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mhm. Uh huh. From Gainesville, Florida. Hello. I'm Mike Cannon. And welcome to conversation. My guest on this conversation is former United States Senator Eugene McCarthy. Welcome to conversation, Senator. One is, I want to say a little bit about you for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with your history.

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You are a native of Minnesota. Attended ST John's University and the University of Minnesota. Served from 1948 to 1958 representing the fourth District of your home state in the United States House of Representatives. And then from 1958 until 1970 you were United States Senator from your home state, 1968.

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Because of your opposition to the Vietnam War, you challenged the incumbent president of your own party in the primaries. And later in 1976 you ran as an independent candidate for the office of president of the United States. Glad to have you here at the university. Pretty much the record.

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Uh, I'd like to ask your impressions of the current group of candidates running in the Democratic primaries. Uh, we've said its a routine statement. I suppose on all our parts that we're waiting to see which one or ones break out of the pack. There are so many running.

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But how do they strike you as a group? And are there any individuals who are particularly impressive? Well, I hesitate to say that there really isn't anyone that seems to be outstanding, and I don't think anyone is going to break out of the pack in terms of attracting any great national support.

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It may be that someone will break out of the pack. Possibly Mondale's out of the pack now. He may break back into it. As time goes on, it's rather interesting. In 1960 you're Kennedy was nominated as late as April of the election year. Uh, there were these six or seven candidates running and they were all I think, most of them better than what we have now.

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It was Kennedy and there was Johnson. There was Hubert Humphrey. There was Senator Symington, Governor Minor of New Jersey. Wayne Morris was a candidate, so P. Williams with the candidate, there may have been one more, but it was interesting. They were all running sort of on the same platform, saying, This is the party platform and I'm the person who can best represent it.

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In contrast with that, you have practice. Every candidate now is trying to establish that he's different in terms of where he stands or what he will do from the other candidates, which I think indicates that there isn't a real party position of any substance. And so they all play around.

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Sort of like Gresham's law of politics, that bad issues are minimal or peripheral issues or unimportant distinctions tend to take over the what should be the substantive matter of the campaign. I have not found any one of them yet whom I think has defined what should be sort of the real basic position of the Democratic Party.

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Until that happens, I think they just kind of spin around as they are. But of the campaign rhetoric that you've heard so far, the cadence and content of the speech is Well, I think it reflects sort of the generalization I made that If you don't really have any substantive issues, you then begin to make sort of accidental distinctions so that at least the leading candidates are pretty heavy into adjectives.

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I think not much substance. Well, you're a student of political language. Well, sort of accidentally. So you and of American poetry and its many forms. I'm wondering if there is any imagery, successful, dynamic imagery in the political speech we're hearing now that compares with some of the great speech makers in American politics.

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Well, I I don't think anyone could recall a figure of speech that's come out of this campaign so far. A real image. Ah, you'd be reduced to pretty pedestrian. You shouldn't say pedestrian, I guess when you have an astronaut run. But the language has been pretty ordinary, most of it, and it really has been rather important.

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So I suppose you have for the adjective. You can't get it into a noun or one adjective. Possibly why you ought not to write it in poetry. And but other linguists say the same thing. And I've really studied Mondale more than others, and you find him using sometimes two or three adjectives for one noun.

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And once you get to that, you sort of forget what the noun is, and you begin to think about the adjectives and and I think it's probably dangerous to elect the president on the basis of his adjectives. I see it. It is something a little heavier than that, at least the verb once in a while or good solid.

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Now, I heard you once site a particular image, that of a of a bird in a gilded cage. A figure of speech used by one of our Hubert Humphrey. Yeah, Humphrey left some images you asked about. Stevenson left, um, images, but his We're really not metaphor.

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It was more than the language itself, the ballot sentence in the alliteration and sort of allegories. He was really not into the kind of what I call images of poetic images or metaphor, but it was good language. But Humphrey Yeah, well, there's nothing like this in this campaign.

