Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

One morning last month in Burlington, Vermont, at the law office of John Franco, one of Bernie Sanders’ best friends since the 1970s, Franco talked to me at length about Sanders’ commitment and his consistency and his charisma. Even at the beginning of Sanders’ career, he said, four decades before he started packing arenas in college towns and liberal havens as a renegade 73-year-old, self-described socialist taking on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment, “People didn’t want him to stop talking.” He talked about how Sanders “completely changed the political culture” in Vermont. He talked about how Sanders’ surprising current surge in national polls is “validation.”

“I’m proud of Bernard,” he said.


All of that was interesting. But I wanted to know not just about what Sanders has done. I wanted to know more about who he has been. So I asked what I thought was an innocuous question about Sanders’ son. How did Sanders juggle aspirations as an eager political activist with his role as a divorced young father?

“That’s out of bounds,” Franco said.

Out of bounds?

“It’s none of your f—-ing business,” he said. He smiled, but he wasn’t joking.

It’s always been that way with Sanders. The issues. The issues. Stick to the issues. The rich are too rich. Those with power have too much. The middle class is withering. Inequality is a crisis, and the system is rigged. With Sanders, what you see is what you get, insist the people who know him best — and that’s almost all you get.

But if his positions are well known, the person, it turns out, is less known. Before Sanders was a U.S. senator, before he was a congressman, before he was mayor of Burlington — before he won one shocking election, then 13 more — he was a radical and an agitator in the ferment of 1960s and '70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion of laborers who didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old.

In his chosen home, a state that at the time was morphing from one of the country’s most resolutely conservative to one of its most reliably liberal, the New York City-raised Sanders found an environment that suited him: a tolerant, loosey-goosey era and place, but with an abiding Yankee sense of privacy. It allowed him to focus on what fueled him without being forced to discuss publicly significant details about his personal life — like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement, and the fact that the mother of his one biological child is not his ex-wife. That’s a surprise to some who have known him for decades. It’s also very much a product of an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters and local reporters who have steered clear rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.

That these kinds of basic biographical details could emerge now, almost 44 years after he first ran for office, is a point of sharp contrast with the woman he’s running against, and gaining on. Clinton just might be the most unceasingly scrutinized citizen of her generation — while, of all the 2016 presidential candidates, Sanders, public figure and private person, is a rarity on the national stage: the known unknown.

***

Sanders’ life in electoral politics started on Oct. 23, 1971, in Plainfield, Vermont, in the library of Goddard College, a campus that doubled as a lefty hot spot, when the nascent anti-war Liberty Union Party was looking for someone to run for U.S. Senate. Sanders was barely 30 years old. He had thick-rimmed glasses and dark, curly hair, and his toddler son, Levi (pronounced LEH-vee), was seated in his lap. Sanders raised his hand.

New Window OPTICS: Bernie Sanders, the Early Years | Photos from his college years to his time in Congress. (Click to view gallery.) | Sen. Sanders' office; Rob Swanson; Erik Borg/The Vermont Freeman

“We didn’t have a lot of choices, and he was willing to do it,” John Bloch, a party member who was at the meeting, told me on the phone.

“Liberty Union was running anybody and everybody they could find,” Martha Abbott, another party member who was there, said when we met in her office in Burlington.

“Sanders said, ‘You know what? I’ll try it. What do I have to do?’” Peter Diamondstone, one of the party’s founders, told me at his home in the woods in Dummerston, Vermont, near Brattleboro.

Early in his first campaign, Sanders would say later, he was so nervous during a radio interview the microphone picked up the sound of his knees knocking the table. “A strange thumping noise traversed the airwaves,” he would write in 1997 in Outsider in the House, the closest he has come to an autobiography. “And the few calls that came in expressed no doubt that this career was to be short-lived. ‘Who is this guy?’ one of the listeners asked.”

Sanders had grown up in Brooklyn, in Flatbush, in a three-and-a-half-room walkup. He was lower middle class, the son of a housewife and a Polish immigrant who sold paint. He was Jewish. He was, he once said, “very conscious as a kid that my father’s whole family was killed by Hitler.” He was cut from his high school basketball team, which wounded him, but he was good on the track team. He could run and run.

