Comi
entary___
Nicholas Von Hoffman
Cutting the mustard
WASHINGTON (KFS) — What
metaphor do you use for the demise of
Eagleton? Was he, in those last hours and
days of his brief Vice Presidential
existence, the terminal patient, suffering,
struggling, artificially alive because no
one would pull the plug? Or was he a dying
game bird, fluttering, bleeding, flying a
few feet, collapsing, getting up again, the
victim of the hunter’s botched shot, until
you wanted to scream at them in the
television tube, “For ehrissakes, kill him,
for mercy’s sake, finish him off.”
Two days after the joint announcement
with McGovern that he had three times
been hospitalized for depression, the
question had ceased to be political. The
politics was how the deed would be done
and that had nothing to do with this erect,
jerky-mannered man who flew from city to
city telling audiences he had polls, in
dependent polls and letters, and long
distance phone calls all testifying that he
wasn’t a nut, that he could “hack it,” that
he could “cut the mustard.” He used those
phrases hack it, cut the mustard those
pharses that bespoke not a political
struggle, not even a Missouri politician’s
ambitions, but Eagleton fighting for his
personhood.
At the end, at the last press conference
where George McGovern gently
chloroformed him, Tom Eagleton, just
before he went under, tried to distinguish
himself from Richard Nixon He would be
around he said, alluding to Nixon’s much
remembered adieu when he said we
wouldn’t have him to kick anymore. But in
that act of separation from Nixon,
Eagleton affirmed that the two lived by the
same code of cool under pressure, of
mustard cutting, of toughing through, of
that ceaseless, death-haunted restlessness
of the white, American male striver. “Stay
on, hang in there, kid,” Eagleton had said
earlier in the week, the week he constantly
referred to as The Week That Was.
Why did he go?
Three times he had gone to the hospital
for depression. That was his awful,
disgraceful secret. Why did he go? The
medical records aren’t available, nor need
they be because Eagleton told us on one of
those shattering TV performances he put
on during his week:
“As a young man I must say I drove
myself too far and I pushed myself
terribly, terribly hard . long hours day
and night, and after the campaign was
over 1 did experience exhaustion and
fatigue at the age of 42 I’ve learned how
to pace myself.”
So like Nixon. Discount the never
proven, never laid to rest rumors that he
also sought help in a similar hour, there is
Nixon’s own testimony in his book, “Six
Crises.” The same days and nights, the
same letdowns, the same staking of one’s
own good opinion of one’s self on cutting
the mustard, fella.
So many fields of mustard to be cut with
joyless, manic, controlled energy, always
smiling and never a tear. Nixon did cry
once on Dwight Eisenhower’s shoulder,
but Sen. Muskie was ruined by a tear.
Don’t cry, fella, just cut the mustard, and
no wonder these guys develop per
sonalities as ill-suited to them as their
capped teeth and their dye jobs. I d be
depressed, wouldn’t you?
The mustard-cutter ever hacking it
upward can display no outside
weaknesses. They must be stuffed inside
or else you get this excerpted from CBS:
George Herman: Have you recalled
the name of the tranquillizer?
Eagleton: No ... it was a blue pill, but I
don’t remember the name.
Herman: Senator, this is a television
program, and everybody watching you can
see that you’re perspiring considerably
and that your hands have a slight shake to
them.
Eagleton: Well, the lights in the studio
are less than cool, and they focus in on the
guy getting the third degree .
God, Eagleton, you didn’t use the right
anti-perspirant. You forgot your little blue
pill. In this man’s league, every dry
skinned contestant takes the saliva test.
Yes, the rules are depressing, and don’t
excuse yourself by telling me Cicero was a
senator who delivered the Cataline
orations wet in the eye and wet underarm.
He wore a toga, and you wear a business
suit.
Then there’s Anderson
Still, you did well, Eagleton. You almost
made it. You escaped Jack Anderson, who
was going to cut you down for his mustard.
The two of you hacking it, you toward the
second highest office and he toward
another scoop. He’s not allowed a bad day
either, and don’t tell us about Dita Beard
or ITT, what we want to know is what have
you got for us this morning?
Yes, you did well, Eagleton. You can’t be
blamed for feeling depressed those times.
As you said, “I pushed myself terribly,
terribly hard,” and maybe you snapped
out of it and shouted a question at the air:
Why do we do this to ourselves?
