JACKSON AND THE JEWS

...I said T would, and wondered what Washington would feel like after all these years...

...We cannot help looking over our shoulders, and, when we do, we see the field we have passed through is littered...

...It was a mix, as such things almost always are, of ideology and the temptations of power, of affection for the man and attraction to his prospective station...

...Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, the composite came out looking like Hubert Humphrey...

...Back then, it seems, we knew better what liberals were about...

...There is only one way to find out, and that is to ask, and there is only one way to ask, and that is to know what the questions should be...

...But the kind of diplomatic perspective which can give birth to such initiatives has not been a prominent element in Jackson's record...

...Current CIA estimates are that a war this year would be won by Israel, with 36,000 Israeli casualties...

...So, not atyp-ically...

...in number, who must depend on the good will of others...

...Therefore, those who seek peace in the Middle East, who are not satisfied with a precarious, bankrupting and ultimately fatal balance of terror, must look towards diplomatic initiatives...

...But caring is not enough...

...For even if one were to accept the offensive notion that it is enough to be good for the Jews, it is not clear, not yet, that Jackson meets the test...

...and some of my onetime colleagues at MIT went off to Washington to make things right, and that mattered, but in the wrong way...

...What I think I have learned since is something I should have known a long time ago...

...But preventing such a war from happening at all, ever, is a far more urgent task...

...Jackson was a candidate in the 1972 primaries, but his candidacy elicited virtually no interest among Jewish liberals, and not much more than that among other Jews...

...Like the four sons, we will get the answers we deserve...

...and is not demonstrably bad for America, and therefore is entitled to our support, is an abomination...

...We were his natural backers, his "safe" constituents, but we are having none of it today...

...Some of our onetime colleagues have, to be sure, remained bogged down in the post-Vietnam isolationist mood...

...But we...

...For Jackson has not changed...

...And with respect to the great unfinished business of the 'Sixties, the business of decency for blacks (I say decency rather than equality, because it turns out that equality is a vaguer concept after all), there are few of us who any longer even pretend that we know what should be done...

...After Kennedy, everyone was too plastic, and I hadn't yet learned that you don't Not knowing any longer what -or who - is good for America, concerned that nothing is convincingly good for America, we repair to a simpler dictum: let it at least be good for the Jews...

...Hence our insistent goal must be peace...

...And it is not enough for presidents and would-be presidents, if we would select them wisely, if they would govern well...

...could interpret Jackson as a liberal, perhaps, find enough in his record to satisfy myself that no great ideological sacrifice was involved in my signing on— for by now I was being" asked to do that — but would it not be supposed by people who matter to me that I had sold out...

...They know especially what the costs of armaments are coming to, and will come to...

...We will not allow ourselves that luxury, nor will a piteous world that requires repair, nor will an embattled Israel that must be defended, nor will the old, the poor, the young, the sick, the workers, the middle class, the farmers, all those whose hopes depend not on rhetoric but on .. . government...

...And where are the Jews with the courage to demand that of the candidates, of Henry Jackson and of every other one who courts our support...

...so far as symbolic politics goes, the most moving political event I have known...

...It is not at all clear that he has such a perspective, and it is almost certain that he does not feel the voters — even those voters most interested in Israel's welfare — care much for it...

...Leonard Fein _L_ Watching the television commercials during the Massachusetts primary, watching and listening to Shapp and Jackson, Udall, Shriver, Wallace, Carter, Harris, Bayh (maybe there were one or two others, I've already forgotten) I found myself conjuring up a composite candidate, the best of each who sought my vote...

...But about Israel I do profess to know something, and what I know is this: we have long since passed the point where more arms may be thought an adequate response to Israel's peril...

...he has not shifted ground to curry liberal favor...

...It is easier not to ask, to depend on hint and inference, or to let the candidates themselves propose both the questions and their answers...

...First things first: four years ago...

...We took our years one at a time, and any war-free year was thought a bonus...

...As it happens, I believe that if we judge Jackson on the basis of the general welfare of the nation, he has some powerful arguments on his side...

