Interview with Eugene McCARTHY: Clean Gene Is At It Again

Twenty years ago, the Minnesota Senator mobilized the forces of antiwar protest by daring to challenge President Lyndon Johnson. His candidacy then was an odd mixture of poetry and politics, of sardonic humor and philosophical discussion. McCarthy’s latest race, on different tickets in different states, is more symbolic than serious, but he is still attempting to change the political system and is still full of irony and sarcasm. His new book, Required Reading, is a collection of his essays. He talked with TIME chief of correspondents John Stacks and New York bureau chief Bonnie Angelo.

Q. Why exactly are you running again?

A. There’s a substantive reason first. I don’t think the two parties are raising really critical issues. Second, there’s a procedural reason. There is a need for continuing challenge to the two-party system that has been forced on us by state legislatures and federal election laws. And third, half the people don’t participate in elections. With different procedures you’d have 70%, 80% of the people voting.

Q. What do you think of the other candidates in this race?

A. As the saying goes, Dukakis bites off more than he can chew, but Bush chews more than he bites off. I think that’s a fair distinction.

Q. In your new book you categorically banned a fairly large pool of would-be Presidents: Governors, Vice Presidents, ministers, ministers’ sons, generals, corporate presidents.

A. They weren’t just theory. There’s a realistic example that goes with all the exclusions — like Walter Mondale and George McGovern as ministers’ sons.

Q. You proposed abolishing the vice presidency.

A. I’m serious about that. In 1803 there was a vote in the House on abolishing the vice presidency. It failed, 85 to 27. Handling succession would be easy. We did it with Ford when we had to ((when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in 1973)). It was simple. But instead of that method, I’d just reconvene the Electoral College. Under the Constitution, theoretically, they pick the President anyway, and the Vice President. It would give some meaning to the Electoral College.

The vice presidency clutters up the campaign. Even having Bentsen — you get a ticket with each person unbalanced in a different way, and you call it balance.

It’s an insult to the electorate. It puts people in line to become either the candidate or the President who shouldn’t be there. It wastes good people, takes them out of circulation for eight years and sometimes practically destroys them.

Humphrey, for example, was hurt by being Vice President, even if we hadn’t had the war. Mondale was hurt politically, but Humphrey was almost made a different person by Johnson, whereas Mondale just had a little bit of a burden, having been there with Jimmy. I said Mondale was a good choice because he had the soul of a Vice President.

Q. In this campaign, the very word liberal is like a poison dart. Is liberalism dead in this country?

A. I think they made a mistake in not defending it. In the ’60s liberalism had some standing. It was under fire, but it was acceptable. After that, progressively, the liberals began to qualify their liberalism, saying, “I’m not an unreconstructed liberal,” or “I’m a sane liberal.” First the conservatives and eventually the liberals began to attack it and qualify it until it eroded. Some of those people say, “We’re neo-liberals.” That can be anything.

Q. You’re a paleo-liberal then, by that measure.

A. Now I say I’m a pure neo. Not a neo-liberal or liberal-neo. An existential neo. But this is a good place to rest. We ought to retire the word for about seven years.

Q. Do you think that Reagan and his popular successes have changed the nature of the presidency again?

A. He was, in a way, a very constitutional President. It was accidental, I think, but he didn’t tamper with the court. He didn’t really abuse the Senate. The Democrats just sort of surrendered. The same was true with the House of Representatives. I don’t think he had a clear idea of the differentiation of functions.

I think the strength of Reagan was that he said we’re going to make the society function again. Whereas the Democrats said, “We are going to take care of failures. We’ll have more welfare and do more for the poor.” Or “We’ll take more people off the tax rolls.” This came out of the Great Society — a handout state.

Q. I’m surprised you’re not more offended by the Reagan presidency than you seem to be.

A. I’m kind of offended by the whole process. I’m offended by the candidates we have now. We’re lucky we’ve got by as well as we have. But I was more offended by Carter than Reagan. Reagan had been kind of in national politics. It was bad stuff, but he had been out there saying things. Jimmy came on with his righteousness and the meeting on the mountain and firing everybody at midterm and taking us out of the Olympics, and the grain embargo. Reagan was not as pious as Jimmy. He said he was reborn but didn’t know when it happened or what it did to him. Jimmy said he was reborn in the woods with his sister.

Q. Don’t you think then that morality should figure into shaping policy?

A. Some, I guess. But I don’t think you can get up and say it every morning, which is what Jimmy did.

Q. If you were to win with your coalition — to ask the Dan Quayle question — what would be the very first thing you would do as President?

A. At the White House, I’d carry the suitcases up, then check the location of the red telephone and see if it was working.

I don’t think you worry so much on what to do first if you’ve been thinking and writing about the institutions, because you have an understanding of how the office functions. It isn’t just a projection of the person — that’s a thing that’s been built up. We elect the person and then find out what we’ve got, what kind of a President he’s going to be, when the institutions and the traditions ought to take care of about 90% of it.

Harry Truman had the clearest idea of what the institution was. He knew when he was Harry Truman and when he was President. He respected the other institutions of Government.

Q. Had it not been for Bob Kennedy, do you think you would have been President?

A. No. I don’t think so, but I think we might have come very close to carrying the convention on the issue of the war, and we’d have been in a better position to try to force Humphrey to make some concessions.

Q. There must be some sense of considerable disappointment, to look back at ’68 and realize what you did, the risk you took and what happened, to be a kind of prophet without honor.

A. That’s really it, I guess. It didn’t work. You take some consolation that we had to do it. Somebody had to do it. Then say, well, we gave the people a chance to have their say in the middle of the war.

But the fact is that the war went on and that the full force of the party was pretty well wiped out. But I think the party would have been fragmented and split anyway, even if we hadn’t done it. If it had responded, I think the party would have had new vitality, as it did after ’48, and civil rights. It would be a different party.

Q. I think there’s a lingering sense — you can see it in this campaign — that the Democrats are a party of weakness, and there is almost a continual shooting of the messenger.

A. When people talk about the Viet Nam War being lost because of critics, I say, we didn’t win — I lost. The party endorsed the war. And Nixon won and George McGovern lost.

Q. Do you think this country has digested the war experience?

A. I don’t think so, no. It’s curious that the Viet Nam Memorial is the most popular one in Washington. I wrote a thing about it. In the paper a soldier said, “This is a funny monument. It doesn’t have any beginning or any ending.” Just like the war.

Q. It keeps recurring, in art, in politics.

A. The whole thing was so corrupting. It corrupted the military. It made them dishonest. It made them do things that wouldn’t otherwise be done. It corrupted the press. It corrupted the Administration, certainly. I’m sure they knew they were lying to us. And corrupted the Democratic Party. And actually, it started the country’s fiscal disorder.

Q. You say you’re offended by this year’s campaign, and you certainly didn’t care for the last Democratic President. Over the years, you’ve talked about politics as a vocation and a profession, yet you seem to have taken a turn away from politics.

A. You get kind of thrown out of the party and rejected. I’ve given the electorate a chance to vote for me in many conditions against all sorts of opponents. So you can’t be hanging around the gate too much. I haven’t started saying I told you so yet — that’s the last step, and I’m holding off on that.