John Kenneth Galbraith on Eugene McCarthy

Fenris

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Sun Dec-11-05 12:57 PM
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John Kenneth Galbraith on Eugene McCarthy

Edited on Sun Dec-11-05 01:01 PM by Fenris

I found this passage in my reading last night, and thought it deserved a wider audience. It's from Galbraith's 1977 book "The Age of Uncertainty." If you like it, recommend it.

The Vietnam war showed wonderfully the relationship between leadership and commitment. Eugene McCarthy had never previously been celebrated for strong, uncompromising positions. He was amused, civilized and somewhat lazy. It was a time when almost every other major politician was trying to be against the war in principle, for it was a matter of political necessity. McCarthy scorned such cant and came out in unequivocal opposition. Millions to whom he had previously been unknown flocked to his side.

I had guessed they might. One day in the late sumer of 1967, I went up to Mount Ascutney in Vermont to address a meeting urging the opening of peace negotiations. It was to be held in the ski lodge; a couple of hundred were expecting. When we arrived, the mountain top was covered with people. I had a damaging sense of exaltation. A sermon on the mount. People were, indeed, waiting for new leadership, any leadership, on Vietnam. Across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire a few months later, McCarthy came within a few votes of beating Lyndon Johnson in the primary. It was clear that in the Wisconsin primary a few weeks later he would win. Johnson called a halt to the bombing and withdrew as a presidential candidate.

In the next months I marched with Gene, if that is the word, and resisted the thought that Robert Kennedy might be the stronger candidate. Mostly I raised money, an easier thing than might be imagined. People who felt guilty about the war assuaged their conscience with cash. Ours must have been one of the few presidential campaigns in history in which no one worried about finances. I led the McCarthy forces on the convention floor, though without great confidence that I was being followed. I seconded Gene's nomination, and when I returned home, my wife asked what had happened to my speech. The television cameras had all been on the riots downtown. In Chicago I had crossed the police lines to address the more violent protesters. The Chicago police dutifully clubbed others who thought to do so but they recognized a member of the Establishment and escorted me through. It was disconcerting, but better than being clubbed.

Of all the men I've known in politics, Eugene McCarthy had the most subtle mind and by far the greatest sense of the music of words. He was, indeed, the first serious poet in the American political pantheon. In speaking for his nomination at Chicago, I said that this might not yet be the age of John Milton but it was no longer the age of John Wayne or John Connally. John Connally was sitting there. New York and California delegates sitting near, with that genius for originality that marks American liberalism, jumped to their feet and proposed sexual violence on Connally. John told reporters, "Where ah come from, it helps to have Galbraith against yoou." We owe the end of the Vietnam war to Eugene McCarthy. If he had not committed himself but had tried like the others to straddle the issue, he too would have remained unknown, with his poetry unheard.

Copyright 1977 by John Kenneth Galbraith