November 18, 1969
Page 34526
"DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" – REMARKS BY HARRY McPHERSON TO THE WOMEN'S NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CLUB
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Harry McPherson, who served with great distinction as general counsel to the Democratic Policy Committee, Deputy Undersecretary of the Army for International Affairs, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army for Civil Functions, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, and Special Counsel to President Johnson, recently spoke before the Women's National Democratic, Club.
Although Mr. McPherson's remarks were entitled "Democratic Vistas" and were addressed to a partisan audience, I am impressed by his well-balanced analysis of some of the doubts at present besetting all Americans and by his suggestions for restoring faith in our basic democratic ideals. I commend his message to Senators and ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
DEMOCRATIC VISTAS
(By Harry McPherson)
I chose "Democratic Vistas" as a title so that I could talk about the outlook for our Party, and for democratic ideals in America.
Anyone who speaks confidently about either takes a lot of risks. I think there has never been a time in this century – with the possible exception of the late ,20's and early 30's – when the values most people live by were under such attack, and when understanding was so clouded. Ten or twenty years from now we will probably describe it complacently as "a time of transition," but that doesn't do us much good now. We are confused about ourselves, and that hurts. We are deprived even of the feeling that what we are transiting to is likely to be better than what we have.
Many of the beliefs we have lived by – and by "we" I mean the American center – have been strained so severely by events that their continued vitality is in doubt. Much of what we held to be self-evident at the beginning of this decade seems now, in the words of the old Scottish verdict, not proved.
Let me be specific and talk about some of those beliefs. I am going to simplify, at the risk of being simplistic, in order to provoke your thought and comment.
We believed, at the beginning of the 60'S, the limitless potential of the American economy, if properly stimulated, to bring the good life to all. To a majority it has. But for many millions, things are no better now than they were ten years ago, and for a large number of people things are worse. What's more, after several years of experiment and considerable expenditure of funds, there is no common agreement on a remedy.
We believed that the "Negro problem", as it was called, could be solved if we could only force civil rights legislation through the Congress. We did, and it wasn't. The riots taught us that "the problem" was deeper and more complex than that. Then we decided that a great deal of compensatory help was needed, but we weren't sure what was most effective, and we were further confused by the frequent hostility of the recipients, who felt that we were making decisions for them that they should make themselves. After a time we decided that the problem lay in ourselves, in white racism; but when we escalated our rhetoric in an effort to expunge that evil, we alienated a great many voters, including many who had customarily supported our political spokesmen. At the moment we are in neutral – torn between our consciences and our reluctance to exacerbate our divisions.
We believed in urban renewal, and now many urban scholars and many city poor think of it as a threat or a monstrosity or both.
We believed in aid to depressed areas; that was one of the programs we thought most urgently needed passing, back in the early 60's; and who can say today what has become of it?
We believed in aid to education, and we still do; but so far as I can tell, we are presently without the means to tell what Title I has achieved. It is probably fortunate that despite our uncertainty about its effectiveness, aid to education develops its own lobby as it goes along, and may bring results even if we don't know why or how.
We believed, like most people, in the basically stabilizing value of material goods; those who had cars and roads to drive them on, television sets, and labor-saving devices were likely to be more content than those who didn't. But now our chief concern is that the cars are poisoning the air, and even 400 horsepower ram-jet engines can't compensate for that, especially when they are carrying us at 15 miles an hour behind a procession of others over what used to be the American earth. The quality of television speaks for itself, and the labor-saving devices can't be fixed this month.
We believed in youth, particularly in college-educated youth; but now youth – particularly college-educated youth – has made it clear that it doesn't believe in us. That is unsettling, and not a little irritating. I'll say more about that later on.
In international affairs, others of our beliefs have taken their lumps. The luster is off foreign aid. Though the need for it is as great as ever, we've heard more about its failures than its successes, and on top of our boredom with it and our impatience with those who have received it, we now have the rationale that we need the money here at home.
When we began this decade, we thought our gravest international problem after peace with the Russians, was in meeting our obligations abroad with sufficient military force and flexibility. What we needed was not more weapons of massive retaliation, but transports, helicopters, APC's, mobile artillery and automatic weapons. We needed systematic planning. We needed specialists in jungle warfare and hard-nosed AID and political cadre. When we had all this, we could meet a war of communist insurgency and defeat it before it got out of hand, before it required massive infusions of our manpower. We could do this, no matter what the political climate in the country where the war was fought.