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Humphrey was talking about Eisenhower at one time, and he said he's a bird in a gilded cage. He said they Republicans keep him in the living room, singing sweet songs to everyone that passes by while back in the kitchen, the black birds are eating up the public pie, not necessarily original images.

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They've been around a long time, but at least it was an original application and and sort of memorable, and I think it people remember things like that you can get away with pretty radical positions in American politics if you present them in such a way that people don't really remember who said it.

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MM are identified with you, or you can say pretty ordinary things and with the right kind of language and have some response. But there's not much of it in this campaign we're observing this fall, the unhappy 20th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was a master of the language, and he had a form of speech, which I think is called chi elastic.

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Where, um, statements across, uh, let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate as not what your country can do for you, but, uh, and that is also memorable. It lends itself to easy memorization. It doesn't hurt you, either. You've protected yourself on both counts.

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I think that was part of the Kennedy, I suppose, almost a technique of politics that have language or or some of his speech. His his speeches were irregular. I think they reflected the fact that he did use speech writers or took the style of people and used it.

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Ah, we'll use different styles, and so his speeches were irregular. But there were those elements of style such as you describe. He got into the balance sentence a little bit, too, that was usually attributed to to Sorenson. I think it's one of the legacies of Stevenson, which has not been very well honored by later practitioners in the way in which he could.

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He could use it. Just recently, I got out Sorensen's book on Kennedy and reread the chapter in which Ted Sorensen describes the making of the inaugural address, which was a very short speech, by the way, uh, one of the shortest delivered in this century but very powerful.

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And Life magazine, I recall, which had no special sympathy for Kennedy, published the entire text after the inauguration, calling it in its headline, a great inaugural address. I thought it was a very bad speech. Very interested. Yeah, I did. I was. I was there and heard it.

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I said, You know, this doesn't sound good to me. It was too aggressive, and I thought Kennedy seemed to be on the defensive too much. He was sort of over proving more than I thought he had to prove about himself, especially the militancy. Yes. Uh, let the word go forth from this time and place that will bear any burden, undertake any hardship.

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That's right. So far, it was sort of a declaration of war in the world, in effect saying, Well, if you behave yourselves, well, tolerate you. But you better be careful because we're ready and we're coming Almost a sort of license Her What McNamara supposedly did was develop a contingency plan for every possible confrontation around the world.

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This was the declaration of the base for the contingency plans, which they proceeded to do. I am whether I could really prove it. But if you allow a kind of loose historical judgment on this program, I don't know how strict my program is known for loose judgments of every Sunday.

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But I sort of watched candidates and I've served under five presidents while I was ever they're inclined to. It seems to me that the thing the charges made and this is true of members of Congress, the charges made against them in a campaign that they seem to be most worried about after they're elected, they're inclined to want to do something to prove that the charge wasn't valid, you know, and I think that Kennedy Ah, I don't know whether he suffered politically from it, but he he thought he was sort of the Nixon charge that whether you're inexperienced, he's not prepared to make hard decisions, he be soft, you know.

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He won't make military decisions. And I've been there while with Eisenhower, and I think it kind of readiness to establish a a military character as soon as he was elected. And that was in the inaugural address. I thought his State of the Union message, given that same year, was a very good speech.

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It was. It analyzed our problems that it presented kind of what I thought, a decent, procedural way to deal with them. But the inaugural address I thought was, Does your loose historical judgment, as you call it, uh, cover, cover this kind of behavior as well? Namely Kennedy's, uh, early involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion, which might be interpreted under your rubric to show the same thing as it was a logical extension of the inaugural address and, by contrast, Nixon opening up relations with China.

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Well, let me take it through Tuesday. I think that Johnson, whatever his motivation, was I wanted to prove that he could handle the war better than Kennedy had. So you had the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and Nixon, when he moved in, was going to show that he could do it even better, and that he would mind.

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And I and Mom hi far. I mean, mine the one and bomb and going to Cambodia. This was the way to do it. And each one was sort of trying to prove something against either what was said about them in the campaign or about against their predecessors.

