THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Eric Hirschhorn

“I never had a boss from whom I learned more than Bella.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, February 2024

JW:  Would you please introduce yourself with your full name, and when and where you were born?

EH:  Sure. It’s Eric L. Hirschhorn. I was born in April 1946. I was born in Brooklyn, but my parents lived in Long Beach, New York, which is a barrier island off the south coast of Long Island, and I was raised there.

JW:  Tell us a little about your background, your childhood, and maybe what led you to the career you wound up having.

EH:  My parents had some involvement in local politics, and in politics [in general]. I remember at the age of six, my mother took me into the voting booth and lifted me up so that I could pull the Stevenson lever.  I can remember that, so it goes at least that far back. And I remember my mother having the Army-McCarthy hearings on television.

JW:  Do you have siblings?

EH:  I have two younger sisters. They’re politically very aware, but neither of them has been involved in politics.

JW:  Oh, interesting. Well, how did you get involved then, yourself? I mean, beyond those experiences, how’d you get involved in politics?

EH:  Even as a high school student, there were local political races. I got involved with a couple of those for school board and for city council. I also got involved in my last year of high school with anti-nuclear-weapons politics and continued that somewhat in college, which was at the University of Chicago. I got involved in some local politics there, and then went to law school at Columbia and practiced with the legal services program on the lower east side of Manhattan.

One of my areas of practice was juvenile delinquency cases, which were heard in the Family Court, which wasn’t open to the public. The prosecutor was not the district attorney but the corporation counsel. One of my regular opponents was a guy named Hal Mayerson, who was active in the Village Independent Democratic Club.

He called me one day out of the blue and said, “Do you have any clients in the girls shelter on 14th street?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “I have a friend who’s running for Congress, and there’s been several big stories in the Daily News about what happens in an overcrowded shelter with delinquent teenage girls. And my friend would like to talk to somebody who knows something about it.” I said, “Who’s your friend?” He said, “Her name is Bella Abzug.” I said, “Well, I don’t know her, Hal, but if she’s a friend of yours, I’d be happy to talk to her.” That’s how I met Bella.

JW:  So, you got to know her, obviously, yes. I want to hear how that conversation went.

EH:  Well, it’s interesting. The campaign office was in the old Village Voice office on Sheridan Square in Greenwich village. It was a condemned building and you could see daylight through cracks in the walls. It was that bad. I think Marilyn Marcosson sent you to me. Is that right?

JW:  Yes.

EH:  Well, I met Marilyn the first day I went to that office. Her hair was caught in a mimeograph machine. She had long hair then. Anyway, I’m waiting to meet the candidate, and I hear her screaming through a closed door, I mean, really letting somebody have it. And I said to somebody, “Who’s she talking to?” And the person said to me, “Albert Shanker.” I said to myself, “Sign me up.”

JW:  Oh, wow. What an intro.

EH:  Yes. So, I ended up writing press releases and some speeches for her and being a nighttime driver along with Peter Riegert. He was the other nighttime driver—an actor who later became well known as ‘the pickle man’ in the movie Crossing Delancey. I think he had a tv series, too, some kind of crime series.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and I ended up coming to Washington the following spring as [Bella’s] legislative assistant. And that was my introduction, really, to the women’s movement. I had been involved in progressive politics before then, but not particularly with a slant toward the women’s movement. More anti-nuclear-weapons and anti-war and things like that.

JW:  Right. Well, I want to go back a second. What were the problems at the girls shelter?

EH:  I think just a lot of factions. Gangs, fights, some drugs, what you might expect.

JW:  So, you moved to Washington. What were some of the issues on your legislative plate? And what year was that?

EH:  June 1971. She had taken office in January, but I had a commitment to work in the New York State Assembly for that session. I worked for a group of backbench Democratic assemblymen who had put together some of their secretarial hire money to hire a lawyer to read all the bills the night before they came to the floor. So, that was what I did from January until June.

In June, I came down to Washington to take up the job as Bella’s legislative assistant. She already had two part-time legislative assistants, Judy Wolf and Nancy Stanley, but she didn’t have a full-time person. I think she felt like she needed more help in that area. So that’s what I came out to do.

JW:  Do you remember what some of the legislative issues were?

