is a family to me and not a professor. And so we were close, dear friends by then.
That Fall, it was my Senior year, and I was filling out applications for law school. I decided I wanted to go to law school, and Jim Dlugosch, the head of the Housing Finance Agency, I called him to get some help on some housing stuff we wanted to do in Rice County, and he said, ‘Why don’t you take a year off of college and come work for me right now. You'll do research projects. We're just launching this agency. There's a lot of stuff we don't know. You're really good at that. Just take the year off.’ I said ‘No, I can't, I really want to finish college. I want to go to law school. I want to do this work with Paul, I’m an RA in my dorm, so I need to stay here but I appreciate the offer.’
So I had just filed that away and I'm filling out my law school applications and this was all on paper in those days, there were no computers, no internet. So I’m filling out applications, I had decent grades but got a really good score on my LSATs. And so I was filling out an application from Yale Law School. And the application itself was snooty, it was snobbish, it was just asking questions that had no relevance to anything other than establishing a kind of an elitist perspective on the world. And it was appalling to me. I just started thinking, this is not the life I want, I would never want to be part of that. I asked Paul, I called him up to try and figure out what I want to do with my life and asked if I could come talk to him. We spent the rest of the afternoon talking. And I said, ‘Jim Dlugosch at the Housing Finance Agency offered me a job. I said, if I call today and say, ‘Hey, I could go to Billy Mitchell Law School at night and work for you during the day, would you give me a job?’ I think he'll give me a job right now. It would be a different life, it wouldn’t be any of these other things, my focus would be my work and not law school. What do you think?’
He expressed great interest on my behalf, Antioch had started a kind of avant-garde law school in Washington DC to train poverty law lawyers. It failed, it would have been a disaster if I was there. But Paul was encouraging me to at least think about it. What I said is you know if I call Jim, I can get this job. I know I can get in to Billy Mitchell, go there. Do this work during the day and be a student at night, that would be the best combination. After two-three hours we were talking, from Paul's office., I called Jim and he said ‘Sure, come work here.’
I finished and graduated in June. I can't think of another person, and certainly no one else on the faculty who would have known me well enough to, you know, a more conventional teacher would have said, ‘You should go to the best law school you can get into.’ I did apply to the University of Minnesota law school, just in case I changed my mind and did get in there. I did apply to Antioch, and two days before my college graduation, Antioch Law School calls me and says, “Hey, we'd love to have you come here.” I said, “I'm graduating in two days I’ve already got a job. I've already made my plans for my life. I submitted my application six months ago!” They said, “Yeah, things are disorganized here.
The Dedication page of Conscience Of A Liberal, Paul Wellstone’s 2001 autobiography.
At graduation that year, the Carleton commencement program, there was a printed program, and they are giving various awards for various accomplishments to a bunch of the graduating students. My class was about 425. So the President of the college is speaking to the entire crowd, we’re seated. Grandpa Bob and Grandma were there. He said, ‘There’s many awards that we’re giving out, but I'm going to read the inscription for just one.’ And they called it the Second Century Student Award, it was for service in the community and had nothing to do with academics. I was the recipient of that award. I didn't know until we got there that morning. In my diploma, there was a little note, there's a cash award that goes with award, stop by the treasurer's office before you leave. It was $500, which my net worth before that morning was under $100, so that was also significant to me.
The next year, I'm now working at the Housing Finance Agency during the day, I'm going to law school at night, Carleton decides to fire Paul and they cite that work in the community. He reminded me of this many times thereafter. He said, ‘They gave you this big award, and they fired me for the same work!’ For the exact same work, because there was 100% alignment there was nothing at all even a little bit different.
And so they thought it was praiseworthy to a high degree for students to do this work, but they thought for a faculty member to be involved in organizing low-income people in Faribault, you know without giving academic credit for it or studying anybody, actually doing organizing, actually trying to improve these people's lives having nothing whatsoever to do with academics, but everything to do with the real world lives of these people in a way that had never happened before in that community and never happened before for any teacher at Carleton.
