No-Fault Politics

...Had McCarthy been nominated over Vice President Hubert Humphrey (yet another Minnesotan) at the August convention, the Democrats might have retained the White House, Watergate would never have happened, and Jimmy Carter probably would have risen no higher than the Georgia governor's mansion...

...McCarthy is entitled to be angry about what happened in Chicago, but it doesn't excuse ludicrous hyperbole...

...He repeats his memorable line that in politics, as in coaching football, it helps to be "smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest!' But the redeeming passages are few in a book marred by an indistinct thesis, lazy thinking, and a general sloppiness...

...Arch glibness infects nearly every page...

...It apparently did not occur to him that the new role was inevitable once senators, originally elected by state legislatures, were subjected to direct election by the 17th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913...

...For the author, this means increasingly unbearable stress on the planet's resources...

...If you want to read a serious, literate book on public policy by a contemporary veteran of the world's greatest deliberative body, look in the card catalogue under "Moynihan...

...He chose not to run for another Senate term, leaving in 1971...

...We are pumping ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, making the world "hotter, stormier, and less stable by the day, a planet where huge swaths of God's creation are being wiped out by the one species told to tend this particular garden...

...This historical shallowness shows itself again when McCarthy recalls the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, which became infamous for the beatings of antiwar demonstrators by police run amok...

...Once they catch up, the black, brown, and yellow peoples will simply make up the same share of the earth's inhabitants as they did in premodern times...

...The last shows up in a consistent inattention to facts...

...Like a malcontent rattling away at the end of the bar, he habitually voices opinions unsupported by evidence or argument...

...The lesson is obvious...

...This is just a partial listing...

...But it recalls Samuel Johnson's remark about Lord Chesterfield: "This man, I thought, had been a Lord among wits, but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords...

...Without affecting modesty—McCarthy's self-assurance bordered on arrogance—he had the winning habit of not taking himself too seriously...

...Though McCarthy frequently quotes John Adams, James Otis, and Alexis de Tocqueville, he lacks the historical depth he feigns...

...The differences are marginal: military uniforms rather than those of police, tanks instead of crowd containers, gun smoke instead of tear gas...

...McCarthy and editor Keith Burris, who has contributed an overly adoring introduction, assume that his past gives him unique insights into today's politics and policy...

...McCarthy had seized his historic moment, but then history had proceeded without him, and he had never quite recovered...

...But however enchanting Bobby remains to aging journalists and liberals, McCarthy was a more important historical figure...

...He ran for President again in 1976 as an independent, getting only 680,390 votes, or less than I percent of the total...

...The studies he cites, showing the benefits of growing up without brothers or sisters, just confirm my suspicions: only children tend to have higher IQs, get better health care, and "score slightly better on an 'anomie index.'" It doesn't take a social scientist to figure out that the bigger the brood, the less time and inclination for storytelling, enriching field trips, and thoughtful dinnerFRANCIS X. ROCCA is managing editor of The American Spectator...

...One Is Enough—Or Is It Too Many...

...His thoughts on the subject of reformers and their plans might suffice for a long magazine piece, but in a 273-page volume they are stretched so thin as to become nearly invisible...

...70 August 19 9 8 The American Spectator...

...Perkins was a graduate of Mount Holyoke...

...This year, the 3oth anniversary of one of the most tumultuous years in American history, we have been inundated with lachrymose remembrances of Robert F. Kennedy...

...Yet to prove this specialness he merely goes on reciting the atrocities man has inflicted on the planet...

...McKibben knows that there is nothing new about warnings that the environmental end is nigh...

...Beginning a decade after that, by one projection, "world population would shrink by roughly 25 percent with each successive generation...

...His emphatic belief is that "we could not have run the antiwar campaign of 1968 without wealthy donors, now banned under reform laws...

...table conversation...

...McCarthy says Iraq has a population of 12 million, which is low by about 9 million...

...Burris is guilty of his own serious lapse in the introduction when he repeats the myth that McCarthy led Richard Nixon in the polls at the time of the Democratic convention...

...But often the reader is left wondering what on earth is the point of this exercise...

...The worst was Martin Durkin of the Eisenhower administration...

...When Johnny Carson asked him during the 1968 campaign if he thought he would make a good president, McCarthy replied that he would make an "adequate" one...

...He brings to mind the (possibly apocryphal) story that a few years after being buried by Ronald Reagan, Mon-dale ran into George McGovern and asked, "How long does it take to stop hurting...

...He meanders without haste through a variety of broad subjects, from "The Fever to Do Good" to "Congress—It Used to Work...

...The most notorious case is that of Thomas Malthus, who foretold in 1798 that humans would soon number too many to feed themselves...