EH:  My original portfolio was very heavily, stop-the-war efforts. Efforts to put riders on appropriations bills, efforts to kind of organize members and staff to support legislation to stop the bombing, to stop this, to stop that, whatever. That was really my major focusearly on. Obviously, there were other issues. I ended up also being her staff person for the Public Works Committee. So, there were a lot of issues about getting mass transit money for New York and things like that.

As time passed, there were issues that involved the women’s movement. We introduced the first bill to require the government printing office to allow women to use the title Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs. We introduced a federal abortion bill. It was only three weeks before Roe v. Wade was handed down, so it was kind of mooted by that. But it was an effort that now, sadly, is fresh again.

I think Jamie Raskin has a bill. I think our bill relied on the commerce clause, I don’t remember, I haven’t looked at the bill in a long time. But in January 1973, Bella introduced an abortion bill. And three weeks later the Supreme Court handed down Roe v.  Wade. So, the bill became a moot point.

JW:  Were you involved in the 1972 Democratic Convention?

EH:  Let’s see, ’72 no. ’76, yes. Bella spoke at the ’76, and I was with her on the podium. That was when Carter was nominated at Madison Square Garden. That was the only convention I’ve ever attended.

JW:  Oh, really?

EH:  Yes. One was enough. It’s kind of a mob scene.

JW:  I was at one later. I forget which year. Anyway, what was she like to work for?

EH:  I often say that I never had a boss from whom I learned more, or at greater expense. I learned a great deal from her about politics, about how it really works, about law, and how it really works. But she was certainly high maintenance. She set high expectations for herself but also for everybody who worked for her. I would say we got along better after I no longer worked for her.

JW:  Marilyn said that the hours were like eight in the morning until twelve at night often.

EH:  Sometimes. Certainly, eight or nine at night. But then, being a generous soul, she’d take us all out to dinner at The Monocle, which was the only restaurant open at that point on the Hill, at that late hour.

JW:  Okay. That’s right. Now, what I want to know is, did she yell at you?

EH:  Oh, yes.

JW:  I mean, that was your introduction, so I just wondered how that went.

EH:  Oh, yes. If I had a dollar for every time I was told I was going to be fired, I would be a wealthy man. A lot of, “You people are killing me.” A lot of that. But she was very much a three-dimensional person, too. She was a real person and she could be very warm and very funny, too.

JW:  What were the issues that you were most concerned about at the time, that you were really involved in?

EH:  Well, the heavy issues were the anti-war issues. Her big pitch as a candidate was as an anti-war candidate when she ran in the Democratic primary against Leonard Farbstein, who was a supporter of the war in Vietnam. So, her big pitch was as a peace candidate. I have lots of good Bella stories.

JW:  Well, let’s hear a good Bella story. Give me one.

EH:  Okay. My first vacation. She hired me to come down while I was still working in Albany in the state legislature, and I said, “You know, the end of the session here is lunacy. It’s around the clock session the last week or so. I’m going to need a vacation before I come down to Washington.” She said, “Not possible. The Nixon welfare bill is coming to the floor in June. I need you here. You can take a vacation later.” “Okay,” I replied.

So, I get there, and after a month or two, I come to her and I say, “You’ll remember our discussion about vacation. I didn’t take a vacation before I came, but I’m going to take a vacation for three weeks in September.” She said, “What is wrong with you? There’s a session in September. You can’t be gone during a session.” I said, “Oh, God. I just didn’t realize that was the schedule. I’ll fix it.”

So, I go back to my girlfriend and we rearrange everything, which was not so easy for her because of her job. And I come back to Bella a few days later and say, “I’ve rearranged everything. I’m going to go during the congressional recess in August.” She says, “What is the matter with you? You know we can’t both be gone at the same time.” I didn’t say another word. I went in August.

JW:  You did?

EH:  I went. And every time she called—from the beach, I might add—and asked for me, they’d say, “He’s not here.”

JW:  And you didn’t get fired? Wow.

EH:  No. I never actually got fired, but there were plenty of, “If you walk out that door, don’t come back.”

JW:  So, how long did you last?

EH:  I worked for her for two years, from June of ’71 to June of ’73. And then I moved back to New York, and spent two years in a big Wall Street law firm. Then came back in September ’75 to be counsel to her subcommittee. She had the Government Information and Individual Rights Subcommittee, and I was there until she left office in 1977. So, I did two stints, and I came back as the counsel.