After he graduated from James Madison High School in 1959, he went to Brooklyn College for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he joined the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Peace Union and the Young People’s Socialist League. He read psychology, sociology and history. He read Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. He demonstrated against segregated housing owned by the college and against the city’s segregated schools – the latter getting him arrested and charged with resisting arrest for which he ended up paying a $25 fine. He met a woman who would become his wife. In 1964 he graduated with a degree in political science and got married in Baltimore.

That summer, not quite 23, he and his wife, Deborah Sanders, bought for $2,500 some property in Vermont, near Montpelier in the town of Middlesex off Shady Rill Road, according to property records. He wanted to live in the country, he has said, and had some inheritance money from his father, who had died in 1963. They spent parts of the next few summers on the property, living in what had been a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor. The marriage ended only two years after it began, in 1966.

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

By 1968, he was living in Vermont full time. On March 17, 1969, according to records, Sanders bought another property, in out-of-the-way Stannard, with a population of fewer than 200 people, in the rural area of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. Four days later, Levi Noah Sanders was born, at Brightlook Hospital in St. Johnsbury, Vermont; according to his birth certificate, his mother was a woman named Susan Campbell Mott.

Sanders had met Mott in New York and lived with her there. He lived with her in Stannard, too, but not for long before moving to Burlington, Vermont’s biggest city. Raised in New York, educated in Chicago, Sanders’ deep-woods idyll was over. Burlington, according to Liberty Union archives and campaign finance records, is where he lived when he started running for office.

Sanders was “not a politician,” he said at the start, but he nonetheless possessed characteristics that would make him a successful one. He could be prickly and yet captivating. He had a way of being somehow simultaneously doom-and-gloom and inspirational. Even though he considered his personal life off limits, he still relentlessly solicited attention, sending to newspapers and radio and TV stations onslaughts of typewritten press releases that could read like screeds. And even though he had little appetite for chit-chat, he still loved to campaign, and he did it tirelessly — traipsing around the state in his drab blue, Bondo-bound Volkswagen bug without working windshield wipers, showing up at newspaper offices and asking to be interviewed, visiting prisons and power plants, talking at schools and churches and inside people’s homes, and talking and talking and talking.

He ran on the Liberty Union ticket for Senate in a special election in early 1972, and for governor later in 1972, and for Senate again in 1974, and for governor again in 1976, never getting more than 6 percent of the vote.

Liberty Union was a ragtag new party — small, anti-war, left-wing — that existed only in Vermont. Some people called it a socialist party, but it had no official affiliation. Sanders and other members had generally egalitarian sensibilities, advocating for the young, the old, the poor and the rights of women and workers. Sanders was more Old Left than New Left, “a 1930s radical, not a 1960s radical,” as Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor, would later put it. He was not a hippie. He did not live in a commune. He considered himself a radical, a third-party independent, but he didn’t call himself a socialist. The Liberty Union, he thought, was “a reason to knock on doors,” “a good way to organize and educate people.”

He had, already, the consistency of a piston.

“In America today,” he told the Bennington Banner in late 1971, “if we wanted to, we could wipe out economic hardship almost overnight. We could have free medical care, excellent schools and decent housing for all. The problem is that the great wealth and potential of this country rests with a handful of people …”

“A handful of people own almost everything … and almost everybody owns nothing,” he wrote in the Liberty Union newsletter called Movement in 1972.

From a 1973 radio address by Sanders.

“There are two worlds in America,” he said on a radio show called Vermont Spectrum in 1973.

By 1974, around Vermont, from Rutland to Barre to White River Junction and all the way up to the Canadian border, Sanders was impossible to ignore. His worldview was clear. So was his M.O.

“He’s a unidirectional wind-up — I don’t want to use the word toy, because he’s nobody’s toy, but he’s a growler,” said Denny Morrisseau, an anti-war activist who was a Liberty Union member in the early ‘70s. “Straight ahead, growl. Straight ahead, growl.”

The radio shows. The newspaper quotes. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

“… the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the vast majority in the middle are having a harder and harder time …”

Records from Sanders' Early Years in Vermont The old sugar house in the land near Middlesex a quarter of a mile into the woods off Shady Rill Road. The primitive cabin, which had a dirt floor before Sanders installed wood, was the first place he lived in after he moved to Vermont. (Click to view the documents full size.)



Open In New Window The Middlesex property record from 1964. Open In New Window The Stannard property record from 1969. Open In New Window Bernie Sanders' son's birth certificate from 1969. Open In New Window The Middlesex property record from 1970. Open In New Window The property record from 1979. Top photo by Michael Kruse

“… and the situation is getting worse …”

“This,” he wrote in one of his releases in 1974,” is the burning and fundamental issue of this campaign.”