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And so it sort of just ran on until we were in Cambodia. Uh, I I it seems kind of macchia value, but I'm beginning to think we ought to let it kind of set up a little war for every president so he could win it quickly.

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Like Grenada. Yeah, I kind of have Grenada. Grenada could do it every four years, and we can send in the Marines and captured again, and each president would say, Well, I want a war, and he wouldn't have to prove it in any other area. Just say Well taken care of that.

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Now you can You can relax and be yourself. This may satisfy Ronald. Uh, Jack Kennedy had Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger and other gifted writers to assist him in the preparation of his drafts. President Kennedy, uh, Reagan, uh, at the present time also has some gifted writers, and I wonder if you know them if you could say a word about them.

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I'm thinking in particular of the speech that President Reagan gave announcing the invasion of Grenada. And he did use the word invasion when he first announced it, uh, later, he called it a rescue mission. But in that first speech, he used a very dramatic turn of phrase that sounded as though it came right out of a Hollywood screenplay.

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We got there in the nick of time. It's like the perils of Pauline. Just the transfer from there. Well, uh, you're quite right. Uh, the Roosevelt has speechwriter, as you know, or one or two. And, uh, so did Eisenhower. Nixon had I guess Pat Buchanan was one.

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Well, I know the person whom I'm told writes most of Reagan's speeches. If a man named Dolan Uh oh, I don't know what his background was. I think he was in public relations or something. But he, he wrote campaign speeches to and supposedly is is Ronald's preferred speechwriter.

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There's a statement that President Kennedy made. I'd like to quote it. If more politicians, new poetry and more poets new politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live. Is that the kind of statement that you would make? Well, there's not many politicians who accept that most politicians now refer to me as a poet.

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They don't mean to complement. Some of my poet friends are urging me to get it back into politics. I think their motives are pure. I don't know what kind of judgment it implies as to as to my poetry. Well, uh, that's a good statement, but it's one of those sort of balance statements.

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Again, if Kennedy's where you can, you can have it either way, you know, it doesn't really prove anything, But he did have Frost read a poll, not the one that Frost intended to read. You recall because Frost could not see the sunlight blinded him and the poem he had written for the occasion.

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He could not deliver. And so he gave another 30 recited. That's right, it's the other one. I think either you couldn't read or blew away. And so you and I would show real real barred in Frost that he could call on memory too Well, I don't think there's any real contradiction.

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I think would be helpful to have politicians who either are poets or, you know, poetry. They the only president we've had who sort of did except that he would like to write poetry was Lincoln, you know. And he had three major. I'd call him major poems published before he became president.

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But I think he wrote them in the forties. And it's rather curious correspondence between him and a friend of his named Johnson about the poems. And, ah, he had shown them to his friend. And he said, I think they had to be published in Lincoln said, Well, you can do it if you want to, but don't put my name on them because I might be ridiculed.

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Mm. And they were published anonymously and papers in southern Illinois, Ah and Lincoln in one exchange that he wished he could write better poetry, he said. He'd give up everything. He hadn't even go into debt. He could write better poetry. So there it was. And I used to tell you, I'm a better poet that Lincoln was.

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And since he was our best president, you just take it one step further and say there's no contradiction between having an interest. And he had some skill in in writing poetry and, uh, being in politics, Senator, in this 20th anniversary year as we remember John F.

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Kennedy, the tendency of many is to think of his many fine qualities of the extraordinary impact he had not only upon our country but upon the world, including the developing world that now seems to have such bad feelings about us. What are some of the criticisms that might be made of President Kennedy's brief tenure in office?

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Well, I think what he did was created an attitude of anticipation of hope and whether or not that would have been fulfilled if he'd stayed on or not. No one can quite say. I mean, there are people who say it would be there. Others who say it won't I you know, I'm gonna make rash judgments.

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But in the case of these historical questions, it's hard enough to find out what happened without going on to say what would have happened or what might have been. Ah, there were two or three things that sort of were tended to feed the whole one was his youth, who always his attitude, uh, the Alliance for Progress.

