UNDERNEWS EXTRA: LUNCH WITH GENE

DEC 10, 2005
FROM THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
EDITED BY SAM SMITH
Since 1964, Washington's most unofficial source

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NOTES ON A NAPKIN
LUNCH WITH GENE

Sam Smith

OVER THE PAST QUARTER CENTURY or so, Mark Plotkin and I would have
occasional lunches with Eugene McCarthy. Plotkin, now a political
commentator for Washington radio station WTOP, had been McCarthy's
campaign manager when he ran as an independent for president in 1976.
The lunches were at such places as Duke Zeibert's - a haven for the
untight powerful - and later at the Review conference room at La Tomate
Restaurant - AKA the table just southwest of the bar. Between lunches,
Gene McCarthy would write poetry, books of essays, columns (which I
happily published in this journal), drink coffee at the H&J Grocery in
Sperryville, Virginia, and, when the mood struck him, run for president.


During or after lunch I would invariably find myself scribbling a few
words on a napkin or in my butt pilot, the small note pad I keep in my
back pocket. Here are some the things these notes recall.

[]

DURING THE 1976 CAMPAIGN, while McCarthy and Plotkin were in Florida,
Bill Veeck announced that he was reactivating Minnie Minoso for eight
at-bats so he could claim to have played over four decades. Veeck was
always coming up with ideas. Some weren't so great, like putting his
players in short pants, but some became traditions like having the
announcer sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh-inning
stretch. When Chicagoan Plotkin read the Minoso story he quickly came up
with another idea for Veeck: have him reactivate former Soo Leaguer
Eugene McCarthy. Gene was excited and Plotkin made the call. Veeck had
just one question: "Can he hit?" Plotkin assured him that McCarthy was a
strong hitter. There was a long pause and then the reply, "Nah. . .
Daley would kill me."

[]

ONCE WE WERE having lunch at Duke's when Rob Reiner came into the room.
McCarthy rose to greet him and the much shorter Reiner, clearly
delighted to see him, rushed forward and then hesitated, asking "Do you
do hugs?" Gene did.

[]

ON ANOTHER OCCASION former Indiana Senator Vance Hartke sat down with
us. As he approached, Plotkin said, "Here comes one half of Bayh and
Bought." Hartke had been one of the first senators to come out against
the Vietnam war, but after leaving the Senate he lowered his sights
somewhat, lobbying for riverboat gambling and getting caught at the age
of 77 violating state election laws. He was convicted and put on
probation. Hartke told us of visiting Governor Roger Branigan one
morning. The governor was on his second whiskey and said to Hartke, "You
know, I never wanted to be governor, I just wanted to be elected
governor."

[]

ANOTHER SENATOR Gene liked was the one from the west who, when things
got real bad, would say, 'It's antelope time. Nothin' to do but paint a
white stripe down the back of your pants and run with the antelopes."

[]

LONG BEFORE JERRY FALWELL, there was the colorful Catholic television
character, Bishop Fulton Sheen, who not only spread the gospel but gave
the future star of 'West Wing' his stage name. Sheen stayed in character
off the set. McCarthy recalled sitting with him in a restaurant as a
waitress took the orders. When she came to the customer in the fancy
robes, she said, "And what do you want, cock robin?"

[]

MINNESOTA, Gene explained, was a place where people committed their sins
in English, confessed in German and were absolved in Latin.

[]

I ONCE MENTIONED Wisconsin to Gene and received in return the
unpremeditated bias of populist and Nordic Minnesota towards its German
neighbor: "Oh they're just a bunch of socialists over there."

[]

GENE VISITED MAINE ONCE. How'd you like it, I asked. "Well, it seems
that all the women look like men and I got real interested in these
places called redemption centers until I found they were just for old
soda bottles."

[]

GENE TOOK TENNIS LESSONS from Allie Ritzenberg at St. Alban's School in
the shadow of the National Cathedral. Many of Washington's most
prominent went there to release whatever aggressions were left over from
their day job. Ritzenberg, when he wasn't winning titles himself,
coached people like Jackie Kennedy, Katherine Graham and Robert
McNamara. McCarthy viewed McNamara as a coward for showing up on the
courts early in the morning when no one was around to see how badly he
played. Gene told Ritzenberg that he was responsible for the Vietnam War
because he kept hitting to McNamara's strength thereby boosting his
ego. Then McNamara would go to the Pentagon and escalate the real
battle.

[]

SENATOR ROBERT KERR once asked McCarthy for help freeing Oklahoma from
the onerous provisions of the pending highway beautification act. Gene
agreed and gave a moving speech in which he pointed out that billboards
actually improved the scenery of Oklahoma.

