May 2, 2004

'Inside': Revolution Through the Proper Channels

VER the last two decades, countless books have served up countless explanations for American liberalism's decline. Anyone passingly familiar with the literature knows the list -- the loss of the South, the rhetorical (if not always operational) triumph of conservative attacks on liberalism's accomplishments, liberals' own failings and excesses, which alienated such broad swaths of the working and middle classes upon whom midcentury liberalism had relied. Such explanations are generally correct as far as they go. But they are sociological and extrinsic. Are there not ways of explaining liberalism's wane that we might call emotional and intrinsic?

I have long believed that there are, that they are palpable and that they boil down to this: By the late 1970's, the new crop of liberals then inheriting key positions in the Democratic Party couldn't compete for power with their conservative Republican counterparts because they so distrusted power in the first place. Vietnam and Watergate, along with C. Wright Mills and for that matter Bob Dylan, taught them that power was not a good to be sought but an evil to be confronted. When that's the basic emotional posture, it's awfully hard to compete, especially with a cohort as tenacious as modern conservatives.

I thought of this predicament often while reading ''Inside,'' Joseph A. Califano Jr.'s vivid and frank memoir of his remarkable life, because it follows precisely the arc of this agitated relationship between liberalism and power over the past four decades. While ''Inside'' covers earth already trod by a thousand other books, Califano's particular story -- his rise to and use of power, his coming face to face with the generation aforementioned and finally his personal, faith-driven rejection of power -- is instructive for liberals today who are just now recovering from the long post-70's ambivalence about power and realizing that fire must be fought with fire.

Califano -- most famous as Lyndon Johnson's chief adviser on domestic affairs and Jimmy Carter's first secretary of the cabinet department then called Health, Education and Welfare -- came of age at a time when young liberals felt no compunction at all about power. Indeed, seizing it for the purpose of making ''a revolution that saved this nation,'' as he sums up the Johnson years, was precisely the point. Califano certainly made the most of it. He was there in Oxford, Miss., to help escort James Meredith to class. In Robert McNamara's Defense Department, he was part of the team that spent its time dreaming up ways to bring down Fidel Castro (a revealing chapter, which opens with Califano noting that he wasn't exactly proud of this phase of his career), and he felt ''fortunate'' to move to the White House and domestic politics before Vietnam really heated up. He was at the center of everything there, helping to push all that legislation through Congress and learning such pearls of Johnsonic wisdom as ''Never tell a man to go to hell unless you can send him there.''

Joe Califano loved power. And when the Johnson years ended, he amassed more. He became a law partner of Edward Bennett Williams, the ultimate Washington insider. He and Williams represented The Washington Post throughout the Watergate affair. His coffee-and-Danish buddies were Williams; The Post's executive editor, Ben Bradlee; Phil Geyelin, the paper's editorial page editor; and Art Buchwald. On Oct. 20, 1973 -- the night of the Saturday Night Massacre, when Solicitor General Robert Bork fired the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox -- he was, where else, at Buchwald's 48th birthday party at the columnist's tennis club in, where else, upscale McLean, Va. In the fashion of good insiders, he was party-loyal but had close friendships across the aisle. (I'm no legal ethicist, but Califano's breezy admission in these pages that he gave his pal Al Haig some quiet advice on what Haig should say to the Senate Watergate Committee -- while he was simultaneously representing both The Washington Post and the Democratic National Committee -- struck me as a little nonchalant.)

But in the middle of all this, Califano met the McGovernite Young Turks. He had abetted their cause, oddly enough, because as general counsel of the Democratic National Committee he had helped write the rules that forced the party's various executive bodies toward youth and diversity. He had done so out of conviction that such change was necessary. But he was appalled, and properly so, at the 1972 Democratic convention. McGovern could not deliver his acceptance speech in prime time because the nomination of the vice president -- which should have been a pro forma matter that took a few minutes -- degenerated into a Yippie-ish circus as conventioneers shouted out nominations of Ralph Nader, Benjamin Spock, Phil and Daniel Berrigan, Cesar Chavez, Martha Mitchell and Archie Bunker. Things didn't improve when McGovern finished his speech -- at 3:45 a.m. -- and ''dizzying clouds of marijuana smoke rose toward the stage.''

Califano took one more whack at public service. But times had changed; the revolution was over. No longer remaking society with moral clarity, he was now, as Health, Education and Welfare secretary, wrestling with ''the most profound personal, moral, ethical and religious questions,'' as science and technology had brought new issues (assisted suicide, fetal research) into play. On Medicaid funding of abortions, this conciencious Catholic's position pleased neither the Democratic interest groups nor the Roman Catholic hierarchy; with his antismoking campaign -- he used to knock down four packs a day back when he had to contend with Johnson on a daily basis -- he was altogether too crusading for a White House nervous about winning North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky in 1980. When Carter forced several cabinet resignations, Califano was among the dismissed. He went back to being Mr. Fixit, but now Washington was in Republican hands and power was less intoxicating. When his old partner Williams died in 1988, ''I found myself thinking more about how I was spending my own life as a Washington lawyer.'' His first marriage had fallen victim to his career. Men he'd admired, like Clark Clifford, had fallen into disgrace. He wondered whether Williams had died content. He chucked the law, reflected on the admonitions of his parents and the fathers at Holy Cross, his alma mater, to use God-given gifts well. He founded the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, housed at Columbia University and going strong in its 10th year.

Califano gave up power in the end (after, of course, he'd enjoyed more than his share). But the lesson of ''Inside'' is that power is neither inherently good, as some of Califano's contemporaries who felt they were doing God's work in Vietnam saw it, nor inherently evil, as the younger generation of liberals believed. It is a tool. Califano did far more good with it than bad. In an election year when Democrats finally seem to have dropped their ambivalence about power, ''Inside'' arrives as an invaluable guide as to how they might use it if the voters hand it to them in November.