While Weiss was licking stamps, Harold Willens was completing his role as chairman of the successful bilateral nuclear freeze initiative, which called on the United States and the Soviet Union to agree to an immediate and verifiable halt on the testing, production, and deployment of all nuclear weapons, missiles, and delivery systems. For Willens, it was an important milestone in a resume of personal political activism that had already spanned 20 years.
Willens is a campaign unto himself. He has a store of personal experience and business accomplishments that, in many ways, make him the ideal protagonist in the unfolding drama of a new national movement. He was born in Russia in 1914, during the tumult of the Russian Revolution, in the village of Chernigov. In his earliest memories, he is hiding under a bed as marauding soldiers burst into his parents' house demanding food and valuables at swordpoint. Fleeing Russia, his family emigrated to the United States, settling first in a mixed ethnic ghetto in the Bronx. Their life there, he recalls, was one of unrelenting poverty and fear: Willens, who is short and slender, got "beat up every day."
When he was 13, Willens's family moved to another ethnic ghetto, Boyle Heights in east Los Angeles. Life was still tough, but gradually Willens began to accumulate some pleasant memories. Three years after he graduated from high school, he bought a small retail route for $250, which consisted of a truck and a list of customers to whom he sold mayonnaise, pickles, tamales, and a variety of specialty foods. He was a good salesman, and soon bought larger trucks and larger routes. He got married, bought a small house, and started a family. He even went back to school, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1939.
During World War II, Willens served as a Japanese-language specialist in the U.S. Marine Corps. Part of the early American occupation force in both Nagasaki and Hiroshima, he sifted through his fingers the fine dust that had once been buildings and people. He wrote his impressions in long letters to his wife. But as the war came to an end and he began his life again, even the memory of the only use of nuclear weapons against other human beings faded.
Willens had sold his house and business before he went off to war, using the money to buy two neighborhood grocery stores. If he was killed, he reasoned, his family could still live comfortably on the rent money from the two stores. The stores were located on a relatively quiet section of Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. After the war, the boiling commercial activity spilling out of Los Angeles engulfed the property, and Willens was able to parlay his small patch of real estate into a kingdom that now includes, among other holdings, entire blocks of Wilshire Boulevard and several shopping centers. Only 10 years out of the service, he found himself a multimillionaire. "As the saying goes:" he writes, "Now that I had done well, I wanted to do good."
Like Niles, Willens found his attention drawn to the escalating war in Vietnam. Not only did it represent his first major engagement as a political activist, it also introduced him to the same special constituency that Weiss found: businesspeople. As Willens remembers it, he first became aware that business had a particularly important role to play through a suggestion from Marriner S. Eccles, who had been the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, serving from 1936 until 1948. Willens had called on Eccles to ask for a donation to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a Santa Barbara think tank with which he was associated. During the course of their conversation, he told Eccles what he had learned about the war in Vietnam. Eccles thought the information should be distributed more broadly, and suggested that Willens could be particularly effective in reaching other business leaders.
The notion made sense. "If you come up before a business audience sounding like some kind of hippie," Willens says, "they'll write you off. But you see, I look like them, I'm a multimillionaire, I went from poverty to affluence, and they respect that." After his meeting with Eccles, Willens met Henry Niles, and together they created Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace, an association that for Willens combined the right issue with the right audience. He became chairman and ranged the country giving speeches and raising money.
When the war in Vietnam ended, Willens kept active: He involved himself in Presidential campaigns; founded or helped to found such organizations as the Businessman's Educational Fund, the Center for Defense Information, and the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race; served as a delegate to the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in 1978; and, of course, served as chairman of the bilateral nuclear freeze initiative in California. While working on the initiative, he read the results of a survey commissioned by The Wall Street Journal and published in September 1982. The survey asked executives: "Do you favor a unilateral freeze by the United States on the production and deplyment of nuclear weapons?" The survey still irks Willens, who thinks the newspaper was engaging in some kind of "dirty pool" meant to discredit the California initiative: The issue of the moment was a bilateral, not a unilateral, nuclear freeze, and an immediate unilateral nuclear freeze was not then, and is not now, part of mainstream thinking. Nevertheless, although an overwhelming number of the respondents opposed such a freeze, Willens was astonished to find that 36% of the executives in the smaller companies surveyed favored it, as did 27% of the mediumsize-company executives and 14% of those from larger companies. Given that much support for such a radical approach, Willens reasoned, a more realistic and moderate program could probably convince a telling majority of the business community.
