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.”

Sanders acknowledged that some residents might wonder why their mayor was spending a week with Central American revolutionaries when he could be fixing potholes. But he argued that America was headed for “a Vietnam-type war in Central America” that had to be stopped. “It’s going to be a never ending war, and the war will spread… and we’re going to be at war with a whole continent,” Sanders told Burlington’s CCTV.

Sanders’s passion — even anger — on the subject is evident in a video of the mayor, tieless and in shirtsleeves, addressing an audience in Puerto Cabezas about American policy in Central America. The microphone distorts as Sanders’s voice rises and he summarizes Reagan’s attitude: “We’re strong, you’re weak — and you’re going to do it our way, or we’re going to kill you! A very profound, civilized remark.” The crowd burst into applause.

To be sure, Sanders’s opposition to Reagan’s Latin America policies, including in Guatemala and El Salvador, also flowed from his socialist, anti-corporate worldview. “We are going to be the enemy of the struggles of poor people,” Sanders warned Burlington’s CCTV. “Time and time again these interventions in Latin and Central America have been for the benefit of large corporations… And you say, ‘Gee, whiz —s hould foreign policy be made for the benefit of large corporations that want to exploit the people of Latin and Central America?”

For a politician born of the counterculture, the Sandinistas also had a stylistic appeal. Sanders seemed particularly taken by Nicaragua’s grey-bearded cultural minister, Ernesto Cardenal. “He really does remind you of a hippie,” Sanders told CCTV. “He is very strongly into poetry. He is very proud of the fact that they are now teaching poetry not only to peasants and to workers but in the military, in the police department — a very impressive guy.”

Sanders’s visit to Nicaragua wasn’t exactly subversive. Some members of Congress traveled to the country in the mid-1980s, including a freshman senator named John Kerry. The Reagan State Department did not oppose the visits.

But Sanders was unusually well traveled in the communist world. He also found his way to Cuba, where he sought a meeting with Fidel Castro, settling instead for the mayor of Havana. And then there was his honeymoon.

Burlington had several sister cities, including Nagasaki, Japan, a vessel for its anti-nuclear activism. (Burlington rejected a federal request to prepare an evacuation plan in the event of a nuclear war, on the grounds that to prepare for war made it more imaginable.)

Another one was the Soviet city of Yaroslavl, about 170 miles northeast of Moscow. Sanders departed for the city the day after he married his wife, Jane, in a public park in Burlington. Though his memoir describes the 1987 trip as “strange,” Sanders does not elaborate. Bouricius, who joined the delegation along with several other city residents, describes an enjoyable tour that featured vodka toasts with the mayor of Yaroslavl and stops in St. Petersburg and Lenin’s tomb in Moscow.

AP Photo.

And while Soviet Russia might strike many people as a curious honeymoon destination, Bouricius says those people don’t know Bernie Sanders. “Bernie is a very political person, and Jane is very political. It’s not like they were the kind of couple that would have gone to Hawaii.”

Even as he took criticism from his right for spending too much time on global issues, Sanders was occasionally the target of leftists who felt he didn’t go far enough. That was the case in the summer of 1983, when protesters targeted Burlington’s General Electric plant, which produced Gatling machine guns supplied by the U.S. to its proxies in Central America.

Sanders resisted their calls to shut down the plant, arguing that it was unfair to punish workers for corporate policies influenced by Washington.

“I’m not going to throw 3,000 people out of their jobs at union wages and create a depression,” he said in an interview at the time.” In another interview he argued that “you cannot spilt the movement and push workers to one side and have peace activists on the other side.”

Bouricius said that critics always overstated how much time Sanders dedicated to issues beyond Vermont’s borders. He noted that Sanders traveled abroad at his own expense. But he also added that Sanders always had his sights on horizons far beyond the Burlington’s bohemian-progressive borders.

Sanders “has a national and global view about politics,” Bouricius said. “He did not become mayor because he really wanted to get into better insurance programs for the city, the municipal stuff. There was ‘sewer socialism’ where you administer very efficiently, and we did that well.

“But to administer the city well was not why Bernie ran for mayor,” he added. “It was always assumed this was a stepping stone.”

Indeed it was. In the summer of 1986, Sanders attended a board of aldermen debate entitled, “Should Burlington Have a Foreign Policy?” One argument against the proposition, according to Conroy, came from the city’s Republican Party chairman, who argued that city official who couldn’t resist getting involved with foreign policy should move on to bigger things.

A person like that should run for Senate, the chairman said. Or even for president.