...He had the air of a star college athlete twenty years later, stuck in a job that offered none of the glory he had tasted so young...

...Stone was one of the better influences on Nixon...

...The people who helped this along were his palace guard, not fat cats," says McCarthy...

...McKibben's positive case for stopping at one child per couple rests on environmental grounds...

...He describes Clement Stone, a lifelong Midwesterner who made his fortune in insurance and publishing, and recently celebrated his ninety-sixth birthday, as "the late Texas financier...

...That sounds vague and unfocused, and it is...

...The world's population, now almost six billion, is growing at the rate of "a New York City every month...

...McCarthy's purpose is to expose the hollowness of many modern political customs and to offer better ways to address 68 August 1998 • The American Spectator the nation's problems...

...He accuses President Bush of making no effort to ban chemical and biological weapons, though Bush negotiated and signed a worldwide treaty banning chemical armaments...

...Thus, "The best secretary of labor was Frances Perkins...

...One suspects that what makes this time special ("in almost an emotional sense," as he tellingly admits) is that Bill McKibben happens to be living in it...

...For we live in "a special time," a phrase he repeats over and over like an incantation...

...The only reason to read this book is to acquaint oneself with the qualities that led McCarthy to his rendezvous with history—his stubbornness and impatience with those who see the world differently, his sober attachment to his idiosyncratic principles, and, not least important, his exalted sense of himself...

...end his term by announcing that no violation of law or morality has been found" — though eight independent counsels have closed up shop without seeking a single indictment...

...When he spoke in public, he gave the impression of a supple and unpredictable mind at work, not a tape recorder robotically playing back a canned pitch...

...If he means this passage as a serious claim, he needs to justify it...

...If he means it as a wisecrack, he needs to make it funny...

...He laments the transformation of the Senate, which the founders intended as a check on popular sentiment...

...There are occasional glimpses of the McCarthy wit, as when he says that gadfly Washington reporter Sarah McLendon operated "on the theory that it was impossible, or nearly impossible, to make a dishonest person honest, but that with a little luck and with courage, one might make a dishonest person truthful, at least for a little while...

...Leave aside the prospect of cleaner technologies, which seem to be the post-industrial trend...

...It is too bad there weren't ten of him...

...He misquotes the line uttered by an anonymous cog in the Chicago Democratic machine that served as the title for Milton Rakove's book, We Don't Want Nobody Nobody Sent...

...It was he, not RFK, who had the surpassing nerve to challenge a formidable (and formidably unscrupulous) incumbent president of his own party —and, and, with his surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire presidential primary, dealt Lyndon Johnson a mortal STEVE CHAPMAN is a syndicated columnist on the staff of the Chicago Tribune...

...He describes this book as "a series of reflections about a series of attitudes—the attitudes of the postmoderns and their hopes and promises for reform of politics...

...The Chicago police behaved brutally, but they didn't invade a sovereign country with half a million troops to Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Argument for Single-Child Families Bill McKibben Simon & Schuster / 254 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Francis X. Rocca A s the oldest of three children, I was receptive to Bill McKibben's argument for single-child families...

...Even McKibben assumes that our numbers will peak around 2050, but at lo or 11 billion if present trends continue: "Will these be the 5 billion straws that snap the camel's back...

...He says it is "unlikely that any special prosecutor will44 However enchanting Bobby remains to aging liberals, McCarthy was a more important figure...

...McKibben claimsthat global warming, less than ten years ago a mere hypothesis, is now "a fact...

...As for the bad stereotypes—that the single child is spoiled, lonely, or just plain odd—these have never jibed with my experience, and McKibben handily debunks the skewed research that has long reinforced them...

...The qualities that made him an appealing politician, however, don't suffice to make him an interesting writer or thinker...

...Crusaders against overpopulation typically focus on non-white, underdeveloped countries...

...Eighteen years later, he is still ridiculing John Anderson for misusing the word "perpetrate...

...Since Burris gets a rare editor's credit on the title page, he also deserves a half-share of the blame for the errors that are scattered throughout the book...

...As for the assumption that money is a malignant influence in politics, he notes that W. Clement Stone was one of Nixon's most generous supporters but had nothing to do with Watergate...

...A recent article by Nicholas Eberstadt, which McKibben mentions but does not discuss, argues that this drop could start within ten years in the richer nations, and within fifty years overall, with the number of people on the planet peaking in 2040 at less than eight billion...

...He scoffs at Ross Perot's supporters, claiming that they are "exurbanites" who are "beyond the reach of public transportation, water systems and sewage, having their own wells and their own septic tanks (the ultimate symbol of independence), served by volunteer fire departments and county police"—to which the natural reply is, "Prove it...