...But we, who like to think we cannot help caring, no longer know where caring points...

...Depending, as we do, on that good will, shall we ignore the welfare of those others, the general welfare...

...Good citizenship, our civic religion, now seems an empty and formalistic ritual...

...a liberal's questions are not so obscure...

...But the old way — labor and the intellectuals, blacks and Southerners, and all the other elements of a successful coalition — is surely more useful for the nation than a politics of kaffee-klatschism...

...We arranged that I would fly with Jackson from Washington to Santa Fe in February...

...Appeals to the blue-collar worker leave them cold and queasy...

...It is, at best, what one can expect from the Loyal Opposition...

...it depends merely on the absence of war...

...He had a few speeches scheduled in New Mexico, T had a lecture to give in Houston, so T hitched a ride on the small plane someone had lent him for the trip, and we flew together for seven hours, spending a good chunk of time in private conversation...

...The very widespread assumption that Jackson is good for the Jews rests, of course, on his zealous pursuit of freedom for Soviet Jews and on his continuing support of Israel's military capability...

...III...

...Coalitions are sloppy, but so is America, and much credit is due the politician who seeks to forge them...

...The reservations that I had when I came were with me when I left...

...We have moved from the certainties of Reordered Priorities and Vast New Social Programs to the confusions of affirmative action and neo-isola-tionism, and the change has brought us near to collapse...

...Humphrey is to politics what ragtime is to music, an expression of the national preoccupation with nostalgia, and for much the same reason: when hopelessly lost in a maze that appears to lead nowhere, go back to the starting point, the last place or time or person that can serve as reassurance...

...How long will it be, how long can it be, before even that component becomes impossibly expensive...

...Poor Henry Kissinger...

...More and more the candidates seem ready to work for some form of national health insurance, and we think that a good thing, but we know now, as we did not then, that it will end up costing more than is predicted, and working less well than is intended, that one way or the other, we are in for disappointment...

...It means risking the sinking discovery that there are no answers to the questions that matter...

...detente (how hawkish...

...They seem instead to be entirely satisfied with promises of arms and more arms...

...Perhaps Jackson is good for the Jews, perhaps he is not...

...When a leader of that opposition wants to become the President, we must know what he is for as well as what he is against...

...More than seven years of investment, and he ends in involuntary bankruptcy...

...It is not enough for liberals, as our present aimlessness shows...

...But where do we start to build again...

...have to love a politician to want him to win, or to work for him...

...and Camelot was mostly floss, and floss, pleasant though it be, does not feed the hungry or clothe the poor, and in the end, I didn't know any more than the rest of us how the poor were going to get clothed...

...But isolationism has never been a realistic option for Jews...

...Against his rigid and sometimes truculent perspective on foreign policy, there is his great sensitivity to human rights...

...he has asked all that need be asked is...

...That requires something more than, and different from, what Jackson has shown us thus far...

...And where is the candidate with the vision to speak of peace...

...So I was ready, more or less, when, back in January of 1974, a friend called and asked whether I'd like to meet Henry Jackson, moment had already been conceived, and my first thought was that an article might come of it...

...I question neither his honesty, nor his probity, nor his passion...

...The heady promise of our victory in 1960 now seems most empty...

...Not knowing any longer what — or who — is good for America, concerned that nothing is convincingly good for America, we repair to a simpler dictum: let it at least be good for the Jews...

...Hubert Humphrey isn't running after all, not as I write, at any rate...

...turning, we become pillars of salt, politically immobilized...

...As far as I can tell, current American policy in the Middle East has as its primary goal the reduction of Soviet influence in the region, and, in that respect at least, the policy has been tolerably successful...

...Ten years ago, the absence of war in the Middle East was a real achievement...

...For the central barrier to peace has been and remains Arab intransigence, and there is no reason to suppose that that problem will get anything but worse...

...We picket Soviet performers, despise Soviet spokesmen, distrust Soviet motives, curse Soviet behavior...

...But most of us are no longer sure of that, and have not yet sorted out the relationship between those directions and the emergence of the crazies, the burning cities, the rest of that disastrous time...

