THE SURGE FOR McCARTHY
PROGRESSIVE The Surge for McCarthy The world spotlight beat down on the Wisconsin countryside this month as Senator Eugene J. McCarthy brought his snowballing campaign for the Presidency to this...
...Columnist Clayton Fritchey expressed it in a sentence when he said: "It has all, or nearly all, been said before, and, far worse, it has all, or nearly all, been ignored before...
...Now he would only say vaguely that the burden is not on the Government but on "our free society...
...Perhaps they decided that bigger, better riots would soon be making demands on their space...
...In announcing his candidacy for governor of Wisconsin recently, Attorney General Bronson LaFollette, the only Democrat holding statewide constitutional office, declared that his position on Vietnam was closer to McCarthy's and to that of Senator Gaylord A. Nelson, a dove, than to Mr...
...Perhaps it will start with Omaha, Nebraska...
...How far can McCarthy go...
...The greatest energy and the highest talent in the Government are devoted not to the cities but to the war...
...On the same day, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John W. Gardner, whose department encompasses most of the areas involved in the racial crisis, quietly cleaned out his desk and left the Government...
...With surprising courage— surprising because of its essentially conservative, politically cautious composition—the Commission diagnosed the cancer destroying the nation as white racism, and warned that "our ing to predict the Presidential outlook for 1972: "Suppose we were having this conversation in 1940, and trying to guess who would be the next three Presidents after Franklin Roosevelt...
...No speeches, no salutes, no medals...
...When the President finally spoke, it was to commend the Commission—"a very distinguished group...
...That, he seemed to imply, ought to satisfy the people clamoring for more spending...
...The police stockpile weapons, and the Army devises elaborate counter-insurgency plans...
...There is now more manpower, more money, and more muscle behind the McCarthy candidacy in Wisconsin...
...nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal...
...With grim fatalism the nation seems to be settling in for a new round of escalation in the racial war...
...Wisconsin's top Democratic officeholders, including both U.S...
...Gun dealers report that small-arms sales are booming...
...Senators and two of three Democratic Congressmen, are neutral in the race between McCarthy and the President, whereas their opposite numbers in New Hampshire strongly supported Mr...
...In what is surely one of the most forthright findings of any of the multitude of commissions that have investigated U.S...
...The rallying cry has produced no rally...
...Behind him were his extraordinary showing in New Hampshire, his almost equally impressive performance in three Minnesota Congressional districts, and his capture, by default, of the entire Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic National Convention...
...The Commission called for income supplements and establishment of uniform national welfare standards "at least as high as the annual 'poverty level,' " with the Federal Government assuming at least ninety per cent of the cost...
...The Commission found that Federal programs have suffered from poor planning and inadequate coordination, and have fallen far short of meeting the needs...
...But the Administration's program calls for only half that number...
...It uncovered the latent power of creative youth...
...The Commission's urgent warning notwithstanding, the nation—or at least its current Government—does have a "higher priority" than the crisis of poverty and race...
...It is this mindless resignation to catastrophe that the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders tried so hard to dispel in its massive report last month...
...The essential difference is that while the Administration has proposed—as preparation for some distant future—"pilot projects" and "models" and "demonstrations"—all designed to give the semblance of action without incurring the full costs—the Commission has proposed action programs that would begin now to solve problems and redress inequities...
...There was little to suggest that the new Nixon had any greater appreciation of the causes of conflict and disorder in our cities than the old Nixon...
...Last summer, Humphrey called for a Marshall Plan style attack on the problems of the cities—with money no object—until President Johnson shushed him up...
...The Commission's own proposals, it must be noted, were far from revolutionary...
...It was a small clue, but a telling one, to the nature of the priorities as they are now perceived in Washington...
...It revealed, too, a heartening willingness on the part of many Americans to respond to the summons of a rational, reflective leader who eschews the bang-bang histrionics of conventional political tactics...
...The strategy decisions that preoccupied the President as the Commission submitted its report dealt not with cities at home but with war in Asia...
...McCarthy's hard-working Wisconsin organization, run by amateurs who have become professionals almost overnight, is skillfully exploiting the bandwagon effects of the Senator's remarkable performance in New Hampshire...
...He said he was disappointed by the proposals for new and substantial expenditures because the money just is not there...
...To be right, we would have to have picked a Senator fighting for his life in a Democratic primary in Missouri, an obscure colonel in the United States Army, and a kid still in college...