That’s another great Bella story. When she was trying to get me to move back to Washington and take the job, she said, “It’s in another building. You’ll never see me.” She knew how to sell it. Of course, it turned out not to be true. Unfortunately, Congress had telephones. But we did a number of big hearings about NSA and the FBI sending people to pick up copies of international cables every day, in a basket, from the three big international telecommunications carriers. That was a big deal. And we also did the Government in the Sunshine Act. That was legislation that came out of that subcommittee.

JW:  Explain what that is.

EH:  That is an open meetings law. It was modeled after the Florida open meetings law. Hence the name, Government in the Sunshine, since they’re the sunshine state. It was modeled after the Florida open meetings law, and it was sponsored by Lawton Chiles in the Senate. and Bella and Dante Fascell were the sponsors in the House. That came out of our subcommittee, and we were able to get it passed and signed by Gerald Ford.

JW:  An accomplishment for sure. Absolutely. Well, that’s great. And so, you left when she left, you said, ’77?

EH:  Yes. I went to work for Jimmy Carter on his reorganization staff.

JW:  What was your role there?

EH:  I was in the National Security and International Affairs Group and did reorganizations of public diplomacy, which was the U.S. Information Agency, of foreign assistance, and of foreign trade. Because the Education cluster didn’t have a lawyer, I drafted the Department of Education legislation for them.

JW:  Oh, I see. When it left [the department of Health, Education and Welfare]?

EH:  As proposed by the administration. And mostly as enacted, there were not many changes made as it went through Congress.

JW:  This was to change Health, Education and Welfare?

EH:  To create a separate Department of Education. Right.

JW:  And now we have Health and Human Services, and Department of Education is separate, and you were involved in that at the time.

EH:  I should backtrack a little to say, that I’ve now been in Washington pretty much straight, except for ’73 to ’75, for more than 50 years. And the most important thing I accomplished in that time – and there were things later in my career – but while I was working for Bella and with the Public Works Committee, was to include, at the request of some handicapped groups in the 1973 Highway Act, the first legislation to require cut curbs for wheelchairs.

And it turned out also to be handy for strollers. Every time I trip over one of those curbs, I’m reminded of it. And Bella never got credit for it.  That was unfortunate, because it was something important she did. It wasn’t a movement thing, it wasn’t an anti-war thing, it wasn’t a women’s thing, but it was important. And every day you see the result of it.

JW:  And yet it didn’t fit into the small, I guess, definition of Bella, in a way.

EH:  Yes. Bella cared a lot about the public works side of her portfolio and it never got much press. All her efforts to get highway money turned into mass transit money for New York, got very little press. But she spent a lot of time on that.

JW:  She did it? She got a lot of money for mass transit?

EH:  Yes. Basically, canceling the Westway, which was supposed to run up the west side of Manhattan, and trying to get that money in the hands of the transit authority.

JW:  When you said you had other accomplishments, what were they later on?

EH:  Well, reforming the export control system. I can’t imagine that would be a great interest.

JW:  Well, we’re interested in you.

EH:  Well, alright. I did government reorganizations for Jimmy Carter, and then the last year and a half of his term, I got a job at the Commerce Department – which I had been involved with in my trade reorganization – in charge of U.S. export controls. And that became part of my private practice.

From 1981 when Carter was defeated and we all went into exile, until 2010, when I returned to the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Commerce. I spent a lot of time on that, and during the Obama administration, did a lot of streamlining of the export control system to basically reduce the number of licenses required that would have been granted anyway, and focus more on the ones that were of concern. So that became kind of my area of expertise.

JW:  What went around came around. And so many years later, you were back.

EH:  Yes, that’s right. I had 29 years in private practice and then came back to the federal government from 2010 until Obama left office, and I left at the same time.

JW:  I see. And did you retire at that point?

EH:  I don’t like to use the word retire, but I don’t have a full-time job since January 2017. I’ve gotten involved in a bunch of professional gigs involving legal ethics mostly, some occasionally with export controls, still. I spend time with my two grandchildren who live nearby, and walk in the park every day. My law firm forced me to put away, kicking and screaming, a bit of money. My wife has been a law teacher for 40 years, and she put away money, too. And so, I don’t have to worry too much about paying the mortgage.

