36      COMMENTARY___________________________________       CHICAGO SUN-TIMES ♦ MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2006

FEATURED LETTER                        

_________________________

Murtha faces Gene McCarthy's fate

________________ J ohn Murtha (D-Pa.) is the
     Gene McCarthy of the Iraq
     war.
         A majority of Americans
     may not know or remember
"Clean Gene." He was the educa-
tor, poet and Minnesota senator
who blew the whistle on President
Lyndon Johnson's failed war in
Vietnam. To those of us coming of
age in the mid-1960s, he was the
one ray of hope in a Congress that
sheepishly followed Johnson's De-
mocratic war party down the road
to disaster in Vietnam.
    When he received more dele-
gates than the president in the 1968
New Hampshire primary, Johnson
began to acknowledge his failure in
Vietnam and dropped out of the
1968 presidential election. Unfortu-
nately, McCarthy was too anti-es-
tablishment for the Democratic
Party, so they dumped him for
Bobby Kennedy. When Kennedy
was assassinated, they turned not

_____________


He will become a mere
footnote in the folly of a
deadly, unnecessary war.

to McCarthy but to war party sta-
ple Hubert Humphrey. The result
was the election of Republican
Richard Nixon, who prolonged the
war for seven agonizing years, re-
sulting in almost as many Ameri-
can casualties as had occurred up
to his election.
    We anti-war activists, now griz-
zled senior citizens, have had to
come out of retirement in a new
century to oppose another disas-
trous, unnecessary war -- this
time in Iraq. And it is fitting that
our Pied Piper is the grizzled sep-
tuagenarian Vietnam combat Ma-
rine veteran John Murtha. He
came out of a pro-war, pro-military
stance to speak the truth that the
war was unwinnable and our pres-
ence in Iraq was doing more harm
than good. His vision helped the
Democrats regain the House and
Senate after 12 years of Republi-
can rule -- the last five of which
have been a descent into military
madness.
    And how did the Democratic
Party reward Murtha? They
dumped him as Speaker Nancy
Pelosi's choice of majority leader in
the House in favor of Steny Hoyer
(D-Md). Hoyer, predictably, has
been AWOL from the effort to
withdraw our soldiers from the ca-
tastrophe in Iraq.
    If history repeats itself, we have
about seven more years of slaugh-
ter in Iraq before we find a face-
saving way to withdraw from cer-
tain defeat. And John Murtha, like
Gene McCarthy 40 years earlier,
will become a mere footnote in the
folly of a deadly, unnecessary war.

Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn