Tributes to Michael Harrington
Bromwich, David
Michael Harrington had two qualities of the greatly good—patience, and an almost total freedom from vanity. A political worker by calling, he was also, irrepressibly, a quick-witted man, who...
...Where are the troops...
...yet one cannot imagine him looking bored, and the tiredness rarely showed in public...
...That's what I want to know," said Harrington...
...You can undercut your opponent, in the belief that, as he grows weaker, you will grow proportionately stronger...
...Michael belonged to the second...
...When I think of him now, he is standing typically with a cluster of people, listening or earnestly talking and then looking up if a new one joins, to see what you will have to say...
...There are two schools of thought on how to win a debate...
...How many have there ever been...
...How few like him are left on the scene—as if our prospects had grown smaller all at once...
...Most good or effective public speakers belong to the first school...
...In America, for all who have known him and known his example, Michael Harrington is another name for hope...
...A sense of humor saves a few steps, it saves years", and Michael had a sense of humor—with a long or short fuse, as needed...
...He was a good writer, but a great speaker, and it is hard not to connect his matter-of-fact charity with his way of talking to a large audience...
...In debate, in writing, in the whole conduct of political life, he showed the continuous strength of heart that sometimes comes from being "proud up to the point of equality...
...Nobody else in the group would have put it so kindly...
...To have confessed to feelings of discouragement must have seemed to him a sin against hope...
...Sanity fought that battle to a friendly draw...
...For his look was always alive and inquisitive, his voice incapable of patronizing, just as it was incapable of false deference: he was a democratic person to the bottom of his soul...
...It was only the outward sign of a natural and undistractable feeling for justice...
...But then, nobody else predicted that Moynihan would come back as a liberal, and a steady one at that...
...Or you can state an alternative view so candidly, with so firm an appeal to the self-respect of your listeners, that the other side simply seems to have wandered into the wrong conversation...
...Was there ever anyone who wasted less time...
...Where are your people...
...Talking to a group of friends in the early seventies, he spoke undogmatically of "my disagreement with Pat Moynihan and others who think they can have the best effect by working in a Republican administration...
...WINTER • 1990 • 107...
...But he never gave up on an enemy, or even a temporarily forlorn ally...
...And yet, 106 • DISSENT Remembering Mike saying so, one can imagine him looking up, and shrugging off the dramatic cast of this remark, and saying something different...
...It was one of Michael Harrington's unwritten rules to leave everyone—and his country, too—plenty of room for the lucky turn, the generous second thought...
...He must often have been bored, or tired...
...Once, after a lecture, I heard him argue with an ultra-pure nut—another Irishman, a Jesuitturnedcommunist and an engaging fellow, but half crazed with conspiracies...
...A political worker by calling, he was also, irrepressibly, a quick-witted man, who could startle himself (in the middle of some careful analysis of historical trends) with a sly joke or a glancing allusion...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