JW:  That’s great. So how would you say those years working in Congress and working for Bella affected your whole way of thinking, your whole future career.

EH:  I think they made me much more sensitive. More my future life, than my future career. They made me much more sensitive to women’s issues and the women’s movement and such. And I think that’s continued. I mean, I think you and I ran into each other at the National Women’s Law Center dinner, for example.

JW:  We did, yes.

EH:  My wife and I have been contributors to that. She was hired to work for Liz Holtzman by Michael Greenberger. I think she was his successor, so when he left, he hired her. And that’s how we originally knew Marcia [Greenberger].

JW:  Oh, I see. Oh, that’s great.

EH:  I actually knew Duffy [Nancy Duff Campbell] when I was a legal services lawyer in New York. Duffy was also in legal services. She was at the Columbia Center on Social Welfare Policy & Law and I was in the field operations.

JW:  Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to add?

EH:  No, I don’t think so. I think that I come back to the beginning, which was that I never had a boss from whom I learned more than Bella. She had a very practical, on-the-ground view of how politics worked. And it served me well in my later career and my later life to appreciate that. Watch what they’re doing, not what they’re saying.

CONTINUING CONVERSATION WITH ERIC HIRSCHHORN

JW:  Thanks for joining me again. So, you were legislative director, right, for Bella Abzug?

EH:  Yes. It was called legislative assistant then, but I was sort of in charge of the legislative operation.

JW:  Okay. Were you the only man on staff?

EH:  No. Let’s see, there was somebody who did veterans issues, involving not only veterans issues as such, but the Vietnam War in general. I think for a while we had a man as a receptionist, and the press secretary in New York was a man. There were quite a number of men on the staff.

JW:  So how did it feel to be a man among the women’s movement that was happening at the time?

EH:  Felt great. I’ve always liked women since I was a kid, and I still do. So, I’m perfectly happy to be a part of it.

JW:  And you commiserated with the issues that, particularly the women’s movement issues at the time?

EH:  Yes.

JW:  Were there any issues in particular that you were most interested in?

EH:  You know, obviously, I worked for Bella and was interested in the issues she was interested in, because that was what I was hired to do. That included not only the issues for which she was very well known, which included women’s movement issues, inequality issues, but also anti-war issues, and even the very mundane public works issues, because she was on the House Public Works Committee.

JW:  Now, I understand you did work with her on drafting some legislation specifically, right?

EH:  A lot of legislation, yes. As far as the women’s movement is concerned, a bill that she introduced in January 1973, to create a federal right to abortion. I worked on drafting that. And also, a bill she introduced to require the Government Printing Office to use Ms. which they did not then use, for any female who wanted to use it.

JW:  Okay, well, let’s go back to the abortion one. Do you remember anything about the bill itself?

EH:  Not a great deal. I believe that we had a long discussion about whether to base it on the equal protection and due process clauses of the constitution, or to include the commerce clause as well. I don’t remember even where we ended up on that. I think maybe without the commerce clause, although I think I’m the one who thought the commerce clause should be included.

JW:  But it was giving every woman in the United States the right to have an abortion.

EH:  Yes. Again, I don’t remember all the details. I think it may have lacked in details. It was a pretty sweeping, far-reaching bill. It was introduced a couple of weeks before Roe against Wade was decided, so it became moot long before we could try to get any committee to hold a hearing on it.

JW:  I see. Of course, over time, the requirements of Roe were pretty eroded. It might have been a good thing,

EH:  As I recall, it did not have time limits, it didn’t require doctor’s visits, it didn’t have, any of those really, millstones, that were imposed later by the courts.

JW:  Right, that actually did apply to the Roe standard, let alone now after Dobbs. So why did she want to introduce the bill when, I mean, Roe was already argued. Twice, in fact, and so it was going to be decided. I’m curious as to why she wanted to introduce that.

EH:  I don’t remember. We were aware that there was a case pending. Maybe we weren’t that confident that the court would end up where it ended up. I really don’t remember.

JW:  Yes, I can see the doubt. Okay.

EH:  Of course, in hindsight it seemed obvious, but believe me, in foresight it wasn’t so obvious.

JW:  That’s interesting. So now let’s talk about the second bill to require the Government Printing Office to use Ms. as a title for women. What prompted that bill?

