Explaining McCarthy

Writers cannot shake their fascination with Eugene McCarthy, the moody Minnesotan who had the courage to challenge his party's President, then seemingly lacked the spine or energy to wage more than a languid, token campaign against Hubert Humphrey for his party's nomination. What kind of a man, they wonder, can reject frantic calls from campaign aides at key moments, first because he is watching the All-Star baseball game on television, next because he is playing softball with a group of nuns? What about his pettiness toward opponents, his long refusal to endorse Humphrey after the Vice President won the nomination, or his peculiar reaction to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as something one should not get excited about? It has the elements of deep fiction or psychological drama, so perhaps it is fitting that two critic-novelists think that they have found the answers.

Writing in the New American Review, Wilfrid Sheed offers the intriguing, if overly pat explanation that McCarthy is a "Commonweal Catholic." This is Sheed's term for those members of the generation of U.S. Catholics, now aged 35 to 60, who combine "oldfashioned religious training" with progressive politics shaped by unionism and papal encyclicals on the worth of labor. This kind of Catholic clings to "an abstract, quasi-scholastic style" marked by witty references to arcane books and thinkers. The type is "congenitally mistrustful of ambition and scornful of those who push themselves beyond their merits." When such a Catholic finds himself tempted by ambition, Sheed claims, "he reminds himself over and over that he isn't that hot." Since U.S. society tends to honor ambition, this Catholic avoids criticism by feigning laziness.

Crazed Frivolity. McCarthy's training as a seminarian and a professor fits him neatly into Sheed's category. "Anyone who has ever sat around a rectory, or even an Irish living room, will have heard many duplicates of McCarthy's wit," Sheed writes. But for a presidential candidate, the McCarthy humor was a handicap, Sheed says, since it made him sound like "a 13th century eccentric, a man of crazed frivolity." Too often, his bookish metaphors made "a man of rather direct and earthy intellect seem vague and woolly." He appeared to be "a lofty bumbler, sacrificing precision for the sake of a cute reference."

A Commonweal Catholic, as Sheed sees it, cannot believe that his personal feelings are relevant to the issues. He has only contempt for "weeping politicians," who either confess their political sins or flaunt their virtues. "McCarthy could not, if life depended on it, act out his compassion for the poor," says Sheed. "Politically, this subject demands a certain amount of Mammy-singing. You can denounce the war calmly, and the emotion will take care of itself. But when you come to poverty, you must perform. McCarthy spoke precisely as strongly about both subjects; yet he was felt to be passionate about Viet Nam, indifferent about race."

Would such a man make a good President? Sheed thinks yes, but he is not certain. "The habit of frivolity is tyrannical, wants to make a joke of everything. With McCarthy . . . when it lapsed, a very deep melancholy seemed to take over." In the end, claims Sheed, McCarthy "underestimated himself sinfully. And he was, I believe, after the first shock, delighted to be free of his role, to escape from his Secret Service man and return to that niche a little below the top."

In a two-part series in Harper's, Jeremy Larner, a novelist who helped write McCarthy's campaign speeches, takes a more critical view of McCarthy as a captive of his own personality, his obsession with style and his upbringing among German Catholics in central Minnesota.*The German immigrants, Larner writes, accented "regulation and reserve, scholastic superiority, and security in judging others who succumb to worldly experience." McCarthy's training at Minnesota's St. John's University stressed that in a God-ordered universe one gets in touch with God only through laboriously acquired "right reason." In this tradition, social justice can develop only "little by little," and crisis-oriented alarmists are to be despised.

To Larner, those views opened a gulf between McCarthy and his most activist supporters, who were bent on reforming society in a hurry. But for McCarthy, claims Larner, "the race was over in a moral sense the day he agreed to run. With that act, he accepted his obligation and carried out his reasoned judgment." Rather than fight for power, he would present his views in a balanced way, hoping to "expose the hypocrisy and self-seeking of other candidates." If the times were right, he would be elected and would make an "adequate" President--"which is all anyone can be and well beyond the reach of those who blow themselves to greatness."

Bitterness and Pessimism. If all that sounds lofty, Larner suggests that McCarthy's restraint may actually have masked a "fear of looking bad--like certain athletes who would rather lose than go all out to win. If one goes all out and loses, then one is without excuse." Thus McCarthy would not approach ethnic and other groups he needed to win, because it would "open himself to criticism or rejection." Larner also detects in McCarthy "a deep-seated bitterness, which made him downrate individuals even as he was calling for a national policy of generosity." Perhaps, says Larner, McCarthy is infected by "a guilt and fear so relentless that it demanded the destruction of every possibility of power or success."

How does McCarthy feel about such harsh amateur analysis? He dismisses the Sheed article as "pretty much froth. I really don't know what he means by Commonweal Catholic--I suppose that's one of those new lines." McCarthy tags Larner's effort only as "a mixed piece." He does not seem to consider all this McCarthy watching a very significant activity. "I suppose this game will go on," he shrugs, "as long as I'm marketable." Yet he did hint during the campaign that there is indeed something mysterious about him that may never be explained. "There is something wrong with McCarthy, all right," Larner quotes McCarthy as saying. "But they don't know what it is."

*McCarthy's mother, Anna, who died in 1945, was of German origin; his father, Michael, now 93, is of Irish descent. Both were born in the U.S.

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