Editorials

When I learned last week from my social media and Internet connections that Gus Newport had died, I thought about a line I’d once heard sung by a gospel choir at St. Paul AME Church.

“After all I’ve seen, I still have joy.”

Gus approached everything in life with enormous enthusiasm, truly with joy: running for office, being in office, policy planning, academic endeavors, networking with the livelier parts of the left, and most of all, encouraging and mentoring his compañeros in the eternal struggle against evil .

On my laptop I have a sticker once handed out by The Nation, offering a quote from the late lamented Molly Ivins:

“We have to have fun while trying to stave off the forces of darkness because we hardly ever win, so it’s the only fun we get to have.”

Well, yes, but Gus was one of the few resolute progressives who did win, at least for a time, who actually won a couple of terms as mayor without sacrificing his principles, and still had fun.

He served seven years in the early 1980s. Many key progressive goals, notably effective rent control, were realized in Berkeley during his time in office. Ever afterwards he followed Berkeley politics with interest, even when he moved Back East for a spell.

While living in the Boston area, he taught at MIT and worked with community organizations. He was especially proud of a method he’d devised for exacting meaningful community benefits from developers who demanded lucrative zoning concessions. He also lectured at Yale, the University of Massachusetts and UC Santa Cruz.  

Back in the Bay Area, he supported a great variety of progressive candidates for office, bringing in his host of national and international friends when necessary. He snagged Bernie Sanders to support Jesse Arreguin for his first term as Berkeley mayor, though he later expressed disappointment in Jesse and declined to back him a second time. But the remarkable thing about Gus was that he endorsed and disparaged potential political allies with equal enthusiasm and generosity.  

In a multitude of ways Gus Newport epitomized the character of Wordsworth's "happy warrior", to which many politicians have aspired, from Al Smith to Hubert Humphrey to Barack Obama, but few achieved.  

Carole Kennerley Davis, who served on the Berkeley City Council with Gus in the ‘80s. recalled that you could have a vigorous disagreement with him on matters of principle at council meetings, and ten minutes later you’d be friends again. Holding grudges was not his style, which is why he achieved so much.  

We’ll miss him.  

Here’s the Berkeley Historical Society’s interview with Gus in 2021: