Gene McCarthy 20 Years Later

...Actually, he is a traditionalist who believes that new problems can be handled in old-fashioned ways, and that the sloppy solution is often the best in an imperfect and sinful world...

...McCarthy puts Kennedy's appointing his brother in the same class as Richard M. Nixon's choosing his campaign chairman, John Mitchell, as attorney general: In both cases, men were selected who had to be more concerned about the fate of the Oval Office occupant than about the fate of the nation...

...To McCarthy, Harry S. Truman was the country's last "constitutional President": He believed in the "sharing and separation of powers under the Constitution and...

...By placing the top man in the Judiciary and the leaders of House and Senate on the commission, Johnson in effect forestalled any later independent action by the other two, theoretically co-equal, branches of government...

...Congress' old seniority system may have had its faults, says McCarthy, but in the long run it worked much better than the present absence of authoritative figures to press for legislative action...

...A candidate who gets his nomination through the primaries could think, even though he might not say so publicly, that he has captured the nomination, and that it therefore belongs to him and his supporters, rather than to the party...

...As McCarthy puts it: "The naming of the commission was a clear demonstration of President Johnson's lack of a sense of the institutional importance of government bodies, of his barbarian (in the classic sense) disposition to subordinate, if not destroy or seriously corrupt, institutions by Presidential will, and of his personalizing of the office of the Presidency...

...The summons to serve what John Adams termed the "public happiness" comes in the fourth and final chapter, inadequately entitled "Entropie Politics...

...Countering McCarthy's philosophic conservatism—probably rooted in his profoundly Catholic early years—is his political liberalism...

...They may also be taken as McCarthy's carefully crafted determination—always stated light-heartedly—to establish his bona fides prior to presenting his searing indictment of the post-Truman Presidency and his negentropic program...

...Some of the harshest criticism is reserved for Lyndon Baines Johnson...

...McCarthy's bringing the case is a reflection of his visceral distaste for reforms and reformers...

...The Supreme Court upheld the McCarthyBuckley complaint...

...McNamara, "from the automobile industry with no record in the Democratic Party," as Secretary of Defense...

...In addition, independent committees may spend whatever they please in support of or in opposition to a candidate, so long as their efforts are not coordinated with the official campaign of a candidate...

...If the shared dream does lie dormant within them, it will take more than this charming book to rekindle a fire in their bellies...

...The kids found a candidate and threw themselves into the campaign...

...Roberts...

...the separation of some government programs from partisan politics...

...Eliot might have paraphrased himself to write about McCarthy: "Between the program and the passion, falls the Shadow...

...But McCarthy's singling out the primaries is not surprising...

...Whether that generation today shares old Gene's vision of a just society at peace with itself and with the world is dubious...

...Their quarrel with the Establishment was going beyond resistance to the war and the draft...

...the emergence of a national (as opposed to regional) consciousness that inevitably draws attention to the Chief Executive, the sole person elected by all the people...

...that he was the candidate of the "kids" in the Vietnam era mainly because he wanted to head some sort of aparade, sooner or later...

...The original act of 1975-76 imposed limits on both contributions to and expenditures of candidates, and of socalled independent committees...

...In fact, many—especially women—will be turned off by his urging that we "attempt to define the direction and limits of affirmative action, unless we are prepared to 'accept' equality of all kinds as a guiding objective, thereby proving the accuracy of de Tocqueville's warnings of this inherent danger in a democracy...

...To do their part they had to go "Clean for Gene"—to shave, to wear proper clothes, trim their hair, speak politely...

...But McCarthy picks another moment to make his point: the immediate aftermath of Kennedy's assassination, when Johnson set up the Warren Commission to report on the tragedy...

...In one sense, that is true...

...As an example, McCarthy cites JFK's naming Dean Rusk, "who had no standing among Democrats or any identification with its established foreign policy positions," as Secretary of State...

...At several points in the book McCarthy becomes emotional in his tirades or in his cry for justice...

