CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — Forty years ago Marshall Ganz, a top field organizer for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union, watched in confusion as Bobby Kennedy left a stage at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel.
Ganz was supposed to whisk him away to thank a roomful of farmworker volunteers who had just helped him win the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary. But Kennedy was heading toward the kitchen.
Before Ganz could catch up, the room erupted in screams and yells. Robert F. Kennedy had been shot.
"Talk about feeling history just falling through your fingers," Ganz said.
Ganz is sitting at his kitchen table as he tells the story, one in a series of personal narratives from his life as a rabbi's son in 1950s Bakersfield, a civil rights worker in Mississippi in the 1960s and, later, a key figure in the United Farm Workers' boycotts.
They are stories of faith and betrayal, love and hate, hope and disillusionment.
And if Barack Obama succeeds in his historic quest for the White House, the Illinois senator will owe a large debt to Ganz's passion for such narratives -- and for the way this graying, portly man taught Obama's top field organizers to weave thousands of individual volunteers' stories into a social movement.
Ganz, 65, has no official role in the Obama campaign. But when key Obama organizers run into a problem, they look to Ganz, who teaches organizing and leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
When the Obama campaign held a series of "Camp Obama" training sessions around the country last summer, Ganz was brought in to hold two-day discussions of personal narrative and leadership.
Campaign officials estimate that 200 to 300 organizers were trained at about a dozen Camp Obamas -- three of them co-led by Ganz.
The effort's biggest success came in caucus states like Iowa, where tightknit organizations were better able to get people to the meeting sites.
But grass-roots efforts also paid off in South Carolina and Wisconsin and helped keep the margin small in Indiana.
Ganz's "style of organizing really does speak to who Barack is as a candidate," said Obama field organizer Buffy Wicks, 30, who ran the campaign's grass-roots efforts in California and Texas.
"Marshall really believes in empowering people and teaching them how to become community organizers."