...It must undertake programs requiring "unprecedented levels of funding and performance...
...The outcome of the New Hampshire primary confounded the press, the politicians, and the pollsters...
...Consider these factors: • Most objective observers are convinced that public sentiment against Johnson Administration policies in Vietnam is substantially stronger in Wisconsin than in New Hampshire...
...The Administration has appointed a committee to study welfare problems...
...McCarthy's prospects in Wisconsin seemed brighter in mid-March as this was written than they had been in New Hampshire where he rolled up forty-two per cent of the vote in his peace crusade against President Johnson...
...Robert C. Weaver, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said the Commission's recommendations in his field were not impossible ¦—just highly improbable...
...It was clear that Mr...
...In fact, he continued, "we may have undertaken more than Congress will give us the resources to do...
...And finally, it demonstrated the moral and political maturity of voters who were sandbagged during the final weeks of the campaign with the disgraceful effort by the Johnson camp to discredit McCarthy as a disloyal appeaser who would be "cheered in Hanoi" if he made a respectable showing in New Hampshire...
...It was this succession of McCarthy triumphs that led Senator Robert F. Kennedy to play Hamlet once more...
...The Federal budget is strained not by the needs of the cities but by the war...
...With candor that has become all too rare in Government reports, it described the "squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods...
...Johnson's...
...All the way...
...The word is that they work better in the United States than in Vietnam...
...There the race on the Democratic ticket is between President Johnson and McCarthy...
...We are reminded, when we think of the modest McCarthy beginnings, and how far and fast he has come, of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is reported to have said to an interviewer in declinThe Long, Hot Summer of 1968 opened, unseasonably, early in March in Omaha, Nebraska...
...The day after McCarthy's stunning achievement in New Hampshire, Kennedy went before the cameras and microphones to announce that he was "reassessing the possibility" of entering the race against President Johnson...
...In due time, it will issue a report to be filed and forgotten...
...what some newsmen had flippantly dismissed as "a children's crusade" became a mature surge for political emancipation...
...The New York Times ran the story on Page 30, and some newspapers didn't bother with it at all...
...Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, with one eye fixed on the White House and the other on the white racists who might help put him there, deplored the report's "undue emphasis" on white racism...
...In deference to the White House, the Commission dropped from its report a projected chapter on the costs of its proposed programs...
...We've gone about as far as we can go," he boldly told a Senate subcommittee...
...I believe that we've got to make it very clear to potential rioters that in the event something starts next summer the law will move Wo Higher Priority' in with adequate force to put down rioting and looting at the first indication of it...
...The Commission called for steps to provide low and moderate income families "within the next five years, six million new and existing units of decent housing, beginning with 600,000 units in the next year...
...Every Commission recommendation has been actively discussed even within the Johnson Administration, and many have been endorsed by it, although in far more limited form...
...It is impossible to predict at this stage of the proceedings, more so because of the prospect that Kennedy will enter the race...
...Hope will return to American hearts only when we recognize the moral outrage we are committing in Vietnam and, at the same time, act boldly on the Kerner Commission's conclusion that there is "no higher priority" than the challenge at home...
...Johnson...
...race relations, this Commission went to the heart of the moral crisis confronting America on the home front when it said: "What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro American can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto...
...Meanwhile, our immediate concern is the crucial Wisconsin primary, in which Kennedy cannot run...
...PROGRESSIVE The Surge for McCarthy The world spotlight beat down on the Wisconsin countryside this month as Senator Eugene J. McCarthy brought his snowballing campaign for the Presidency to this state of long progressive tradition...
...Obviously, too, they devoutly hoped that their report would similarly affect all Americans...
...Eugene McCarthy is far stronger today than were the men in 1940 who became Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy...
...President Johnson says he expects a bad summer—many bad summers...
...Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who once would have welcomed such a report as a clarion call for action long overdue, said the Commission's assertion that the nation is moving toward separate but unequal societies "may be true, although it's open to some challenge...
...It was a bush league effort as racial disorders go—one dead, some windows smashed, a few cars stoned...
...In graphic detail it recounted the indignities to which black Americans are subjected and the insensitivity, ineptitude, and sheer indifference to human life which officials—particularly those charged with "maintaining law and order"—have displayed...
...On the day the Commission released a summary of its report, President Johnson presented the Medal of Freedom to his departing Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, and ceremoniously bade him farewell amidst a great fanfare of oratory and salutes...