Of every campaign.

***

His message was clear and unwavering. His private life, meanwhile, was complicated and less settled.

He shared custody of his son in an informal arrangement with Mott, according to people who knew them. “She was around a lot,” Nancy Barnett, a friend who lived nearby, told me. Barnett called Mott “a pretty quiet, private person.” Sanders rented a small brick duplex at 295 1/2 Maple Street that was filled with not much furniture and not much food in the fridge but stacks of checked-out library books and scribbled-on legal pads. His son, who called his father “Bernard,” had an upstairs bedroom.

“Pretty sparse,” Gene Bergman, an old friend, said about the apartment.

“Stark and dark,” said Darcy Troville, a fellow Liberty Unionite who lived around the corner and shared with Sanders homemade jellies and jams.

“The electricity was turned off a lot,” Barnett said. “I remember him running an extension cord down to the basement. He couldn’t pay his bills.”

He worked some as a carpenter, although “he was a shitty carpenter,” Bloch told me. “His carpentry,” Morrisseau said, “was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

He worked as a freelance writer, putting intermittent pieces in the low-budget Vermont Freeman, a Burlington alternative weekly called the Vanguard Press and a glossy, state-supported magazine called Vermont Life.

The standards of the Freeman were not strict. “It was always fun to see what came through the mail,” said Jennifer Kochman, one of the editors when Sanders was a contributor. The recent uncovering of something he wrote in an issue from February 1972 created a burst of news coverage. It was a jumbled rant about gender roles that mentioned masturbation and rape, but even in Sanders’ commentary on the sexes he reverted to his central theme of injustice: “Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other.”

His writing wasn’t a living. The Vanguard paid as little as the rest. “It would’ve been not more than 50 bucks,” said Greg Guma, a former editor. Vermont Life? “Our rate was 10 cents a word,” said Brian Vachon, a former editor.

“He was always poor,” Sandy Baird, another old friend, told me in Burlington.

“Virtually unemployed,” said Nelson, the political science professor at the University of Vermont.

“Just one step above hand to mouth,” said Terry Bouricius, who was involved with Liberty Union, served at times as a de facto campaign manager for Sanders and at one point crashed for a couple months on his couch.

Liberty Union “people found it difficult to support themselves while engaging in full-time political work,” Michael Parenti, one of those people, wrote in the Massachusetts Review in the summer of 1975. “Some held jobs that allowed free time for campaign activities, while others lived off unemployment insurance.”

Sanders, according to an article in 1974 in the Bennington Banner, was one of them. He was on unemployment for a few months in 1971. In subsequent Liberty Union campaigns he advocated for “the doing away with all time limitations for unemployment benefits.”

“His work was to be a politician,” Guma said. “He put everything into what he was doing.”

“I don’t know what he did for money,” Troville said. “Everything was always campaigning. Everything was always organizing. Everything was always writing.”

“He was totally involved in his attempts at running for office,” Marvin Fishman, who knew him at the time, told me on the phone.

In 1977, though, weary of running and losing, his hair turning gray, he quit Liberty Union. The party had stalled, he believed, its members talking more to each other than to potential voters. He needed to try to make a better, more stable living, but didn’t want to give up a platform from which he could preach.

He started a business out of 295 1/2 Maple, making low-budget films about people, places and events in Vermont and New England history that he felt were getting short shrift in the region’s schools. American People’s Historical Society, he called it — “a newly formed nonprofit organization producing audio-visual from an alternative point of view,” he wrote in a pamphlet he distributed.

His biggest project was “a 30-minute color documentary videotape,” he wrote in a flier, about Eugene Debs, “the great American trade unionist, socialist and revolutionary” and frequent early 20th century Socialist Party presidential candidate — one of Sanders’ heroes. He priced it at $200 or offered it for rent for $35. He drove all over, like he had running for Liberty Union, inviting himself into schools, meeting people and trying to persuade them to listen.

“It wasn’t just a way to make money,” said Steve Goodkind, a longtime friend. “He made filmstrips about people he admired and believed in. He just thought kids should know the truth of how things really were.”