And rather than answer, you threw
yourself at the doctors, as we are told to
do, and they said modern medicine has a
cure for all emotions. They tranked < cq)
you and told you that you were sick, but
maybe the real secret was that you never
were, that you were well and depressed
because you had damned good reason to
be, and maybe we had to howl and drag
you off the ticket because otherwise the
rest of us careering males would fall into
depression too.
The last thing you said on the CBS
program, you said it retreating into the
third person, was about that Week That^
Was of yours: “. . . I’ve weathered thiA
week very well, and I think it’s been 3^
successful week for Tom Eagleton because
he’s his own man.” Well, if you are, you
can relax because then you don’t have to
cut the mustard any more.
Copyright. 1972, The Washington Post
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
On the right . . . William F. Buckley Jr.
Some thoughts on abortion
Professor John Noonan of the University
of California at Berkeley teaches both law
and philosophy, and is among other things
an authority on the history of the abortion
controversy l^ist week, giving his views
on abortion in debate with a vigorous
campaigner for abortion-on-demand, he
confronted the usual question. The usual
questions: "If your wife were raped and
made pregnant by an insane Indian,
wouldn’t you desire an abortion for her?”
To which Professor Noonan repin'd calmly
that the contingency, so frequently ad
duct'd, recalls the aphorism that hard
cases make luui law
He meant by that that legislation ought
not as a general rule to attempt to confront
extraordinary situations There are laws
against murder, but under certain cir
cumstances, murder is renamed, and
officially excused. Those who approach
human contingency with Thomistic ap
petites to cover every situation, either
exasperate, ultimately; or they end their
days in futility: or they make bad law.
The Supreme Court, confronting
outrageous behavior by the police in
searching the home of Mrs. Mapp. gave
us: not a mere reversal of the particular
conviction of Mrs. Mapp, a discrete
thunderbolt of judicial indignation No,
they gave us a thing calk'd Mapp vs. Ohio,
which categorically forbids a trial court to
consider any evidence that was discovered
m the course of an illegal search. Thus
tradition was overturned, and unconvicted
crime soared indeed, a hard case made
for a bad law
F’rofessor Noonan and others who op
pose abortion-on-demand ought not to be
made to justify their opposition to abortion
on what-would-you-do-if grounds. On a
famous occasion, defending the cause of
pacifism, Lvtton Strachey was asked at
the Oxford Union debate in the thirties that
put Oxford down as resolved not again to
fight for King or country, what would he do
if he entered his house and found a burly
creature attempting to rape his wife?
"Why,” said Strachey, “I suppose I should
try to come between them.” Better an ad
hoc solution here, than one that seeks to
incorporate universal law
The point about abortion is whether the
state should sanction routine abortion.
That, at least, is essentially the point being
considered in the various states where the
CO&ICY
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abortion laws are currently under review.
There are laws against mercy-killing. It is,
nevertheless, a well known fact, if not a
highly discussed one, that doctors, in
hopeless cases, occasionally pull out the
tube.
Even so, we stand as a society com
mitted to the notion that old people should
be, as a general matter, secure against
licentious euthenasia, and to that end there
is appropriate legislation. It is Professor
Noonan’s feeling that the tide is slowly
turning. Not towards abortion, but against
it: that the moral insights of an alert
community are gradually awakening
the fact that a well-developed fetus is
human being, as defenseless, as parasitic,
as the nonegenarian, but like the
nonegenarian, a human being nonetheless.
Granted the biological debate will
continue, on the question of at exactly
what point is it reasonable to assume that
life has entered the fetus (“ensoulment."
they used to call it). About this matter
there is disagreement, though continuing
research seems to point to earlier “life"
rather than later life Here again we must
consider the matter whole. The case
against the human ness of old people who
have lost their power to think, to control
their movements, to experience pain
except nervously, could be made if one
disdains the central assumption which is
that we deal with human life A fetus is a
human life. Professor Noonan contends
And he reminds us of the very
distinguished Americans who not much
more than one hundred years ago quite
literally believed that the Negro people
were not human That they were therefore
a species apart, to be bought and sold,
separate or bred, for the convenience of
their owners.
The mother is nowadays thought of. by
the modernists, as the owner of the fetus in
the sense that a slavemaster was the
owner of a slave Wrong both times There
is no reason. Professor Noonan believes, to
be pessimistic about the discovery of the
rights of a fetus W e are. after all. only one
hundred or so vears from discovering the
rieKs of Black men
It is an insight