THE MAKING OF A CANDIDATE SENATOR EUGENE McCARTHY BEGINS TO CHANGE HIS IMAGE

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31656, 17 April 1968, Page 10

THE MAKING OF A CANDIDATE SENATOR EUGENE McCARTHY BEGINS TO CHANGE HIS IMAGE

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David Gray,

writing to the “Guardian," Manchester, train Milmnukee 1

• nuucnesier, from Milwaukee.] (Reprinted from the Guardian” by arrangement I

As move follows move in the struggle tor the Presidency, it becomes more and more apparent that Senator Eugene McCarthy, who started out as everyone s favourite professor, is beginning to look and behave more hke a normal candidate for power. With Johnson out of the way, with Kennedy—for all his money and political machinery—hardly the little friend of all the world, the opportunity is so clear that McCarthy is beginning to change his image.

The voter is being allowed to see that the Senator, already established as a candidate with a peace platform and an ability to decorate it with sense, style and wit, is also a determined and ambitious politician. From being way out he is now coming further in. The “children's crusade”— a phase of his campaign which he would now like the public to forget—has been superseded by his conception of a new national movement in which he sees himself uniting all those Democrats and quite a few Republicans who want peace and who dissent from Johnsonism.

More Arrogance There is still plenty of youth and radical liberal idealism, but even in the course of his campaign in Wisconsin McCarthy has been gradually curbing his tendency to give donnish little lectures embellished with quotations Shakespeare, Robert Lowell, Walt Whitman, and even a mysterious Celt called Caduc the Wise, have drifted in regularly to reinforce his arguments—and he has begun to speak out boldly and firmly. The public man is more assured, more arrogant than he was a fortnight ago. “Listen to my ideas on the subject” has given way to “Take notice of what 1 would do about it.” The arrival of Kennedy in the contest has concentrated his mind wonderfully. He still does not like the business of campaigning and he does not disguise his contempt for the normal ballyhoo of American politics. The McCarthy student army is dedicated and enthusiastic, but it is under strict control and its members have accepted his disciplines. “Neat and clean for Gene" is one of them. The policy is one of quietly persuading the public rather than attracting attention by empty demonstrations.

This is a cerebral revolution. McCarthy would no more have stood in the hotel lounge here and shaken hands with a stream of 10.000 supporters—as Nixon, with his Rotary Club smile, did—than the McCarthy students would have marched down the main street, like 40 Johnsonites did, with a mindless chant like: “Hey, hey, what do you say? All the way with L.8.J.” Appeal To Reason The Senator pays the electorate the compliment of appealing to its reason. If conventional electoral methods have brought them a President like Johnson, the argument goes, then McCarthy is quite right to attempt something different. This was why it was so hard for him to

make the journey into the inner core, where most of Milwaukee’s Negroes live. He had made his civil rights position clear, but his students wanted the gesture, and the press, who are not his dearest friends, mainly because he has not the slightest idea about the way a journalist’s mind works, kept barking about it.

It was not a very graceful performance and only people who behaved well were Milwaukee’s coloured population, who accepted the intrusion of the candidate and his accompanying circus of reporters and photographers with a certain amount of cheerful curiosity and showed no enthusiasim for McCarthy at all.

Perhaps they were not supposed to. There are few coloured faces among the McCarthy workers. Its revolution drew all its strength from young white middleclass idealists. Most of them feel passionately about civil rights, but their candidate has not lit many torches on the matter. Press Relations McCarthy's relationships with his press have deteriorated. On the whole the journalists who have been working with him respect him and enjoy the quality of his campaign. They like the dedication and enthusiasm of the kids.

Unlike Kennedy, McCarthy has no great need of the professionals and intellectuals. He does not need a crowd for comfort; he makes his own mistakes (although maybe that independence is based on the fact that he has not enough campaign money to afford a huge caucus of advisers) and those who have to follow him like a great chorus or like dramatic critics who have to take part in the play, recognise his charm —even though he does not show much of it to them—and individualism.

He is hypersensitive to criticism: he spends a good deal of valuable speaking time answering what he considers to be unfair comments in what must be quite obscure newspapers and when bigger newspapers fire, he jumps in a most surprising fashion.

Ned Kenworthy, of the “New York Times,” only had to suggest that the candidate lacked adrenalin for McCarthy to leap up, gallop for six and a half miles round the ghetto, and play a little basketball in the process, and he still keeps referring to

his much publicised dispute with his press assistants long after any politician with a knowledge of public relations would have let the matter die. The press here do resent two things. One is his continued implication that newspapers had aided the Administration in concealing the truth about Vietnam, which seems ludicrous when one remembers the amount of honest and moving American reporting of the tragedy. He sometimes behaves as though he invented dissent. The other is his failure to keep to schedules and to the texts of the speeches which are distributed beforehand (although that has improved since last week's explosion). “1 am surrounded by reporters who cannot read, radio commentators who cannot hear, and television men who can’t see,” he said the other day. It would be a pity if he carries this conflict too far, otherwise it may spoil the reporting of his campaign, and, compared with Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson, he still gets a very good press indeed. California Show-down What happens to him now that Mac Bird has become Mac Lear, now that the King has had to bear such a heavy reckoning for the war that McCarthy did most to proclaim unjust? The Senator thinks that the show-down with Kennedy will come in California. He has the advantage of having been right first while Kennedy was hesitating. Nothing could have exceeded the heroism with which the Senator from New York exposed him to danger. If Humphrey comes in, what policies can the Vice-President find to stir the mind of the nation? Intellectually, McCarthy is setting the pace at the moment.

In terms of policies, there has only been a thin tinkling from Kennedy, and Johnson must still hold the secret of the power game. On television the other night, he looked much more like a Renaissance cardinal than a lame duck.