Sanders believed he was finished with electoral politics – until in late 1980, when his friend Richard Sugarman, a religion professor at the University of Vermont, showed him a breakdown of his Liberty Union vote tallies. As a whole, they were scant, but Sanders had done better in Burlington than anywhere else — and especially in the city’s poorest wards. Sanders decided to run for mayor — and then, by 10 votes, he won. It was March of 1981. It was a big story. The irritant activist was an elected official, now making $33,800 a year, more than he ever had. Reporters started showing up in Vermont.

Clippings from news coverage of Sanders in the 1970s.

On a resume Sanders distributed, he wrote: “Divorced, One Son.”

***

Sanders was interviewed by Phil Donahue on NBC. He was on Canadian TV. He was on British TV. He was featured in Garry Trudeau’s nationally syndicated Doonesbury comic strip. He was in the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times and Newsweek and the Irish Evening Post, and what he was, in all of the coverage of his improbable win, was cinched into one grabby word.

Socialist.

He was the socialist mayor who somehow had gotten elected in the immediate wake of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. He was, as Rolling Stone declared, the “red mayor in the Green Mountains.”

Sanders, who long had fashioned himself as something of a media critic, poked fun at the facile storyline.

“Yeah, OK, I’m a socialist,” he told the Globe. “We’ll charge $10 a head to come see the freak mayor of Burlington.” He said he was being “bombarded” by questions from reporters. “There are a lot of people looking at us.”

That more people knew his name, though, didn’t mean people knew everything about him.

As a reporter named Louis Berney wrote in the Vanguard after Sanders’ win, “his rumpled appearance and harried style, his charismatic oratory and fiery invectives against corporate America … are familiar to the Vermont electorate and have become woven into the state’s political folklore. Yet as Sanders prepares to take over the helm of Vermont’s largest city, little is known about the man.”

Berney’s article in the Vanguard, headlined Sanders on Sanders: Meet the Mayor, included a mention of Sanders’ normally off-limits private life — but what Berney wrote was incorrect:

Sanders in 1981 after a thin victory in the Burlington mayoral race. | Rob Swanson

He and his wife had a son, Levi.

In an email this week from China, where he teaches journalism, Berney wrote: “I can’t remember the particulars of the interview. And I couldn’t swear that he actually said, ‘My wife and I had a son.’ It’s possible that he said it in a way that is similar to what you quote from his resume. I might have erred in putting one and one together and coming up with two and a half. I do know that neither Bernie nor anyone else attempted to correct the error.”

“He was very, very guarded about that,” Alan Abbey, who covered Sanders and City Hall at the time for the Burlington Free Press, told me in a Skype conversation from Israel, where he now lives. “I know we didn’t probe that, for sure. I would say I didn’t push enough, and I certainly wasn’t pushed by my newspaper. We knew he was divorced. We knew he had a kid. I think we may have left it at that.”

Sanders’ biggest obstacle in his initial term as mayor was an obdurate City Council, suspicious of the socialist Sanders’ aims, not a prying press corps. As mayor, though, Sanders got more and more people to vote — he later called that increased political engagement his “proudest accomplishment” — and he got more and more people to vote for him. In ’81, he got barely more than 50 percent; by ’87, it was 56. U.S. News & World Report called him one of the nation’s best 20 mayors.

He decided to leave office in ’89. The next year, he was elected to Congress, and he was reelected in ’92, and again in ’94. In '96, he faced a Republican named Susan Sweetser. And she paid an investigator to look into his background.

Cathy Riggs called his ex-wife.

Sanders called a news conference.

“This is the kind of activity which makes politics so distasteful to people in the country and I think encourages people not to participate in the political process, not to vote, and certainly not to run for public office,” Sanders said.

His second wife, Jane Sanders, whom he married in 1988 – and to whom he is still married – also talked. “We are who we say we are,” she said.

Riggs said she was just doing her job and that she had done nothing illegal.

Sanders in his Outsider book devoted nearly three pages to the episode.

“She contacted my ex-wife, Deborah Messing, from whom I’ve been divorced for over 25 years,” he wrote. “Deborah contacted her friend and neighbor, Anthony Pollina, who used to work with me, and Anthony contacted me. Deborah and I then talked.

“Clearly, Riggs was hoping to find a disgruntled ex-wife who would spill the beans on her former husband. But that was not going to happen with Deborah, who has been remarried for over 20 years. While we don’t see each other very often, we remain good friends, so Deborah told Riggs where to get off. Her sentiments were reflected all over Vermont.”

