LETTERS
Editors: After a rather exhausting day of giving interviews and pressing the flesh, presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy said good-bye to his two campaign workers and entered the terminal at...
...After the 1968 primary he enjoyed the loyalty of thousands of young people...
...DARCY G. RICHARDSON Melrose Park, Pa...
...It is disheartening to read that "the worst pirates and criminals came to the New World" seeking, according to her, gold, and plundering the Indians and misgoverning them to boot...
...A scene from 1968...
...When McCarthy announced that he wouldn't run for re-election in 1970, he also stated that he felt that he could be more effective working outside the senate chambers—which is precisely what he's been doing for the past eighteen years...
...Senate, McCarthy has also paid more than his fair share of attention to the political life of his country...
...And unlike either Bush or Dukakis, the old antiwar hero courageously played the role of the messenger of bad news, speaking quietly and intelligently about ways to realistically reduce our national debt and trade deficit, as well as ways to significantly reduce America's military costs...
...It wasn't, McCarthy noted at the time, his service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that made opposition to the war a major issue in American politics, but his willingness to enter several Democratic primaries in 1968 that made the conflict in Vietnam a central issue...
...McCarthy, the seventy-two-year-old blast from the past, had just completed a busy day on the stump as the presidential standard-bearer of the tiny Consumer party...
...In 1982, following a twelve-year absence from public office, McCarthy, with twenty-two years of legislative experience under his belt, tried to regain his old Senate seat—only to be rejected by Minnesota's Democratic Farmer-Labor party (DFL...
...J. LEON HELGUERA Nashville, Tenn...
...q Hispanophobia Editors: I protest, more in sadness than in anger, the intemperate (and historically inaccurate) characterizations of the Spanish settlers and the Spanish colonial regime made by Tina Rosenberg in her "Will Democracy Come to Chile...
...instead, for reasons hard to grasp or condone, he just quit...
...And then in 1980 he endorsed Reagan, the most reactionary president in the twentieth century...
...Editors: After a rather exhausting day of giving interviews and pressing the flesh, presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy said good-bye to his two campaign workers and entered the terminal at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport...
...Hispanics and Latin Americans, tinged as it is with chauvinism and redolent with that peculiar cultural imperialism that comes so easily to the many Johnnycomelately reporters who cannot lay their biases aside when writing of Latin America...
...IRVING HOWE Replies: Our correspondent is right in saying that Gene McCarthy has—sort of—remained in American politics...
...For Eugene McCarthy, politics is a vocation...
...If only...
...Disheartening, I repeat, because, despite repeated refutations of such assertions about Spanish America by scholars over a century or more, beginning with William H. Prescott, Rosenberg persists in making them...
...In addition to teaching, lecturing, and writing since leaving the U.S...
...If only his earlier supporters—those who rallied to his cause back in 1968—were still standing with him...
...Apparently, the DFL establishment preferred a politically inexperienced multimillionaire by the name of Mark Dayton, an heir to the DaytonHudson retail fortune...
...He has always shared the Plutarchian view that participation in public life is not some sort of game to be ended at some given point—but, instead, it's a continuing commitment...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Thus, it was a bit surprising that someone as astute as Irving Howe could possibly suggest (Dissent, Summer 1989) that McCarthy, after retiring from the U.S...
...Her apparent Hispanophobia will be offensive to many U.S...
...Senate in 1970, essentially "retired from public life...
...576 • DISSENT...
...McCarthy alone took the issue directly to the people...
...Though most political "experts" had long ago relegated McCarthy to the history books, there he was—"Clean Gene" —winding up his third presidential campaign since 1968, a year in which his antiwar candidacy forced a sitting president out of the race and nudged the administration to adopt a more conciliatory position on the Vietnam War...
...Had he stuck it out in the Senate, using that forum to express progressive views, he could have led a valuable popular movement...
...In any case, McCarthy still wasn't about to call it quits...
...Dissent, Summer 1989...
...Remained as an offbeat figure, sadly ineffectual...
...No, the date was November 2, 1988...
...What possible justification could there be for that...
...So last year, the onetime pied piper of American politics, running on a few minor-party labels—including the Consumer and Progressive party tickets—warned his fellow citizens that the United States is quickly becoming "a colony of the world...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
