Nick Coleman: Chuck Hagel makes the case for conscience

In 1968, the year he was wounded and nearly died in Vietnam, a young soldier from Nebraska named Chuck Hagel didn't think much of people like Eugene J. McCarthy.

Hagel, who was 22 in 1968, believed that the Vietnam War was a noble effort. (He changed his mind only after hearing tape recordings of President Lyndon Johnson admitting during the war that he knew it could not be won, but that he didn't want to be blamed for losing.) McCarthy, meanwhile, was an antiwar senator from Minnesota whose 1968 campaign for president would prod Johnson to not seek reelection and would bring Bobby Kennedy into the race. McCarthy believed the war was a bloody tragedy that was undermining the American form of self-government.

So there was something of a long-overdue reconciliation last week when, 41 years after the tumult of 1968 -- and in a similar time of war and angry politics -- Chuck Hagel traveled to Collegeville, Minn., to deliver the annual Eugene J. McCarthy lecture at McCarthy's alma mater, St. John's University.

Hagel's timing was near-perfect: He finds himself in a situation that bears resemblance to the position McCarthy found himself in four decades ago -- that of a man whose conscience has forced him to abandon the demands of political parties and Washington infighting in favor of standing up against the problems he believes are bringing his country to a standstill and making it incapable of fixing itself.

Gene McCarthy would appreciate the irony, and the man.

Hagel was a two-term GOP senator from Nebraska who stepped down after completing his second term last January. He won his last election with an amazing 83 percent of the vote but was ostracized by many Republicans after his 2005 decision to oppose the war in Iraq, a decision that caused him to be castigated by talk-show demagogues for not supporting his party's president, George W. Bush.

Hagel never took the bait. He simply stated he had sworn an oath to the Constitution, not to a political party or president, and that the war was a mistake, reminiscent of the war in Vietnam.

At the Democratic National Convention last year, Eugene McCarthy's photo was misidentified as Joseph McCarthy's, an embarrassing confusion of the great antiwar crusader with the witch-hunting conservative senator from Wisconsin. But Republicans, you can be sure, still recognize Chuck Hagel: He was the first GOP senator to oppose Iraq, and he bucked his party's strategists by defending the duty of Americans to question their leaders, saying, "Questioning your government is not unpatriotic. Not questioning your government is unpatriotic."

But the way some of that questioning is being conducted today, especially on matters like health care reform, is not healthy, Hagel said. It is wrecking the country at a time of crucial challenges. Obama, he said, faces more problems than any president since Lincoln, and the country won't be able to solve them unless we stop shouting at each other and find common purpose.

"Our country has lost a good deal of what Eugene McCarthy was about," Hagel told a crowd of about 400 who gathered to hear him speak Wednesday. "Our public discourse has become so raw, so rude, so embarrassing, it's debased our system. Any fool can get up and scream at someone. It takes conscience and courage [the twin themes of the annual McCarthy lecture] to find solutions to our problems. The rudeness of the discussion," he warned, can overwhelm the process with the result that "we end up with nothing, we fail our people, and we fail our country."

Hagel's name was mentioned last year as a possible GOP presidential candidate, and also was floated as a possible cross-party choice as a Democratic candidate for vice president. He is close to President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, both of whom served with him in the Senate, and it won't surprise anyone if he ends up with a high-profile job in the Obama administration. Still calling himself a Republican, Hagel has hinted that he thinks the country might need a third party, and his criticism of the lack of civility in politics is bipartisan and more: He goes beyond the parties to include the media and the public itself in the blame.

"We've lost our ability to self-govern because we've been paralyzed by partisan politics," he said in Collegeville. "From both sides. We have to bring back some semblance of a consensus, some kind of governing coalition. We'll never get there if we debase the process by tearing each other down."

Forty years after Eugene McCarthy broke his party's mold, Chuck Hagel seems pleased to be staking out some McCarthyesque terrain of his own.

"If we follow the McCarthy model," he said, "we're going to get through this."

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. He can be reached at nickcoleman@gmail.com.