...He sees the law and the commission that enforces it as major reasons why corporations are as powerful as they are in American politics...

...For while the first half of it does describe the chaos descending upon American society, the second half is "negentropic," reciting McCarthy's program for bringing a measure of order out of the chaos...

...If weekly earnings were reduced in line with hours worked, the end result would be the redistribution of unemployment without any redistribution of income...

...The Shadow, of course, is McCarthy's self-doubt about what puny man can do to alter his eternal condition in the chaos of a heedless cosmos...

...If we did not know otherwise, we might easily conclude that this is another one of those campaign documents that modern candidates are in the habit of producing to ensnare the serious citizen...

...No doubt some will read the book as McCarthy's apologia pro vita sua, and with good reason...

...From his gut, he blows the trumpet...

...Although John F. Kennedy was quite the opposite, "the personalization of the Presidency, firstasa matter of style and then as to procedures and substance, advanced...

...that when he refused to step aside for Bobby Kennedy, he was continuing his war against the Kennedy clan...

...But as he listens to his own call he writhes and reaches for the mute...

...And a superficial reading would confirm the impression...

...Perhaps the author is indeed once more a candidate, now running in absentia—a spirit invoking a spirit of the past in whimsical, witty, hypobolic prose...

...and his own brother, Robert, as Attorney General...

...Others will be unhappy with his opposition to bilingualism...

...Here McCarthy is giving voice to his deepest feelings about our society...

...In the spirit of the agrarian radicalism that for many years played a major role in Minnesota through the Farmer-Labor Party, he assails corporate power, bureaucratic arrogance and bungling, needless foreign entanglements, disrespect for the land, consumer overindulgence, mindless waste...

...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Assistant president, ILGWU The title of Eugene McCarthy's book might suggest that it is a collection of anecdotes, vignettes and musings about American politics as experienced or witnessed by a one-time United States Senator and Presidential aspirant more or less from the time he was elected to Congress in 1948...

...A counterculture was emerging in the form of hairdos, costumes, ornaments, language, incivility, disorder, and an aping of the lower depths...

...That law was challenged in the courts by Eugene McCarthy, in a suit he brought together with William F. Buckley Jr...

...Unwittingly, Gene McCarthy brought the black sheep back into the fold...

...He worries about the unacceptably high level of unemployment, too, and proposes both reducing the legal work week and imposing a tariff on imports from countries whose burden of defense falls on our shoulders...

...Catchy as the notion of a "defense import tax" may be, by McCarthy's own reckoning it would add some 3 per cent to existing tariffs, a sum of no consequence...

...Labor will be cooled by his unrepentant support for the Landrum-Griffin features of the labor-relations law...

...He takes a few lines to explain what is wrong with each of these structural reforms...

...Reading those lines, T.S...

...But it is true largely because McCarthy himself was active in turning a fairly good law into a downright bad law...

...He parallels his view of seniority with Chesterton's view of a hereditary monarchy: "Whereas the practice was illogical and often resulted in the seating of bad or inadequate rulers, over the years it seemed to work out, and, in any case, it did seem to save a lot of trouble...

...McCarthy attributes the personalization of the Presidency to "the growing importance of primaries...

...While it did not outlaw political action committees (PACs), the total sums a candidate could receive and spend were limited...

...The early chapters refute many charges: that when he nominated Adlai E. Stevenson for President at the 1960 convention, he was a "stooge" for Lyndon B. Johnson...

...Reducing the work week, not a novel idea, would similarly do very little for the country...

...His appointment of Republican Senator Warren R. Austin to be U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations is cited as "the clearest example of Truman's" dedication to the "constitutional" ideal...

...Eisenhower affected the Presidency more by what he didn't do as President and by what he delegated to others, principally Cabinet members...

...Heavily anecdotal, the opening chapters can be seen as the belated rebuttals of a misunderstood man...

...In the same vein McCarthy puts down purists, who want clean systems, with a line from William Stafford: "If you purify the pond, the water lillies die...

