California Primaries: Disarray before Assassination
Kaufman, Arnold S.
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE story two days after the Oregon primary was entitled "How McCarthy `Caught Fire' in Oregon" (through his sharp attacks on Bobby Kennedy, it conjectured). Next to...
...Nor had any of the 50 state Democratic leaders who met and COMMENTS AND OPINIONS formed the first McCarthy organization on No vember 11...
...Robert Kennedy had encouraged the groups that invited him to press on with their work...
...But that state sends only 35 delegates to the Convention...
...We had asked the Senator to try to stop Johnson, to try to stop the war, to try to re-order national priorities, to breathe new life into the American political process...
...I remembered also that Robert Kennedy had publicly accepted his share of the responsibility for the disaster in Vietnam, had confessed to error...
...how the slaughter must cease...
...That this is so is something we have somehow failed to communicate to McCarthy...
...At least the McCarthy ad focuses on a basic issue...
...The difficulties are a bit greater with Humphrey because he has somewhat more credibility, certainly fewer enemies, than Johnson...
...If by some miracle, McCarthy wins the nomi nation, those of us who feel as I do will be elated...
...Personally, I think McCarthy would make the better President...
...I remembered the meeting Zolton Ferency, Al Lowenstein, and I had in my home in Ann Arbor just before Al went off to Washington to ask McCarthy to run...
...I came to a full-page McCarthy ad...
...We had had one devil of a time rounding up all of a hundred people...
...And our failure is a measure of the electoral disaster that impends...
...It was all about Vietnam...
...I remembered the Congressional anti-Vietnam lobby that had been organized in Washington in April of 1965...
...There was my wife holding a McCarthy for President sign...
...I reread a clipping my friend Jack Gore had sent from Colorado...
...Moreover, on the Sunday news program after the "great debate" he said that, between Humphrey and Kennedy, he at present had no preference...
...But despite McCarthy's superior virtues, either man would be vastly superior to Humphrey—not just because of what each is, but because of what each represents in terms of prevailing social forces...
...Out of the debacle of the Johnson Administration is rising a new breed of indefatigable radicalliberals—people who'd rather be right than winners but who have the will, energy, and savvy to be both...
...I remembered that McCarthy had not even shown up when the first Fulbright-Rusk confrontation took place in early fall of 1965...
...McCarthy, RFK Coalition "Stops" Drive for Hubert," was the headline...
...By the same token, however, he has less power and must make the fight under a very considerable handicap: that he has slavishly and joyously served as the Administration's chief salesman...
...Rather we hoped and expected that he would pursue it as long as it was useful to do so in behalf of the aims and values we shared...
...We decided it would not be a bad thing to have that problem on our hands...
...We'll work our hearts out for him...
...And I disliked the crude way in which Kennedy decided to enter the race...
...Nor had Zolton or Al...
...I like his air of calm reason, his intellectual grasp of complex issues, the hint of burning moral passion that occasionally slips through his intellectual guard...
...The problem is not very different from the one facing the peace insurgency in New Hampshire —to convince the pros that they can't win with an Administration candidate...
...We were a lonely band...
...Next to this report, another headline read, "Humphrey Enjoys Oregon—and Counts Delegates...
...It was little more than a month after the escalation began, little less than a month before the National Teach-in...
...In Denver, three McCarthy and three Kennedy delegates had been elected...
...I looked at the photo of the first airport demonstration for McCarthy that we organized in Detroit's Metropolitan airport in early November...
...It maintains vital pressure on the negotiating process...
...McCarthy's staff, it seemed, was not succumbing to campaign madness...
...He was directly involved in the disaster of the Bay of Pigs...
...They also did very well in subsequent balloting...
...Our problem—those of us who are against the Johnson Administration and its heirs—is to make sure that anxieties about the consequences of an endless McCarthy-Kennedy battle are stilled...
...just one of those subtle lies of implication...
...He had, he explained, made commitments to those who asked him to run...
...And, as a member of the National Security Council, he must bear a part of the responsibility for our original— and fundamentally erroneous—decision to in terfere in Vietnam...
...And then I read: Kennedy was part of the original commit ment...
...THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE story two days after the Oregon primary was entitled "How McCarthy `Caught Fire' in Oregon" (through his sharp attacks on Bobby Kennedy, it conjectured...
...But if Kennedy takes the nomination, we'll be no less energetic...
...Why the hell did the McCarthy people have to lie, just like all the others...
...Humphrey can perhaps still be stopped...
...I remembered the hard-hitting antiwar speeches he began to make in 1965, long before McCarthy spoke out...
...Oh, not a bald-faced lie...
...Certainly, SANE's National Board, when it became the first independent organization to support McCarthy, offered its help in that spirit...
...Gore and the head of the McCarthy campaign in Colorado, George Williams, had organized, with Kennedy people, a group effort, precinct by precinct—together they had shut out the Humphrey forces in the first balloting...
...Yet both men could make good Presidents...
...Both Humphrey and Kennedy (and Nixon, Reagan and Rockefeller too) are part and par cel of the kind of thinking about America's role in the world that is leading us on to catas trophe...
...McCarthy and Kennedy leaders in Colorado kept their perspective...
...Robert Kennedy is not my ideal, I thought...
...The next day, in the Los Angeles Times, I read that McCarthy had said he would not bow out of the race regardless of what happened in the California primary or in the period before the Convention...
...His vanity and pride are just as capable of wrecking us as Kennedy's ambition and insensitivity...
...Very good, I thought...
...In Pennsylvania and Ohio, Hubert was raking them up...
...A member of the Foreign Relations Committee, McCarthy supported the President's policy at that time...
...As a charter member of the Dump-Johnson movement, a principal organizer of the Michigan McCarthy for President Committee, I had understandably mixed feelings as I continued to turn the pages...
...that there had been reports that top military brass had ordered the war to be won "within three months...
...This made me mad...
...There is reason to hope that either would redirect American energies away from pursuits of war, away from the arms race, and toward the building of a better America...
...but neither is Eugene McCarthy...
...And I thought, Dammit, she had never asked him to continue to run no matter what...
...The one thing Humphrey and his supporters must be made to understand is that—come what may, no matter who wins the nomination and the election—those of us who have made sur prising things happen in the recent past will continue to make them happen in the future...
...None for Humphrey...
...Our aim was to stop the war and to re-order national priorities...
...I remembered our discussion of what we called "The Kennedy Problem...
...We had never requested that he pursue the Presidency regardless of consequences, regardless of con tingencies...
...He displayed courage when he responded to the call for a candidate...
...Our opponents are only slightly different: Johnson then, Humphrey now...
...Above all, it does not emulate the mawkish sentimentality of the half-hour TV plug for Kennedy that I saw in Los Angeles a few nights ago, whose lack of reference to issues and use of the "sainted President's" memo ry had made me ill...
...And of course we never supposed that Johnson would drop out...
Vol. 15 • July 1968 • No. 4