[]

WHEN THE VALERIE PLAME case came up I asked Gene whether there was an
easy way to tell who was the CIA operative in an American embassy. Just
look for the staffer who shows the least respect towards the ambassador,
he replied.

[]

SOMEONE asked what Gene would do if he were to become pope. He replied
that he would cut the Ten Commandments down to four and reorder them.

[]

GENE had other novel solutions. He favored prayer in school but only on
court-ordered buses. He also suggested that pregnant women be allowed to
drive down the HOV-2 lane, an argument that would later end up in court.


[]

HE LIKE PRINCIPLES YOU COULD FOLLOW: "An old Congressman - I think it
was Brad Spencer - said, 'I'll tell you, young men, you may make a
mistake once in a while, but vote against everything that starts with
're.'

He said, 'Vote against all reorganizations.'

'Vote against all recodifications.

'Vote against all resolutions.'

They hadn't started to reinvent government then but he would have said,
'Vote against all reinventions.'

And, he said, 'Vote against all Republicans.' That was the last word and
rather a good bit of advice."

[]

GENE AND I both owned property in Rappahannock County, Virginia, about
two hours away. If DC had the population density of Rappahannock, it
would have only 2,000 people living in it. I bought the place in the
early 1970s from G. Brown Miller, who once told me, "You know, partner,
your friend Erbin is a mighty fine fellow." I agreed. "He gave me one of
them marijuwana cigarettes the other day." "How'd you like it, Brown?" I
asked. "Well, it seems like to me, for a man who's lived on moonshine
all your life, it don't do much."

I once went entered the H&J Grocery store and found a group of men
drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden
holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the
other. It was explained to me that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.

[]

DESPITE ALL HIS LOSSES in presidential races, his defeat in the 1982
Minnesota senatorial race sometimes appeared to bother him most. And
Rappahannock County was partly to blame. It seemed his opponent had
depicted McCarthy as a stranger who lived amongst the Virginia gentry
and the horsey set. Gene tried to explain the difference between, say,
truly horsey Middleburg, Virginia, and Rappahannock - such as the
roughness of the latter's terrain and its groundhog holes. Challenged to
explain who did live there, "I acknowledged that there were one or two
gentlemen in the county and another two or three marginal ones, whose
names I refused to give out, and went on to explain that the men of my
acquaintance in the county were country lawyers, well diggers,
preachers, horse trainers and traders, orchard men, cattle breeders and
horse breeders, wood cutters, timber men, a game warden, at least three
country store owners, an auctioneer, two filling station operators, the
keeper of the hounds, a real estate man who encouraged people to eat
rutabagas, a county supervisor, one or two persons suspected of being
moonshiners and bootleggers, poachers, a coon hound trainer and hunter,
and one suspected of keeping fighting chickens, and a few scattered
United Airlines pilots."

[]

GENE ARGUED THAT books without autographed inscriptions were more
valuable as they were bought by people who actually wanted to read the
book and not just to please a friend.

[]

ON HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY, McCarthy recalled Robert McNamara appearing before
a Senate committee:

||| He testified one day, and [Senator] Wayne Morse asked him, "How many
tanks are there in Latin America?" And McNamara didn't look it up,
didn't ask anybody, and he said "Nine hundred and seventy-four." Wayne
said, "That's pretty precise." And then without another question
MacNamara said, "That's sixty percent as much as a single country,
Bulgaria, has."

I had resolved earlier never to ask him any more questions, but this was
too much, and I said I was interested in that answer. And he said,
"Well, that's right." I said, "Well, I agree with nine hundred and
seventy-four, but why did you tell us it was sixty percent of the number
in Bulgaria?" And he said, "Because it is." And I said, "Well, why
Bulgaria? Do you, in your world, count tanks relative to Bulgaria?" I
said, "Is there a kind of Bulgarian absolute, as far as tanks are
concerned?" And he said, "If there were, I would tell you about it."

And I realized then I learned what a true fact was. If you take two
things that are not true and juxtapose them, then you've got to believe
they're true, because they seem so precise. I mean, nine hundred and
seventy-four and sixty percent of Bulgaria: You say, "That must be a
true fact." |||

[]

FINALLY IT WAS TIME to go to a retirement home. As Gene had said when he
turned 80, he was "beyond the reach of the scriptures" with their
lifespan of three score and ten. But he didn't think all that much of
his new form of exile. For one thing, there had to be at least three
people at each table in the dining hall: "You need one to eat, one to
talk, and one to hear." And he learned early not to sit at the same
table with Victor Reuther who had developed an endless capacity for
describing his near death in an attempted murder while a labor leader.
Gene's view of retirement: "I feel like I'm on a cruise ship on the
River Styx."

[]

HERE'S ONE OF HIS POEMS he recited on his 80th birthday

THE PUBLIC MAN

He walks even in daylight with his arms outstretched.
Fishlike, he shies at shadows,
his own following him, nose to the ground,
like a blind bloodhound.