...that when he challenged Johnson in the 1968 primaries, he was a "stalking horse" for Robert F. Kennedy...

...that when he presented himself to LB J as an alternative choice for Vice President, he was engaged in sibling rivalry with Hubert H. Humphrey...

...On the contrary, it is of a piece with his generally negative attitude toward "reforms" in the process of government...

...And yet, it is in the long light of history that McCarthy will best be remembered—if not in name then in deed...

...Along came Gene...

...between the word and the deed, falls the Shadow...

...His acceptance of the impurities have caused many to see the author as a cynic...

...Post Truman, Presidents took hold of too little or grabbed too much, but invariably "personalized" rather than institutionalized theirrole...

...He points to the coming crisis as similar to that of the Roman civilization, marked by "unequal distribution of wealth, depopulation of the countryside, exorbitant veterans' demands, high unemployment of citizens, the widespread use of slave labor, bread and circuses for the poor, debt-ridden farmers, costly military ventures, oppressive taxes levied on some, and a government controlled by wealth, unprepared to comprehend the magnitude of the state or its innumerable problems...

...A closer re-read, however, reveals that this thoughtful, though seemingly offhand, work is dedicated more to the future than the past...

...And the former Presidential candidate's brief program— despite its recognition that the wealthy are overstuffed and the poor are overly neglected—does not go beyond the customary proposals for higher taxation of the affluent to achieve a more equitable income distribution...

...Consequently, there are no limits on expenditures...

...They re-entered the mainstream, albeit as a cross current...

...the U.S.' increasing involvement in world affairs, shifting the center from the Legislature to the Executive...

...Through an uncertain and muted trumpet, the old McCarthy, who led the "children's crusade" of the 1960s against America's role in the Vietnam War, calls upon his troops—raised in the "apathetic '50s," stirred to action in the seething '60s, and lost in the yuppieish '70s— to give expression to what he asserts is their real "concern about professional and community ethics, about social justice, patriotism, and the good of the commonwealth...

...This might have been expected, given LBJ's toying with McCarthy while selecting a running mate in 1964, and their head-on confrontation over Vietnam in 1968...

...He appeared on the scene when a large and certainly vocal part of a generation was turning against society: They wanted no part of a distant war being fought for a cause they did not understand...

...Thus the generation that McCarthy expects to make the needed turnaround will find no programmatic guidance in his book...

...still, his rejection of them is essentially philosophic, a deep conviction that the more things change, the more they remain the same...

...He also distrusts his feelings...

...There may be some merit to this argument, yet other forces may account as well for the President's expanding power—such as television...

...The grounds then, as now, were that the law " encroaches on almost every guarantee in the Bill of Rights and other provisions of the Constitution...

...These times," he concludes, "do not quite deserve, by historical standards, to be called 'times that try men's souls.' They certainly are times that try persons' minds...

...A candidate may spend as much money as he pleases on himself...

...It is the last hurrah of a poet-politician who some years ago abandoned the hustings—albeit a hushed hurrah in the manner of the man who, during a Presidential campaign, insisted that his best turned thoughts be delivered as throwaway lines that were hard to hear and harder to understand...

...be abolished...

...What is most likely to turn of f the politically sophisticated liberal, though, is McCarthy's demand that "the Federal Elections Commission, established by the Federal Elections Law of 1975-76...

...Subsequent Chief Executives appointed people who were little more than puppets manipulated from the White House...

...So, thanks to this case initiated by McCarthy and Buckley, the poor candidate can come into the market place of ideas with his little voice and the rich candidate can appear in the same agora with bull horns, amplifiers and brass bands...

...The Court's rationale was that to limit the independent committees or to limit the candidate is to interfere with freedom of speech...

...Each, naturally, is guaranteed "freedom of speech," the one in a whisper and the other in deafening decibels...

...He feels that changes in the Democratic Party's rules, in the rules of the House and Senate (including the curb on filibusters), in campaign financing, and even introducing electronic roll calls have all been counterproductive...