That is, except to Wisconsinites, who rewarded his earnestness by electing him to four terms from 1989 to 2013. He was, according to his famous campaign slogan, nobody’s senator but theirs.

Former colleagues of Kohl, fellow Democrats and rival Republicans alike, invariably describe him as gracious and honest, quiet but effective, and above all, dedicated to Wisconsin.

A decade after he left office, with Washington consumed by partisanship and gridlock, Kohl’s soft touch in the Senate seems almost archaic. But always an optimist, he continues to work behind the scenes to promote practical solutions to society’s problems. In 2019, he donated a record $10 million to the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. The gift has already proved transformative for the school, boosting its efforts to train future leaders and advance the public good.

“I think we are seeing all of our greatest fears right now. The chaos, the disregard for truth and facts, the unwillingness to listen and talk to each other,” Kohl says. “But my greatest hope is in the fact that we are still a democracy in the greatest country in the world. I think we can look to appeal to our better angels and come together if we make the effort.”

Kohl, 87, believes he still has a debt to pay off, despite decades of public service and hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropic gifts. It’s the debt he feels from having had such good fortune in his life. In his first stump speech in 1988, he noted that wealthy people have a “special responsibility to those who are not as comfortably well off” — those like his parents, European Jewish immigrants who came to America with nothing and built a business empire that set the stage for one of Wisconsin’s most beloved public servants.

The American Dream

The Kohl family’s American dream began 100 years ago. Kohl’s father, Max, emigrated from Poland, and his mother, Mary, from Russia. They left behind many family members in Europe who later lost their lives to the Holocaust.

Struggling to find their way in Milwaukee, the couple decided to open a corner food market beneath their southside apartment in 1927. Their English was so poor that customers had to point at the items they wanted to purchase.

Max and Mary Kohl often discussed social justice at the dinner table with their kids.

“They always looked forward to the future with optimism and determination,” Kohl says. “And they showed us that your life would be measured far more by what you contribute than by what you have.”

In 1946, at age 11, Kohl cut the ribbon at his family’s first supermarket, which would soon expand to multiple locations. In 1962, the family opened the first Kohl’s department store. It’s now the largest such chain in the United States with more than 1,000 stores. Kohl grew up with his sister and two brothers on 51st Boulevard in the Sherman Park neighborhood. A few hundred feet away on 52nd Street lived Bud Selig ’56, the future commissioner of Major League Baseball. They met in early grade school and have remained best friends for more than eight decades. They still meet for lunch almost every week, calling each other only by their last names.

“We have a lot of great memories, fun and funny stories, and maybe even a bit of a shtick,” Kohl says.

They bonded over sports from an early age, and Kohl delights in sharing the story of how the two faced each other as captains of their respective baseball teams in the sixth grade. In Kohl’s telling, Selig recruited a towering 6-foot-something stranger to pitch in the championship game. Kohl’s team struck out at every at-bat and lost 9–0.

“He has a wonderful imagination,” Selig says, laughing.

The two friends found their way to the UW for what Kohl calls the best four years of his life. Both he and Selig studied history and political science, roomed together, and joined the Jewish fraternity Pi Lambda Phi.

Kohl (right) with best friend Bud Selig in the 1955 Badger yearbook. He calls his UW experience the best four years of his life. UW Digitized Collections

At the UW, Selig became close friends with Charlie Thomas ’57, a Black football player, and encouraged him to join the otherwise all-white fraternity. It was a radical notion in the 1950s, but Kohl immediately offered his support.

Thomas’s pledging was controversial both inside and outside of the fraternity house. But on the night of the vote, which lasted until 2 a.m., Selig and Kohl deployed the persuasive skills that would later define their careers. They convinced their peers to integrate the fraternity. Thomas went on to a successful career as superintendent of North Chicago schools.

Kohl still holds dear the values his immigrant parents instilled in him: integrity, humility, determination, kindness, hard work, resilience. They’re the same ones that made him one of Wisconsin’s most respected employers and policymakers.

“He’s Unique”

After he graduated from the UW, Kohl earned an MBA from Harvard, joined the Army Reserve, and became president of the Kohl’s Corporation, which had expanded to 50 supermarkets and several department stores.

Taking after his father, Kohl continued to run the rapidly growing chain as if it were still a small mom-and-pop shop. He conducted many job interviews himself, believing that employees would be more loyal if they were hired by a Kohl family member. He made the rounds to every store, inspecting the tidiness of food displays and even bagging groceries for customers during busy times.

“With any store we walked into, he knew every employee by their first name, and he knew all their families,” Selig says. “You could tell his whole heart and soul was into it.”

Employees stayed for years, if not their entire careers. They had their own credit union and health insurance. They had five weeks of paid vacation. They received employee discounts and grocery coupons to buy Christmas dinner for their families.

“Our employees were extensions of our family,” Kohl says.

The family sold the business in 1979. Almost a decade later, when Kohl first ran for office, many former employees championed their former boss. Mary Carini, who worked for Kohl’s food stores for 10 years, was a registered Republican but volunteered for Kohl’s 1988 Democratic campaign, still touched by how he checked in on her during her divorce.

“He’s unique,” she told the Capital Times. “I never knew a businessman of his caliber of intelligence and drive, yet so compassionate toward people.” It didn’t hurt Kohl’s political prospects that he was the savior of the state’s professional basketball team. Milwaukee Bucks owner Jim Fitzgerald announced in 1985 that he was selling the franchise, lamenting that its arena had the lowest seating capacity in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Kohl feared a sale to out-of-town bidders.

“I knew I needed to step up and do what I could to keep the Bucks here,” says Kohl, who bought the team for nearly $20 million.

Kohl preserved the Bucks yet again in 2014. He sold the franchise with the contingency that the new owners make a long-term commitment to Milwaukee. He also donated $100 million to the construction of a new arena to help make that a reality.

And Kohl arguably deserves as much credit as anyone for the team’s 2021 NBA championship. It was under his ownership that the Bucks drafted league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and traded for all-star Khris Middleton. Before the championship parade, a TV reporter told Kohl that he made the moment possible by saving the team. Kohl, looking as always like he wanted to be anywhere but in the spotlight, responded simply: “Well, that’s nice to hear. I was one of many.”