This belief is no longer widely held. Some, who did not cotton to military power as the best answer to threats of aggression, put their faith in the United Nations. Last year's President of the General Assembly, a Central American, told us in effect that that faith was misplaced, at least at the present time; that demagoguery was more common than statesmanship among the members of the world body. One does not have to be an Israeli to share that opinion.
All right, enough. Assuming for the moment that a number of our 1960 beliefs have not weathered well, or at the very least have been shaken, what do we do now?
There are a number of alternatives, and substantial numbers of people have already taken one or more of them.
One is to decide that these beliefs were never any good, that they were superficial and self- serving; that they appeased the conscience, but were never anything more than the opiate of the liberals. Since our society is sick, racist, imperialist, and obsessed with material goods, nothing decent can come of it until the system is destroyed and the society re-constituted. This of course is the indictment of the New Left, of many articulate college kids. The young have created a kind of Salem, in which the weaknesses of their elders are daily excoriated with the tyrannical righteousness of a hanging judge. A good many of their elders, stung by charges that contain some truth, as well as tantrum, have begged forgiveness, and turned on their unrepentant contemporaries with the passion of the converted – or at least with the self-protective cunning of trusties. This phenomenon seems particularly evident among college faculties, television commentators, editorial writers and columnists. Its driving force is guilt, and it is probably insatiable even if the whole country ends up crowded into the confessional.
Another alternative is to decide that the government programs that grew out of liberal-centrist beliefs were generally misdirected and futile, because they weren't addressed to what really ails us: namely, the alienation of modern man, the absence of community, anomie, powerlessness, and so on. Again, there is truth in that. Poets and novelists have been writing about it at least since the 1920's and J. Alfred Prufrock, and one result of multiplying the college population five times over is that many more people are exposed to that mordant analysis. But the problem with this alternative, in my view, is that it suggests that there are things government programs can do directly to fill the emptiness in individual life. And that creates just the kind of unsatisfiable anticipations about which complaints have recently been made. Maybe there are such things; maybe "participation" is one of them, if it means something better than shocktroop violence. But I think we are going to have to find personal meaning and community and effectiveness as by-products of government action to make this a more humane and attractive country, rather than as the fruits of a War on Anomie Programs.
Still another alternative is to play it cool, "lower our voices", as President Nixon said, and let things ride for a while. After a period of intensive law-making, exhortation, dire warnings and challenging prescriptions, this has undoubted political merit. Liberals tend to nag, and after a while the naggers get sore and want to be left alone with a beer and the tube. Whoever promises to let them alone is bound to win favor. The problem with this alternative – beyond the fact that it goes against nature in most Democrats – is that it is often nothing more than a stylistic cover for a basic lack of concern. If you don't intend to do anything about poverty, urban blight, pollution, racial discrimination, consumer frauds, and the spoilation of the countryside, you first stop talking about them. Problems don't go away just because of that, but when trouble breaks out, at least you aren't accused of having made a lot of speeches and launched a lot of programs that didn't solve them. As I say, this has political merit, but in my opinion it is ultimately irresponsible.
Another alternative is to say we just don't know enough to build new beliefs about what must be done; we need a crash program of social and economic research and analysis. we don't know enough, but there is an obvious danger here that waiting around for a scholarly consensus on our problems and their remedies will be waiting too long.
In the international field, one popular alternative is to hold that since Vietnam proves we can't do everything, by extension it proves that we shouldn't try to do anything. This nation, which has borne the principal burden of maintaining world peace for a quarter of a century – and in a time of unparalleled, explosive danger, has managed to contain and stabilize most of the sharpest threats to peace – should now, it is argued, adopt a kind of laissez-faire approach to aggression.
Maybe Vietnam has exposed an American hubris that needed exposing, but I don't believe abdication by the most powerful democracy of its world responsibilities is the lesson we ought to draw from it.
It is unfashionable to make historical analogies, particularly if they refer to the days before the Second World War, but I think what we learned then, and what has until recently been commonly accepted as true – that democracies ignore aggression at their peril, that we cannot go it alone, either in a fortress America or a love-in America, that our need for reform and regeneration here at home does not diminish our concern for what happens elsewhere – I think these lessons, though they are now more than thirty-years old, can still be trusted. Restraint, yes; retreat, no.
