Seymour Hersh

10. Speaking for Gene McCarthy

98 CHAPTER 10 Speaking for Gene McCarthy A Quixotic Campaign Is Born Lyndon Johnson easily defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964 in one of America ’s largest landslides. Emboldened, the tall Texan pushed ahead on his Great Society reforms as Medicaid, Medicare, and civil rights legislation sailed through Congress. These were legacies and carryovers of John Kennedy ’s presidency, Johnson insisted, but so too was the gnawing war in Southeast Asia, which became Johnson’s obsession—and folly. The French had failed in Vietnam, and America slowly but surely stepped into the vacuum, first with advisers under Kennedy. And then Johnson persisted, insisting on bringing the North Vietnamese to their feet, with thousands of troops and tons of bombs. But America had grown increasingly restive with the war as television captured the mounting casualties. “Wait until those coffins start coming home to the small towns in Minnesota, and you’ll see the American people turn against this war,” observed Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy.1 Hurt by successive summers of urban race riots and a faltering war, the Democrats took a severe battering in the midterm elections of 1966. By 1967 Democratic Party dissenters organized a “Dump Johnson” movement, unimaginable three years earlier. A cadre of antiwar liberals began to cast about for a candidate willing to take on a suddenly vulnerable sitting president. The insurgents looked to the junior senator from New York, Robert Kennedy. But Kennedy feared a primary battle would wound the party and hoist a Republican—Richard Nixon, George Romney, or Nelson Rockefeller —to the presidency. And he feared he could not win. Eyes turned to McCarthy, a devout Catholic who was nearly Johnson’s vice presidential choice in 1964. One credential made McCarthy most attractive—he SPEAKING FOR GENE MCCARTHY 99 firmly opposed the Vietnam War. “The central point,” he said, “is what this war is doing to the United States . . . what it’s doing to us around the world today, this draining of the material and moral resources of the country from our really pressing problems.”2 It was, McCarthy declared, a matter of conscience; the war had to be opposed. The insurgents threw their support to fifty-two-year-old McCarthy, although many still hoped Kennedy would jump in. McCarthy declared his intent in November 1967 to challenge Johnson in the April 2 presidential primary in Wisconsin, a progressive Minnesota neighbor. But his supporters convinced him to brave the snows of New Hampshire for the nation’s first primary, March 12. McCarthy, the Irish Catholic poet who loved baseball and hockey, now had to put together a team for a quixotic quest for the presidency. “We were never quite a team,” observed Curtis Gans, a young reformer who helped organize the “Dump Johnson” movement.3 What actually emerged was more a guerilla uprising connected by an idea but with no central discipline. Nonetheless, it was destined to become part of American political folklore. A group of well-educated people, mostly liberal, jelled around a man who was like a nineteenth-century utopian poet. And although McCarthy was a loner who stuck to his own counsel, he still needed a campaign staff to run for office. Reporter Richard Stout, who covered McCarthy, observed that “a campaign staff began to develop, in much the way a pickup baseball game develops.” And Sy Hersh—a baseball lover who hated the Vietnam War like Senator McCarthy—got a call.4 A Typewriter and an Insurgency By early fall Hersh was awaiting publication of his book on chemical and biological weapons. He had also started his other career—hitting the campus lecture tour to tout the book and warn of these weapons of mass destruction. But the restless energy of the reporter, who glories in the crush of deadlines and pursuit of stories, still lurked in Hersh. He needed action. One of Hersh’s golfing partners was Tim Clark, whose father Blair had been named manager of McCarthy’s campaign. The Harvard-educated Blair Clark had been a CBS producer and once edited the liberal Nation magazine. Tim Clark told his father about Hersh. “I was interested simply because I didn’t know much about McCarthy,” Hersh 100 SPEAKING FOR GENE MCCARTHY said, adding, but “I liked his opposition to the war. He was somebody doing something and I was interested in that.” Although Hersh largely kept his opinions to himself, privately he had grown to hate the...