Such implausible humility is familiar to anyone who knew him as a senator.

A Nonpolitical Aura

It’s one of the most effective and imitated slogans in recent political history: “Nobody’s senator but yours.”

“Voices of special interests were drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens,” Kohl says of his first Senate run in 1988. “And I made the pledge not to accept contributions from political action committees or other special interests.”

As he stated at his campaign kickoff event: “The important thing is that when the campaign is over, I will owe nothing to anybody but the people of Wisconsin.”

Crucially, Kohl’s everyman personality made it believable that he couldn’t be bought. He often wears the same navy-blue blazer with a faded Bucks cap. Even when he owned an NBA team, he sat with the crowd rather than at courtside. He’s lived in the same Milwaukee condo for 50 years. He prefers to dine at casual “paper napkin” restaurants like George Webb and Ma Fischer’s.

“I think in a lot of ways he was always seen as a guy with Wisconsin at the forefront and as a businessman at heart,” says Scott Klug MBA’90, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin who served with Kohl for eight years. “That gave him sort of a nonpolitical aura.”

Kohl was late to enter the crowded Democratic primary in 1988. At 53, he was a political outsider. He staked liberal-to-moderate positions on issues, overcame a few gaffes, and sailed through the primary, despite criticism about his heavy campaign spending. Kohl won the seat and held onto it with steadily increasing support. In his last Senate race, he carried all 72 Wisconsin counties. He did it by treating public office a lot like his business. But now, five million Wisconsin citizens were his customers.

A Workhorse Senator

He welcomed them all. The office hosted Wednesday morning breakfast for any Wisconsinites who happened to be visiting Washington, DC. The senator would stop by, take photos, and hand out Bucks pens. His aides were on hand to respond to the visitors’ policy concerns or assist them with their travel plans.

“It was mandatory,” says Ben Miller, who served as a legislative aide in Kohl’s office in the early 2000s and now oversees government affairs for UW–Madison. “Every week, we all had to be there with doughnuts and coffee.”

Kohl’s office earned the reputation as one of the best customer service operations in the Senate. If a constituent called about a missing Social Security check, his staff would promptly track it down. Every phone call was returned, and every letter answered.

Behind the scenes, Kohl was one of the Senate’s biggest (if quietest) players, sponsoring or cosponsoring more than 3,000 pieces of legislation over his career. With gun violence on the rise in the ’90s, he negotiated a series of bipartisan gun-control measures. He authored a bill banning guns in school zones. When the Supreme Court overturned it on a technicality, he rewrote the legislation to address the loophole and prohibit guns within 1,000 feet of schools. He also cosponsored the Brady Bill, which required an instant background check and a five-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns.

Such bipartisan compromises on a hot-button issue were anything but inevitable. In July 1998, Kohl wrote legislation mandating that manufacturers include child-safety locks with the sale of handguns. He allowed California senator Barbara Boxer to serve as the lead sponsor of the amendment, which the Senate rejected on a 39–61 vote. Less than a year later, Kohl introduced a nearly identical proposal. It passed 78–20.

“We used to call it the ‘Herb Kohl Vote Count’ in our office. There would always be more support than projected when Senator Kohl held a floor vote because his colleagues on both sides of the aisle trusted him,” says Jon Leibowitz ’80, a former chief counsel for Kohl who later became chair of the Federal Trade Commission. “Everyone knew he was doing it for the right reasons, and they would want to vote with him.”

With a soft voice, shy demeanor, and short stature, Kohl rarely commanded the room. But when he did talk, his colleagues knew to listen.

Republican senator Chuck Grassley told Milwaukee Magazine in 2010: “I’ll bet he never has done anything to harm or hurt anybody behind their back.” He added that he probably talked to Kohl less than to any other senator, and yet accomplished more with him than anyone else.

“Since I came from the world of running a business, politics to me has always been based on working hard, finding common ground, and getting things done,” Kohl says. “It often means being willing to meet in the middle.”

Over 24 years, he cast his fair share of controversial votes. He voted to prohibit same-sex marriage in 1996 but against a constitutional ban in 2006. In 2002, he supported the resolution to authorize the use of military force in Iraq.

“I had misgivings at the time but ended up voting in favor,” he says. “I was wrong.”

After his fourth term, Kohl retired from the Senate in 2013. His colleagues lined up to recognize his legislative achievements around public education, health care, child and senior care, consumer rights, and Wisconsin’s dairy industry. One called him “a classic workhorse senator, as opposed to a show horse senator.”

“He saw it as his job to give a voice to people who need to be heard in Washington — children, working families, and farmers,” says Tammy Baldwin JD’89, who won Kohl’s Senate seat after he retired. “I think when you ask people what they want public service to be, Herb’s legacy is a shining example of what it can and should be.”

Leading by Example

Kohl’s father once told him the old adage “Money is like manure; it’s not good unless you spread it around.” Kohl has made a habit of it.

In 1990, he started the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation, which has provided more than $30 million in grants and scholarships to Wisconsin students, teachers, and schools. His main charitable entity, Herb Kohl Philanthropies, has awarded thousands of grants to nonprofits that support educational and economic opportunity.

“My parents taught me the immeasurable value of a good education,” Kohl says. “Education is an investment with the greatest return. It is also the great equalizer.”

After the UW struggled for years to fund a new sports facility to augment the aging Field House, Kohl stepped forward with a $25 million lead gift in 1995 for the basketball and hockey center that still bears his name.

And now he has turned his attention back to policymaking. In 2016, he gave a $1.5 million gift to the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs to establish the Herb Kohl Public Service Research Competition, which supports evidence-based policy and governance research by faculty members and students. Topics have ranged from childhood poverty and solar energy to water quality and opioid prescriptions.

Encouraged by its success, Kohl donated $10 million in 2019 to boost the school’s outreach, teaching, and research efforts.

“Our democracy is being threatened by bitter partisanship, and the La Follette School is poised to lead by example — fostering cooperation, respectful discourse, and service to others,” Kohl said at the time.

