It was 1948 when Abner Mikva, fresh out of college, volunteered at
the 8th Ward Democratic headquarters in Chicago. "Who sent you,
kid?" the leery ward committeeman asked. "Nobody," Mikva said, and
the man informed him, "We don't want nobody nobody sent." That
marked the beginning of Abner Mikva's storied political career,
which would take him to the Illinois Statehouse, the US House of
Representatives, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Clinton
White House-culminating in a Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded
by a young politician he had mentored, Barack Obama. Around that
time, eighty-seven years old and in declining health but as wise
and wry as ever, Mikva sat down with his former speechwriter and
longtime friend Sanford Horwitt for the first of the conversations
recorded in this book. Separated by a generation, but with two
lifetimes' worth of experience between them, the friends met
monthly to talk about life, politics, and the history that Mikva
saw firsthand-and often had a hand in making. Conversations with
Abner Mikva lets us listen in as the veteran political reformer and
unreconstructed liberal reflects on the world as it was, how it's
changed, what it means, and what really matters. Speaking in no
uncertain terms, but with an unerring instinct for the comic, Mikva
has something to say-and something well worth hearing-about his
bouts with the Daley political machine, the NRA, and the Nazis who
marched in Skokie. Whether recalling his work as a judge on civil
rights, describing his days as White House counsel, decrying the
most activist Supreme Court since the Civil War, expounding on our
rigged political system, or assessing the Obama presidency, Mikva
is eloquent, deeply informed, and endlessly interesting. And
finally, in this intimate and unfiltered encounter, he remains an
optimist, inspired and inspiring to the very end of a remarkable
life of public service. In 2016, at the age of ninety, Abner Mikva
died on the Fourth of July.
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