A Little Symposium on the McCarthy Campaign
Clark, Joseph & Kramer, Albert & Peretz, Martin
We asked a few friends to analyze the McCarthy campaign—here are their responses. Martin Peretz teaches at Harvard and has been active in the peace movement; Joseph Clark wrote "Of Views,...
...Even now, Bobby Kennedy's public utterances make him appear more at odds with the President and in tune with the nation's insurgent young than does McCarthy...
...The Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at City College was after all the ideologist of our squalid little war against the Cubans, to fix only on the one incident where his intellectual taste for belligerence actually appeared somewhat to sway events...
...They are sorely mistaken—though I do not mean to imply that McCarthy should make position concessions to the Left...
...And anybody with the slightest awareness of how even this sorely debilitated system works knows that even a circumscribed minority—providing it is organized, has a reservoir of post-election elan and is strategically placed geographically and at particular points in the class structure—can exert fulcrum strength in setting limits to the exercise of power...
...Albert Kramer is the pen name of the staff member of an AFL—CIO union.—ED...
...SO WE OWE SENATOR GENE MCCARTHY a vote of our deep appreciation...
...1. Martin Peretz EUGENE MCCARTHY has demonstrated enormous political courage in challenging President Johnson directly in the primaries...
...The desires of an impatient elite, even when armed with the latest word from Debray, will have little effect on the march of events...
...But they all speak in those cock-sure, jaded tones that even McCarthy, an honest man, is not entirely able to resist...
...With the fortunes of this war being what they are, the strategy of telling the truth and the strategy of political success are at last and self-evidently one...
...He takes all this stoically, and he is not a driven man or a possessed one...
...In any case, the one option for democratic radicals is trying to restore some semblance of democratic choice to our politics...
...Whether the contests were between Republican-Democrats and Federalists, adherents of slavery or freedom, progressivism, populism and the New Freedom or McKinleyism, rugged individualism or the New Deal, old or new frontiers, the course of our history was always vitally affected by the electoral process...
...So Gene McCarthy must carry the torch for peace, however limited by lack of funds and staff and what the journalists call charisma...
...Warm, working bodies are after all a necessity in any campaign...
...Demanding an ideological posture from McCarthy which they know he does not hold, they will perversely prefer the ugly lucidity of the present incumbent...
...The studied moderation of McCarthy's initial appearances and speeches were helpful, I think...
...Social priorities, the crisis of the cities, race relations, the hopes of America's youth—all lie in the shadow of Vietnam...
...And since he has risked the ire of the supremely powerful in this country, we can be sure that he has done so only because of the most compelling conviction that this war is, by any measure, beyond the endurance of moral men...
...If McCarthy wins some of the primaries or does exceptionally well, the course of national policy can be affected, positively...
...But I have little THE MCCARTHY CAMPAIGN patience for those who fear a weak showing by him will push Johnson to the Right...
...Whatever happens, McCarthy will have earned the gratitude of the nation...
...That style reflects the dead-hand of American politics: the unarticulated canon of elitist evasiveness and the amply articulated dogma of the Cold War in its most dubious manifestations...
...The outcome of an election was often decisive in determining the path taken by America...
...He put the Vietnam issue where it belongs—in politics, in an arena where people can be influenced, organized, and where voters can be aroused—at this stage, primarily in the states where McCarthy has entered the primaries...
...He is not a man much given to the quixotic gesture...
...MCCARTHY MERITS OUR ESTEEM on these grounds alone, and most especially because he must know that though it is he who is making dangerous investments, it may be the Junior Senator from New York who will do the inheriting...
...As for those shrill incendiaries of battles past who now assure us that—hang the Vietnamese!—we can have a war as well as more welfare and an extension of civil rights, their feel for what is politically possible makes even less sense than their economic calculus...
...It's even conceivable, though hardly likely, THE MCCARTHY CAMPAIGN that Johnson will switch his position in midstream...
...A writer in the Wall Street Journal (Jan...
...More often than not, this argument comes from people who really like Johnson just where he is, though nowadays they are not always willing to admit it...
...We asked a few friends to analyze the McCarthy campaign—here are their responses...
...Then, at least, the worst predilections of their theories may come to pass...
...A more cynical man than he would, in these circumstances, be more distrusting of the feckless establishment liberals now giving him advice, even as their hopes reside elsewhere and they wait poised for an opportunity to show how fickle they can be...
...McCarthy has to exert heroic efforts to remain in the mainstream of politics, the only place where he can be effective against Johnson's war...
...Joseph Clark wrote "Of Views, Aims, and Dogmas: A Letter to my Son" for our May-June 1967 issue...
