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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."