Cutting Against the Grain

...He wants you to work harder...

...McCarthy keeps his distance...

...Often it goes like this: "Weeks after the [Oregon] campaign, I read a poem by William Stafford and some things became a lot clearer to me...

...They were pretty well turned on...

...Having judged that the war in Vietnam was a mistake without precedent in our history, we were called upon not only to correct our mistake but to search out the causes and conditions that led us into it...

...He actually provoked Theodore White, who has a noted capacity for thinking up nice things to say about mean and stupid politicians, to this personal statement in his The Making of the President 1968: "All through the year, one's admiration of the man grew-and one's affection lessened...

...I had said that I was going on to California the next day, and the Oregonian said to me: 'Don't tell them we are here.' " But often the writing is terribly stiff and formal, as if to foil critical analysts as well as to further discourage the many people who did not love the Senator in September as they did in May...

...It was called 'An Oregon Message' . . . [The poem ends:] This message we smuggle out in its plain cover, to be opened quietly: Friends everywhere?we are alive...

...What he likes, believe it or not, is what might be called pure politics: politics as the affairs of reasonable men, as a sort of civic religion (minus the gods), in contrast to what he views as the vulgarization of politics in our time...

...In much the same way, he rarely attacked Lyndon Johnson personally in the 1968 campaign (Dean Rusk was his favored target...

...There is wit and spite in this book, a number of poems, speeches, and pleasant asides about campaigning, regional curiosities, reporters ("They reminded me of blackbirds on a telephone line...

...McCarthy sees it the other way round: The candidate stands up and suggests the judgment that must be passed, the application to which the vocation should be put, and you get to put your money and your effort where your mouth is...

...Best wishes...

...They needed, I thought, a speech of some restraint if they were to be prepared for the long and difficult campaign, which I knew lay ahead...

...His proposition was that the war was wrong and the time had come to "pass a judgment" on it...

...It was not a time for storming the walls, but for beginning a long march...

...When one flies off, they all fly off...

...He is sarcastic...

...And if you want a full and complete account of the 1968 campaign, read something else...

...Rather, from his high ground, he stood for a turning away from the politics of pride and ego, and a return to the politics of reason...

...McCarthy won't play hero...

...Those moon rockets have missed millions of secret places...

...But it is interesting that a reporter who so typifies the "I love a parade" attitude toward Presidential politics is moved to such a remark...

...Here are a series of illustrative passages from his book: "If one were to characterize the year 1968 in the way in which Chinese mark the years . . . 1968 would have to be called the Year of the People...

...I was not previously familiar with the poem, but reading it clarified a remark a man had made to me in a town on the southern border of Oregon...

...His campaign organization was setting up twenty-six different committees to deal with different kinds of Americans...

...And he is not nice...

...A special committee to deal with the Polish, a special committee to deal with the Italians, even one to deal with the Irish...

...We expect doctors to take chances on being infected as they care for the sick...

...There is a plausible explanation for the way he hides himself, speaks in terms of vocations and passing judgments, has practically liquidated "the McCarthy Movement," and written a political autobiography entitled The Year of the People...

...McCarthy has fought a good fight, and will have at least earned that tribute when he is given a valedictory at the Democratic Convention in 1972, or wherever else...

...Acceptance of professional status carries special responsibilities and obligations, including the obligation to take risks...

...Camelot, etc...

...If McCarthy does not like hero-worship, and does not want "fans," and did not approve of the way Johnson "personalized" the Presidency, and had reservations about the way the Kennedys played image and power politics, what does he like...

...He is inscrutable...

...Then there is his courage when it mattered, a courage that was called foolhardy by the political experts, but later revealed itself to be both calm and reasoned...

...I wish he had earned, and won, more...

...As I read it, the Kennedy approach was to put together an 'organization,' to assemble pieces of America without any organic whole...

...the Senator uses it for the title of the last chapter of The Year oj the People...

...when one returns, they all return"), and other subjects...

...He writes: "For nearly twenty years, especially in talking to students, I had emphasized the need for a revived sense of profession and vocation in modern society, not in the traditional or formal way in which these two concepts were accepted in earlier times but in a modern context in which each person comes to an understanding of what his work is all about, what its social implications and concepts are...

...You won't quite see him in this book about the 1968 campaign unless you happen to have already sensed what the man is about...

...McCarthy does not directly attack what he is against in such statements: pop politics, bread and circuses, cult of personality...

...White, of course, was hardly alone in his sentiments...

...He did not tell people what they already knew: that they abominated Johnson...

...The people gathered there [in Chicago, early in the campaign] did not need to be inflamed or exhorted...

...That the judgment also involved Johnson he generally managed to leave unstated...

...Reviewed by MICHAEL JANEWAY Associate editor, "Atlantic" "America is hard to see," and so is Eugene McCarthy...

...I was quite prepared to speak about the injustices in our country?against Negroes and against others -and was doing so, but only in order to get all of the people to respond, to accept their responsibility, and not to distract people from the common problems which faced us...

...his method was to take the high ground, and leave the walking to you...

...For it was the year in which the people, in so far as the system and the process would permit, asserted themselves and demonstrated their willingness to make hard political judgments and take full responsibility for those judgments...

...And we should also expect politicians, if the issue is important enough, to show a similar sense of profession and to understand the obligation to take political risks when necessary...

...McCarthy said of Adlai Stevenson, in nominating him for President at the Democratic Convention in 1960, "Do not reject this man who, his enemies said, spoke above the heads of the people, but they said it only because they didn't want the people to listen...

...A special committee to deal with the Negroes, a special committee to deal with the Puerto Ricans, and one for retired former public officials...

...Politics as hero-worship-In the manner of the Kennedys-Is escapist and bizarre: The candidate manages himself superbly, and you are permitted to be "for" him...

...I like this book because I like McCarthy: his mind, his manner (including that perverse strain that seems to make him play antihero just to get the goat of the fan-club types and the cheerleaders of the press who write about "charisma"), and also his arguments...

...Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party...

...Burn this...

...The line is from Frost...

...He cuts against the grain of the public need for political gods (to supplement the loss of the real thing...

...I did not know there were that many...