Oblomov for President

NOBODY KNOWS: REFLECTIONS ON

THE MCCARTHY CAMPAIGN OF 1968 by

Jeremy Lamer. 189 pages. Macmillan. $4.95.

His campaign was one of the great astonishments of an implausible year. He piped up an army of some of the nation's best youth. As much as any other man, he helped to unhorse a President and turn the U.S. toward a withdrawal from Viet Nam. He seemed to represent those rare qualities in American politics: intelligence, restraint, courage. For a time, his followers thought, he legitimized a new politics of participation; 1968 became, as he later wrote, "the Year of the People."

Yet where is McCarthy? After his Year of the People came Richard Nixon and his Silent Majority. Two years after the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy seems to have abandoned his political base in Minnesota, where his once formidable organization is a shambles. He has resigned his powerful seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and taken to writing a monthly column for McCall's. In short, with the arrogant melancholy of a Nabokovian conjurer, McCarthy performed his trick, then packed his belongings and disappeared. Why?

According to Jeremy Larner, a 32-year-old novelist who worked as McCarthy's speechwriter from Wisconsin to Chicago, the entire movement was based on an enormous misapprehension. McCarthy's political sensibility derived in some ways from his liberal Minnesota Roman Catholic background. "Here," says Larner, "was a basic difference between McCarthy and the volunteers who comprised the McCarthy movement . . . For McCarthy, all temporal conditions were relative. For the people who worked for him, their ends here on earth--peace in Vietnam, racial justice in America--were absolute."

As the campaign went on, it began seeming to many in the McCarthy army that for the candidate, participatory democracy meant freedom to work out his eccentricities before an audience. In time McCarthy disregarded his staff's advice almost totally. "The man who was running on the issues," writes Larner, "demanded acceptance on total faith--which was one of the qualities for which we bitterly castigated L.B.J." By midsummer, with the convention approaching and Robert Kennedy dead, "McCarthy regressed to his balanced presentation of self, to the sacred ceremony of his personality." Gloomily, Larner thought of Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you."

Looking Backward. McCarthy's passivity, Larner came to suspect, was hard to distinguish "from a fear of looking bad. In this he was not unlike certain athletes who would rather lose than go all-out to win." But beyond that, there seems in retrospect a certain ascetic bleakness in the candidate's character, and a perverse satisfaction in disappointing the expectations of others. McCarthy seemed to cherish his acedia, his spiritual Oblomovism. He emerges from these pages as an almost hermetically private man who one day--defying all logic and expectation--challenged the President and enlisted a tremendous, genuine but misplaced popular passion. McCarthy's followers must now wonder whether they did not fall in naively behind a brooding circuit rider whose attention was fixed all along on some interior stage. McCarthy carried the flag for a considerable popular uprising. Yet his net effect, in retrospect, was to tame and domesticate dissent--to lead it to the Chicago Stock Yards. It belatedly erupted on Mayor Daley's streets, but soon afterward McCarthy vanished.

If only because he is a man of some profound scruples, McCarthy is an American political oddity. Perhaps no other politician has campaigned on the premise that the very act of seeking power is corrupting. This became the central paradox of his fight: he was scrupulous to avoid seeking the presidential power even while he sought it. Larner believes that McCarthy might actually have been elected President--a proposition that is debatable and unprovable. What he really means is that McCarthy could have won if he had been a different kind of man. But then a different kind of man would never have taken on a lost cause in New Hampshire in the first place.

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