De Antonio handles the two most shocking events of the presidential campaign-the death of Kennedy and the Chicago convention-with particular skill. America has seen too many flag-draped coffins, too many widows. De Antonio shows only a group of weeping blacks and the thousands who lined the tracks to see the funeral train go by.

The apocalypse in Chicago is presented in the same low-keyed manner. Wisely avoiding what could only have been a replay of Medium Cool, de Antonio concentrates his camera completely on what went on inside the amphitheater. The film ends as Hubert Humphrey accepts his nomination in grateful praise to his president. Nothing more has to be said.

ANYONE who expects an objective treatment of McCarthy in America is Hard to See will be disappointed-he obviously would not have made the film if McCarthy had not captured his imagination. One cannot help wishing, though, that de Antonio would provide more help than he does in explaining McCarthy. Others have attempted to do this-as the rash of books on the campaign will attest-but most either make no attempt to be critical or, like Jeremy Larner's Nobody Knows, complain that McCarthy was not an entirely different person than he really is.

Some criticism of the campaign is voiced by Richard Good-win and Arnold Hiatt, the campaign treasurer, but most of the blemishes are ignored. Nothing in America is Hard to See conveys the hopeless disorganization, the bitter feuding of the national staff and the exasperating unpredictability of McCarthy himself. They were a major-at times predominant-part of the campaign and they should have been part of America is Hard to See.

But ultimately it is foolish to demand answers and concrete truths and unimpeachable descriptions when so few seem to exist. If we are confused and hesitant, it is but a reflection of McCarthy. When he spoke after the movie he seemed discouraged: "I said so much in 1968 and now it has to be said again. There is no change in policy." The Democratic Party, the vehicle for change to which he was once so committed, remains the same-and it must be abandoned. "I would not ask you to work within the party in 1972," McCarthy finally said.

And, like Lenin, everyone wonders what's to be done; but there is no answer. "It's nice to know people are still around," Sam Brown said before returning to Washington to organize another march. "But we can't meet like this two and a half years from now-that's the limit. If there's no significant change then ...." His voice trailed off.

Whatever course is eventually followed-if electoral politics are given one more chance or abandoned for the barricades-the McCarthy campaign will be remembered as a symbol of hope. "The campaign demonstrated clearly," McCarthy wrote in The Year of the People, "that the political system of America is really much more open than people believe it to be ... 'America is hard to see,' as Robert Frost has written, but if one looks hard and long one will see much that is good."

For those who gathered in Hanover last week and millions of others, that remains in doubt.