Transcripts

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know what'll happen. I don't think it's going to be a great consequence if they work out some reconciliation between the two positions. The differences aren't going to be very great. It's like everybody's running now on the same platform.

Everybody wants to balance the budget. Some say we're going to do it in nine years. And someone says seven, five. Ross Perot is going to balance the budget. Colin Powell is going to balance the budget and do away with crime. So the differences between them are pretty well hyped up differences. I don't think they have much economic significance.

SPEAKER 2: Do you see also any kind of real understanding on the part of the public or any real explanation from our representatives in Washington about what the budget really is?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: I don't think they have control. Paul Douglas, who was in the Senate with me, and he left the Senate. He went to teach at the new school in New York. And he was going to teach a course on the budget. And I think the budget at that time was probably 700 or 800 billion. And he quit. Halfway through the course, he said, you can't do it. You can't teach the budget.

And when I first went to Congress, we had a budget. It was right after the war. We had a budget of about $50 billion. And the chairman of the Appropriations Committee said, we gotta put it all in one appropriation, get it under control. He did it one year, and he was a genius. And he came back and said, you can't do it. You're not up to handling a 50 billion complex budget in one bill. And we did away with it. And it wasn't until the '70s that they started this crazy budget thing again.

And the difference is procedural really. Under the old process, you had separate appropriations for agriculture, state department, defense. And there were always two or three people on the subcommittees who knew what was in it. Now everybody's responsible for every appropriation. So everybody has power, and nobody really has full knowledge or responsibility.

The old system, you could rely on somebody to say, well, I know what George Mahon will do about defense is a pretty good thing to do, or what John Rooney does, or John Fogerty. But in my mind, it's chaos now. And I don't know how you work your way out of it. Just pass it and make as many wild claims as you can along the way. And just out, out, shut out the others.

SPEAKER 2: Are you hinting that might be possibly what's happening right now?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I think the budget process which was adopted in the '70s under Nixon was a serious mistake. In fact, Congress has reorganized itself into ineptitude. And the budget process is one example. The other is the manner in which the Congress itself operates, with too many committees, too many subcommittees, again, a spreading of power, but without fixing responsibility. I bought half the problems we have, I think, are procedural now.

SPEAKER 2: I'm sure you expected that we'd ask you about politics when you came in.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I'm ready to make rash judgments on almost any subject now.

SPEAKER 2: But you're in town to read some poetry. And I'd like you to share some of that with us, if you could tonight.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: It's Kieran's Pub. He's catering to the poets and so on. And it's a thing that goes almost inevitably with Irish and politics that you have to be a poet. And the results in Ireland are that they've had some bad poets who were pretty good politicians, and some pretty good poets who were bad politicians, and some politicians who were bad poets. So we're working on it here to see that that doesn't happen.

But there's no real conflict. You can get poetry out of any experience you have. And politics is a major experience of most people in America, at least. I don't try to do very serious political poems. I've done one or two that I guess you'd say are pretty serious. One about Lyndon Johnson, which I may recite tonight.

Johnson was an interesting person. He was always making moves. And one of his actions to dominate people was to take them out on his ranch and have them shoot a deer. And then Lyndon would have the head mounted for you and put it on the wall. And then he'd have the meat ground into sausage and give you the sausage, which you could distribute to your friends. And there are two or three stories.

One involved, John Kennedy, who he took him out on the ranch. And between the time they were elected and the time they were sworn in, and he had Kennedy shoot a deer. And Kennedy supposedly said he didn't aim at it. It must have been the Secret Service. But anyway, after it was shot. He kept after Kennedy in the White House, saying, where is the head of the deer that you shot on the ranch? And Kennedy finally put it up, according to the story.

And Senator Humphrey, in his memoirs, tells about being taken out on the ranch and asked to shoot a deer. He said he shot one. And Lyndon, then they came to another one, he said, shoot that one too. And Senator Humphrey said he shot two of them. And he didn't want to shoot the first one, but he did. And he had the head on the wall in his office.

And he gave me some of the sausage. And it was kind of a funny experience. I took it home, and my wife said, do you want me to cook that? I said, I'm not going to eat it. And she said, well, why don't you give it to a friend. I said, I don't want my friends to eat it. She said, well, give it to somebody you don't like. I said, I don't even want my enemies to eat that stuff. It took on a symbolic significance for me.

And I wrote the poem which says, gentle, the deer with solicitude, solace them with salt, comfort them with apples. Prepare them for this man who will come, a stranger with an unfamiliar gun. The watcher calls and trust the head turns between the antlers. Saint Hubert's cross burns. No conversion today, but quick shot, the buck drops to his knees in decent genuflection to death.

The doe flees. He is not dead. He will arise. In three weeks, the head will look from a wall, but with changed eyes. What of the body of litheness and swiftness? Oh, witness, ground-hearted muscle, intestinal case tied with gristle, a sausage sacrament of communion. So it all may be one under the transplanted eyes of the watcher. The only poetic license we took was to imply that when Lyndon had the head mounted, he didn't put in facsimiles of the deer's eyes, but of his own.

SPEAKER 2: Kind of heavy stuff. [LAUGHS]