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Uh, which It was a very good beginning, but it was all sort of dampened down by a Cuban thing and by the missile crisis and by other things that went on, I think his principal contribution lasting one or at least a continuing one, which they carried forward was was in the area of civil rights, the first in the enforcement the way in which they operate under rather difficult circumstances.

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Mississippi, Alabama. But generally that they minorities felt that they had an administration which was going to do things for them. The court was decisions are going to be enforced and that there would be a civil rights bill passed. And although it wasn't done in his administration, and I'm not sure he meant to pass a bill in his first term, some evidence he was going to wait until second term, but it was.

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It was It was It was on the ways and I saw Quotation from Mansfield, who at that time was the majority leader in the Senate saying that they had in mind and it would have been passed. He's quite right. And so there was no break in the in the, I would say, the development of extension of civil rights.

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Ah, I think his greatest area of failure was foreign policy, and he handled the economy very well. The political economy the country in those years was probably run better than it has been at any time carried on until Nixon became president. Walter Heller was an aide.

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Yeah, Walter was, I think the principal advisor and Corey Taylor is sort of embarrassed now because Reagan keeps saying, We got our supply side economic theory from Walter Heller. Walter wants to repudiate, said Well that his mind was not a great theory. I was just making a judgment in time, and they can't say I was.

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It's like George Kennan, who is trying to repudiate containment. So not This is not my idea, they said. Oh yes, Georgia, it's yours. There's a little column, a man named Carl writes for the Des Moines paper about the dangers of doing good. He didn't cite these examples, but he he said, You know, you'll start something that's pretty good at it.

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It gets out of control. And he cited Dale, Carnegie said, who? Trying to establish good relationships. And he said he'd made the handshake dishonest. And let's Billy Graham, he said to Billy introduced us to electronic religion. It was pretty good. But he said, Now Billy can't compete with those who've taken over from Oral Roberts.

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Falwell carried it beyond Billy. Billy was about to do good, and this is what you wind up with. The same is true of Heller and and Canon in the field of politics and economics. I think, well, it's not. I think the record on in foreign policy is Kennedy Thing is, is not very good and nuclear build up a nuclear build up.

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He began by charging there was a missile gap in his campaign speeches. That's right, but there was not accept in our favor. Yeah, roughly As I read in Tony Lewis, we had something like 40 nuclear devices at the time and the Russians only had six. So in numbers, at least there was a gap in our favor.

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And Kennedy almost immediately ordered another 1000 nuclear bombs just to keep the keep the game going. Uh, I don't know what kind of advice he was getting. I do know that Geri Wisner, who was at some point, is the science advisor later ahead of Mitt, has said We never should have gone beyond 200 that any any, any kind of reasonable balance that we could have gotten the Russians to hold the 200 us to hold a 200.

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That should have been enough to to provide a deterrent. And it was clearly in the Kennedy administration that went beyond what Wisner, who was part of it now says is as far as we should have gone. So I assume that his advice was overridden. So you date the beginning of the nuclear arms race from the Kennedy administration.

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Well, we made the great leap forward. And then, of course, the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, I think, put tremendous pressure on the Russians to build up their nuclear arsenal and also to build up their Navy because there was a naval confrontation and in the great humiliation of Khrushchev.

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And also it really led to his being deposed. I think his, uh, having to remove the missiles from Yeah, and we stopped his ship at sea. You know that which is a a pretty aggressive act to stop a ship on the high seas. Was it also during President Kennedy's administration that the Berlin Wall was first erected?

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Yes, it was. That was another defeat. It was a defeat. Yes, of course. True, but had sort of surrendered something on Berlin with the airlift. I don't know what I would have done if they'd asked me. I think I was. In the case of the airlift, I think I would have said We're going to send trucks and see what the Russians would have done.

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And I think that if Kennedy had said, You can't put the wall up, we're going to run a couple tanks through tomorrow morning and tell you what time it is. We're coming. I don't think the Russians would have fired on them. It was it was more symbolic in terms of what it meant was a reality.