The school now hosts the annual La Follette Forum, convening hundreds of lawmakers and leaders to discuss timely policy topics and bridge partisan divides. It’s launched a poll to capture Wisconsin residents’ thoughts on policy issues. And it’s holding several community events across the state this fall to share policy research and enhance public discourse.

“At UW–Madison, we’re not just convening conversations,” says Professor Susan Webb Yackee, director of the La Follette School. “We’re creating the research that identifies major problems and connects them to solutions. We’re educating future leaders whose public policy skills will translate to government action.”

With Kohl’s support, the UW is becoming an incubator for practical solutions and a setting for common ground. To say he’s fighting an uphill battle may be the understatement of this political decade. Congress — and much of the country — has doubled down on partisanship and division.

Is it too late?

“I have to believe that there’s still room in today’s political environment for people like Senator Kohl,” says Miller, his former legislative aide. “Otherwise, I’m not sure how I would get through the day. I don’t want to lose hope. And part of that optimism is because of what he’s instilled in me.” •

Schweber: “I don’t know a moment that parallels this one for the extremity of the changes in such a short time.”

Over the course of a week last June, the United States Supreme Court made headline-grabbing rulings on abortion, gun rights, climate change, immigration, school prayer, and separation of church and state. The conservative majority flexed its muscle with decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. According to constitutional scholar Howard Schweber, a UW political science professor, that seven-day period was unprecedented in Supreme Court history. “I don’t know a moment that parallels this one,” Schweber says, “for the extremity of the changes in such a short time.”

What’s the historical significance of the Supreme Court’s June decisions?

For a century or more, there was an understanding that the Constitution is an instrument to protect rights that became recognized over history. An enormous range of the rights fall into that category: the idea that the Constitution protects parents’ rights to have a say in how their children are educated; the idea that people have a right to dictate health care decisions for their children. And if this court were to be consistent with Dobbs and its other decisions, a huge range of rights that we’ve taken for granted for generations would be stripped down. I think people have barely begun to realize just how revolutionary the implications of these rulings are.

How do the justices in the current majority differ from their predecessors?

In the past, even justices who had strong ideological convictions would usually back off and say, “Well, we’re not going to do something too upsetting or too radical.” With very few exceptions, justices have tended to be cautious. The current majority is not cautious at all.

Is it conceivable that the Supreme Court would see fundamental changes?

The number of justices — nine — is not magical. There have been as few as six and as many as 10. There’s also nothing in the Constitution that would prohibit [Congress from setting] term limits.

How do you think the court’s recent decisions will affect public trust?

The number of people expressing a great deal of trust in the Supreme Court is down to 25 percent — wildly lower than any court since polling began. And the reason is that, love it or hate it, there was always a sense in the past that the justices were grownups doing something sane and defensible, even if you didn’t like it. If the current court acts in a way that continues to drive their poll numbers down, at a certain point there will be bipartisan distrust. And then the political conditions would be in place for some kind of serious change.

Herrera: “For decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged.”

Yoshiko Herrera was earning her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union faced dissolution. After a study-abroad visit to Eastern Europe in 1990 and a peek behind the crumbling Iron Curtain, Herrera switched academic tracks to study the “different world” she saw and the ethnic, national, and social groups within it. Now she’s an expert in Russian politics and a professor of political science at the UW, and the war in Ukraine has given her yet another post-Soviet conflict to study. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Herrera has done countless interviews for local and national news outlets to explain Russian president Vladimir Putin’s destructive actions and why she believes Ukrainians’ resolve for statehood will eventually prevail.

At the start of the invasion of Ukraine, you called Putin’s actions an “incredible miscalculation.” What did Putin miscalculate?

It’s a miscalculation based on a profound misunderstanding of Ukraine and a significant underestimation of the international reaction in terms of sanctions and military support for Ukraine. The lack of respect for sovereignty and nationhood in Ukraine led Putin and his military advisers to not seriously examine the situation, including assessing Ukraine’s likely resolve, military capabilities, and lack of support for a Russian occupation. Because the 2014 Crimea invasion was such a shock for Ukraine, Ukrainians realized the danger to their state and nation, and they largely got over some of their historic differences and built a more inclusive sense of Ukrainian national identity that’s not just based on ethnic or linguistic traits.

What are the consequences that Putin, and Russia more broadly, have faced?

Even if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO per se, it is going to remain strongly anti-Russian, which is the opposite of what Putin wanted. Plus, Finland and Sweden are now on track to join NATO. And every other country in Europe has been put on alert that Russia is a dangerous country, and they need to treat it as such. In many ways the results for Russia have been disastrous. Regardless of the outcome of the war, for decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged. Ironically, a military defeat of Russia and Putin may be the best hope that Russia has to improve its prospects. But I want to emphasize the war has been a terrible, unprovoked, humanitarian and economic catastrophe for Ukraine.

How do you see this war ending? Do you expect to see peace anytime soon?

Right now, nobody really knows how long this can last. Unfortunately, I think both sides are very committed to fighting, so I don’t really see the prospect of a ceasefire or any negotiated settlement anytime soon. Ukrainians will not give up their state. The only question is to what extent they will be able to beat back Russian forces. On the Russian side, we see that there is no limit to Putin’s cruelty.

What do you believe is the United States’ role in this conflict?

Number one is in the coordination of international economic sanctions, especially with Europe, against Russia. There is more to be done on energy sanctions, and the U.S. should keep pressing on further secondary sanctions. Even though sanctions are not going to have an immediate effect on the war, they are going to weaken Russian state capacity and capabilities over the next few months or year.

Second is military support and weapons supply, and the U.S. is doing a lot, but Ukraine needs more help on this, and the U.S. should lead the way. There are a lot of reasons why Western governments might not be advertising everything they’re doing — I tend to be of the view that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we are not aware of — but the military support from the West is absolutely critical to helping Ukraine win.

Humanitarian support for people in Ukraine, as well as displaced people, is important. There is also a major role for Europe and the U.S. in terms of supporting the rebuilding process in Ukraine. The world needs to hold Russia to account in terms of war crimes.

How should the United States navigate future relations with Russia?

