The Player

"There has never been any strain between us," Dwight Opperman claims. "We differ on a lot of political issues, but they are not unfriendly differences; hell, he's my son! Besides, now they kind of complement each other. I have political friends, he has political friends, and so even if [the government] changes parties, we have someone in control.

"I have little regard for politicians," he continues. "Vance is the one who thinks it is an honorable profession. But he's got better judgment than I do. I'd rather have a monarchy, and make him king." Later, when asked if he admires Vance more than anyone in the world, Dwight replies, "Yeah, that's probably right." For a moment there are tears in his eyes.

Vance's only sibling, Fane Opperman, remembers a brother 10 years older "who excelled at everything," whose science projects took over the kitchen table and proceeded to win awards at the State Fair, and who became a state debate champion while at Ramsey High School in St. Paul. "Because of the age difference there was no sibling rivalry," Fane says. "Vance, along with my parents, was a tremendous role model. I idolized him then and I always have.

"I'll always remember visiting relatives when I was about 5 or 6, and we would end up in the living room, and all the adults and the children would eventually be around Vance. He might be talking about science or politics or just telling jokes, but he'd be commanding the floor. He likes to be in command and because he's so brilliant and articulate, he's got a natural control."

Opperman was still an adolescent when he decided he wanted to be a lawyer. He pegs the exact moment to watching Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings at the age of 10 or 11; the family was living in St. Paul's Midway section, where static from the nearby streetcars interfered with the TV reception. By the time he arrived at the University of Minnesota in 1964, Opperman was burning with the optimism of Kennedy's Camelot and had become an integral part of a nascent student movement.

In 1963, he was elected vice president of the National Student Association, a group affiliated with the Students for a Democratic Society. The position called for him to travel around the country organizing on college campuses. It was a propitious time for such an assignment as the civil-rights crusade reached a crucible with the freedom rides in the South. Years later, Opperman and his wife would adopt an African American child and name him Chaney, after the civil-rights martyr James Chaney.

But during the mid-to-late '60s, the civil-rights movement splintered along racial lines and many white students turned their energies against the burgeoning war in Vietnam and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. By 1968, two Minnesotans--anti-war candidate Gene McCarthy and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey--were locked in a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, fought in large part over Minnesota's influential liberal electorate.

At least one book--The 6th Ward, by David Lebedoff--and many magazine and newspaper articles have been written on the 1968 insurgency of the anti-war forces in Hennepin County, led by Opperman and his law-school classmate Howard Kaibel. Abetted by after-hours access to computers at Pillsbury, the pair organized and profiled potential voters around the UM's West Bank campus with methods 20 years ahead of their time. They followed up with door-to-door visits in the fall and winter of '67, resorting to pencils when the frigid temperatures froze the ink in their pens.

"A lot of it was Vance," says Kaibel, now an administrative law judge working with the Hennepin County public defender's office. "He was just super bright. He'd sit down and rattle off the words for a flyer. And he had a photographic memory. To this day, I call him 'The Chief.'"

Opperman's anti-war cohorts had their regional and national counterparts. On March 5, 1968, three of Minnesota's eight congressional districts supported McCarthy at the precinct caucuses, mirroring the candidate's strong showing against President Johnson in New Hampshire. On March 30, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. That summer, Opperman was elected chair of the Hennepin County DFL.

Perhaps the most accurate and prescient profile of Opperman during that period appeared in the April 1968 issue of the now-defunct monthly Twin Citian. Dressed in a suit accessorized by a paisley tie and cowboy boots, Opperman was on his second double Jim Beam with a water chaser as the interview began at 11 a.m. He had been up five days in a row, and had completed his law finals the previous day.

"Sure I've read Marcuse," he told the writer, speaking of the firebrand socialist philosopher who will forever be associated with the late '60s. "But I'm not sure about [the] new left in his sense, at all. Actually, I'm a radical. I'm committed to a revolution but strictly within the traditional party framework."

The writer, Thomas Gifford, described Opperman as "a good listener, a trait so often evident in the truly skilled exploiter... For a man of 25 he seems to have spent years in national service. No wonder those less aware of the realistic manipulation of people and power can feel in themselves a certain embryonic twinge of fear when he is in full swing. He is not a wild man and he is not--like most wild men--likely to fade away."