...Yet we do not have the option others have, we cannot slip into apathy...

...Worse still, how would I abide the others, those who supported Jackson for the very reasons that gave me pause...

...Not peace at any price, but peace if at all available, while its price is still affordable...

...Tt means defining our interests...

...Outside, the bands of others have begun to play...

...Remembering the highs, the temptations, my readiness to launder those views of the Senator with which I disagreed, my eagerness to learn of his virtue, I cannot honestly say that my Jackson trip was an example of liberal self-sacrifice, martyrdom for the greater good...

...No policy which has as its primary end the exclusion of the Soviets depends on peace...

...That does not mean that we should be self-denyingly altruistic, that we must place the interests of others above, or even on a par, with our own...

...The Yom Kippur War, together with Israel's new vulnerability, and our own, set me into sluggish political motion again, ill winds filling the sails that would carry me out of the doldrums...

...The notion that we can rest comfortably with the assertion that this candidate or that is good for the Jews...

...I suffer here the same ambivalence as most of us in trying to sort out the events...

...In short: dissatisfied with Henry Kissinger, we turn now to his adversary, in the hope of something better...

...But preventing such a war from happening at alt ever, is a far more urgent task...

...most especially to those, small The secular argument for Jackson may be better than liberals commonly suppose...

...And liberals need comforting...

...Wanting to impress, I also wanted to be impressed...

...Without these two specific ingredients, Jewish enthusiasm for the Jackson candidacy would be only a fraction of what it now appears to be...

...Except for a brief flurry of activity on behalf of McGovern in the 1972 elections, I was in political hibernation from the day Robert Kennedy was killed in 1968 until the winter of '73...

...And we are even nervous about American military weakness...

...I have since learned, does not go far enough, or come near enough...

...Our new concern for American military strength makes Jackson's identification with American power seem like an asset rather than a liability...

...where that is the only question a citizen need ask...

...Insofar as we are confused about the thrust of domestic programs, Jackson's espousal of traditional social welfare programs seems safe enough...

...For the world stands on its head: businessmen consort with the disciples of Lenin, urging cooperation on us, while liberals walk arm in arm with Latvian and Estonian demonstrators we once supposed were fascists...

...Yes, there are those who will argue that the directions of the New Frontier and the Great Society were right directions, that all we needed was more time and more money...

...remembered Prague as an aberration, looked forward to (we didn't know its name back then) detente...

...To get the answers, you've got to know — and ask — the questions...

...And it was also, surely, a search for certainty, for an end to confusion, for the discovery of a leader who could offer convincing answers where I had run dry...

...It is simply not the case, however we might wish it so, that what is good for any particular group is necessarily good for all others...

...Wisely or not, I had loved RFK, and the night he quoted Aeschylus from the back of a flatbed truck in a Cleveland slum — the night Martin Luther King was killed — was...

...If liberals are to get it together again, figuring out the questions is a plausible place to begin...

...Hence the secular argument for Jackson may be better than liberals commonly suppose...

...That is why his familiarity, which once bred something like contempt, now gives rise to comfort...

...We were chiefly about ending the war in Vietnam...

...It is his way to stand fast as well as firm...

...The wise son is wise not because he knows the answer, but because he asks the right question...

...Peace for Israel...

...Yet T had reservations, large-sized...

...But asking questions that matter means asking them of ourselves as well as others...

...When I left, it was neither in huff nor disillusion, but because the improbability of maintaining the relationship without my moving to Washington became obvious to both parties...

...Against Jackson's record on Vietnam, there is his perfect record on civil liberties and civil rights...

...Or: in the event of a new Arab-Israel war, Henry Jackson would be as good a friend to Israel as we might wish...

...Was it Soviet villainy and Kissinger's duplicity alone, or was Jackson's own obduracy, his understandable reluctance to share credit with Kissinger, a factor in the eventual debacle...

...Now our insistence on American international involvement and American military power has put us in league with bedfellows with whom we cannot help but feel strange, but they no longer seem more embarrassing than our erstwhile colleagues of the Left...