Now, having frowned on these alternatives, I ought to come up with my own. I considered saying that it is too early, that we ought to wait and see what Mr. Nixon vetoes and threatens to veto, and that will be our new set of beliefs. That is how we did it in the fifties, when Mr. Eisenhower was vetoing Democratic legislation, and it carried us into the mid-sixties. In the sixties, of course, we ran into the problem of putting our beliefs into programs and our programs into effective action. Sometimes they worked splendidly; sometimes we succeeded chiefly in becoming more realistic.
But I won't take that out. It's only fair that I give you something to shoot at.
First, my program is to elect and reelect as many Democratic Senators, Congressmen, and Governors as we can in 1970. The main reason is that historically Democrats produce whatever progressive ideas get produced; Republicans come in when the country gets tired of producing and wants a coffee break. By 1970 the country will have had its coffee and it will be time to work again.
Second, it is time to turn our attention to the second part of legislative activity, the part that comes after the great dramatic struggles to get programs adopted. That is the fight for adequate appropriations. The best antipollution bill in the world, the most hopeful education act, the broadest anti-poverty program, cannot clean a single river, teach a single child, or help a single family unless enough money is appropriated for them. Through the appropriations process, the Congress can destroy the potential of these programs by subtle attrition, just as if the country had risen as one man against them. The concerned center ought to have the sticking power to stay with good programs and see that they are funded.
Third, Democrats in Congress should examine – outside the Appropriations Committees, as well as within – the effectiveness of the programs they passed in the 1960's. Where they are not producing desired results, we ought to know why. It may be because they are poorly managed; it may be because they have been starved; it may be because they were erratically aimed in the beginning. I for one would rather find out in the open, under the aegis of men on the Hill who are basically sympathetic to them, than to have efforts begun with such concern and hope put to death in the dark downtown.
Fourth, I would like to hear Democrats talking again about the country's urgent needs – the needs of our cities, our poor, our racial minorities, of everyone who wants a fair shake in the marketplace and a tolerable environment. Vietnam and college radicals and Judge Haynsworth aren't the only things worth discussing. And as to the fear that forgotten, lower middle-class white Americans will get bitter if we start talking about the blacks and the poor again, I think that is misplaced and exaggerated. I don't believe lower middle-class whites want a country where millions of people are held in perpetual bondage and bitterness. Much of the writing I have seen about them by upper middle-class liberals contains a barely concealed contempt for their opinions and instincts. I think Democrats who regard this large group of Americans as being interested in a better country for everyone, and as something more than a muttering crowd of racists, will do all of us a favor and still avoid backlash against themselves.
Fifth, I hope our Democratic attitude toward the activist young will be marked by patience, sensitivity, a desire to understand, candor, and adult manliness. There is much to be learned from them: their perception of the weakness of many of the arrangements and compromises that grown men have believed necessary, the calculated way in which we blind ourselves to what is unpleasant and uncomfortable, the gap between what we say and do, and so on. It is very hard to learn from young people who tell us what they see in a disrespectful, sometimes obscene way.
The instinct of some grownups is to tell them to bug off, it's not their world to run; a variation on this is in telling other grown-ups, in a vice presidential kind of way, what we think about the kids. Other adults, as I said earlier, simply defect and become kid-ults. The most successful approach I have seen is the one that seems to come naturally to generous and confident men. It embodies a readiness to change where change is called for, without worrying too much about loss of face. It is candid about the real problems men deal with as they do business, teach, practice, and govern. It is firm in its belief that the new Salem of the young, with its doomsday jeremiads and denunciations, is no place to live the good life. And it is clear that, however much we adults might want to find the fountain of youth, we are not willing to fake having found it for the sake of youthful acceptance.
Sixth and last. I think the beliefs we started out with, and that I described at the beginning, have in common a good purpose. In many cases the purpose inspired claims that were beyond our achieving, but that does not make them bad purposes. On the contrary, our purpose should still be to eradicate poverty; to end racial discrimination and its social and economic effects; to rebuild our cities more attractively; to improve the quality of education; to distribute wealth more equitably; to demand better and safer consumer goods; to work for improved public arts; to stop the spoiling of the air, the water and the land; to contribute to man's security against war, tyranny and aggression. Maybe these things can't be done as quickly as we once thought,
or with the tools we have given ourselves. But they ought to be done as quickly as possible, and with the right tools. And if Democrats don't try to do them, who will?