...The Senate larded its civil rights bill with "anti-riot" amendments while watering down the open housing provisions...
...In a near-parody of his own Great Society rhetoric, Mr...
...If he decides to run, as seemed likely at press time, his candidacy could gravely split the peace crusade launched so courageously by McCarthy...
...The war in Vietnam, which was not considered by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, casts its long shadow over the report...
...Nothing less than a moral revolution in the thinking of white America will free black America from the chains it is determined to break—peacefully if possible, violently if necessary...
...It will dispatch its task forces to the scenes of new riots...
...As might have been expected, the sole fatality was a Negro youth, sixteen-year-old Howard Stevenson, felled by a white police officer's shotgun blast...
...As the Commission acknowledged, its recommendations constitute no more than "an honest beginning...
...His spokesman assured reporters that the report would be "carefully evaluated...
...Until we have order we can have no progress," he declared...
...Experts have estimated these costs as falling in a range of $10 billion to $20 billion a year— a figure comparable to the "Freedom Budget" long advocated by such civil rights leaders as Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King—and a figure well below the level of current spending for the war in Vietnam...
...There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience," the Commission declared...
...In a year or two, we fear, another Presidential commission will be detailed to examine a new and more devastating set of civil disorders...
...a lot of talent" —without commenting on its warnings or recommendations...
...Those who do not learn from history, said Santayana, are condemned to repeat its mistakes...
...President Johnson maintained a conspicuous silence for almost a week after the Commission he had appointed during last summer's Detroit riot submitted its report...
...Unlike New Hampshire's, Wisconsin's wide-open Presidential primary law permits citizens to vote on either the Republican or Democratic ballot regardless of their political affiliation...
...But less than a month after publication of the report, it seems to stand in serious danger of being forgotten— at least by those who have the power and the responsibility to translate the Commission's recommendations into action...
...White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it...
...If this seems an overly grim appraisal of the present and the prospect, we can only reply that the record of the recent past and the mood of Congress and the country today do not seem to us to justify a more cheerful outlook...
...The President urged the bankers to read the report along with his own special message to Congress on urban problems...
...If the nation is to avoid blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness, the Commission concluded, it must make a commitment—"compassionate, massive, and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth...
...But clearly there is now a fighting chance, especially when one considers how far McCarthy's candidacy has come since those dark days in December when the announcement of his candidacy was greeted by a "ho-hum" response in the press and a Gallup Poll disclosure that hardly anyone knew McCarthy or what he stood for...
...In the latter, he said, he "undertook everything we could conceive of that we had the resources to undertake...
...Johnson told a group of bankers and savings-and-loan executives assembled at the White House that the Commission had spent an "unprecedented amount of money—millions of dollars" to compile its report...
...Representative George H. Mahon of Texas, chairman of the important House Appropriations Committee, was one of the first to comment on the report...
...An Administration and a Congress obsessed with a multi-billion dollar military strategy in Vietnam and a penny-pinching rejection of explosive needs at home are bent on faithfully fulfilling Santay-ana's formula for disaster...
...Where the President has, for example, proposed creation of 100,000 new jobs in 1969 by means of a voluntary businessmen's effort, the Commission has called for a first-year total of 550,000—half of them to be created by the Government as "employer of last resort...
...Johnson was embarrassed by the scope of the Commission's recommendations and annoyed by its failure to congratulate him on the accomplishments of his Administration...
...We intend to analyze next month the decision Kennedy has made...
...He was still brooding out loud when we went to press...
...Indeed, all of its proposals have been advanced for years by progressive politicians and publications...
...Obviously, the Commission's chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, and his ten colleagues were profoundly affected by the 130 witnesses they heard over a seven-month period, by the visits they paid to the ghettos, by the 1,200 persons interviewed by the Commission staff, by the detailed surveys of twenty-four disorders in twenty-three cities...
...It reflected a deep-going rethinking by Americans of their values and their priorities—in terms of Vietnam and in terms of the crisis at home...
...Many Republicans, robbed of a choice on the GOP ballot by the withdrawal Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" of Governors George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller from the Wisconsin primary, are expected to cross over to the Democratic ballot and vote for McCarthy because they have no other effective way of expressing their rejection of President Johnson's Vietnam position, or because they want to embarrass the President and the Democratic National Committee by rolling up an impressive anti-Johnson vote...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
