The Age of Democratic Unraveling : Washingtonian Reflects on His Party’s Unlearned Lessons

Among the wise men of Washington, Harry McPherson is the best writer.

Since Jan. 31, 1956, when he first drove to the capital from Texas to accept a job as a counsel to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson--a job he took without meeting the volcanic man--McPherson has been privy to many of the inner precincts.

There are many volumes on the bonfire of Manhattan but few on the romance of low-rise Washington. McPherson’s book, “A Political Education: A Washington Memoir,” is about the youthful provincial who learns through late-night sessions on Capitol Hill that power is not impersonal but wielded by men of widely varying motives. He becomes the true Washingtonian, judging newcomers by their grasp of the nuances from the perspective of having done so himself.

Book Reissued

“A Political Education” is unique partly because it is among the first and last words on the cataclysmic events of 1968. It was originally published in 1972 and has just been reissued (by Houghton Mifflin), after a flood of books on the meaning of 20 years ago today. It brackets an era.

To McPherson’s dismay, his memoir of long ago remains timely. It appears in the midst of a season of ruminations, if not recriminations, on the latest debacle of a Democratic presidential campaign. McPherson was present at the destruction: the fall of the House of Roosevelt, precipitated by the good works--war in Vietnam and civil rights at home--performed by F.D.R.’s most dutiful follower, Lyndon Johnson.

The age of unraveling is chronicled in “A Political Education” in vivid detail. “Vietnam,” McPherson writes, “became a second consciousness . . . One thought of friends, and Vietnam; raising a family, and Vietnam; investing in the market, writing a letter, visiting a university, watching television, and Vietnam. Like an acid, it was eating into everything.”

McPherson has not, after all these years, escaped Johnson. He believes that a syndrome, which he defines as “you are what you were,” afflicts Washingtonians.

“No matter what you do in the rest of your life,” he says, “unless you do something very spectacular, you remain a ‘former Johnson aide,’ certainly in the newspapers. You may be a great older tennis player to your friends, or a nice father or even a pretty good lawyer, but you’re a former Johnson aide in the minds of most people.”

Shortly after leaving the employ of Johnson, who had departed for the Pedernales, McPherson offered his acumen and writing skills to the Senate campaign of Richardson Preyer in North Carolina. His generosity was gently rebuffed. “You realize,” McPherson says, “that you and your former boss are poison.”

Democratic Treadmill

Every four years, he has watched as the Democrats reenact their defeat, as if condemned to a cycle of eternal return: “you are who you were” on an absurdly large scale. “Terrible,” he says. “Terrible.”

Still, as a lawyer and sometime political adviser to prominent politicians, McPherson has thrived. He hasn’t gone home again. He lives in Kensington, has been president of the Federal City Council, a commissioner on the Three Mile Island inquiry, counsel to the Democratic National Convention of 1980, and vice chairman and general counsel to the Kennedy Center. He has done better than his party’s presidential candidates.

The highest compliment the 59-year-old McPherson pays to those in politics is to say that they approach it with a combination of “fervor and humor,” which is a way of saying that detachment is as essential as purpose.

In late 1977, McPherson and a small group of Washington wise men met privately with Charles Kirbo, President Carter’s longtime adviser, on the difficulties the Carter Administration was sinking into.

Clark Clifford spoke for the group when he answered with a loud “No!” to his own question of “whether one with no experience of Washington . . . and who is surrounded by men who also have little or no experience with this can be expected to succeed.”

Kirbo was curt and defensive, and McPherson judged him an “impenetrable provincial”--not a compliment.

Search for a Candidate

“For a long time,” McPherson says, “I have known people who thought the way to break it (the cycle of defeat) was to find Roosevelt’s, Truman’s, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s ideas, and put those ideas into the head of some pleasant hayseed who could disarm people by his apparent folksy manner. Once in office he would lead a new social revolution.” This has not worked.

Neither has the minimalist approach taken by Michael Dukakis. “Dukakis tried to duck the bullet simply by not talking very much about the issue.”

To McPherson, the Southern liberal, the issue was, is and always will be the issue of race. In 1988, that issue has mutated so that Democrats “are perceived as having bonded . . . to black America to the ultimate disadvantage of white America,” McPherson says.

In the primaries, Dukakis gave the illusion of having finessed the issue. “He benefited from being in the race with Jesse Jackson. Jackson served the purpose of making him not-liberal and not-black. But then you are the nominee of the party, which includes Jackson. And throughout the campaign Dukakis scarcely dwelt on the issues of the cities, cities equaling blacks. He didn’t dwell on racial justice, those old Democratic issues.” Ultimately, paying no attention did not work.

“Pretty soon,” McPherson says, “we won’t have Mike Dukakis to kick around anymore because we won’t have anything to remember. He’s the unsmiling Cheshire cat. None of the synapses that lock on something that you really feel and experience ever got activated.”

Race an Issue

What remains after the campaign is the issue. “What does the white man have against the Democrats?” McPherson asks. He notes that Johnson is the only Democratic candidate since F.D.R. to win 50% of the white vote and that Carter is the only one to have won 40%. Both happened to be Southerners.

McPherson seeks a revision of rhetoric. “A generation has passed since integration,” he says. “The language used to address America’s racial problem in the ‘60s was about the need for society to eradicate its guilt as best it could. That was the driving thing, the moral lesson. But people don’t feel it any more. The party ought to quit sounding like a divorcing wife laying guilt upon the husband.”

But this in itself is not a solution, which McPherson is the first to recognize. “I’m not sure this would do the trick,” he says. Nor is tinkering with the party rules a real solution. “We keep trying to rearrange the lines on the court, lift the net. Last time it was Super Tuesday.”

McPherson seeks the force of the intangible. “I came back to personality,” he says. “The magnetism doesn’t have to be associated with a lot of glamour. We don’t need a movie actor to portray glamour. People want someone who is a mensch, a strong person who is his own man.”

He has a reverie that Washington may be ruled by those who understand Washington. “I’d give almost anything to have someone I could feel strongly about,” he says. “I want to care a lot, and I haven’t for a long time.”

In his dream, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) is President, Rep. Tom Foley (D-Wash.) is speaker of the House and Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) is Senate majority leader.