So they tried to fire him and the students organized. I was going to school four nights a week and working a full time job and so I couldn't be there in person. And again, this is before cellphones, so I couldn’t be connected to it. But there were other students who were there who organized, applied some pressure, but the school didn't really back down. They hired these two independent academics from other institutions to come in and interview a bunch of people. Both of them separately interviewed me for about an hour and I talked at length about everything I had learned from Paul. Not just the community work, you know, the car rides, but that as a teacher, his monumental skills as a teacher was engaging students. Not ever: Here's the answer. It was, ‘What do you think and how would you solve this problem?’ Here's the real problem. We're not going to study in a detached way, we're going to read real life stories of real people who are experiencing these circumstances, what would you do to help these people, what do you think would help them, and understand their circumstances, understand what might be done, and the politics of how to approach all that in a way made things better, including reading Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky himself came to one of those classes with Paul. This was a year or so before Alinsky died. He talked to us about organizing.
I just raved about Paul. Other current and former students were saying the same. These academics came back and said if academic freedom means anything, it's that you should grant tenure to a Paul Wellstone because how else can Paul Wellstone be Paul Wellstone, approach teaching the way he does, approach his students, who loved him and revered him and are grateful to him, that he was such a central part of their time at Carleton. You know, you’ve got to give him tenure.
And so the Board of Trustees is meeting, they hear these academics, who speak passionately. This is a closed meeting by the way, there is no live stream or anything. After they’re done, the academics are excused from the meeting, and the President, the same President who read the inscription for my award, who was very kind and good to me, who introduced me to somebody one day at some meeting and said, “Rick got the highest score on the LSATs of any Carleton student the last time it was given.” So this President liked me, and hated Paul. Again, we're doing the same stuff, but it was fine for students to do that, not okay for teachers. The President turned to the leadership of the Board, and said, ‘Let's just fire him anyway. What the hell. You know, let's just fire him.’
Bruce Morgan had just been hired to be the Dean of the college. I never met him. The Dean of the College at a school like Carleton, it’s not a Dean of students, it’s an academic Dean. It's really a leadership position. This meeting is still going on, and he has not been there for a long time. And he gets up at the meeting and says, ‘If you fire Paul Wellstone I am going to tell the whole world everything that happened here, and so you're going to give him tenure right now. Or I'm going to quit and I will tell the whole academic world what you did here, how wrong it is, how it’s a violation of everything the school's supposed to stand for.’ This was not a young man. This would have been a career killer for him. The Carleton Board in those days, even more so than it is now, were mostly rich, white men who gave a lot of money to the school. And were so called masters of the universe, that were not accustomed to having anybody tell them what to do.
They said, ‘Okay, well, we'll give him tenure, please don’t do that to us and tell the world that we're really bad people, because we are but we don't want to be called on it.’ So they gave him tenure on the spot, which gave him the freedom to do whatever else he wanted to do. This was in 1974, he stayed there on campus until some point in his run for Senate, he took a sabbatical. But for another 15 and a half years, 16 years, he was able to stay because of this Dean.
Two weeks after this confrontation, that Dean died of a heart attack, and he had said to Paul, he talked to him about it, that it had been, dealing with it the whole year, all year not just that meeting, was extremely stressful, the most stressful circumstances he had ever dealt with professionally in his life. He might have had a heart attack anyway. It's hard to say. 1974 there have been different options in health care available. Who knows? But you know, that was just beyond humbling to think that somebody would sacrifice his career ultimately, it might have even ended up costing him his life. So Paul got tenure, he got to stay.