Sanders cited a chunk of an article from the Associated Press written by Christopher Graff, who at the time was the AP’s longtime Montpelier bureau chief (and whose son, Garrett Graff, is the editor of Politico Magazine).

“What may be considered fair and proper in other states leaves Vermonters apoplectic,” Graff had written. “It is against this background that Vermonters viewed Susan Sweetser’s hiring of a private eye to probe Sanders’ background. Such a hiring would not even gain a passing mention in most states these days. It is accepted practice.”

Sweetser, seeing that this attempt at a thorough vetting of Sanders had backfired, denounced the woman her campaign had hired. “I want to make it clear to the people of Vermont that Cathy Riggs went too far,” she said. Too late. Sanders trounced Sweetser, winning the election by more than 20 percentage points.

Sanders went on to win another election in 1998, and another in 2000, and another in 2002, and another in 2004, and was elected to the Senate in 2006. In 2012, 40 years after he got 2.2 percent of the vote in his first bid for the Senate, he was reelected to that seat with 71 percent. “He’s very trustworthy,” said Donna Kaplan, who gave him $20 when he was running for governor in 1976. “What Bernie is saying is the truth,” said Bob McKee, who gave him $100 during that campaign. “And he’s never wavered,” said Betty Clark, a friend from his time with Liberty Union.

Over the last three and a half decades, occasional personality profiles have appeared; invariably, they have focused on his socialism and his looks — his unfussy clothes, his uncombed hair.

“I do not like personality profiles,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2007.

This past May, in Burlington, he announced he was running for president on a blue-sky day on the bank of Lake Champlain. Some 5,000 people came to see him do it. “This campaign is not about Bernie Sanders,” he said in his speech. In speeches in Denver, in Wisconsin, in Iowa and in Maine, he has said the same thing over and over. “Not about me.”

CNN issued its “Bernie Sanders Fast Facts,” listing his children, his three stepchildren as well as Levi. “With first wife,” it said.

***

“I knew this was going to happen sooner or later,” Deborah Messing, Sanders’ first wife, said last month when she answered the phone at her home in Montpelier and I introduced myself.

She then asked if she could think about whether she wanted to talk about her ex-husband. I said sure. She called back not even half an hour later.

“I don’t feel comfortable giving an interview,” she said.

Susan Campbell Mott is now Susan Mott Glaeser. She lives in Burlington. I reached her on her cell phone earlier this month. She didn’t even let me ask a question.

“I’m really busy, and I don’t have time to do this sort of thing,” she said.

Bernie Sanders holds a rally to kick off his run for U.S. Congress in Burlington, Vermont, in this Sept. 16, 1988, photo. | AP Photo

Levi Sanders, who lives in Claremont, New Hampshire, not far from the Vermont border, didn’t return messages left over the past couple weeks, at his home and at his office in Boston, where he works as a social security and social security disability insurance senior analyst for Greater Boston Legal Services.

On Wednesday, I sent Michael Briggs, Sanders’ spokesman, an email with a list of questions, including personal questions about the parts of his past that to this point have gone largely unknown or unchecked. Knowing his opinions about the media and recalling the Sweetser incident, I expected at least a lecture.

Sanders has criticized the press his entire political career.

“The question of who decides what’s important and what’s not important is really the most important issue,” he said at a forum on the media in Burlington in 1988, “and the media does not have a habit of focusing on what’s important.”

Something like that.

Briggs called me a little more than an hour after I sent my questions. He said he had talked with Sanders and had answers. He ticked them off one by one.

He told me where Sanders met and married his first wife and how the marriage ended. “She got a Mexican divorce, is what I was told,” Briggs said. He explained the origin of the money Sanders used to buy the Middlesex land and the carpentry he did on the sugar shack. He said Sanders received unemployment, “for a few months,” in 1971, though Sanders can’t remember what the job was that qualified him for the benefits. He told me where Sanders had met Mott and where they lived together. He confirmed she was the mother of Sanders’ son, despite previous news accounts. “Whatever has been reported,” he said, “what you have is accurate.”

The last question I had sent him was whether there was anything else he thought I should know.

“Yes,” Briggs said.

“The middle class is collapsing. Income and wealth inequality is greater now than it has been at any point since before the Great Depression. The American people are working longer hours for lower wages, and they’re angry. Those kinds of things, you should know.”

