"His assassination was more pivotal to the country than his brother's" Ganz says. "He really could have made it happen."

Ganz's interest in politics led him to campaign for Jerry Brown in the late 1970s. And by 1981, he had left the UFW to work with other unions and political campaigns full time.

"I needed a breather," he says. "It had been a long struggle organizing for 18 years [and] I wanted to see about making grass roots organizing more widespread."

Ganz says the decline in the strength of unions nation wide made his work more difficult. By the late 80s--having found ways to use computer technology to better target voters--he had become almost exclusively involved in working with Democratic political candidates.

Techniques of grass roots organization and voter targeting that Ganz pioneered were proven capable of winning campaigns for candidates on extremely tight budgets.

"We got Maureen O'Connor elected mayor of San Diego for $150,000," Ganz says.

And just six weeks before California Senator Alan Cranston's hotly contested re-election campaign in 1986--in which each candidate spent $13 million--Ganz received a call from Cranston asking for help.

Despite the longshot odds of being able to organize a grass roots campaign overnight, Ganz says, "I decided to give it a shot."

In the end, it worked.

"We turned out 160,000 voters for Cranston," he says, "and he won the election by 105,000 votes."

Later, in a major get-out-the vote campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988, Ganz helped deliver 750,000 votes.

By 1990, however, Ganz decided it was time for another pause to rethink his priorities. He had become disenchanted with the cynicism of politics.

"I had spent so many years on [learning] how to do these things, that I lost sight of why," he says. "Then I remembered--I'd never graduated."

Ganz contacted Harvard and arranged to return and complete his senior year. He and his wife, a Bunting fellow who graduated from Harvard in 1979, share an apartment in Cambridge. And he is still affiliated with Winthrop House.

"It's been really interesting," Ganz says. "I'm doing more reading than I've done in years."