EH:  I’m trying to remember whether Ms. Magazine was already around at the time.

JW:  What year was it? I could tell you. What year was it?

EH:  Well, it was between June of ‘71 and June of ‘73, but more than that, I could not tell you.

JW:  Okay. Well, it may or may not have been around. I’m not sure.

EH:  Yes, it would have been ’71, or it might have been at the beginning of ’73, but I think probably  ’71 or ’72. I can’t be more specific about it.

JW:  Well, can you talk about the reason that you wanted the GPO to do that?

EH:  I think the honorific Ms. was beginning to be used by people in the women’s movement. Whether the magazine was already there or not, I don’t remember. And one issue that was raised, was that the Government Printing Office; including the printing of the Congressional Record, would say, Mrs. Abzug, or Mrs. whatever. And Bella thought that if people wanted to use the Ms. honorific, which doesn’t indicate whether one is married or not, that they should have the right to do so, just as a man had the right to do so. Indeed, Mr. was used for all men, whether married or single. So, she felt that women, and many women wanted to do this, should have the same right. And that if the Government Printing Office wasn’t going to do it on their own; and we may have had some correspondence with them, I don’t remember beforehand, that there ought to be a law, as they say.

JW:  And what was the reception to that bill?

EH:  That I don’t remember.

JW:  Did it go to committee or you don’t remember that?

EH:  No, I think before too long, the Government Printing Office agreed to do what the bill called for.

JW:  Oh. So again, that bill would have been moot, since it was done.

EH:  Yes. I wish I knew the timeline. I don’t.

JW:  Well, it’s a long time ago, but I appreciate you even raising these. So, were there any other issues? Like, did you supervise anybody on bills that pertain to the women’s issues at all?

EH:  Well, we had a lot of correspondence about it, and I assisted in supervising the legislative correspondence people. We had people on staff and interns who worked on correspondence. So, you know, okay, we’d get letters about various issues, and that included women’s issues. I don’t remember specifics beyond that. We had a lot of correspondence about the war in Vietnam, which was raging at that time.

JW:  Yes, I think she was kind of famous for both women’s issues and the war in Vietnam.

EH:  She originally won her seat and won her primary against a sitting Democrat, mostly on the war issue, on the west side of Manhattan and lower Manhattan. She had been very involved with Women Strike for Peace for quite some years before that. That was her original.

JW:  Can you explain anything about that for our audience?

EH:   Women Strike for Peace was a women’s anti-war, anti-nuclear movement. And Bella, just as a private citizen, and as a lawyer practicing in New York City, was very involved in Women Strike for Peace. And that was kind of the core of her original supporters when she decided to run for Congress in 1970.

JW:  Yes. So, it was really working with women even then.

EH:  Absolutely.

JW:  Any other connection to the women’s movement that you can recall happening in the office?

EH:  The National Women’s Political Caucus was formed by some meetings in Bella’s office. A number of prominent women attended them, and so that’s something else that was going on in the office while I was there. I was not directly involved in that. Other staff people were involved in that.

JW:  Well, I’ve got one other question. Did Bella wear her hat in the office, whichever hat it was of the day?

EH:  No. Nor did she wear it on the House floor despite that story. When she’d come into the office, she’d take her hat off.

JW:  Well, I just couldn’t help but ask.

EH:  By the way, the story about her being told by the doorkeeper to take her hat off on the house floor is utterly untrue.

JW:  Oh, wow. She knew enough that that was against the rules.

EH:  She was a lawyer first and foremost. And she was a lawyer who stood for a lot of things, but one of them was the rule of law. She believed in changing the law when it was wrong, but she was not a scofflaw. And she certainly, unlike people who now try to wear guns into the house chamber, she never wore her hat in the chamber. She told me that, and it’s also in the book she wrote about her first year in Congress.

JW:  Oh, wow. Well, I’m going to look forward to seeing her movie. I have tickets.

EH:  Oh, good. I’ll probably be there all three nights.

JW:  See you there.

EH:  I’m going to speak on the 14th, although that seems to be a moving target. But I’m going to speak at one of the three performances.

JW:  Oh, super. Yes, I think that’s the day I’m going.

EH:  It’s a Thursday.

JW:  Yes, I think, a friend picked the date. Let me see. Yes, I’m going to be there the 14th.

EH:  I will see you then, in person.