Saturday marked the death of a "gentle" Senator who became the conscience of the nation, Eugene McCarthy, 1916-2005, reported here and here. Eugene McCarthy was a quixotic figure who was both erudite and down to earth, a sometimes stirring speaker and an often reluctant politician.
He did two extraordinarily brave things during his career. In 1952, he stood up to Joe McCarthy, the Senator from Wisconsin who terrorized most of the country with his fake communist-hunting investigations in which he brandished empty pages or old data as a sword to cut people from their careers, their friends, their families, and sometimes their lives. Eugene McCarthy met him head-on in a debate on foreign policy that should have shown the nation Joe McCarthy's lack of substance. The debate was months before Edward R. Murrow would run his first show exposing McCarthy, depicted superbly by David Strathairn in Good Night, and Good Luck. It was several years before Joe Welch would finally bring McCarthy down with his famous "Have you no shame" line at the investigative hearings (a film clip of which is seen in the movie).
In 1968, Gene McCarthy galvanized the youth of the nation in an anti-war movement that tried to speak truth to power. We were in college and we were frightened by the draft that could take fathers, friends and brothers away. Unlike this war of choice where the journalists are "embedded" with the military and where there are so few independent reporters who dare to explore the world beyond their computer, in that war journalists ventured all to bring pictures of the war into people's homes. We saw the photographs on television on the news every night--flaming helicopters, "advisers" dropped into a war zone. Johnson withdrew his candidacy for the presidency after McCarthy's campaign began, and Robert Kennedy took up the campaign only after McCarthy had shown the possibility. Although the war killed on for seven more violent years of napalmed children, blazing monks, and agent-oranged jungles under Nixon, McCarthy had brought it to front and center stage and forced everyone to think about this commitment to a winless war in a place that did not want us for a cause that didn't exist in a manner that stole the life out of a country, a people and our own nation.
McCarthy must have wondered at the twists of fate that have brought us to our present circumstances. In response to a real danger, we have a context of smear and fear that has taken away civil rights for everyone, resulted in detentions and deportations of thousands on mere suspicion or association or dissent, and permitted military imprisonment of American citizens without due process yet has done very little to address the muddled intelligence that continues to threaten our ability to deal with real terrorism. At the same time, we have an imperialistic war of choice that is again gobbling young lives and in which we are again dropping hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordinance on villagers and maiming old men and young children.
It is thus with great sadness that I note the passing of Gene McCarthy. There are few people who have the courage to speak against power. He did so, and he helped to bring understanding, for a while, to an entire nation.
Growing up as a child, my parents regarded Eugene McCarthy as a political hero, the likes of which we have probably not seen since. He stood up for courageous principles in face of adversity, and eventually much of his stance prevaled... until current times of the Bush NeoCon administration.
John Kerry is trying to make a strong stand, and I think history will show that he, like McCarthy, came close to Presidency, both robbed by American voter shallow insight....
Posted by: merrill nisam | April 30, 2006 at 01:16 AM