The foreign minister of Burlington, Vt.
In addition to filling potholes, Bernie Sanders focused on the Soviet Union, Cuba and the Sandinistas.
Bernie Sanders is pictured six months after winning the mayoral election in Burlington, Vt. | AP Photo
In June 1986, the House of Representatives voted to send $100 million in U.S. military aid to Nicaragua’s contra rebels. It was a major victory for Ronald Reagan’s hardline anti-communist foreign policy.
In Burlington, Vermont, Mayor Bernie Sanders sprang into action. Sanders quickly called an emergency board of aldermen meeting to discuss how the lakeside college town should respond.
This was not a surprising or unprecedented move for the young socialist mayor, who considered it his small city’s responsibility to craft a foreign policy in opposition to the Reagan administration’s. The previous summer, for instance, Sanders had presided over a local meeting to protest Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.
But even in lefty Vermont, his foreign policy activism provoked eye rolling. The Grenada episode led the Burlington Free Press to complain that the city’s leaders were debating foreign issues “while legitimate city business was ignored.” Seven of the city’s 13 aldermen skipped the Nicaragua meeting, with many complaining that Sanders was, once again, wasting time on a far-flung cause.
“People tried to portray him as neglecting his mayoral responsibilities as he was doing these other international things,” acknowledged Terry Bouricius, a longtime Sanders confidante, and an alderman at the time, who dismissed the criticism.
Sanders was undeterred. To the young socialist mayor, all politics was global. “[H]ow many cities of 40,000 have a foreign policy? Well we did,” he wrote in his 1997 memoir, Outsider in the House. “I saw no magic line separating local, state, national and international issues.”
The alderman’s meeting produced a vague plan for a donation to the Nicaraguan people, compensation for what Sanders called their suffering at the hands of the U.S.-backed contra rebels. (The tale is described in W.J. Conroy’s Challenging the Boundaries of Reform: Socialism in Burlington.) The result was, Sanders later conceded, “more symbolic than anything.”
It often was. But that never stopped him.
As he takes on Hillary Clinton, Sanders, now a Vermont senator, is drawing huge crowds with a potent message about income inequality and corporate greed in America. But in Burlington, Sanders was as passionate about global politics as he was about local ones. His city hall office on Burlington’s Church Street became an unlikely pocket of resistance to Reagan’s anti-communist policies. His annual budgets prominently featured updates on “world peace.” (Burlington’s incineration in a nuclear war, he insisted, would be a very local issue indeed.) He acted as a self-styled peace envoy, paying visits to Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. He even honeymooned in the USSR, an experience he has called “very strange.”
Through it all, Sanders directly linked his city’s mundane struggles with issues like housing and infrastructure to the grandest geopolitical themes. “Not only was the war against Nicaragua illegal and immoral, it was an outrageous waste of taxpayer money. As a mayor, I wanted more federal funds for affordable housing and economic development,” Sanders wrote in his memoir.
There’s little evidence that Sanders managed to influence the American ship of state during his tenure as Burlington mayor from 1981 to 1989. A collection of Sanders’s mayoral papers at the University of Vermont includes numerous messages to Congress and the White House relaying Burlington’s opinions on various policies. (One December 1986 letter from Sanders to Reagan notified him of a 7,001 to 5,914 city referendum condemning the House’s aid to the contras). The records show fewer replies, although Republican Rep. Trent Lott of Mississippi, or someone writing on his behalf, did politely acknowledge a notice of the city’s support for a nuclear freeze. “Burlington’s foreign policy had no discernable impact on the anti-Marxist proclivity of the Reagan and Bush administrations,” Conroy concluded in his book.
Approached in a Senate building, Sanders promised a later interview but was unavailable before POLITICO’s deadline.
It’s impossible to understand the rise of Bernie Sanders without understanding the way America’s role in the world captivated him.
Substantively, Sanders wasn’t hugely out of step with liberal Democrats who loathed Reagan’s foreign policy — and who lived in visceral fear of nuclear war. But he stood out for the emphasis and effort he devoted to those subjects, and the controversy they produced even in one of America’s most liberal cities.
“World peace is, in my mind, a very local issue,” Sanders declared on the first page of his 1987 city budget message, one of many archived official documents examined by POLITICO for this story. “If a nuclear war takes place, the citizens of our city will perish with the rest of the nation. That’s a local issue.”
Sanders’s foreign travel demonstrated that he was no armchair activist. In the summer of 1985 he traveled to Managua on the invitation of the socialist revolutionary government of Daniel Ortega, whom Reagan had targeted for overthrow but whose cause Sanders called “heroic.” (Sanders had drawn the Sandanistas’ attention thanks to his pursuit of a sister-city relationship between Burlington and the Nicaraguan town of Puerto Cabezas, which endures to this day.)
Sanders brought a local reporter with him for the weeklong trip, which featured a meeting with Ortega himself. Sanders said he was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the country — “I was treated in a special way,” he later said — and hoped to dispel what he called false U.S. media reports about the Sandinistas. (Ortega, who serves as president today, did not respond to an interview request via Nicaragua’s embassy in Washington.)
Burlington was divided on the wisdom of Sanders’s trip, according to Conroy’s account. The Free Press snarked that “the mayor fancies himself a budding diplomat capable of making intelligent decisions about the merits of a government on a long-distance basis. It is the classic mistake made by amateurs.” One Republican alderman warned that the trip revealed where Sanders’s “real interests lie,” and charged that “Burlington is nothing but a stepping stone in his long-range ambitions and plans.”
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