We always stayed in touch and again, this was before e-mail or cellphones. I always knew that whatever Paul ended up working on in his life, I would help him in any way I could. And in those days, in my Carleton years when I was a student and spent all this time with him, he never ever talked about running for office himself. He did have huge respect for a few elected politicians. Huge respect. But not a lot of respect for many others, including many Democrats. He saw firsthand over and over again, often Democrats would abandon low income people in need for political reasons. And in those days, his focus was on the organizing and on the advocacy. It was only later that he came to realize he did all this great advocacy, did all this great organizing, and then there'll be a group of white guys sitting in a room with a vote and they'll just vote no, and it was like the Carleton trustees till the Dean confronted them. ‘I don’t care what we should do, I don't care what these people are telling us is the right thing to do. We know what the right thing is, we're still going to do the wrong thing, because we can. Screw these people. We don't really care what happens to them. We don't really care, even if we say we do.’ And so you realize you had to have a seat at the table, where the votes are made, where these decisions are made. That if you stop with the organizing if you stop with the advocacy, combined with the organizing you didn't get the final decision. Sometimes, but not often enough.
So we always stayed in very close contact. We remained the best of friends, there was no point in time where we weren’t closely tied together. Paul ran for state auditor in 1982, I worked a lot on that campaign. He was running for the wrong office, but it was an interesting campaign, we had some great moments. The night before the DFL convention, where he got the endorsement for auditor, we talked about this book we had both recently read, a biography of Huey Long who was governor of Louisiana and US Senator. He was assassinated by a mentally ill person, but Huey Long was considered and written about and described as a demagogue. There's a book written and a movie made called All The King’s Men, ostensibly about Huey Long, that portrayed him very unfavorably, but this history professor at Louisiana State wrote this scholarly biography on Huey Long that Paul and I read and it dramatically changed our perspective, Huey Long was actually pushing FDR to be way more progressive than FDR would have been on his own. We were still in the throes of the Depression at that point in this country and Huey Long was pushing for a much more radical agenda.
One of the milestone things in that book, and we talked about it that night, is the first campaign Huey Long ran, it was not for himself, it was on behalf of somebody else running for some office. They lost, but Huey Long said everything he needed to learn to be a successful candidate, he learned in that defeat and that he would not have known if he hadn’t lost, in every respect. And so I said, ‘It won't be the worst thing in the world, if you lose, but let's make sure we learn,’ and he agreed. He had read that book, he loved it as much as I did, and we took that to heart. He won the nomination, he lost the general election to Arne Carlson, who never lost an election in Minnesota. Arne Carlson was the incumbent and had a solid record as auditor.
Ironically, as a historical footnote, on the night election in 1982, they're interviewing Paul at the DFL headquarters, and he's wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and the studio host says, “My goodness, look how he’s dressed!” with disapproval, and the camera pans back and in the studio with her is then US Senator Rudy Boschwitz, he wasn't on the ballot that night, he was just joining, talking commentary. He was also wearing a flannel shirt and said, “What's wrong with that? I like the way he’s dressed,” of course not knowing about their future encounter [in the 1990 US Senate election}.
So, it wasn't close, but again, you know, it was the wrong office for him. We just didn’t fit, but it was very exciting, and so that year, the convention was in Duluth and our campaign budget for the convention is $20, literally. When the convention hall opens at a specific time, you have teams for the various campaigns who have scoped out spots where they're going to hang signs, and all the rest of it, and they had walkie talkies to communicate. Our team was Paul and I, and two current students, and we each had a roll of masking tape and a couple of signs and that's all we could afford. A University of Minnesota Duluth Professor friend of his put us up. When it came time for his endorsement fight, we didn't have any money for campaign signs, so Mark Dayton, who won the endorsement for US Senate seat but lost the general election race that year. We took the Dayton signs and on the blank white side with a magic marker, we wrote Wellstone and had people waving these handwritten signs. He gave a fiery speech, the crowd loved it.
He got over 85% or so within the first ballot. In the Iron Range, where the real diehard union labor stalwarts of that era lived, he got close to 100%, those people loved Paul Wellstone. Like no one else did. And so I was there for all of that. I got to see all of that, I was ostensibly his floor manager of the convention, never having done that before my life just figuring it out on the fly. But it was wonderful experience. And again, this is 1982, I’ve been out college for nine years and it just underscores the point. It wasn't anything to do with me anymore. It was what could I do to help Paul, and do something I believed in, do something that I could help accomplish that I felt would allow him to make this a better world, and I firmly believed that.
