Volume 23, Number 3 · March 4, 1976
Cato's Gang
By Garry Wills
The Hard Years: A Look at Contemporary America and American Institutions
by Eugene J. McCarthy
A Richard Seaver Book/Viking, 229 pp., $8.95
If Men Were Angels: A View from the Senate
by James L. Buckley
Putnam's, 284 pp., $8.95
Charles Percy: A Political Perspective
by Robert E. Hartley
Rand McNally, 247 pp., $8.95
Scoop: The Life and Politics of Henry M. Jackson
by Peter J. Ognibene
Stein and Day, 240 pp., $8.95
The Senate can turn on you with anachronistic relevance, trendy yet dignified—Sam Ervin coming into his own at last. It is an embarrassment and a source of strength, like the South. The two, of course, intersect; they reinforce each other, eerily. I don't mean, simply, that Southerners have guided and stalled Senate debate—the superb courtesy of that chamber is proved by the way it still calls what it does 'debate.' Even non-Southerners, when they settle fully into Senate ways, often do it by getting Southernized. Who was a better master of mintjulepy eloquence than Everett Dirksen, from Illinois? The quirkier such people get, the more we see in them a type. The toga is the last refuge of ruling idiosyncrasies. Even a rebel and deserter of the Senate like Eugene McCarthy has become more whitely flown of mane, more pirouetting of stance—suggesting, in manner at least, the Bilboizing of the intellectuals. McCarthy became more senatorial by leaving the Senate—the last way to join the Club was by ostracizing himself.
Review, 4116 words
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