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But it was it was a retreat, All right. In retrospect, do you give any credence to the various conspiratorial theories about the nature of the assassination itself? Well, I don't know. I think that they were undoubted. There were people conspiring and talking about killing. Probably are about every president.

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But I don't think there's any evidence that they discovered a conspiracy out of which Sarah hands their hand came. It all relates to that whole Warren commission. You know, Mike, which was very badly handled. It was not Saran Saran and Jack Kennedy. I mean, Oswald Oswald.

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And yeah, the signature was Sarah and Sarah, and I think he was a free agent, and I think Oswald was, But that doesn't mean there weren't conspiracies but Johnson every thought he had, that this was a terribly divisive and unsettling thing for the country, which it was, and that the best thing you could do would be the to have a commission sort of settle it quickly, get it out of the way.

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And then he decided to do that, he would have to put on the commission the most reputable or supposedly most trusted officials in the country. And so he got her a war and a chief justice to head it up, which was a serious mistake. Why was it a serious mistake?

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Well, first of all, it was pretty evident that this was not going to be an easy investigation. And what they're going to hurry it. You're going to take the chief justice whose integrity as chief justice should be protected. But you also in a way prejudice the whole court because you put the court and the chief justice behind this commission report.

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He took Dick Russell, who was the president of the Senate at that time, and that's the position of High Honor. And Russell told me he didn't want to take it. Johnson said, You have to do it. And that sort of put the honor and the integrity of Russell and the Senate behind it.

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He took the speaker of the house, or I think he took the speaker of the house and the leaders in the house. So he took everyone he could find in government who had in every office that had a reputation and even institutionalized integrity, and put it behind the report.

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And the report was, I said, bound to be inconclusive. It was presented as though it were, and it had. All of these people have signed on, and Johnson said, that takes care of what it didn't take care of and it would have been better. I think they've had a long running commission, could still be going on.

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Something happened 20 years ago with that assassination that continues to have its effects, directly or indirectly in our perception of the safety of public figures. And just recently we had a bomb explode in the Capitol building itself, and there is widespread talk of fencing off the capital from the American people.

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That's a very bad thing to have happened. It's almost like the Vatican captivity. Yes, we elect the president, lock them up, study, make decisions from behind the walls behind the fence. I think the Kennedy, of course, Roosevelt was not killed, and Truman wasn't although they were attacked that the the Kennedy assassination had a more serious, more serious I mean a deeper emotional impact than even the reflections on earlier is that are those that will come later because party he was he was young and it was it didn't reflect any any kind of political motivation in the case of the Puerto Ricans attacking Truman.

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Why, we said, Well, it was It was it was politics. Or but in the case of Kennedy, it was just actually, it was accidental. I shouldn't forget that President Roosevelt was shot at in Miami 33 Sarah Mac was killed. Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago was killed instead, by the way, the assassin in that case was tried, sentenced and executed within 38 days of his crime.

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And, uh, and since that time you've had because she had the assassination of Robert Kennedy, which there might have been a minimal political motivation in that. But it was more like something out of camels, the stranger that it was politically motivated and the attacks on Ford were both unrelated to politics.

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And so was the attack on Ron Reagan. Whether that started with the attack on Kennedy or not, or the kind of non political deranged strange people decided to shoot the president. Senator, thank you very much for sad, sad note said no to. But that's where we are, you know?

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Well, it's the 20th anniversary of that event, and I thank you for sure. It's curious about most Everybody remembers just what they were doing when that when they got the word. And it's one of those psychological things and we have 15 seconds. Where were you? I was having lunch at a restaurant near the capital right about noon when they called and said, The president's been shot and called us over to the Senate floor.

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But I've talked to lots of people, young people, people who were eight years old. They say I know a nice of mine. Said she was helping her mother paint the kitchen, you know? And they don't remember. Everyone remembers it. I want to thank you very much for coming to the University of Florida.

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I want to thank Accent the student group, which is made possible. Your visit. Uh, thanks again for being with me on this program. Good to be with you. Mhm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.