OLEAN -- Commentators are forever quoting the observation of poet T.S. Eliot that April is the cruelest month, but life and experience have convinced me December, despite its undeservedly giddy holiday reputation, is the most unkind when it comes to claiming the lives of humans held dear, whether one actually knew them or not.
My own much-loved father died 26 years ago this month, as did my mother's brother, and as the wintry weekend started last Saturday, two important participants in the nation's cultural and political history during the decades before the turn of the millennium crossed the divide.
As a Washington reporter, I did get to know Eugene McCarthy a little bit.
The erudite and sardonically witty McCarthy, a former U.S. senator from Minnesota who died in his sleep at 89 in a Georgetown nursing home, probably saved tens of thousands of young American lives in 1968 when he changed American history almost single-handedly by toppling a sitting president.
The stubborn and pompous incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, was thought to be a shoo-in for renomination by the Democrats, despite his insistence on pouring more and more men and resources into a disastrous and still-unexplained war in Vietnam. No viable Democrat displayed the guts nor the inclination toward career political suicide to challenge him. Except for Eugene McCarthy.
McCarthy was no lifelong peacenik. He enlisted in the Army in World War II and served as an intelligence officer throughout, supported the Korean War, and initially backed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which got us into a vastly expanded Vietnam War. By the tumultuous year of 1968, however, he was an acerbic opponent of our involvement in the conflict that ultimately took more than 58,000 American lives. Other popular anti-war politicians -- including New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the martyred JFK -- repeatedly declined to run when urged to do so. Not McCarthy.
He announced his candidacy for the White House, tore into former mentor and fellow Democrat LBJ at every opportunity, and to the delight of fellow doves in Congress and hordes of college-student war protesters who cut their hair and campaigned door-to-door for him, McCarthy picked up surging voter support. By the time of the first party primary in New Hampshire (it was in March in those days), the whole country was watching.
McCarthy pulled off an enormous upset by attracting 42 percent of the vote. LBJ got 49 percent, but McCarthy garnered 20 of the state's 24 convention delegates. President Johnson, suddenly, was no longer unbeatable. Four days later, the politically brilliant and opportunistic Bobby Kennedy entered the race. Two weeks later, facing certain defeat by McCarthy in the Wisconsin primary, LBJ further shocked America by announcing on national TV his decision not to seek re-election. Three months later, Bobby Kennedy -- moments after declaring victory in the California primary -- was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen.
By the time the Democratic National Convention in Chicago rolled around in August of 1968, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey had gained the lead. About 3,000 noisy, disaffected, protesting, taunting anti-war demonstrators filled the downtown Chicago streets and waterfront parks. Unprovoked Chicago police and Illinois National Guardsmen surged into the crowd of protesters, attacked them indiscriminately, made mass arrests, and clubbed unarmed demonstrators -- injuring about 300 of them. I'm not writing this from some history book. I know. I was there, covering for the Niagara Falls Gazette and Gannett News Service. I saw it with my own eyes. McCarthy looked down at the unnecessary chaos from his Conrad Hilton Hotel room on Michigan Avenue -- first in sober detachment, then in hurt and concern, then in outrage. He ended up letting injured youths -- bandaged with torn sheets and pillow cases -- into his rooms and floor corridors. The next day, he delivered withering commentary to reporters out front.
Hubert Humphrey was nominated, but lost the election to Richard M. Nixon. The Democratic Party was split into factions. McCarthy, disheartened, resigned his powerful spot on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and declined to seek Senate re-election in 1970.
His comet-like run may have been brief, but it changed American history. It transformed the ineffective and disorganized grumbling of right-thinking and concerned citizens into a national political movement, disgruntlement into fruitful political action. The Vietnam War went on for more than half a decade, but Eugene McCarthy sparked the national fire of concern that finally got us out of it.
As the great "New Yorker" magazine writer Louis Menand observed last year, McCarthy in 1968 was "seized by the moment. He deliberately sacrificed his career to stand on ground that no other Democrat had the courage to venture out on."
McCarthy ran again for president in 1972, 1976, 1988 and 1992 -- but never came close. Most of his energy was spent traveling around the world, speaking, writing books, writing essays, writing articles, and lecturing at his alma mater, St. John's University of Minnesota. He lived in northern Virginia and kept an office in Georgetown. As a national correspondent in Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, I would call him now and then for comments usable in this story or that. He was always gracious and friendly.
During one Democratic primary in New Hampshire (I think it was 1988), McCarthy appeared in the motel lobby where I was waiting to board another candidate's campaign bus. We said hello, and a few moments later one of the younger reporters -- sleepy, slurping coffee, unaware of the historical figure in the room, and chatting with me about political history -- mentioned he'd always wished he could meet the guy who upset Lyndon Johnson. My back was to McCarthy. I said, "Just a minute, I'll see if I can conjure him up," then turned around and wiggled my fingers like a magician. The ever-alert McCarthy heard me, turned around, and was amused when I introduced him to the awed, open-mouthed colleague.
