THE LOST ART OF MUD-SLINGING

H.N. Burdett When 19th century British statesman Benjamin Disraeli excoriated his chief rival, William Gladstone, as "inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity," he was referring to a real condition, journalist/author Gerald White Johnson once told me. Not only is it possible to become drunk on words, he explained, but anyone in that condition can become as plastered as having over-indulged "in the rawest busthead that ever dripped from a moonshine still." Nowhere is Johnson's supposition more evident than in the overheated realm of politics where rhetorical intoxication transpires well beyond candidates and their spokespersons, spilling over and into precincts far and wide from polite dinner party conversation to robust neighborhood gin mill give-and-take. The current quadrennial presidential race is widely touted as certain to erupt into the most vituperous ever waged. If an eyebrow or two is raised here among those who have delved into American history beyond the standard lifeless textbooks, that reflex emanates from recollections that the nation's most revered founding fathers were once targets of more than their share of verbal arrows. Alexander Hamilton was accused of embezzling public funds, George Washington of plotting the subversion of the republic. Nearly 60 years ago, the aforementioned Professor Johnson, writing in The New Republic, noted that the allegations against Hamilton and Washington were leveled not by politicians but rather by "merely newspaper editors, so it is questionable that their mouthings should be compared with public utterances." Johnson lamented the lost art of mud-slinging of which he deemed John Randolph of Roanoke and the virulent abolitionist Charles Sumner, both "learned and witty," as "the greatest master." As examples, Randolph's characterization of Stephen A. Douglas, who was both undersized in physical stature and possessed of ringing rhetoric, as "a noisome, squat and nameless animal" and of Senator A.P. Butler's defense of "the harlot slavery" as "though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his eyes." And there was Randolph's description of Edward Livingston, trusted adviser and Secretary of State to President Andrew Jackson: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he both shines and stinks." Johnson compared Randolph and Sumner with far clumsier purveyors of calumny, leading mid-20th century right wing Senators William Jenner of Indiana and Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. Jenner lambasted General George C. Marshall,