MIRRORS ON THE DEMOCRATS

...yet that is a benefit bequeathed to the admirers of every losing candidate, and seldom so far indulged as to create a market for a two-volume biography, the first volume of which runs to nearly 800 pages...

...Martin worked as a speechwriter for Stevenson in die 1952 campaign, but now he thinks Stevenson was of a type that simply does not get elected President: "He was, indeed, an off-trail candidate, a sport, a man who behaved and talked unlike almost any other candidate in recent memory...

...For example, had the choice of a President been thrown into the House of Representatives in 1968, the House might have made as good a choice as that made by the minority of voters who elected Richard Nixon...

...And this condition is not improved by Burns' effort to locate Kennedy in terms of "the flawed legacy of Camelot," a conception which upon elaboration proves so wanting in judgment and even taste, as to make it difficult to regard Burns' study, for all its impressive thoughtful-ness, as truly a serious one...

...Indeed, so quiet, so uninflected is his voice...

...Events did not entirely control Steveson's political appearance, yet he did come to seem to many rather more liberal in bis political views than in fact he was...

...By this high standard, the recent record is certainly not encouraging...

...for in the fun-house mirror of politics, conscientiousness could easily assume the shape of indecision, and ambition checked, of weakness revealed...

...that not even the somewhat too familiar flash of his wit is enough to rouse one entirely from distraction...

...Through the years he had grown convinced that the Democratic party had become 'an odds and ends patchwork of theories and expediencies, tainted with Populism, haunted by Bryanesque wildness, unfit to govern since the Civil War.' Cleveland had been elected in spite of the party...

...There is a least no hint in the magnificently detailed first volume of John Bartlow Martin's biography that Stevenson ever gave serious thought to abandoning the party which he seems to have come to originally as the result less of any sustained scrutiny of its record than of some force as little rationalistic as tradition or heredity (his grandfather had been vice president under Grover Cleveland...

...it is almost as if somehow he does not fully exist, except as a creation of others...

...They did reject him, of course, as it was by then, as even McCarthy knew, inevitable that they should...

...And because he had integrity...

...No other agency could be expected to do the job for the nation...

...Adolph Hitler, it will be recalled, was appointed chancellor with a coalition cabinet in which the Nazis were in a minority...

...Martin labored for a decade on this work and his dedication has paid off: the first volume is a triumph of the Old Journalism, telling us more about Stevenson, from birth through his defeat in 1952, than any previous work has or than any subsequent one soon is likely to, and doing so in such a way as to gain our confidence that we are actually encountering the real Stevenson...

...The alternative is to surrender the United States indefinitely to the Democrats and Republicans-to let them just take turns running the country...

...Ironically, were this to happen, a result might be to provoke one or more additional parties into existence...

...If he could run against Taft, he would replay the old debate of the William Allen White Committee days and he could be comfortable and probably win...

...He was remote, too, in the doubtless more significant sense that, while he apprehended the political realities, he did not simply yield to them, but instead, without thereby seeking to escape those realities, actually tried to submit them to moral judgment It was a difficult and demanding undertaking, one which may very well have received, very privately, special force from a childhood accidwt in which Stevenson, age 12, shot and killed a playmate...

...McCarthy is doubtless correct in supposing that the two-party system is not beyond challenge...

...The formulation of such policies would have to become a prime party responsibility...

...Nevertheless, McCarthy may be onto something...

...Still, there continue to be those, among them scholars like Herbert S. Parmet and James MacGregor Burns, who hope to see the Democratic party made more responsible, more disciplined, more fit to govern...

...There must be similarly conservative men today, listening to the former governor of Georgia...

...Much, including not least the future of the Democratic party, may depend on how it turns out...

...Stevenson was more responsible...

...McCarthy seems in this collection of essays and appreciations, as well as in his previous works, to proceed from an analogous conception of the proper way to exercise the Office of Writer...

...After encountering Stevenson's private opinions of Truman's "Fair Deal" at a meeting in March, 1952, one member of the Americans for Democratic Action came away ' wondering if he should counsel his colleagues to labor to prevent, not promote, Stevenson's candidacy...

...The elder Kennedy's portrait, well and justly done, hangs in Francis Russell's gallery of "President makers," eight men without whom eight other men would not have become President...

...But now, the future (if not, thanks to Jimmy Carter, the very immediate future) of the party seems to some in doubt...

...And he was a friend-that was his great quality...

...but also true, it might not Richard Nixon is perhaps not the only menace to be avoided...