In the mid-1990s, I invited him to be my guest at a White House Correspondents Association dinner -- a big formal affair where the president always shows and various political and entertainment celebrities are primping and table-hopping. He accepted, and willingly chatted with me through the meal about his place in history. I had always felt he failed to give the public and fellow Democrats the idea he really wanted the White House. After all, when his plane landed in Chicago in 1968, he asked reporters questioning him about the not-likely presidency, "Who would want the job?" He seemed to be running on a platform of decent political behavior.
But McCarthy denied a lack of interest in gaining the White House. He was bitterly disappointed he never got it, he acknowledged. He also copped to two other longstanding feelings that haunted him through the years. One was a personal feeling of resentment toward Lyndon Johnson, whom he once admired. Johnson had publicly stated upon his 1964 nomination as Democratic standard-bearer that McCarthy and fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey were the finalists for his vice-presidential pick.
He chose Humphrey, but prevailed upon the disappointed McCarthy to make the convention speech nominating his rival -- a piece of political sadism of the kind that LBJ was infamous for. He rubbed McCarthy's nose in it, and McCarthy never forgot it.
McCarthy also told me he resented Robert Kennedy, not only for belatedly jumping into a presidential race McCarthy believed he could have won, but for "not having the political fortitude" to personally deliver the bad news. "Instead, he sent his little brother Teddy over to tell me. I didn't respect him for that."
Last Saturday, Teddy Kennedy commented on the thorny relationship between his fallen brother and McCarthy, and on the ironic parallels of history.
"Gene's name will forever be linked with our family," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat. "In spite of the rivalry with Bobby in the 1968 campaign, I admired Gene enormously for his courage in challenging a war America never should have fought. His life speaks volumes to us today, as we face a similar critical time for our country."
McCarthy could be stubborn, too, and an odd duck at times. Five years ago, this committed liberal accepted the top annual award of the Conservative Political Action Conference for being critical of campaign finance reform. McCarthy believed big contributors were important to liberal reform movements. "In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III," he observed.
The octogenarian McCarthy despised President George W. Bush, wouldn't even watch his 2001 inaugural, and compared his first administration to the novel "Lord of the Flies," in which a stranded group of boys on an island turns to savagery. "The bullies are running it," McCarthy said of Dubya's White House. He was kinder to political reporters. He only compared them to "black birds who flock together."
McCarthy was a recognized poet, too. Some critics panned his work, but I always liked it. In 1968, after he had lost his best career chance, McCarthy, in "The Day Time Began," used kite-flying to envision his devalued future: "Now I lie on a west facing hill in October/the dragging string having circled the world, the universe/crosses my hand in the grass./I do not grasp it./It brushes my closed eyes, I do not open./That world is no longer mine, but for remembrance./Space ended then, and time began."
I consider that great poetry, great foresight and great honesty.
The other prominent American I mention, who died at 65 Saturday, was Richard Pryor, the comedian (turned actor) who expired of a heart attack, probably triggered by years of bravely fighting the degenerative wasting disease multiple sclerosis.
Sure, Pryor was notoriously foul-mouthed and focused mainly on racial inequality, and sure, he had problems with drugs and alcohol. But he was dirt-road honest, few stage professionals instantly connected with an audience like he did, and his timing was better than Jack Benny's. He was a ground-breaker. He tremendously advanced the art. And he was hilarious.
As the prescient humor critic John G. Nettles wrote last summer on the Web site www.popmatters.com, Pryor was not a "funnyman" who clowned around. He was instead someone who "used his gift to drive home brutal truths." More than anything else, wrote Nettles, Pryor "was a diarist, a confessional artist whose monologues derived from his own chaotic and frequently self-destructive life, Brother Richard testifying from the lip of the abyss." All the bad words were just window-dressing.
I recall the first appearance Pryor made after he almost died in 1980 when he ignited while freebasing cocaine. He started by graciously thanking "all you whities who sent me matchbooks" during his long recuperation. Then he launched into a description of his addiction, near-incineration and attempt to run away from the flames that enveloped him -- which included the observation, "When you are on fire, people WILL get out of your way." Pryor could make even self-immolation humorous.
I also liked his bit on trying to stick up the owners of a Mafia strip joint to get paid for his early-career gig there. They not only come across, but are so amused by the in-your-face insolence, they put him back to work and make him their mascot.
Pryor led a hard life. He grew up in his grandmother's Illinois whorehouse, and was playing drums in a nightclub by age 7. He had many critics, but seven years ago, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation's capital awarded him the first-ever Mark Twain Prize for Humor. And he deserved it. In his acceptance speech, he said he was proud that, "like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred."
Recent visitors to Pryor's Web site, seeking a status report on his illness, were greeted by the initial words, "I ain't dead yet, motherf-----!"
Would that it were true.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 13 2005 |