So now America waits and the world waits, as the Bush administration moves perhaps inexorably toward war with Iraq. Yet the executive branch is not solely responsible for American foreign policy. The Constitution confers on Congress the power to declare war, and charges the Senate, by virtue of the advice-and-consent clause of Article II, Section 2, with special responsibilities on matters of foreign policy. Members of Congress have a patriotic duty to give the president their best, candid judgment about matters of war and peace.
As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I hoped the country had learned some painful lessons from the experience of the Vietnam War. It appears I was wrong-at least about the nation’s politicians. As the Bush administration prepares to make war on Iraq, some in Congress wring their hands but make no move to reconsider the October 2002 resolution giving the president authority to take military action. The timid compliance of Congress recalls the tilt toward excessive presidential action and congressional inaction on Vietnam thirty-five to forty years ago. I was reminded vividly of these parallels recently by the presence in Oregon of former Senator Eugene McCarthy.
The threat of war against Iraq foremost in his mind, McCarthy alighted in Oregon like the eagle on the Great Seal of the Republic, olive branch in one talon, sheaf of arrows in the other. Now eighty-six, McCarthy is considered a ghost in Washington, but in the provinces he remains a living presence whose words quicken the pulse. Many of us have considered him a guardian of the republic since May 1968. Then, after hastening Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race by coming within 230 votes of a victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, McCarthy overcame odds as great or greater, winning a decisive victory over Senator Robert Kennedy in the Oregon primary.
McCarthy’s allegiance has always been to the conception of the Senate imagined by the Constitution’s framers. When asked by my students at Lewis and Clark College how he had come to challenge an incumbent president of his own party, McCarthy cited the proper role and responsibilities of the Senate. He ran because although opposition to the war in Vietnam was centered in the Senate, antiwar senators were unable to move Johnson to change his policy. In truth, McCarthy felt a special responsibility, because he had voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 giving the president broad authority to wage war. "There comes a time," he said in 1967 of his turn against the war and decision to oppose Johnson, "when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag."
Addressing the students, McCarthy also reviewed the tendency of presidents, almost by now a reflex, to misread the advice-and-consent provision of the Constitution. Nowadays, if presidents are so good as to allow the Senate to advise them, they act as if consent should follow as a political droit du seigneur. Last October, for example, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was testing the waters for an alternative to the resolution authorizing military action against Iraq, Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Warner went on a pilgrimage to the White House. Accompanied by the majority leader and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, they stood alongside Bush to offer support in advance of congressional deliberation. This action, before debate by the Congress, compromised the Constitution’s separation of powers and undermined its checks and balances.
Introducing his old colleague to an overflow crowd at Lewis and Clark, former Republican Senator Mark Hatfield declared that McCarthy’s 1967 book, The Limits of Power, with its Jeffersonian call for Americans "to show more certainly our ’decent respect to the opinions of mankind’" and for the Senate to "exercise more competently, conscientiously, and effectively its constitutional responsibility for the formulation and conduct of the foreign policy of the United States," had been his own "textbook" when he arrived in the Senate.
At the podium McCarthy raised issues remarkably similar to those he took to the country in 1968. His subject remains constitutional government, his theme the increasingly willful neglect of constitutional principles and practice by elected officials, especially presidents. McCarthy is now a witness-a citizen like the rest of us, no more, no less. In old age he keeps faith with Plutarch’s view that "politics is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life." As the senator who placed President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address in the Congressional Record, McCarthy now sees the military-industrial complex Ike warned of as far more institutionalized and, therefore, more dangerous. He is highly critical of the press as well. Notably timorous responding to the virulent, anti-Communist hysteria of the Joe McCarthy era and, later, to the government’s half-truths and lies about Vietnam, the press, in McCarthy’s view, acts like one more special-interest group. Now that major newspapers depend on television stations for revenue, their publishers are at the mercy of government agencies and of the two parties that have a monopoly on regulatory appointments.
McCarthy also warned of the FBI’s usurpation of functions reserved to the judiciary, and its disregard for the First Amendment. Attempts to link unconditional support for homeland security with patriotism could diminish for good those freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Further, he fears terrorism is replacing communism as a mantra justifying greater governmental power. Finally, he says, the two established parties use the power of government to close rather than open the political process.
Whether speaking to a large audience or to a class, McCarthy challenges Americans to fulfill the duties of citizenship, a worthy struggle, which might restore the "spirit of public happiness" John Adams saw everywhere in evidence at the time of the American Revolution. Noting McCarthy’s optimism about the nation during the turbulent, hard year 1968, a student asked if he had become more pessimistic. McCarthy paused, "I’m more apprehensive now," he said simply, the slight catch in his voice betraying the same quiet alarm I remembered from 1968. To see how far he’d go, I quoted his 1968 election-night remarks in New Hampshire: "People have said that the campaign has brought the young people back into the system. But it’s the other way around. The young people have brought the country back into the system." McCarthy smiled. "Well," he said, "the system’s tougher now." He paused, looking at the students. "But maybe you are, too."
Like the rest of us, McCarthy has to be tougher these days. As he toiled slowly through the metal detector at the Portland airport on his way out of town, the alarm blared. Two security personnel marched him to the public place marked off for body searches. Characteristically, he submitted with jokes rather than complaint. The search was long, thorough, and tedious until McCarthy’s belt was finally identified as the offending metal. His wheelchair off to one side, he stood still through it all, arms stretched to the limit on either side, stocking feet firm on the floor. In the meantime a small knot of people gathered; one or two recognized him and muttered against the indignity. McCarthy looked them over. "It’s all right," he said after he put on his shoes, his jacket and scarf, his hat. "It’s only when they do these things to everyone that we’ll do something about it."
As Americans wait on Iraq, there are acts of recourse: first, to affirm that precious "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," which Jefferson, Adams, and the other founders linked to the American cause in 1776; second, to remind elected representatives of their patriotic duty to pass independent judgment on issues of war and peace.
Eugene McCarthy’s challenge in 1967 and 1968 touched the better angels of our nature and aroused a constituency of conscience. Will we find that same courage again? [end]