As long as Putin is in power, we have to deal with a threatening, malevolent, untrustworthy government. There is no building trust with an untrustworthy regime, and hence the U.S. and Europe will have to act accordingly. One thing that is likely to change is that there has to be a long-term reconsideration of energy policy generally to [take] into account both the environment and these national security issues. Given the Russian threat, it is more important than ever that the U.S. have a coordinated national security policy with a reliable executive in the Oval Office.

Salas’s precarious life as a migrant worker led him to value labor rights. Wisconsin Historical Society

As a labor organizer, as a student, and as an educator, Jesús Salas MA’85 follows one principle, which he learned from Cesar Chavez: “When you start something, you stay for the duration,” Salas says. “It doesn’t matter how long the duration is.”

Throughout his career, from teenage migrant worker to UW System regent, Salas pursued goals requiring long-term effort. In the 1960s, he helped create the labor union Obreros Unidos, and after earning his master’s, he helped establish UW–Madison’s Chican@ and Latin@ Studies program. Persistence saw him through.

Salas was born in Crystal City, Texas, in a community of Chicano migrant workers. They followed an annual circuit, traveling north as the frost receded and south as it advanced again.

Throughout the 1950s, Salas went to school in the communities where his family worked, until his parents bought a café in Wautoma, Wisconsin.

The precarious life of a migrant worker led Salas to value labor rights. In the 1960s, he began to organize fellow laborers. His initial efforts were frustrating: owners fired those who joined unions, and county officials harassed organizers.

But Salas took inspiration from Chavez, who was then organizing migrant workers in California. He chose to persist.

Eventually, Salas connected with a UW–Madison professor, Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush MA’24, PhD’28, an economist with the Institute for Research on Poverty.

“She headed the first Poverty Institute Migrant Wage and Working Conditions Study, and she hired me and my brother to go into the camps and introduce a whole core of graduate students from UW–Madison,” Salas says.

While organizing, he completed his bachelor’s and then master’s degrees, a process that took about 20 years.

And when he was done, he took his degree in political science and began teaching at Milwaukee Area Technical College, where he helped establish a bilingual teaching program.

Governor Jim Doyle’67 appointed Salas to the UW System Board of Regents in 2003, and he served until 2007. He worked on the physical planning committee, advocating for infrastructure improvements and for continued growth in services for the Latino community.

In retirement, Salas continues to travel to Crystal City, Texas, and to advocate for migrant workers’ rights.

“It’s been a long haul,” he says, “But we stay with it.”

Mildred crossed the Atlantic and enrolled in a doctoral program in Germany when she was 26, just as Hitler was rising to power. Appalled by the Nazi leader’s popularity, Mildred and Arvid began holding meetings in their Berlin apartment to discuss strategies of opposition. During the 1930s, their small, scrappy group intersected with three other resistance groups. By 1940, it was the largest underground resistance network in Berlin. In 1942, the Gestapo tracked them down. Arvid was hanged and Mildred was beheaded, the only American woman executed on Hitler’s direct order.

Mildred’s great-grandniece Rebecca Donner conducted extensive research, drawing on family records and archival documents in four countries — Germany, England, Russia, and the United States — to create a compelling chronicle of courageous resistance. Mildred tried to thwart Hitler by every means possible, recruiting Germans into the resistance, producing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, helping Jews escape Germany, and becoming a spy in an effort to defeat one of the greatest evils of the 20th century.

National Archives and Records Administration

Donner’s book, which she describes as a fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story, has won numerous literary awards and is now out in paperback. We have excerpted a section that depicts Mildred and Arvid’s time at the UW and their move to Germany after their marriage.

From the book All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner, published by Little, Brown & Company, an imprint of Hachette Books. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Donner.

IT IS SEPTEMBER 1, 1932.
In exactly seven years, the Second World War will begin.

This morning, by comparison, is not noteworthy. For Mildred it begins, we may imagine, like any other morning as she rises from a simple, wood-frame bed to draw back the curtains, letting in the light. Because the apartment has wide windows, there is plenty of it, even in the dead of winter, when the air in Berlin seems grainy, the texture and hue of chalk. A narrow hallway leads to the main room, where Mildred drifts from window to window, drawing back curtains. Bookcases crammed with well-loved books line the walls. Oil paintings of dense forests bring rich splashes of gold and emerald to an otherwise modestly furnished room. Here is a sofa with wooden armrests. Here are two tattered rugs. A sturdy round table, two sturdy chairs. Floor planks show their wear, pitted in places, and creak under Mildred’s feet as she moves to the far corner of the room, where a white porcelain stove stands, its thick pipe stretching to the ceiling. Sometimes there’s coal, sometimes there’s not. Today, perhaps, there is. Mildred stokes the coal lumps with an iron rod, bringing up fresh sparks. The water in the kettle she sets on the stove is enough for two cups of coffee, one for her, one for Arvid.

It’s by force of habit that she does this. She is alone, though not for long. Arvid will return from his trip to Russia soon, in time for her birthday. She will be 30 — is it possible? — in just over two weeks.

Breakfast is simple, usually nothing more than a hunk of bread swiped with whatever’s on hand — jam, butter, mustard, she’s not particular. At the center of the table, she likes to put a flower or two in a glass of water. Tulips in spring, lilacs in summer, alpine roses in the fall, honeysuckle in winter. Sometimes the flowers are from her students. Sometimes they’re from Arvid.

Arvid is a romantic. It’s a side others don’t see. Others see a man who wears round, owlish spectacles and rarely leaves the house without a necktie. (Behind closed doors, he happily yanks it off.) Others see a man who spends hours on end at his desk. (But Arvid loves nothing more than to amble around a mountain on a Sunday afternoon, letting his thoughts wander, inhaling the tart, bracing air.) And though it’s true that Arvid is a man who loves the certitude of cold, hard facts, his head is stuffed with poetry. He was made to read Goethe as a boy and can now, at 31, recite long verses from memory, murmuring them into her ear.

They met at the University of Wisconsin, when Arvid wandered into the wrong lecture hall. He’d wanted to watch Professor John Commons deliver a lecture on American labor unions, but the person at the lectern wasn’t Commons. It was Mildred, then a 25-year-old graduate student. The topic of her lecture was American literature, and he stayed until the end. Then he approached the lectern and introduced himself.

