On Eugene McCarthy's Required Reading
Howe, Irving
REQUIRED READING, by Eugene McCarthy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. 299 pp. $17.95. I used to be an admirer of Eugene McCarthy. While Senator from Minnesota, he was just about the...
...But other pieces have a curious way of blending cracker-barrel postures with styles of high savvy, as if to regather the strands of the long-standing tradition of American disenchantment...
...Was it just for a handful of culture that he left us...
...Some felt he lacked stamina, the strength of character needed for serving as spokesman for a minority...
...petulance?—that kept him from playing the part that, one felt, had become his historical privilege...
...All display a brand of literacy that, in the years of Bush and Quayle, makes one regretful, even bitter, about the choices of this talented man...
...After the 1968 election, in which the unspeakable Richard Nixon won, our man Gene resigned his seat in the U.S...
...And then something strange happened, exactly how or why it is still not clear...
...Others felt he had yielded to personal pique...
...Still others felt McCarthy, fancying himself a poet of sorts, had been lured by the delights of the literary life—he had become friendly with Robert Lowell, an admirer of his campaign, and (it was said) Gene now cared more for literary salons than political arenas...
...SUMMER • 1989 • 411...
...He could have followed the path of the elder senator Bob LaFollette, the Progressive from Wisconsin who in the early 1920s—a decade with resemblances to the 1980s—spoke up for liberal options...
...When he started to campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, McCarthy heartened thousands of young people who had been struggling to make opposition to the war a major issue in American politics...
...Senate and retired from public life...
...What could he have done after losing the nomination...
...The man has a sharp eye and can turn out a good sentence...
...He could have been a voice of sanity in a time of staged falsehood...
...It seemed that he would remain a major figure, the caustic spokesman for the opposition...
...And thereby Gene the Wit, Gene the Charmer could have kept faith with those young people who had rallied to him and were ready to stand with him—if only he had stood by them...
...The more dogmatic elements of the New Left refused to support McCarthy (he was not for the revolution . . .), but others joined with a growing number of liberals to work in his campaign...
...McCarthy didn't win the nomination, but even in defeat his campaign brightened American public life, and at the end of the primary campaign there were thousands of young Americans, now with political experience, who were devoted to him...
...All of the pieces are fragile, unsustained, the work of a man who will not trouble to develop an argument...
...Had it not been for McCarthy's intelligence and courage at that point, Bobby Kennedy probably would not have entered the 1968 primary as a somewhat less forthright critic of the war...
...Over the years, meanwhile, McCarthy has been writing little pieces for various papers, from the New Republic to the Culpeper News, now collected in this book...
...Some of them are keen politically, offering suggestions for reforming the American electoral process and criticisms of our increasingly debased political arrangements...
...And then, in 1980, to my astonishment, McCarthy endorsed Ronald Reagan — aann act of wanton foolishness, to say nothing of political betrayal...
...While Senator from Minnesota, he was just about the first prominent figure in the political establishment to come out unambiguously against the Vietnam War...
...Those who had been close to him were shaken...
...He could have stayed in the Senate, fighting hard, speaking eloquently in behalf of a hundred urgent causes...
...Whatever the cause, McCarthy largely withdrew from public life, becoming a sort of adjunct to academic institutions and an occasional journalist...
...I knew him slightly in those days and recognized his considerable powers as a public figure and, more vaguely, some flaw—vanity...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