...I had the opportunity to meet him in 1980, when he came by The New Republic magazine office to have lunch with my boss, his old friend and supporter Martin Peretz, who invited me and a fellow TNR staffer to come along...

...McGovern replied, "I'll let you know when I find out...

...The Malthusians have been wrong, and the optimists such as Ester Boserup and Julian Simon right, McKibben grants—until now...

...Certainly this is a far better book than you would expect of most senators...

...But Times Books didn't do McCarthy a favor...

...Yet the pluses of being an "only," the author admits, are marginal: no more than a few percentage points in most studies...

...He wielded a deft wit that made the humor of other politicians sound heavy and clumsy—as when he unforgettably captured the essence of a fellow Minnesotan by saying that Walter Mondale had "the soul of a vice president...

...It's hard to imagine a major publisher putting its imprint on such a haphazard assortment of undeveloped thoughts as this if they were not written by someone famous...

...Clean Gene: The Forgotten Hero of 1968 No-Fault Politics: Modern Presidents, the Press, and Reformers Eugene McCarthy Edited by Keith C. Burris Times Books / 273 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Steve Chapman R egardless of what you thought of his views, Eugene McCarthy was a hard politician to dislike...

...Years later, I was sent an album put together by someone who was at the convention, showing, on opposite pages, scenes from Prague and from Chicago, 1968," he says, referring to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...blow that soon caused him to abandon his re-election bid...

...What makes such alarmism hard to buy is the news that world population is soon to go down...

...Here his past endows him with a moral authority that some critics of reform lack...

...Nothing that has happened to him since, though, has come remotely close to what he achieved in 1968...

...He complains that, unlike in the 1930's, people now pay considerable attention to those nominated and elected to the vice presidency, which he dismisses as "a charming constitutional anachronism...

...Instead, the one institution of national government that could (and was intended to) provide wisdom, detachment and balance is reduced to acting as a second House and/or presidential breeding ground...

...As an ideal," writes McCarthy, "the Senate should be one part House of Lords, one part Greek chorus, and one part Platonic guardians...

...The ratio of chaff to wheat is too high to afford much nutriment...

...Then a second-term senator from Minnesota, he adhered to principles that hadn't hardened into dogma...

...I can think of four reasons vice presidents have gotten more scrutiny over the last fifty years: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George Bush, each of whom went directly from the vice presidency to the The American Spectator • August 1998 69 presidency, three of them without an intervening election...

...He didn't have to convince me that gaining a sibling, with the loss of parental attention it entails, can be like "boot camp...

...strangle an emerging democracy...

...McCarthy spent much of the lunch carping, with forced humor...

...He points to them not as the basis for his argument, only to dispel reservations readers might have about it...

...McCarthy apparently never forgets a gripe, no matter how petty...

...Topsoil is wearing away, rivers running dry, grain reserves getting low, fish catches dropping...

...McCarthy has special scorn for campaign finance laws intended to reduce the role of money, which he says "actually increased the power of money by creating advantage for wealthy people (Steve Forbes, Perot) and creatures of interest groups (or PACs), which is exactly what Bill Clinton and Bob Dole had become by 1996...

...In fact, he trailed in both the Harris and Gallup polls...

...I remember him ridiculing John Anderson—whose third-party candidacy in that year's presidential election won 5.7 million votes—for misusing the word "perpetrate" in a debate with Carter and Ronald Reagan...

...Then he largely disappeared from public view...

...They are all on display here, but in McCarthy's case they expressed themselves far more memorably in his actions than they do in his words...

...Only after McCarthy had shown LBJ's vulnerability did Kennedy enter the race, a decision that branded him permanently among McCarthy's followers and much of the rest of the American public as a calculating opportunist, not the bold man of vision depicted today...

...A procession of doom sayers has followed, whose ranks McKibben surveys as he tries to distance himself from them...

...Durkin was a union member...

...Africans and Asians are reproducing at a faster rate than Americans and Europeans, he acknowledges, but only because the poorer regions are finally getting around to industrializing, which means the same improvements in medicine and nutrition that boosted Western populations in the last century...

...But McKibben is innocent of their crypto-racism...

...McCarthy changed history, and with luck might have changed it more...

...McCarthy appeared a faintly bitter man who looked down on his fellow politicians and felt annoyance that people of clearly inferior ability and intellect had succeeded at the profession he had abandoned...

...M cCarthy's factual errors are not random lapses but symptoms of a general indiscipline...

...he asks ominously...

...On the topic of reform, he is sometimes persuasive and, when not persuasive, at least provocative...