Getting Snappish

As if on cue, all three Democratic candidates last week took off the gloves and began punching barefisted. Eugene McCarthy, for the first time, directly charged Robert Kennedy with a major role in the initial decision to commit U.S. military power to Southeast Asia, declaring that Camelot II might lead to "further involvements like Viet Nam."

Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to goad Hubert Humphrey into fighting directly in embattled Oregon and California, and the Vice President accused "some men"--meaning Kennedy--of "exploiting" the nation's problems to advance their own cause. "I do believe," Humphrey said, "there is such a thing as too much ambition."

The new, combative dialogue was not hard to explain. With the Oregon primary this week and the California primary June 4, the Democratic contest was nearing a possible shakedown. In the past, McCarthy has genially admitted that he and Kennedy are not far apart on basic issues, but last week he associated the New Yorker with the "disastrous" policies that led to the war. "Those policies were not merely the product of specific misjudgments," he said. "Rather, they grew from a systematic misconception of America and its role in the world. I am not convinced that Senator Kennedy has entirely renounced that misconception."

Hippies of the Press. Piqued by Kennedy's persistent refusal to debate or even recognize him, McCarthy ironically underlined the point Bobby is seeking to make: that Gene has become a stand-in for Hubert. If he dropped out of the race, McCarthy told a TV interviewer, he would prefer Humphrey to Kennedy. Realizing his error--many of his anti-Administration supporters would leave him if they thought he was merely playing the spoiler's role to block Kennedy--the Minnesotan later hedged his statement, then took a jab at reporters who refused to accept his backtracking. "The people who are with me who seem to be hippies are really the national press," he told an audience at Southwestern Oregon Community College in Coos Bay.

Kennedy is still given the edge in his next encounter with McCarthy, the California primary. The Don Muchmore Poll predicts 40% of the vote for Kennedy, 25% for McCarthy, and 25% for Attorney General Thomas Lynch, who entered the race for President Johnson and is now assumed to be Humphrey's surrogate. Bobby fared surprisingly well in one nonelective contest last week, picking up a minimum of 25 of Iowa's 46 delegate votes (v. about ten for Humphrey, five for McCarthy) at the state convention in Des Moines.

Pollyanna Adams. Even Hubert Humphrey turned snappish. "You won't make this country better," he said, "by leading from fear, despair and doubt." If some "spilt-milk politicians," he added, in a speech prepared for a dairymen's convention in Kansas City, Mo., "would spend more time getting on with the job and less cussing out the cows--or crying crocodile tears about everything in general--we would all be better off." Indeed, if anything nettles Humphrey, it is Kennedy's implication that his "politics of joy" is frivolous and smug. "Hubert," said a sign at one of his Manhattan appearances, "is a stalking horse for Pollyanna."

Humphrey has gone to great lengths to explain exactly what he means by the happiness slogan--slightly dressed up as "the spirit of public happiness"--and maintained that the phrase had been written by a bona fide founding father, no less. Though the Library of Congress has not been able to trace the quote, a Humphrey aide said that he thought John Adams had put the words in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. His source: Gene McCarthy, who once used the phrase in his own speeches.

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