She’d gotten a BA in humanities and started her master’s. He had a law degree and was on his way to getting a PhD in philosophy. After these preliminaries were out of the way, Arvid told her — with a sweet, tenderhearted formality that pierced her to the core — that his family home was in Jena, a small university town along the Saale River in Germany. He spoke English awkwardly, though earnestly. How different he was from the Midwestern boys at the UW, boys who tackled each other in cornfields and on football fields, boys who bragged about all the money they’d make with their degrees, boys who vied for Mildred’s attention with boisterous jokes — Har-dee-har-har! — that weren’t at all funny, at least not to her, although you were supposed to smile anyway, smile and blush and flip your hand and say, Oh, you’re such an egg.

The second time they saw each other, Arvid brought her a fistful of wildflowers. He’d picked them himself. “A great bunch of thick, white odorous flowers mingled with purple bells,” Mildred wrote later, remembering every detail.

Courtesy of the Donner Family

It was morning — a “beautiful” one. Arvid stood on the porch of the two-story house where Mildred rented a room. The house was near campus, owned by a professor who lived there with his wife and their two children. The wife peeked through the curtains, absorbing the sight of blue-eyed Arvid and his wildflowers. She’d taken a keen interest in Mildred’s private life. As Mildred worked doggedly on her master’s degree, the professor’s wife may have believed the younger woman could benefit from a little motherly guidance, mindful that the wrong man could lead her astray. Or maybe she was just nosy. At last she closed the curtains and nodded her frank approval. “Men from the North Sea,” she said, “make very good husbands.”

A husband — good or otherwise — was not what Mildred was looking for. Not now. She was still reeling from a heart-wrenching breakup with an anthropology major from Kansas City named Harry, but she stepped onto the porch anyway, shutting the door behind her. Arvid gave her the wildflowers and expressed his hope that Mildred was having a good morning. He labored to soften his German accent, and she realized that he’d practiced what he was about to say many times before coming to her door. He wanted to take her canoeing — on Lake Mendota, he said, “the greatest of all the lakes.”

His shy gallantry.

All right, she told him, with a shy smile of her own. She would join him in a canoe.

Six months later, on a Saturday, they said their vows under an improvised bower on a ramshackle dairy farm.

Arvid Harnack and Mildred Fish Harnack met on the UW campus and married soon afterward. They then moved to Germany, Arvid’s home country, just as Hitler was rising to power. Courtesy of the Donner family

Arvid returned to Germany to finish his PhD. Mildred would join him soon; Goucher College in Baltimore had hired her to teach English literature for the 1928–29 term. While they were apart, they wrote long letters. They described the books they were reading, their plans for the future. They would both become professors and teach in German universities, and perhaps American universities too. Mildred ended her letters with a drawing of a sun. Arvid ended his letters with the same sun.

THERE ARE MOMENTS — this morning may be one of them — when she misses Arvid with a force that takes her breath away. Right now, he’s probably eating breakfast too, seated at a table in Moscow with a group whose very name is a mouthful: Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft, or Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy. (Mildred prefers to refer to the group by its less cumbersome acronym, ARPLAN.) Its members include economists, political scientists, literary critics, politicians, and playwrights, among them self-avowed right-wing ultranationalists and die-hard Communists. In other circumstances, these strange bedfellows might not have shaken hands, much less sat around a breakfast table, but Arvid is optimistic; they may disagree about methodology, but they are united in their aim.

Germany is in crisis. Something must be done. By studying what appears to be a novel economic solution to the Soviet Union’s woes, Arvid hopes to discover a remedy for the crisis in his own country. Arvid is secretary of ARPLAN. He receives no pay for this work, but his compassion for the poor in Germany and his desire to devise a new economic model to address this problem drive him to his desk day and night.

There are two desks in the apartment. Arvid’s is a great expanse of carved wood that once belonged to his father. The other desk, equally imposing, was once his maternal grandfather’s — Arvid calls him Grossvater Reichau. This is Mildred’s desk now. A big slab of mahogany. Lectures, articles, translations — she writes them all in longhand, filling page after page before turning to the typewriter.

It’s here, at Grossvater Reichau’s great slab of a desk, that Mildred stokes her own outsize dreams. One day she will be a great literary scholar; she will write magnificent books. The desk imparts heft and weight and stability, qualities that are entirely foreign to Mildred. She has no family heirlooms of her own. Whatever slim sticks of furniture had cluttered the small, drafty rooms of her childhood she has long since left behind.

MILDRED DOESN’T LINGER LONG over breakfast. A final swallow of coffee and she’s on her feet again, setting the cup and saucer in the sink, brushing crumbs from her lips. Dirty dishes will accumulate there for days before she notices them, a teetering tower of plates and cups and cutlery. There are always better things to do than the dishes.

She’s still wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown and long, boiled-wool stockings knit by her mother, who bundled them up in a trim package that took two months to make its way from a transatlantic steamer ship to her front door. Her feet skim the creaking floorboards — the heel of one stocking is wearing thin — as she walks to a wide window and opens it. The air, crisp as a cold apple, invigorates her. She flings off her bathrobe.

She begins a series of exercises now, following directions from a book she bought for a few pfennigs. “Most of the exercises aim to strengthen the muscles of the abdomen,” she wrote to her mother last year, scribbling a hasty assurance that she and Arvid will have children “as soon as we can.” The routine — leg lifts and sit-ups and backbends — takes 20 minutes. She’s slender as a dancer, but she’s more earnest than graceful as she flails her arms, kicks her legs. Her nightgown bunches. Her stockinged feet on the wood floor skid and slip.

After exercising, she bathes quickly, using lard soap, and gets dressed.

Though today isn’t significant in the grand stretch of history, to Mildred it’s an important milestone. Today she begins a new teaching job at the Berliner Städtisches Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene — the Berlin Night School for Adults — nicknamed the BAG. There, she’ll come into contact with a fresh crop of German students, and she’s energized by the possibilities. They will be different from the students she taught at the University of Berlin — poorer, predominantly working class, mostly unemployed. Precisely the type of person the Nazi Party has been relentlessly targeting with propaganda.