...Still, his apparent remoteness was an important part of his popular appeal (and so, of his utility to earth-bound party regulars), and it was more than just a pose: He was somewhat remote from ordinary politics, which he never experienced at its lower levels...

...And yet, withal, Stevenson was a political realist...

...but if the transformation were truly a success, that is, if the Democratic party did become, and demonstrate that it was, more fit to govern, then, presumably, the strength of any newborn parties would be negligible...

...His instinct told him to run against Taft but not against Eisenhower, and his instinct was right...

...and yet still somehow one is drawn fitfully into his (as he deemed it in 1968) "constituency of conscience," there to glimpse such sensible notions as the appointing of non-lawyers to the Supreme Court, and to experience the strange and curiously liberating effect produced by a politician so like a free man...

...The much more articulate Burns is much less sanguine about Democratic maturity...

...In later years," Martin writes, "talking about him after his death, some of Stevenson's liberal friends wondered why they forgave him what they considered his shortcomings -his old remarks about Jews, his clear intellectual rather than passionately emotional commitment to civil rights, his loyal defense of policies of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in which they thought he did not believe...

...yet it is fully adequate to serve as frame for this incisive and entertaining exercise in History-as-Journalism...

...but then, as Martin, with a loving candor, makes clear, neither was Stevenson...

...Not the least fascinating part of Martin's book is that in which he scrutinizes the forces at work upon and within Stevenson when he was led, by President Truman's withdrawal and the liabilities of the other possible candidates, to consider accepting his party's presidential nomination in 1952...

...that is, one with more democratic procedures and a better-informed electorate...

...Speculation about what Kennedy as President might attempt or accomplish seems now, of course, if not entirely irrelevant, then nearly so...

...Still, he does perform a service by reminding us of how useful a senator Kennedy apparently has become and of how little the tragedy of Chappaquiddick really tells us about him...

...Kennedy and his brothers were uncertain, back in late 1960, if he should run in 1962 for the Senate, but one man, as Burns notes, was sure: their father, Joseph...

...He took many things into consideration, and it was a complex decision," Martin writes...

...A man presented for the Presidency, McCarthy said in 1968, "should understand that this country does not so much need leadership, because the potential for leadership in a free country must exist in every man an every woman...

...such men do not get elected President...

...still, it would be an exceptionally severe judge who did not come, in the end, to feel about him almost as they do...

...Still, perhaps it is worth noting that he concludes, "The Democrats were showing every indication of maturing from the pragmatic progresssi-vism of the New Deal that had inspired their modern foundations and were becoming, instead, intellectually devoted to giving substance to the rhetoric that Democrats are the party that 'care about people.' Instead of debilitating programs designed for the sake of keeping everybody within the 'big tent,' they would have to substitute demonstrated leadership capable of coping with the domestic and international conditions in a manner consistent with the best interest of their constituents...

...as Martin shows, he expressed such ambition as early as 1930, when he was 30 years old...

...Can it be true that the compromising, moderating and unifying effects long regarded as among the principal virtues of our two-party system are becoming less necessary than they used to be...

...Although he always seemed to many to be at some distance from ordinary politics, from its less-than-noble and never-ending machinations, in fact Stevenson was not devoid of political ambition...

...Parmet, despite his dilligence and good intentions, is, I am afraid, of little use in contemplating these matters...

...In another decade," Burns notes, "the Democratic party may have deteriorated to a point beyond resuscitation...

...McCarthy himself wanders the byways as an independent, persuaded that "The discontent in the country could well manifest itself in a successful independent or third-party effort in the near future...

...But if he must run against Eisenhower, he had lost the foreign policy issue, he faced a national hero, and he would probably lose...

...The two-party system can be defended," he writes, "only if Hie parties themselves are responsive to the needs of the country and if they give the people a choice on major issues affecting the country...

...He must be prepared to be a kind of channel for those desires and those aspirations, perhaps giving some direction to the movement of the country largely by the way of setting free...

...In fact," McCarthy continues, "a coalition might result in better government...

...Doubtless Stevenson's failure to gain the White House left his admirers a little too free simply to celebrate his virtues and to imagine that, had he won, those virtues would have sufficed in any truly important matter...

...Only a southerner, one acceptable to the North, could lead such a renewal party, restore it to its old preeminence, return it to its great heritage of before the war...

...That this indispensability should entitle Russell's subjects to be thought of as "makers" of Presidents is a conceit not to be taken, in every case, entirely seriously...

