McCarthy redux
Burns, Keith
Minnesota election McCarthy redux THE RETURN OF A 'PUBLIC MAN' ON MARCH 18, one day after St. Patrick's Day, Eugene J. McCarthy announced he was running for his old job as senator from Minnesota....
...I have seen McCarthy at some of those meetings, like a father comforting the bereaved...
...They'll remember all the speeches and appearances for causes and candidates no one else would support...
...McCarthy's pursuit of his idosyn-cratic convictions has sometimes seemed almost to be daring his supporters to disown him...
...They'll remember all the issues that were his alone ten or twenty years before anyone else knew they were there...
...McCarthy has been rightly called "granddaddy of the peace movement...
...In the last ten years McCarthy has probably spoken to at least half of them...
...A difficult man to follow because he is a kind of artist at politics: everything is intuitive...
...He gave up that same job twelve years ago, endorsing longtime friend and rival Hubert Humphrey for the seat...
...He was too serious a politician to seek refuge in innocence...
...He is in the great maverick tradition of the Senate, exemplified by men like Wayne Morse, Stephen Young, Ernest Greuning, and William Ful-bright...
...Not easy men...
...In 1977 The New Republic wrote: "McCarthy's temperament is philosophical and reflective...
...That was when Humphrey was as out of fashion as Gene McCarthy is today...
...Nonetheless when he returned to the Senate he was not elected majority leader, he was not given the most distinguished committee assignments, and his last presidential campaign never happened because we were busy falling in love with an anti-politician named Carter...
...If the movement does grow as it seems it could, it will need a senator or two who won't get cold feet...
...Not that this prospect will necessarily lead people to listen to what McCarthy is saying now about corporate power or bureaucracy and the IRS...
...He was there in the 1970s when there was nothing but a skeleton...
...But if he does make it back to the Senate the press will rejoice in having a quotable senator other than Barry Goldwater (Millicent Fenwick, running in New Jersey, would be quotable too...
...Hubert's sin was that he played with the big boys...
...McCarthy's problem has been his dogged anti-heroism...
...politics, like literature, is ironical and tragic...
...They will remember '60 and '68, and all the articles in Commonweal and The New Republic...
...Eventually the liberals and the opinion formulators began to see that whatever his faults and mistakes (and no man can spend thirty years in politics without making mistakes), he was a rare "public man...
...Nor will it induce ninety percent of the folk who owe Mr...
...And as a creative art it begins in the initiator's head...
...Humphrey was that exceptional senator who brought the Senate honor rather than gleaning it...
...If McCarthy returns, this would also be true of him...
...And though the liberals may do little to help him get there, as with Humphrey, they will forget this once he is back...
...Certainly, but for Humphrey on civil rights, no politician has been more consistently con- ' cerned or identified with an issue than McCarthy with peace and disarmament...
...KEITH BURRIS (Keith Burris teaches political science at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania...
...Such a man does not conform, he sees things in his own way...
...Certainly not cult figures...
...America is not kind in politics to yesterday's prophet, and Humphrey had to fight his way back in...
...He waited...
...In Reinhold Niebuhr's wonderful phrase, he sometimes needed to "cover himself with guilt...
...McCarthy has enormous ability and an exceptional congressional record...
...militarism and the defense budget, the CIA, migrant workers, welfare mothers, Vietnam, civil rights, human rights, detente and disarmament, the automobile and the energy question, and on and on...
...small sad groups all throughout the country teetering on despair...
...McCarthy an abiding debt to lift a finger to elect one superior man to a Senate currently controlled by zealots and clods...
...He served a second apprenticeship in the Senate...
...But he is as much a practical liberal as a visionary...
...McCarthy," he said, "has come forward as defender of the American faith...
...But good and courageous senators...
...Humphrey's liberalism was out of vogue and tarnished by his mistakes...
...Indeed the nuclear freeze movement would do well to concentrate its efforts on congressional elections this year...
...In 1968 Walter Lippmann wrote...
...McCarthy's problems, of course, are not what Humphrey's were...
...The mission of Senator McCarthy is to do whatever a gifted and honest man can do to stop the rot in the American political system...
...The McCarthy mystique, once the source of precisely the sort of admiration the Minnesotan abhors (this I think was the basis of his Kennedy phobia and in this too, he was prescient) should not distract us...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 7