...Otherwise, politics becomes a set of accidents, bandwagons fueled by charisma rolling faster and faster into the fog...

...Jewish liberals...

...Worse yet...

...I do not sense, not among Jewish liberals, any great enthusiasm for Jackson...

...writing less in favor of McGovern than against Nixon, I suggested that a Jew who believes that by asking "Is it good for the Jews...

...Some of my friends have grown accustomed, these last several years, to a purist politics, and prefer talking exclusively with one another...

...The most that we can demand is that no group be too badly damaged in the inevitable jostle of a pluralistic democracy...

...A war in the Middle East was considered, not long ago, a reasonable last resort for Israel...

...In the throes of Watergate, integrity mattered more than anything, even than Vietnam, but wasn't Jackson almost too straight, straight become rigid...

...It does mean that politics is complex, and that the politics of absolute self-interest is a threat to all of us...

...Lyndon Johnson once sang "We Shall Overcome," almost, to a joint session of Congress, on every television channel, and that mattered, but not enough...

...in fairness both to ourselves and to those who suggest themselves for the office, we should do our homework, even if there are risks involved...

...It is not the case and can never be, not in a country so vast and diverse as ours...

...It is we who stand on shifted, and still shifting, ground...

...It is not the candidates' fault if they seek to avoid the tricky answers when no one is asking the hard questions...

...The federal government, once our hope for secular redemption, has been revealed as a false messiah...

...Still, Washington is Washington, and an Important United States Senator Who Might Be President is an IUSSWMBP, and a memorandum that I had written after our talk on the plane, in which I had suggested some themes for the forthcoming campaign, evidently made a good impression, and I was asked to do more, and did, for several months...

...Against his support for the ABM, there is his characterization by a Nader research study as the most effective member of the Senate...

...In the event of a new Arab-Israel war, Henry Jackson would be as good a friend to Israel as we might wish...

...Vast numbers of citizens cannot bring themselves to believe, hence will not bring themselves to care...

...But if, as citizens, it is not enough to know only that a particular candidate is good for Jews, as Jewish citizens that goodness is the least we are entitled to be sure of...

...Its success has been built on American pursuit of friendship with the Arab states, notably with Egypt, and the foundation for that friendship, in turn, has been an American assurance that the Arabs will be able to get most of what they want without going to war, and without having to make peace...

...Now that we no longer know what we are about, now that there is a gaping hole where our certainty used to be, and now that our perception of the international problem has changed so dramatically, we are prepared to consider Jackson as we were not four years ago...

...And five years from now...

...Apart from his record on domestic issues — not merely economic issues, but matters of rights and liberties which liberals are bound to take most seriously— there is the fact that (at this writing) he, more than others, seeks to reconstruct the classic Democratic coalition...

...A liberal's answers may still be elusive...

...The mature political activist knows, after all, the difference between establishing connections and selling out...

...Old-timers may cluck their tongues, shocked that it has come to this, but many of us — most, I think — are no longer satisfied by the simple slogans of yesteryear...

...The next war, if there is one, will be incalculably more cruel than the last, and the later it gets fought, the more horrid it will be...

...Little wonder, given the unrelieved cruelty of the Soviet Union to its Jewish citizens, continuing Soviet responsibility for tension in the Middle East, the vulgarity of the Russian attack on Israel...

...And what would my friends say...

...We are electing, these long days, a President for the United States, and...

...Awake, we remember that it is Passover, a time for the asking of questions...

...But, except for those who remain convinced of verities the rest of us now question, there is interest...

...I don't know, even now, how much I wanted them to be straight, how much straightening of them I did as I listened...

...I do not know...

...He was, and is, his mother's son, a good Scandinavian Christian, decency bred into him irrevocably, bred till it hurts, and disconcerts...

...who have chosen to live in America, are bound by that choice to consider America's welfare...

...That's no small thing...

...the Jews (why...

...The wicked son will be turned back, the simple son patronized, the son who does not know how to ask will be allowed to go back to sleep...

...Lest there be any doubt at all here, I regard Israel's military competence as an absolutely essential condition for peace in the Middle East...