...True, a coalition might result in better government...

...The result is mind-numbing...

...George Ball, asked why, replied, 'Because of his gaiety, his wit, his style, and his guts...

...It was, however, essentially a political decision...

...but it is an appeal to a narrow segment of the population...

...In fact, Stevenson made his basic political stand in the middle ground of his party, and that was a place which, especially to a moral absoutist, was not without serious faults...

...But events controlled...

...On the record, they have not done very well by the country in recent years...

...but certainly it was not so long afterward that there came to be increasingly infrequent reason for anyone to be very proud to be called Democrat...

...As it turned out, of course, Harvey ended up hating Wilson...

...McCarthy evidently suspects so, for he writes: "A two-party system may be a device that makes immature democracy work, but it is less necessary in a mature democracy...

...So Stevenson is manifestly someone special...

...There was about him a certain superficial resemblance to the Senator Eugene McCarthy of 1968 whose campaign against the Vietnam War that year produced success in the New Hampshire primary...

...One's doubts that Stevenson would have been do not so much diminish one's respect for him as simply increase it for McCarthy...

...still, Martin seems insufficiently appreciative of McCarthy's accomplishments in 1968 and, perhaps as a result, avoids wondering if Stevenson, in circumstances similar to McCarthy's, would have been so "irresponsible" as to challenge a President from his own party who persisted in waging a senseless war...

...so muffled, so tentative, his conclusions...

...But McCarthy later behaved in a careless, offhand, eccentric, erratic way, as when he relinquished his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...Indeed, for all the labors of Burns and of how many others, for all of the innumerable words which have poured forth to tell us about this Kennedy, it is remarkable how indistinct a figure he remains, only seeming to come somewhat into focus when he is awfully suffering or bearing witness against violence...

...What the Democrats needed was a candidate to be elected with the party...

...A formal and identifiable coalition in the House and Senate might work better than the floating coalitions which now mark the Congress...

...Burns tries, at one point, to decide if a "President"- Edward Kennedy would seek to realign and modernize the Democratic party, and finally concludes, none too persuasively, that Kennedy would (but, Burns adds, the odds would be against his succeeding...

...If mat is so, and if, even as the influence of old-fashioned political machines wanes, the "consuming purpose of American parties" remains, in the late Clinton Rossiter's words, "to create an electoral majority rather than doctrinal unity, to win power rather than to use it," then, as McCarthy says, discontent could well manifest itself in a successful independent or third-party effort, if not in the near future, then just beyond...

...This may well be true...

...Whether, if they hadn't, it would have made any real difference, will never be known...

...Part of the difficulty is that he has attempted to cast his history of the Democratic party since 1945 in the form of a chronological narrative, a form to which it seems little suited...

...The rest of the difficulty is that he writes poorly...

...Such men attract followers who become idolaters...

...Harvey listened with the rapt attentiveness of a convert at a revival meeting, and, like any convert, his moment of enlightenment was the culmination of a long series of psychological effects...

...T)he cardinal question about the two major parties today is not whether they can help govern but whether they can even survive...

...It was also an undertaking not without its risks...

...MIRRORS ON THE DEMOCRATS ROBERT K. LANDERS Aerial Stevenson of Illinois JOHN BARTLOW MARTIN Doubleday, $15 The Hard Years eugene j. McCarthy Viking, $8.95 The Democrats: The Year* Alter FDR HERBERT S. PARMET Macmillan, $12.95 Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS Norton, $11.95 Tfce President Makers: Front jtfarle Banna to Joseph P. Kennedy FRANCIS RUSSEL Little, Brown, $12.50 IT WAS in 1960, which now seems a -*- time long ago, that Eugene McCarthy besceched the Democrats assembled in convention in Los Angeles not to reject Adlai Stevenson, not to reject "this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats...

...One is a little reminded of Ambrose Bierce's distinction between a conservative and a liberal, the former being "A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others...

...Despite that recent record, one rather doubts that the man whom McCarthy so eloquently nominated in 1960 would be joining him today in apostasy...

...One brisk day in October, 1902, as Russell tells us, George Harvey, conservative Democrat and editor of Harper's Weekly, sat at the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson as president of Princeton University, and listened for the first time to the man, likewise then a conservative Democrat, whom he later would "make" President of the United States...

...He would do almost anything for a friend.'" Several of Stevenson's defects seem rather more serious than his friends are readily inclined to admit...