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Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 00:53:57 -0500 (EST)
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Subject: McCarthy's Echo
McCarthy's Echo
Eugene McCarthy did not merely oppose the
Vietnam War. He was a patriotic critic of the
imperialist impulse. As John Nichols writes in
The Online Beat, "McCarthy's 1968 presidential
campaign is often remembered as a simplistic
initiative, an attempt to turn the anti-draft
and anti-war enthusiasms of protesting students
into a political force. In fact, it was
something far deeper, and far more
significant." And its significance has ever
more relevance today with the debacle in Iraq
worsening daily.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Limits of Power
by John Nichols
Nation BLOG | Posted 12/12/2005 @ 4:28pm
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=42185
Sometime in the mid-1990s, after it had become quite
clear that Bill Clinton's presidency would deliver
rather less than had been hoped, and when it was
becoming clear that Newt Gingrich's control of the
House would deliver rather more than had been feared, I
penned a review of a then-recently published collection
of former Sen, Eugene McCarthy's poems. In it, I
lamented the lack of poetry in the politics of the
moment and suggested that America would be far better
served by politicians with a literary bent than by the
dim-witted technocrats and self-absorbed plotters to
whom power had fallen.
A few weeks later, a modest package with a Virginia
postmark arrived at my office. In it was a lovely note
from McCarthy, along with a thin volume of his poetry,
Other Things and the Aardvark, which had been published
in a limited edition of 250 almost three decades
earlier. The senator had given copies of the book to
friends and supporters of his anti-war campaign for the
1968 Democratic presidential nomination. In the book's
preface, McCrathy noted that "ancient mapmakers used
the term 'terra terribilia' to identify what was beyond
their knowledge of the earth" and he then paid tribute
"to poets who have gone beyond the 'known' and the
'certain' into the 'terra terribilia' in the search for
truth."
What did not need to be noted, of course, was that
McCarthy had journeyed, in 1968 and over the decades
that followed, across the terra terribilia of American
politics, earning the enmity even of his onetime
supporters and the affection of some who had once
dismissed him as a dangerous radical. As I would learn
over the years of our acquaintance that began with the
arrival of that package, McCarthy was in most senses a
very conservative man. He studied religion and the
classics, he saw the value of tradition, he embraced
standards of duty and responsibility that are so rarely
followed today that they do indeed seem radical.
But, at the most fundamental level, all that Eugene
McCarthy tried to do during his political lifetime --
with an unfortunate lack of success -- was drag America
back to the best of its values.
We spoke about that struggle when I was preparing my
book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of
American Opposition to Empire, before its publication
this year. The premise of the book was that those
founders who wanted America to lead by example rather
than force -- as "a city upon a hill," to quote John
Winthrop -- had imparted a wisdom worthy of
recollection in these times. This appealed to McCarthy.
Indeed, we found a quotation from a 1967 essay of his
that updated the principle rather nicely: "A nation has
prestige according to its merits. America's
contribution to world civilization must be more than a
continuous performance demonstration that we can police
the planet."
In that essay, which appeared only a few months before
he launched his primary challenge to President Lyndon
Johnson, with the argument that the United States
should cease its policing of southeast Asia and other
far destinations, McCarthy wrote, "Many of our problems
today are the result of our unwillingness or inability
in the past to anticipate what may be the shape of the
world 20 years in the future.... There is never a
totally painless way to pull back from either unwise,
ill-advised, or outdated ideas or commitments. But
throughout history, mighty nations have learned the
limit of power. There are lessons to be learned from
Athens, from Rome, from 16th-Century Spain."
McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign is often
remembered as a simplistic initiative, an attempt to
turn the anti-draft and anti-war enthusiasms of
protesting students into a political force. In fact, it
was something far deeper, and far more significant.
In that 1968 run, and to an even greater extent in his
1976 independent campaign for the presidency, McCarthy
argued for an American role in the world that owed much
more to George Washington, James Madison and John
Quincy Adams than it did to Lyndon Johnson, Richard
Nixon or more recent presidents.
Living in the Virginia countryside, not far from the
homes of the founders he favored, McCarthy remained
steady across the years in his embrace of a Madisonian
vision. He raged as only an American prophet could,
about how George Bush, Dick Cheney and their
neoconservative allies had, with their advocacy for an
unprovoked attack on Iraq, "introduced new concepts
about preventing war that are wholly unacceptable in
our tradition."
"There are things you do in a war which are preventive,
but to just announce it as a general proposition that
you're justified in starting a whole war is another
question," McCarthy explained in a 2003 interview. "I
don't think Bush understands what he's doing."
Weeks after Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, McCarthy
dismissed the endeavor as "a faith-based war" but he
warned that its consequences would be agonizingly real
for America. Indeed, he suggested, they was already
evidence of those consequences to be found in a loss of
liberty about which observers of the American
experiment had long warned.
Referring to the Patriot Act and related assaults on
domestic liberties, the former senator explained that,
"de Tocqueville said you'll find you'll lose the
freedoms you're supposed to be defending by setting up
your defenses against losing them, and that's what's
involved in the stuff that Bush is doing. We haven't
lost any of our liberties to the Iraqis yet, but we've
had our own liberties curtailed."
It remains true that America has suffered from a lack
of poetry in our politics, but it is surely also true
that we have suffered from a slow disconnection with
the best of our values and traditions. With McCarthy's
death, that disconnect grows a little more severe, and
America's circumstance a tad more perilous.
John Nichols is the author of Against the Beast: A
Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire
(Nation Books), a book that historian Howard Zinn says
"reminds us that our opposition to empire has a long
and noble tradition in this country."
[John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent,
has covered progressive politics and activism in the
United States and abroad for more than a decade.
Formerly a writer and editor for The Toledo Blade and
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers, he is now editorial
page editor for The Capital Times in Madison,
Wisconsin.]
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