Does anyone out there remember Danny Brewster? We should. He was the war hero who came home to Baltimore County and became a U.S. senator with White House dreams, but lost it all behind a veil of alcohol.
He was a golden boy but a battered man who was wounded seven times in the worst of the hell on Okinawa, and suffered extended PTSD before we had such a name for it. Combat fatigue, it was called back then. The war’s nightmares brought on the worst of the drinking.
But Brewster, who died in 2007 at age 83, never made excuses. He stood by his political ideals during the turbulent 1960s. He pinch-hit for President Lyndon B. Johnson to take on the racist Alabama Gov. George Wallace in Maryland’s 1964 Democratic presidential primary.
He beat Wallace. But Brewster unleashed racial antagonism in parts of Maryland where it was previously kept under wraps. Then, Brewster took on more political baggage: he voted for the civil rights legislation that helped give America a conscience on race.
Johnson called Brewster his “beloved friend” and one of his “best helpers” in getting the U.S. on the road to racial fairness.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said he was “greatly indebted” to Brewster for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But Brewster’s idealism brought him intense political pressure.
Now, the full Brewster story has been brought to light in a new book, “Self-Destruction: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of U.S. Senator Daniel B. Brewster” (Apprentice House) by John W. Frece, former Baltimore Sun political reporter and Maryland State House bureau chief.
Frece spoke to a nice crowd the other night at The Ivy Bookshop on Falls Road. Brewster’s son Gerry was there, too. Their affection and regard for the late Brewster was obvious. But neither they, nor the book, pull any punches.
In the spring of 1964, in the awful aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson needed two things: re-election and the passage of civil rights legislation.
But the rising political star that spring was Wallace, who famously stood in the schoolhouse doorway at the University of Alabama in June of 1963 and declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
When Wallace decided to test the presidential waters in that year’s Maryland primary, Johnson wanted no part of him. He said he was “too busy running the country” to take on Wallace. He asked Brewster to run as his surrogate.
There came an evening in College Park that spring when both Brewster and Wallace showed up. Brewster spoke to a few hundred people in front of the McKeldin Library, and then Wallace spoke to a smaller but far more raucous crowd inside Cole Field House.
Brewster, slurring his words and stumbling through his speech, got tepid applause from a disappointed crowd that had come to cheer him. The drinking, which was there since the war, was now taking over his life.
Nobody talked about the war that still haunted him — the seven times he was wounded on Okinawa, the legions of men all around him whose lives were cut short. They began to talk, instead, about the increasingly visible alcoholism.
Brewster was an American hero who might have gone on to political greatness. His life makes a compelling story, written by Frece, who’s a pro’s pro.
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