LETTERS
\Editors: Jean L. Cohen writes of "The Legacy of Herbert Marcuse" (Dissent, Winter 1981), expostulating his "penetrating analyses" and "spirit." In the spirit of Dissent, I dissent. Marcuse was...
...In the'70s I was disappointed by many of his positions and nonpositions, but until he endorsed Reagan I would have imagined him as part of any strong reconstruction of the Democratic party—if only as a once-legendary presence and still-serviceable rhetorician...
...Where that leaves him and his admirers I do not know...
...This is an awfully public life for someone who disdains it...
...The Humphrey endorsement has been explained again and again...
...The man I saw was warm, accessible, patient, and great fun...
...His sin is that he was never their man, but in the beginning and today remains his own...
...McCarthy was active in 1972 including campaigning extensively for and with George McGovern, whom he had little in common with but the war issue...
...Marcuse was a sad figure and his thought deficient for the following reasons: 1. His one-dimensionality is contrary to socioscientific evidence...
...I admired him in 1968 because he seemed to me sane about the war, liberal on domestic policy, courageous to have challenged LBJ in the first place, and therefore a worthier candidate than Kennedy...
...Burris might look at Jeremy Larner's memoir of 1968, Nobody Knows...
...The fascinating and sad puzzlement is that instead of accepting McCarthy for what he is, and seeing that it was precisely this independent quality that allowed him to step forth when all the McGoverns and Kennedys would not, the left's resentment has continued to fester...
...Burris think it a rational choice to work for McCarthy in 1976...
...I am amazed when "liberals" say McCarthy's 1976 effort was silly or positively bad, as if this were selfevident, and in the next breath declare their singular dedication to the "poor and helpless...
...And does he now agree with McCarthy's preference of Reagan over Carter...
...The real complaint is that he stayed in politics and continued to steer an independent course...
...Again certain facts seem to contradict this: his own campaigns since '68, help he has given to congressional and gubernatorial candidates, his legal and lobbying work against the federal election bureaucracy and the IRS, hundreds of speeches, scores of essays and articles, radio commentaries, etc...
...They were not of McCarthy's...
...The left was unhappy with McCarthy from the early days of 1968, and dimly perceived even then that they had made a marriage of convenience with a maverick...
...If McCarthy had left politics, or forsaken it after 1968, "liberals" of the Bromwich variety would be contented indeed...
...Will it be enough for them to heckle genially from the sidelines, wonder at how uncivilized everybody has become, and remember a time when campaigns were full of student-driven VWs...
...McCarthy introduced legislation to limit the power of the National Guard...
...Burris has confused a person with a cause...
...PAUL N. PARSONS...
...The endorsement may have been a renouncement of Bromwich's principals...
...For more on the enigmatic side of McCarthy's character, Mr...
...Did Mr...
...Finally, the now old saw that McCarthy turned against politics and decided he was too good for it...
...KEITH BURRIS University of Pittsburgh DAVID BROMWICH REPLIES: Mr...
...There was another race too, between Carter and Ford...
...McCarthy "let them down" because he was unwilling and unable to be a populist hero...
...But why should those of us to whom the cause is more important "accept McCarthy for what he is...
...I saw McCarthy a lot in 1976 when he was putting in 12-hour days of three or four speeches each and was transported mostly in VWs driven by students...
...I was at Kent State in the '70s where students felt pretty helpless...
...q "The Arabs of Israel" Editors: Bernard Rosenberg's article, "The Arabs of Israel" (Spring 1980), erroneously states that "In 1922 Britain partitioned Mandatory Palestine...
...ROGER A. GERBER New York City q Editors: David Bromwich's attack on Eugene McCarthy (Dissent, Winter 1981) was uncivilized and uninformed...
...2. Proletarian class consciousness is inhibited by shared societal values and not by "mass culture...
...McCarthy's endorsement of Reagan was not only consistent with his principles but included a restatement of many of them, some libertarian, some constitutionalist, some in fact liberal...
...Although I often disagree with articles in Dissent, they are always intelligent, and often they present a subject in a way that is entirely new to me...
...5. The purported repressive state is a figment of his disordered thinking...
...But, good as that book is, it contains nothing quite as revealing as Mr...
...He wrote for the tenth anniversary commemorative booklet the students put out last year...
...In fact, in 1922 Britain suspended the applicability of the Jewish National Home Provisions and the Mandate in "the province of Transjordan" and Transjordan remained subject to the Mandate until 1946 when it gained its independence...
...Incidentally, in many ways Marcuse was as Victorian as Karl Marx himself...
...On a personal level, let me say that I never met the petulent and arrogant enigma I've read so much about...
...this was McCarthy's last bit of leverage for moving Humphrey on the war...
...Food stamps cut, and the military budget up by one-third: is that a fair restatement of McCarthy's principles, "some libertarian, some constitutionalist, some in fact liberal...
...Would he hold this for Rev...
...Abernathy too...
...ELLIOTT A. COHEN Pomona, N.Y...
...The image of McCarthy, on campus, quoting Camus, to affirm his solidarity with the "humiliated or debased"—and incidentally to affirm a false equation between the humiliating and the "everyday" —completes the sketch I was trying to compose, and more brilliantly than anything I discovered on my own...
...I worked for McCarthy over Carter in 1976 in part because his record concerning the helpless was indisputable...
...More interesting was Bromwich's recitation of now familiar McCarthy mythology rooted, I believe, in the continuing bitterness of the left toward the former senator...
...4. Marcuse's idea of happiness is nothing but an embellished version of Karl Marx's postulate for overcoming alienation...
...I do not know if this was a liberal disposition or purely humane, but it is unquestionably a fact about Eugene McCarthy...
...Nor is it clear why Bromwich weirdly regards any endorsement as somehow a pledge of common identity...
...Burris's vignette from 1980...
...q Kudo Editors: Please enter my subscription to two more years of Dissent...
...383 And only McCarthy came to our campus and spoke on May 4. He quoted Camus in that address: "I cannot keep from being drawn toward everyday life, toward those, whoever they may be, who are humiliated or debased...
...There are so many factual errors and tired shibboleths in Bromwich's piece that not all can be responded to...
...By endorsing Reagan he has made it a matter of simple pride for the Democrats not to allow him back...
...3. Since economics did not lend itself to support of his idiosyncratic theories, he employed the sophistry of psychology...
...In a time when political debate and vision are finding new extremes of meanness, sense, charity, and imagination are welcome...
...He appears to have said to himself, every time McCarthy opened his mouth: "Now, how can I justify that...
...That statement did not include a promise to "do anything for Reagan...
...If so, is he encouraged by the news he hears from Washington these days...
...I congratulate him on his success...
...From "security risks" in the '50s, to migrants, to welfare mothers, to (most recently) those abused by the IRS, McCarthy seemed drawn to the helpless...
Vol. 28 • July 1981 • No. 3
