National Perspective

by David Shribman

Pulitzer-Prize winner David Shribman is known for his astute assessment of national politics as well as the political scene throughout the country. His outside-the-Beltway reporting takes him to cities and towns around the U.S., where he has the enviable ability to assess political temperament.

Samples

INDIANA PRIMARY ONCE MADE A DIFFERENCE, AND NOW WILL AGAIN

The presidential candidates are slugging it out in Indiana, but it sure is an odd place for a Democratic political showdown.

Only once since the Franklin Roosevelt landslide 72 years ago has Indiana voted for a Democrat for president, and that was in the Lyndon Johnson landslide against Barry Goldwater in 1964, when even Idaho and Utah went Democratic. That means Indiana didn't vote for any of the modern Democratic icons -- not for Harry Truman, not for John Kennedy, not for Bill Clinton and, in 1940 and 1944, not for FDR either. It won't vote for the Democratic nominee in November no matter whether it is Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama.

Indiana is a state both backward (patronage politics prevailed there long after it withered elsewhere) and forward-looking (Indianapolis had metro government before it was a fad), and above all it is independent (for years stubbornly resisting Standard Time so that you never really knew what time it was in Evansville and, with Wabash College remaining as one of only four major all-male colleges, you might sometimes think that time stands still).

The state has had famous conservatives (Sen. William Jenner, a Joseph McCarthy ally who thought that the heroic Gen. George C. Marshall was a traitor) and at least one famous liberal (Sen. Birch Bayh, whose son, Evan, a senator, is a prominent Clintonista today and was that rarest of breeds, a Democratic tax-cutting governor).

It's a place so normal and relentlessly middle-of-the-road that the famous sociological couple Robert and Helen Lynd used it as the centerpiece of their classic 1920s "Middletown" studies in Muncie. (Later H.L. Mencken mocked it as "Moronia.")

The Lynds wrote a sequel called "Middletown in Transition," and like most places that are in the center of things -- Indiana, not wrongly, thinks of itself as a crossroads kind of state -- it is always in transition. It is true that the Democrats control the state House and now have a 5-to-4 advantage in U.S. House seats, but that doesn't mean the Democrats have a prayer for the fall.

And yet Indiana, so often on the periphery of the Democrats' perspective, did have one great moment in one classic primary, precisely 40 years ago. It was the site of one of the few great confrontations between Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York -- they fought fiercely over the Hoosier state -- and of an unforgettable few minutes on a horribly unforgettable American evening.

It was the day that Martin Luther King Jr. died, and though it was four decades ago you should remember that it happened in a different century and, really, in a different world. There was no Internet then, long-distance telephone calls were expensive and relatively rare, and if you used the phrase "cell phone," people might have wondered whether the term could possibly mean that Trappist monks were being given Princess telephones with that nice light-up dial feature.

So as Kennedy's plane headed toward Indianapolis for a rally that evening, the senator didn't know for sure that King had expired. But he and Frank Mankiewicz, his close aide and press secretary, spent much of the flight talking about King, and as they were landing, Kennedy told Mankiewicz to make some notes of their conversation, assemble them into a speech while riding into town on the press bus, and hand the text to him on the rostrum.

But in the chaos and heartbreak of that night the motorcade was disrupted, the bus driver got lost, Kennedy mounted the platform and, according to Mankiewicz, "I was holding in my hands one of the great undelivered speeches." Great, but not as great as the one Kennedy delivered without notes but, as history remembers it, from his heart:

"I have some very sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort."

Kennedy went on to say that he had had a member of his family killed, too, killed by a white man. Kennedy, who carried with him a copy of the Modern Library edition of Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way," then quoted Aeschylus:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Kennedy concluded by urging Americans to dedicate themselves "to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

Not long ago I asked Sen. Edward M. Kennedy about that moment in Indiana. Sen. Kennedy doesn't often speak about his brothers, and when he does, the hurt of their absence seems almost palpable in his words. Ordinarily the Massachusetts Democrat speaks quickly, in a spray of syllables, but this time he spoke slowly, almost reverently.

"In an incredible atmosphere, where the intensity ... was beyond our comprehension, there was raw emotion -- and you saw one person making a difference," Sen. Kennedy said. "There are so few times one person speaks and others listen, and this came from deep, deep, deep down in Bobby. I never saw him speak that way again."

Robert F. Kennedy died two months later. Since then, the Indiana primary has not made much of a difference. It will this time. Perhaps in the course of campaigning both of the Democratic candidates will pause and reflect on that time so long ago, remembering that the work of taming the savageness of man and making gentle the life of this world is not yet complete, and in fact has hardly even begun.

COPYRIGHT 2008 THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

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