...Every important trend now seems in the Arab favor, and the Arabs know that well...

...A politics of commercials and cliches would allow us to slide into and out of the polls with no significant interruption to our sleep...

...regarding foreign policy, reversal...

...No retreat into nostalgia...

...Israeli strength is by no means, by no stretch of the informed imagination, a sufficient condition for peace or security...

...Inasmuch as we have turned against the Soviets, Jackson's opposition to detente seems acceptable, may even be thought heroic...

...Since a settlement appeared impossible, the hope was that some future event not yet foreseeable would make the problem easier to solve...

...to put it bluntly, living in the wrong country...

...It is morally wrong, and, insofar as it is supposed that such a notion points clearly at Henry Jackson, it is an indication of an advanced case of political sloth...

...But symbolic politics...

...But Hubert Humphrey does, I guess...

...We try pulling the blankets up over our heads, but the noise will not let us go back to sleep...

...And the answers, if not always persuasive, seemed to me straight...

...We were embarrassed by George Meany's red-necked anti-Communism, we saw the Pentagon as a sinister playground where Dr...

...And, because we have become disillusioned with large promises, Jackson's modesty is downright reassuring...

...That is no longer so, not in light of the certain price of any future war...

...My questions were the obvious ones: Vietnam (how could he...

...I am, I know, a liberal, yet I do not know any longer quite what that means...

...The specifically Jewish argument for Jackson is not yet convincing...

...I dropped out, or copped out, turned inward, wished the government would leave me alone, thought anarchist thoughts, wondered idly where others found their political energy, came to care more about hidden corners than large stages...

...There are those who will be satisfied to extrapolate from the record, to infer that such tough opposition to Soviet expansionism as Jackson has clearly shown augurs well for Israel...

...The nature of the change we have been through, and of our confusion, has brought us closer to where Senator Jackson has been all along...

...We are wounded by the failures of the best and the brightest, our best and brightest, uncertain that our programs can match our promises, skeptical of those who march resolutely onward...

...But opposition to detente is not a foreign policy...

...Despite all Henry Kissinger's efforts, despite all the summits, the pacts, the treaties, despite all the evidence of American chicanery worldwide, the central fact of the last decade, from a liberal's perspective, is that the Soviet Union has become, for us, the Enemy...

...T had a preliminary conversation with Jackson's administrative assistant, in one of those restaurants near the Capitol where conversation is oh so serious, important, hushed, and I asked for some time with the Senator away from his office, away from the phones...

...I am not so sure...

...Every serious candidate endorses arms for Israel, and several have proud records, not less impressive than Jackson's, as friends of Israel...

...Enter Henry Jackson...

...I am proud the case was made, but I am not convinced that it was made wisely...

...Regarding domestic policy, confusion...

...Strangelove- and the generals threw darts at nuclear detonators, we thrilled to talk of disarmament, welcomed cultural exchange, celebrated the United Nations, took pride in the Peace Corps, embraced Yevtu-shenko...

...There is a country, very dear to us...

...n. A year and a half ago, these same kinds of considerations led me to a brief involvement with Scoop Jackson...

...But the all too foreseeable future events which have now emerged will make the problem harder, not easier, to solve...

...Was it not just yesterday that we hoped, even assumed, that the politics of reason and the evident Russian desire for economic progress would lead the Soviet Union to more responsible international behavior...

...so was considerable respect for the man...

...Get on board early, withstand the scorn of the purists, remember that politics is the art of the possible...

...For the time being, one component of preventing war is Israeli military competence (it used to be superiority, but that has already become impossible...

...And the specifically Jewish argument for Jackson is, it seems to me, not yet convincing, not even with Pat Moynihan's endorsement...

...I have no doubt that Henry Jackson is a decent man...

...The good society, which so recently we could almost touch, now seems as distant as the end of days...

...And Congress, always at least four years behind the national temper, continues to blunder about in a kind of McGovernesque populism that has very little to do with anything...

...Arms for Israel...

...With respect to the Jackson amendment, there are simply too many wheels within wheels to know precisely what happened...