STEVENSON/McCARTHY AND McGOVERN

I remember meeting a very young Marty Peretz in DC back in the summer of '68 and this article sums up very much of what I felt and thought about "the candidate" that year. Here are his reflections on Eugene McCarthy:
Keen for Gene
by Martin Peretz

[The Dems were looking for an anti-war candidate to challenge LBJ] But the savior whom the kingmakers really desired was Bobby Kennedy. He was unwilling even to test the waters, and no one knew whether he was really against the war or still for it.

Gene's stand was characteristically clear, and he was willing to stake his career on the toppling of the president. But the specter of Bobby haunted the campaign. We were working with folk whom you knew might defect the moment the assassinated president's brother decided that his time had come. (And, when his time came, defect they did.) In a strange way, the Kennedy candidacy energized the "Clean for Gene" effort. The rivalry was old and deep. At the Democratic convention in 1960, McCarthy stirred liberals with his impassioned appeal to nominate Adlai Stevenson for the third time--a last-ditch attempt, with Eleanor Roosevelt as its symbolic leader, to deny JFK the nod. Stevenson was a sure loser in the general election, but the liberals had sufficient reason not to be eager for John Kennedy to be president. There was the ugly shadow of his father and the stunning fact of his brother having served an intimate stint in Joe McCarthy's legislative hanging court--and, by the way, when had John Kennedy ever stuck out his neck for a true liberal cause?

It is a shame that the 1968 campaign is mostly remembered for the bitterness between the Kennedy and McCarthy camps. After all, Gene took down a sitting president. Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection two days before McCarthy was sure to trounce him in the Wisconsin primary. Gene's popularity in the polls, even after Bobby's assassination on the night of the California primary, should be read as a confirmation that Americans were once ready to listen to quiet words and reasoned arguments. The diffidence of the poet-politician annoyed the political professionals, but it was intrinsic to his message. One should not seek the presidency in a frenzy, he seemed to be saying. When he would say that he was "willing to be president," one heard echoes of the Founding Fathers' own ideals of tempered ambition and their insistence upon the debt of politics to philosophical ideas. Gene was a Democrat who disciplined himself to republican virtue.

O, for someone like him in American politics now! [my emph] I have never encountered anyone in politics who so knew his own mind. …………Three weeks before the Chicago convention, George McGovern announced his own candidacy, scavenging among the Kennedy delegates. He won a pathetic 146.5 delegates. The shambles of the convention and the riots--which Tom Hayden designed to prove the fascist nature of the U.S. state, as, earlier that spring, he had told Michael Walzer and me he would--left McGovern as Kennedy's heir apparent for 1972. And the Democrats have not yet recovered from the most startling defeat of any major party candidate in our history. When you hear liberals and Democrats blame U.S. policy for Islamic terrorism, you are hearing the McGovernite temper. In societies as in individuals, the survival capabilities of self-loathing are vast. But Gene, a genuinely original man, never traveled in those territories. There was something pure about him, but he was not an innocent.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of TNR and in his maturity has recognized the suicidal tendencies of Democratic extremists, who, as Jon Meacham said last week on Tim Russert, "desire defeat." The utterly pathetic will-to-lose extends now even to wars overseas. The fear and self-loathing of the hard-left has no apparent limits.

But I digress.

McCarthy loved William Butler Yeats and perhaps this poem reflects some of the inner man----an outdated phrase in this era of imagineering---Gene possessed as a part of his spiritual character To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Nothing

NOW all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours' eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

William Butler Yeats