See her now, striding out the front door with her leather satchel, descending four flights of stairs to the sidewalk. See her walking toward the U-Bahn station, swinging the satchel. In the eyes of her neighbors, she’s an American graduate student, nothing more. •

The rest of the book describes the couple’s resistance work in suspenseful detail, as well as documenting their tragic capture and death.

Eagleburger performed heroically during one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War. UW Archives S17568

One day while Lawrence Eagleburger ’52, MS’57 was working on a master’s degree in political science, he spied a poster on a campus bulletin board promoting the Foreign Service Examination.

“I took it, passed it, took the oral exam, and passed that,” said Eagleburger. “Up until then, I had never even thought of the Foreign Service.”

That exam started a widely respected diplomatic career that spanned more than 40 years, culminating with a 42-day stint as secretary of state at the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term and making him the first Foreign Service officer to hold that post.

A quick-witted Milwaukee native, he rose to become the top aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He was known for his skill in managing international crises in Europe and the Balkans, where his seven years of work earned him the nickname “Lawrence of Macedonia.”

Eagleburger was so valued by Kissinger that he was sent to carry out secret diplomacy with the Cubans to test whether relations could be reestablished. He was also dispatched to other hot spots: China after the Tiananmen Square uprising, and Panama after the 1989 U.S. invasion.

He had three sons, all named Lawrence. “It was ego,” Eagleburger said. “And secondly, I wanted to screw up the Social Security system.”

Though Eagleburger was a Republican, his diplomatic skill earned him an appointment by Democratic president Jimmy Carter as ambassador to Yugoslavia. President Ronald Reagan appointed him as assistant secretary for European affairs under Alexander Haig Jr., and he rose to undersecretary for political affairs.

After Eagleburger’s death in 2011, President George H. W. Bush recalled that his performance was “heroic” in the 1991 Gulf War. “During one of the tensest moments of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein began attacking Israel with Scud missiles … we sent Larry to preserve our coalition,” he said.

At age five, Lor joined thousands of Hmong people fleeing Laos to escape persecution. Daniel Moore

Born in a small farming village in Laos, Pao Lor PhD’01 was destined to be a Hmong clan leader, wedding negotiator, or shaman. This all changed when Laos fell to a Communist regime following the Vietnam War. At the age of five, Lor joined the thousands of Hmong people fleeing the country to escape persecution. Lor made it safely to Thailand; his parents did not.

Wisconsin Historical Society Press

An orphan and a refugee, Lor spent two years in Thai refugee camps before boarding a plane to the United States, a place he envisioned brimming with the opportunity his parents had once wanted for him. In his book Modern Jungles: A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of Survival, Lor takes readers through his experience navigating the foreign “jungles” he found in his new home and grappling with the racism that was pervasive in communities that saw large influxes of Hmong refugees in the 1970s. Despite it all, he remained resilient.

“Modern Jungles shines a light on experiences that many of our Wisconsin neighbors have lived through but that are unfamiliar to most of us,” wrote Kate Thompson of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, the book’s publisher, in an email to Spectrum News 1 in April. “At the same time, it includes themes everyone can relate to: coming of age, overcoming hardship, and seeking a place in the world where we feel we belong.”

Lor is the Patricia Wood Baer Professor and chairperson of the Professional Program in Education in the College of Health, Education, and Social Welfare at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.

Ross with the rare mahogany that had been stored in the Forest Products Lab basement since 1919. Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal

When the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol caused extensive damage to historical wooden artifacts, Robert Ross, the acting assistant director of the USDA Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) on the UW–Madison campus, came to the rescue.

The vandalism had caused damage to doors and woodwork made of mahogany, which now has protected international conservation status. This means that the old-growth mahogany originally used in the Capitol is no longer available.

Ross knew that Forest Products happened to have some priceless mahogany that had been stored in its basement since 1919, most likely left over from a study on wooden propellers used for warplanes in France.

Lab staff carefully wrapped some 3,000 pounds of the precious wood and shipped it to the Capitol, where repair work began in June.

Ross told the FPL website Lab Notes that he felt privileged to play a part in the restoration. “I consider working on the U.S. Capitol the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” he said, “because it serves to rebuild the heart of our democracy.”

Kraft (right, with community organizer Sami Saadi) has hard conversations about identity, politics, and government policies. Courtesy of Hadassah

When podcast host Dina Kraft ’93 goes on location, she never knows what sound bites she will capture. “I have chased after a bleating goat in a Bedouin village and tried to get close enough to record a Jewish oud player crooning classic Arabic love songs,” she says.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Kraft tracks down stories the media generally overlook. Her podcast The Branch, sponsored by the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah, gives voice to Palestinian/Israeli friendships, recording stories of Arabs and Jews. Each episode tells the story of a different pair who work together — from peace activists on the Gaza–Israel border, to a soccer captain and coach in the Galilee, to the team who launched a chain of ice cream shops that offer “a corner of delicious sanity.”

Despite the new round of hostilities in recent months, Kraft remains as committed as ever to highlighting stories of unlikely friendships.

“The partners I’ve interviewed who are closest, across the very real divides that would otherwise keep them apart, are the ones who do not shy away from having hard conversations about identity, politics, and government policies,” she says. “They share a profound respect for one another, even when they don’t agree on everything.”

When Kraft was earning her bachelor’s degree in history at UW–Madison, she loved working at the Badger Herald. “It was a great way to learn more about what made Madison the unique place it is,” she says.

A longtime foreign correspondent, Kraft has reported from South Africa and Pakistan for the Associated Press and written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Currently, she is a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Kraft was a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and received the 2020 B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem Award for Journalism.

Kraft also hosts another podcast, The Patient Is In, sponsored by StuffThatWorks, an AI-based crowdsourcing format that features conversations with people navigating chronic illness. So how does an award-winning print journalist make the switch to audio?

“Like everyone else on the planet, it seems, I’ve gotten bitten by the podcast bug,” says Kraft. “Even before podcasts became a thing, I had a serious crush on audio. I love its sense of immediacy and intimacy. I have learned that capturing the pitch of someone’s voice, the peal of their laugh, the way they speak to a colleague, helps reveal their character. And all of this has made me a better, more attentive journalist.”