Grey mists float through the cavities of his skull,
he feeds the sterile steer, and cows of no desire,
on the mast of bitter grapes.
He shades his eyes against fireflies;
and his own life, which once burned bright,
is now yellow tallow.

His words rise like water twice used from the cistern pumps,
and then go out, in a wavery line, like beagles in search of rabbits.
Like a gull crying with a tired voice, he looks back often into the fog.

Each night he holds his stone head between his hands
while his elbows sink into the tabletop. - EM

[]

THE LAST TIME I saw Gene he was observing his 89th birthday in his
apartment with the help of a lobster sent over by the Palm Restaurant.
Gene was not able to move or talk much and when he did speak it was
almost inaudible. But I listened anyway, fascinated that, even at this
sad final stage, the words - though barely comprehensible - still seemed
poetic. It was as though he was working on his last verse.

[]

BUT HE HAD already written it:

Now it is certain that there is no magic stone
there is no secret to be found.
One must go with the mind's winnowed learning,
no more than the child's handhold on a willow leaning over the lake
or on a sumac root at the edge of the bluff.

All ignorance is checked, all betrayals scratched.
The coat is hung on the peg, the cigar laid on beveled table's edge,
the cue chosen and chalked, the balls racked for the final break;
all cards have been drawn, all bets called,
the dice warm as blood in the palm shaken for the final cast;
the glove has been thrown on the ground, the last choice of weapons
made,
a book for one poem, the poem for a line, a line for a word.

"Broken things are powerful," said Yeats,
but things about to break are stronger still.
The last shot from the brittle bow is the truest.

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NOMINATING SPEECH
FOR EUGENE MCCARTHY
Sam Smith
Americans for Democratic Action National Board
December 15, 1992

[In 1992, Gene McCarthy asked me, as a vice president of Americans for
Democratic Action, to put his name into nomination for the
organization's endorsement as the Democratic candidate for president. I
knew ADA was about to endorse Bill Clinton but I agreed to Gene's
request. Here is my speech]

I first became involved in the McCarthy campaign out of friendship. Gene
McCarthy called me and asked for my help. I told him I had already
contributed to Tom Harkin. He said that was all right to help those
young fellows. It's hard to argue with an attitude like that.

My initial task was to figure out why the hell he was running again.

I soon discovered that what appeared quixotic only had that aura because
of the cynical, perverse, corrupt, trivial and destructive politics of
our times. The oddity was not that Gene McCarthy was running but that
we thought it odd.

And what precisely did we think was odd?

That he refuses to give up a good fight?

That he is probably the most intelligent candidate?

The wisest?

The one with the longest service to the progressive cause?

The one with the most experience, both foreign and domestic?

The one of most unflinching integrity?

Or that he believes, in the manner of Plutarch, that politics is a
lifetime avocation and not an occasional experience of convenience?

No, what was really odd was that these qualities appear to carry so
little weight in our political considerations.

In 1948, Gene McCarthy supported national health insurance.

In 1954, he was the only member of Congress willing to debate publicly
with Joseph McCarthy.

In 1968, he opposed the Vietnam War.

In 1975, he went to court against our current crazy and corrupt
elections system.

So the basic question is: do you want to adopt McCarthy's policies now
or -- as we have in the past -- wait another 20 or 25 years?

Is Gene McCarthy serious? No candidate is more serious. But unlike most
candidates these days, McCarthy is serious about his politics. Most
candidates are only serious about getting themselves elected. Most --
including some who will be extolled this morning -- really only hope to
be the misty mirror of our own longings. They are not truly salesmen at
all, but consumers -- consumers of our own gullibility.

Much of what you hear from politicians is not policy and ideas, but
merely speeches. The other night, at the Irish Times pub, Maurice
Rosenblatt explained to me how speeches in Washington are written: first
you write the headline, then you write the news release, then you write
the speech, then you do the research.

It has been said that Washington is a place where perceptions vie with
scenarios to supplant reality. Whether that happens is ultimately,
however, not Tom Brokaw's or George Will's choice, but ours.

Each of us has the choice to surrender to the tyranny of perceptions or,
as Dylan Thomas put it, rage, rage, rage, against the dying of the
light. Part of that choice is before you this morning. I urge you to
consider your remaining potential to choose as a gift, a sacred part of
what makes you human.

To those who would chide me for the impracticality of nominating the
senior statesman of liberalism, I advise you to consider what the great
British liberal, G.K. Chesterton, once said: all good politics starts
with the ideal.

You work backwards from there. So be pragmatic if you must. Accede to
puerile perceptions if there is no other choice. But not -- dear friends
-- on the first ballot. On the first ballot, just vote right.