This was the year of course Carly was born. So Carly is born in August, and I'm spending a little less time on the campaign. He has a campaign staff. We're doing everything that we can but there's not a lot of opportunity, it would have been impossible for him to win that year. But we stay close after that, and then when he called me and told me he was thinking about running for the US Senate, this was very early in 1989. He had a brother that had moved here by then and we meet at his brother's house in Minneapolis with a small group of people.
Boschwitz was running after he had already won a second term. So he was running for re-election having been in the Senate for two terms, had no scandals, had high approval ratings, was going to monumentally outspend us. It was something Paul wrote in his last book, early in the book he said ‘every campaign, to be successful has to start out with a circle of people who believe’ and I was one of those people who believed wholeheartedly, I'm going do anything and everything I could, you know, immerse myself in it, and the rest is history from there. That's how it all started, how it came together.
Sheila Wellstone and Rick Kahn at my Bar Mitzvah- May 10, 1997
I’ll add not about Paul, but about Sheila, to just underscore the closeness. Fast forward to 1998. Pau’s thinking about running for president and we go and spend several long weekends in Iowa at scheduled events. Were Paul go to four, five, six events in the day, and I was driving them in my car. We have long chunks of time between events in the car, we’re talking. It was just wonderful. This is now 25 years after I graduated. Wonderful conversations, none of it chit chat, but about everything going on in the world.
It’s kind of a throwback
It is a throwback to those days, but now I’m the driver though. So Sheila’s with us for all of this stuff and at the end of one of those trips, Paul had to fly back to Washington from Iowa. I drive Sheila back to the event at Sam and Sylvia [Kaplan]’s old house in South Minneapolis, where they're hosting a fundraiser for somebody. So there's a lot of notable people there. Sheila's introducing me to one of these people. And she says, “Let me introduce you to my son Rick,” and then she smiles and laughs and she says, “Well, he might as well be my son.”
I loved those trips down to Iowa, I got to spend a ton of time with them. And then, the last chunk of time I had personally with Paul was in May 2002. He was shooting some campaign commercials in St Paul, and he had several events to go to, this was on a Saturday. After the filming was done, his people in his Senate office said, ‘Paul would love to spend the afternoon and evening with you if you'd be willing to drive him to these events. Some of them are in southern Minnesota, some are in the Cities.’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course.’
So we had six hours being in the car, you know, a little bit of time at these events, but mostly the car and just talking. It was 2002, a lot of stuff going around the world. He's talking about all that stuff. Whenever we saw each other, we started each conversation essentially, as if there's been no gap or just completely in sync right away, understanding each other. He welcomes my thinking, assistance, and perspective. We just engaged in back and forth conversation. We go to that event, we go to an event in a church basement in Minneapolis somewhere. This woman in the Latino community has been threatened with deportation. This event was to raise money to pay for a lawyer for her. The whole crowd spoke Spanish. It was a long day and Paul was exhausted, but he spoke with fire, and the crowd was just roused by it. Affirmed in what they were doing by the fact that a US Senator showed up late on a Saturday night to tell them he was standing with them, and will do everything he can to protect this woman.
At the end of the day, I brought him back to their house. I saw him a couple of times after that, but that's the last chunk of time that I really spent with him and just talked. I had always assumed, I had just turned 50, he was 58, I just assumed many, many years to go. Many more opportunities to work together, to talk.
So I’ll close with that and end on a lighter story and then I will say one last thing and that is I feel Paul Wellstone’s strength and inspiration every single day. And as long as I live, that will never leave me. That strength, that physical strength I have I came to realize was indispensable for Paul, when you're fighting against the world, you have to be very, very strong and I’ve used that strength, it's been indispensable to me, more so in his absence, than when he was still here. I have built upon that now 50 years down the road of lifting weights, the sense of strength I have is Paul Wellstone’s strength, based on his immense physical strength. Because he lifted weights from high school years on. Three times a week like I did. And so I carry those lifetime lessons. I carry all those gifts with me and I carry that strength and inspiration. He will never ever be a distant memory in my life.