OUR COMMUNITY ON THE COVER
The
Levin COURTESY OF WSU PRESS
Legacy
City Council days. Detroit, circa 1970.
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Carl Levin’s new memoir chronicles his 36-year Senate career. JACK LESSENBERRY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
C
arl Levin, the longest-serving U.S. senator in Michigan’s history, admits he had to be pushed into writing his memoir, Getting to the Heart of the Matter: My 36 Years in the Senate, recently released by Wayne State University Press. And we should be grateful to his wife, Barbara, and his longtime aide Linda Gustitus for doing just that. Political memoirs are often little more than self-satisfying ego trips; I confess I fell asleep trying to make it through Bill Clinton’s autobiography, and while better written, Barack Obama’s history of his presidential years may threaten to be longer than the Talmud when finally finished. Not this book. This is the story, in little more than 300 pages, of a good and decent man who never lost an election, and about whom, after more than half a century in public life, there has never been the slightest whiff of personal or professional scandal. You wouldn’t know from this book that he became the only statewide candidate in Michigan history to get 3 million votes. In fact, except for his first campaign, in which he performed the difficult feat of knocking off a powerful incumbent senator (Robert Griffin) and his second, when he managed to survive the Reagan landslide, Levin barely mentions his elections; and the last two, not at all. Nor is this a personal tell-all; what details of his early life we get leave us wanting more. I had no idea that Levin was once a motorcycle fiend who broke his kneecap and otherwise smashed up his right leg crashing into a stone wall in Florence, Italy, or that he worked the line in three auto plants in Detroit and Highland Park. Many readers also may be intrigued to know that his paternal grandparents, Morris and Gittelle Levinson, continued on page 14
APRIL 1 • 2021