...Save for the Stevenson speech in Los Angeles, he has never been the master of what in America goes for great rhetoric...
...History has settled the issue and revolutionary posturing helps no one but the right-wing reactionary...
...We were not prepared that it be he who would do battle with Johnson...
...But even he seems to believe that the ADA liberal intellectual professionals, now belatedly against the war and behaving as if their opposition legitimates everyone else's, can actually turn out warm, working bodies...
...Reform rather than revolution is the method by which popular demands will be advanced...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his friendship for Senator McCarthy notwithstanding, composes no immortal prose for him...
...It is interesting that the Wall Street Journal writer counts not only the cost of the war in adversely affecting the balanceofpayments problem, inflationary pressures, and the diversion of federal resources from domestic welfare, but in "the rebellion and estrangement of so many young people, clergy and academicians...
...Clearly, his politics—whatever their infelicities—are his...
...Even in California, the recent revival of the Left Democracy was largely induced by the real threat of wholesale defections of very populous Left factions from the party...
...Denying the campaign their support is not, however, the kind of "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency" of which Veblen spoke...
...2. Joseph Clark E E VEN BEFORE THE ADVENT of universal manhood suffrage, national elections were the occasion of widespread popular agitation...
...If the campaign is made the vehicle of those ambitious, now middle-aged lawyers, and Washington THE MCCARTHY CAMPAIGN oriented academics already calculating the steps back to respectable docility, there the independently war-anguished or even warapprehensive citizen will see it as yet another sham event—as almost all the forays of the Democratic reform elements have been...
...Perhaps he is sustained by the characteristic solipsism of small men in thinking that the nation would be in greater crisis still if he were to fall flat on his face...
...Those who shape Johnson's Vietnam policies would enjoy nothing so much as identification of the McCarthy campaign with the political hippies and adherents of the Viet Cong...
...Such decent, well-intentioned, and nonsullen radicals could have, and in some places—even as this is read weeks after it is written—might yet make a difference...
...17, 1968) describes the cost of the war: "Every day, in fact, brings fresh evidence that the bill, foreign and domestic, far exceeds anything the nation remotely perceived as it slid into its involvement there, and far exceeds anything the nation perceives even now...
...Rather, it is selfdefeating— at least for those nondogmatic radicals who are embarrassed into a handsoff attitude by the sneers of the doctrinaires...
...UNFORTUNATELY, MANY of McCarthy's generals seem to believe that it would be desirable to do without the ardors of the Left...
...Nor will electoral politics centered on splin ter parties be of any value in settling anything, or in clarifying matters in any way...
...We are so accustomed to the mechanized and relentless smoothie as aspirant for high public office that we are disoriented by someone who is reflective, self-conscious, and honest...
...Martin Peretz teaches at Harvard and has been active in the peace movement...
...With the experts forecasting very small support for McCarthy there is little to be lost if this is indeed the case...
...His last great splash had been in 1960 as a dissident voice at the convention that nominated John Kennedy for the Presidency...
...Only our most ebullient left flanks will not see this...
...But if the campaign is free-wheeling in a rather old-fashioned American sense, and if it is tough and to the point, there is some chance that McCarthy may catch on...
...What would be so wrong with a President whose worst quality would be that he is laconic...
...But with the exception of California, they cannot and they have not for more than a decade turned out the troops...
...I am, of course, not optimistic about McCarthy's chances...
...That would be fine...
...What's more likely—if McCarthy wins substantial support— is that he, or another Democrat, perhaps Kennedy, or a Republican, perhaps Rockefeller, will be elected in November and will take the Vietnam conflict to the peace table...
...Apparently, the candidate takes even that philosophically...
...The political experiences of the last generation, successes as well as failures, suggest that electoral work is the one mode of activity that can galvanize people into such a community of shared values and effort...
...He took up the challenge when others faltered...
...But Kennedy, who is wont to tell you at the mere sight of a handful of coeds that the country is in a crisis comparable only to the ordeal of union a century ago, will not take even the slightest risks...
...More than ever before, political campaigns and elections, are the major means for determining policies...
...The cautious trimmers, animated at best by nostalgia for conscience, and having embraced McCarthy, have been able toaffect the style of the campaign...
...a decent effort should win far more support than is expected...
...Barricades and civil war are hardly likely methods for making important decisions or accomplishing change in the nation...
...Though many issues face the nation today, all are related to the war in Vietnam...
...Who can blame the Senator, who has been over the years closer to them than to us, for eyeing their promises covetously...
...At least in the creation of new coalitions with an active Left that is conscious of the need for vision in politics, if even it is now still barely able to describe that vision...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