Manu Raju ’02 is on live television, audibly out of breath, as he’s being escorted alongside other members of the press corps by Capitol Police to a secure and undisclosed location. It’s January 6, 2021, and one sign that something surreal is happening is the slightly shaken voice of a normally composed CNN reporter. He knew it was serious when he received an email from police three hours earlier with an “internal security threat” warning and directions to lock down and remain quiet.

Raju, 41, had arrived at the U.S. Capitol to cover the certification of electoral college votes in Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump for the presidency. What’s typically a formality turned into a deadly affair when a violent mob of Trump supporters rushed the building and interrupted the proceedings. Throughout it all, Raju did what he does every day on Capitol Hill: talked to sources and reported breaking news on TV, Twitter, and CNN’s website.

“It was so chaotic, and people were glued to their phones,” Raju says. “A lot of people in the Capitol told me that they were relying on my tweets. They didn’t have the TV on because they were hiding under their desks, or they were in shelter, and they did not want to draw attention. We pushed out as much information as we could.”

He adds: “I reflect back on that day, and I often think that I had no idea how much danger we were in.”

Raju, whom CNN promoted to chief congressional correspondent in January, has covered politics in Washington for nearly 20 years. He’s reported on presidential impeachment trials, Supreme Court nominations, key Senate races, and government shutdowns. He also tracks the obscure machinations of an increasingly contentious Congress — a flood of motions and amendments, committee hearings and legislative debates, filibusters and vote-a-ramas. To stay on top of it all requires remarkable skill and stamina.

The job also requires thick skin. A president famously labeled Raju’s network “fake news” and even “the enemy of the people”; a senator insulted him in the halls of Congress. On January 6, a haunting phrase was carved on a door of the Capitol: “Murder the media.”

But Raju has always stayed above the fray, which has earned him widespread trust and admiration from colleagues, politicians, and sources of all stripes on Capitol Hill.

“He is indefatigable,” says Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief. “And this may sound cliché because people talk about hardworking reporters, but he really is the hardest-working reporter on Capitol Hill. And I think that almost everybody who knows him will agree.”

Raju’s meteoric rise in Washington — from a rookie policy insider to one of the nation’s most visible reporters — traces back to an unconventional start at UW–Madison.

An Unusual Beat

Raju works for a 24/7 news operation, and his routine reflects it. “My day starts the moment I wake up,” he says.

He begins answering emails around 6 a.m. There’s an eight o’clock conference call with his news team, and he joins a larger editorial meeting at nine. By the time he arrives at the Capitol and checks the schedule for the Senate and House of Representatives, he’s developed a plan — “a roadmap in my mind,” he says — for the stories he wants to cover and the sources he needs to interview.

At times, the mapping is literal. Raju could make a detective blush with his ability to track the movements of members of Congress, learning their preferred routes from offices to committee hearing rooms to legislative chambers. If he intercepts them — and if they’re willing to talk, which is never a given — he only has a few minutes to extract something newsworthy. “You need to be prepared,” he says, referring to not only the questions but also the fact that he may need to ask them at a near jog.

“Covering Capitol Hill is an unusual reporting beat,” says Feist, who oversees Raju’s work. “You don’t sit at a desk like you might at the White House or the Pentagon, and you don’t sit in a newsroom. You literally work the halls of Congress, and he does that better than anybody.”

In 2017, Raju’s hallway interview with Bob Corker dominated a news cycle and sparked a war of words between the former Tennessee senator and President Trump. “When [Trump’s] term is over, I think the debasing of our nation, the constant non-truth-telling, just the name-calling … will be what he’ll be remembered most for,” Corker said. The six-minute interview marked one of the first public fractures between Trump and a Republican member of Congress.

“Some people see that kind of reporting as performative, but I do not,” says Kathleen Bartzen Culver ’88, MA’92, PhD’99, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics at UW–Madison. “Trying to get statements from politicians in the moment is a critically important part of congressional reporting, because otherwise, we’d be left with canned statements during hearings and in press releases.”

When Raju gathers a new piece of information, he sends a quick note to the network. If it’s important enough, he’ll be asked to report it on air immediately and field questions from CNN’s news anchors. He shares many of the same scoops on Twitter and holds other information for online stories.

His personal rule for sharing news across platforms is consistency. Some political reporters let loose on social media, but Raju’s Twitter feed is one unending string of straight reporting. You’ll find neither personal commentary nor cat photos.

“I don’t say anything on Twitter that I would not say on TV or I would not report online,” he says. While the approach isn’t sexy, it’s earned him a massive reach — more than half a million followers on Twitter alone.

With his thoughtful reporting, Raju has developed a thick Rolodex of sources, ranging from aides to politicians themselves. The key, he says, is maintaining their trust.

“The big thing is to never surprise them,” he adds. “When there’s a story that may reflect poorly on them or their bosses, you have to tell them ahead of time and give them enough time to respond before you report it.”

His relationship with sources allowed him to report with certainty on January 22 — three weeks before the eventual vote — that there wouldn’t be enough Republican support to convict President Trump on the latest article of impeachment.

“At the time,” he says, “people were looking at me, saying, ‘Are we leaning too hard into this?’ And I was like, ‘I’m telling you, I’ve spoken to everybody — nothing is going to change here.’ ” He was right.

Raju’s workday doesn’t end until the work of Congress ends. And during marathon events like an impeachment trial or the deliberation on landmark legislation, that means he doesn’t leave the Capitol until late at night or early the next morning.

“What keeps me motivated is the desire to tell people something they don’t know,” he says. It’s a journalistic urge that he discovered at the UW — while studying business.

An Unconventional Path

Raju is the son of Indian immigrants. His grandfather, Gopalakrishna Adiga, was a pioneer of modernist poetry in India. Raju’s family compares his work, in the native language of Kannada, to that of T. S. Eliot’s in the West.

Raju grew up in Darien, a small suburb of Chicago, where his father worked as a doctor at the University of Illinois–Chicago Hospital. “Growing up with a family of immigrant parents, they really instill in you hard work and work ethic,” he says. “They were never fully satisfied.” But they let Raju and his older brother pursue whichever careers most interested them. For a young Raju, and for no particular reason, it was business.

Raju chose to attend the UW after a stroll through campus. When he discusses his college years, the solemn tone of a TV newsman fades and a warm, lighthearted, humble personality emerges.

His older brother covered sports for a college newspaper at the University of Michigan, so Raju decided to do the same, just for fun. He applied to the Badger Herald, and the sports editor, Dan Alter ’99, assigned him to cover men’s hockey practice the next day. After a few quick pointers from Alter (including to always carry two pens), the future TV news star finished his first story. “I really had no idea what I was doing,” Raju recalled in an essay after he won a Forward under 40 Award from the Wisconsin Alumni Association in 2018.

During his time on campus, Raju worked for student radio station WSUM and became more involved at the Badger Herald. He rose to be the paper’s sports editor during the glory years of Wisconsin men’s athletics — two Rose Bowl victories and a Final Four appearance in basketball. He landed a summer internship with NBC in Los Angeles and later NBC15 in Madison.

By the time he graduated from the UW, Raju knew that he wanted to pursue journalism despite his degree in business administration. But his foray into politics — much like his introduction to journalism — was largely happenstance.

A Rise through Washington

Raju’s parents had moved to Washington, DC, while he was in college. When he graduated, he decided to move in with them and search for jobs in the area.

He caught his first break covering pollution control for Inside EPA, a trade publication for environmental policy wonks. (One report: “EPA Review of Flame Retardant Risks Will Affect U.S. Stance on EU Ban.”) A few years later, he started to write for Congressional Quarterly on the energy beat, where he first cultivated sources on Capitol Hill.

Raju could deftly translate technical policy into understandable terms. The Hill newspaper recognized his skill and hired him in 2007 as a Senate reporter. A year later, he left for a national audience at the all-digital Politico, where he wrote for seven years and became an award-winning senior congressional reporter. His versatility across media platforms and range in policy and politics opened doors at CNN.

While at Politico, Raju was frequently booked by CNN for guest appearances. “It was very clear, even then, that Manu Raju was one of the best correspondents covering Capitol Hill,” Feist says. “When we had an opportunity to hire a congressional correspondent, he was at the top of our list.”

After Raju joined the network in 2015, he was soon met with one of his biggest challenges yet: a public distrust of national media.

A “Fake News” World

A tried-and-true tenet of journalism is not becoming part of the story. In January 2020, Raju couldn’t avoid it.

During a routine hallway interview, he asked then–Arizona senator Martha McSally whether the Senate should consider new evidence that arose during the first Trump impeachment trial. She snapped: “Manu, you’re a liberal hack, and I’m not talking to you.” The interaction was caught on camera and exploded on social media. McSally promptly fundraised off the incident and sold “liberal hack” shirts.

Raju’s colleagues and competitors rallied to his defense. Geraldo Rivera defended him on Fox News. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell wrote on Twitter, “I’ve never see[n] a senator treat a reporter like this. Manu Raju is one of the best congressional reporters I’ve ever seen, including my years working in the Senate. I’ve never detected a hint of liberalism or partisanship from [him].”

Raju handled the incident with typical aplomb. “The people who are coming after us and calling us names are trying to influence how we report the news,” he says. “But my philosophy is to ignore it, endure it, and report factually based on what we know.”

Feist says Raju was simply doing his job — asking tough questions of those in power. “Manu is about as apolitical a person as I know,” Feist says. “He doesn’t pick sides.” That was true when Raju asked Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, about her and President Trump accusing each other of hate. “Are you serious?” she responded. “What is wrong with you?”

Politicians attacking journalists is a trend that concerns Culver, who serves as director of the UW’s Center for Journalism Ethics. “Manu Raju is trying to represent the public interest and hold people accountable,” she says. “And anyone who wants to subvert that and call him an enemy of the people or a liberal hack — I’d like to know what their replacement system is. The news media are a systemic check on government power in this country. If you don’t want someone like him doing his job with care and consideration, then how is the public represented?”

Many polls suggest that trust in national media is at an all-time low. Last year, a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans have little to no trust in mass media to report the news “fully, fairly, and accurately.” A Pew Research poll found that CNN is trusted by 70 percent of liberal Democrats but only 16 percent of conservative Republicans.

Culver notes that distrust in cable news networks likely stems from their increasing reliance on pundits to fill around-the-clock airtime. Viewers may struggle to separate opinion coverage from the news operation.

She also points to the “hostile media phenomenon.” Researchers have found that even when they create a perfectly neutral news text (affording equal prominence to conservative and liberal sources), partisans view it as biased against their views.

“So you could be the ideal neutral news reporter — much like Manu, who does not bring a lot of emotion into his interviews and is very straightforward — and people will still see you as hostile to their views,” Culver says. “What’s important for us as citizens in a democracy is to focus less on whether an outlet is biased against what I think and instead ask, ‘When was the last time I opened my mind about what I think?’ ”

The Next Story

Raju considers himself a family man. Aside from following Chicago and Badger sports, he dedicates nearly all of his off hours to raising five-year-old twins with his wife, Archana, who serves as vice president of marketing and business strategy at a national cloud and data center company. When he’s not covering an all-encompassing event, he spends the entire weekend with them.

Other than that, he says, “I’m always working on and thinking about the next story.”

Madison is never far from his mind. If you’ve watched CNN over the past year, you’ve likely spotted a red Terrace chair in the backdrop of his at-home interview setup. His Twitter bio concludes with the phrase Wisconsin Badger for life.

“There’s no question if it weren’t for my time there, I would not be where I am today,” he says. “I love the University of Wisconsin. It’s like home to me. I love Madison. There’s really no other place I’d rather be.”

For now, Madison will have to remain his home away from home. There’s much more work to be done in Washington.

“The good thing about being at a place like CNN is that it’s a huge network with lots of opportunity to grow,” Raju says. “But I’m happy with what I’m doing now, so we’ll just see what happens in a few more years.”

He pauses for a few seconds — notable only because he so rarely does it.

“If I can survive this pace.” •