RIP: Senator Eugene McCarthy

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To hardened observers it seemed extraordinary that so fastidious a man - a poet
who described himself as "mired in complexity", an intellectual who recoiled
from the crude slogans of electioneering - should have proved such a force. "How
is the Senator this morning?" someone asked McCarthy's daughter Mary in 1968.
"Oh! Alienated as usual," she replied.
Moreover McCarthy resolutely declined to give tub-thumping radical speeches.
"I've grown a little disturbed," he would tell an assembly of agriculturists,
"that almost everything the Church tried to give up at the Vatican Council has
been picked up by the Defence Department - the idea of grace in office, a little
hint of infallibility, a kind of revival of the ideas of heresy and of holy
wars, the Inquisition, a kind of index on publications. The Pentagon is even
beginning to talk Latin, and has given a contract to a Californian company for a
study entitled Pax Americana."

Senator Eugene McCarthy, who died on Saturday aged 89, was one of
the most intelligent and witty American politicians of the post-war period, and
the leader of the Democratic revolt against the Vietnam War which forced the
withdrawal of President Johnson in 1968.

To hardened observers it seemed extraordinary that so fastidious
a man - a poet who described himself as "mired in complexity", an intellectual
who recoiled from the crude slogans of electioneering - should have proved such
a force. "How is the Senator this morning?" someone asked McCarthy's daughter
Mary in 1968. "Oh! Alienated as usual," she replied.

But McCarthy's willingness to stick his neck out, and to oppose
the Vietnam War, in defiance of both the Democratic Party machine and of the
notoriously vindictive President Johnson, bestowed a powerful romantic aura.

His stand was in contrast to that of Senator George McGovern of
South Dakota, who felt that it would be unwise to oppose the President in a year
when he himself was up for re-election as Senator. Likewise, Senator Robert
Kennedy refused at first to prejudice his presidential ambitions by striking at
the crown too early.

For McCarthy the die was cast when the Attorney-General declared
that the President need not necessarily obtain the consent of Congress before
declaring war. "There's nothing left but to take it to the people," he declared,
in announcing his candidacy.

From the moment he declared in December 1967, McCarthy showed
that he was no ordinary candidate. The National Conference of Concerned
Democrats in Chicago, looking for a violent attack on the President, was treated
to a lecture about the Dreyfus Affair in France and the Punic Wars of Rome.

When McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary campaign the
polls suggested he would receive about 11 per cent of the vote. His organisation
was non-existent, and he was unable to conceal his boredom with
fund-raising.

Fortunately, his campaign received a boost from the Tet Offensive
in Vietnam, which broke out in February 1968. At the same time his cool laconic
style - surtout pas trop de zèle - began to make an impact on voters. Would the
Senator like to meet the workers at the factory gate at 6am? "I'm not really a
morning person," McCarthy replied. Many were delighted by such frankness, even
if the political hacks could never understand his appeal.

It puzzled them that McCarthy was unable to receive a brief on
poverty because he was on retreat in a monastery; and that he preferred to
confer with the poet Robert Lowell than with the pundit James Reston. "Sometimes
I wonder whether he's running for the Presidency or from it," remarked an
exasperated aide.

Moreover McCarthy resolutely declined to give tub-thumping
radical speeches. "I've grown a little disturbed," he would tell an assembly of
agriculturists, "that almost everything the Church tried to give up at the
Vatican Council has been picked up by the Defence Department - the idea of grace
in office, a little hint of infallibility, a kind of revival of the ideas of
heresy and of holy wars, the Inquisition, a kind of index on publications. The
Pentagon is even beginning to talk Latin, and has given a contract to a
Californian company for a study entitled Pax Americana."

Naturally, this mode of address appealed to intellectuals such as
Arthur Miller and William Styron, while from Hollywood Paul Newman, Myrna Loy
and Robert Ryan were eager to help with McCarthy's campaign. But the candidate's
sharp ripostes also proved unexpectedly popular on the stump. When a voter
lamented having to choose between Johnson and Nixon, McCarthy readily
sympathised. "I know," he said. "That's like choosing between vulgarity and
obscenity, isn't it?"

His stand brought to New Hampshire an army of devoted students
from the campuses, chiefly from Harvard, Yale, Boston University and Dartmouth,
but also from as far afield as Virginia and Michigan. "The children's crusade"
was prepared to work 17 hours a day, and though McCarthy never welded them into
anything approaching an efficient organisation, their enthusiasm gave his
candidacy a vital filip.

When the votes in New Hampshire were counted on March 12,
McCarthy gained 42 per cent of the Democratic vote, against 49 per cent for
President Johnson. If not a total triumph, this result sufficed to impel Senator
Robert Kennedy to announce his entry into the presidential race. And at the end
of the month Johnson declared he would not be standing again.

The opposition to the Vietnam war was now split between Kennedy
and McCarthy camps. McCarthy held in lofty disdain an opponent who posed as an
idealist while being so obviously motivated by cautious political
calculation.

"It's narrowed down to Bobby or me," McCarthy declared. "So far
he's run with the ghost of his brother. Now we're going to make him run against
it. It's purely Greek: he either has to kill him or be killed by him. We'll make
him run against Jack. And I'm Jack."

Kennedy defeated McCarthy in the Indiana and Nebraska primaries,
but at the end of May McCarthy came top of the poll in Oregon. This was the
first electoral defeat any of the Kennedy brothers had suffered in 28 elections.
All now turned on the Californian primary.

McCarthy depicted Kennedy, who had been a member of his brother's
administration, which had taken the United States into the Vietnam War, as part
of the problem, rather than the solution. And he poured scorn on Kennedy's ideas
for improving the ghettos through private enterprise, insisting that large
federal programmes would be necessary.

But when a television debate with Kennedy was arranged McCarthy
put on a lofty display of unconcern, while his opponent swotted. Kennedy,
exuding a politician's concern for the poor that McCarthy could never be
prevailed upon to express, won on points. He also won the primary with 47 per
cent of the Democratic vote against McCarthy's 41 per cent.

Early in the morning of June 5, after giving his victory speech,
Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan; 24 hours later he was dead.

In the aftermath of this tragedy McCarthy once more stood alone
as a credible opponent of the Vietnam War, facing the Vice-President, Hubert
Humphrey, the representative of the Democratic party machine. Oddly enough,
Humphrey was an old ally of McCarthy, who had nominated him for president in
1952, supported him for the vice-presidency in 1956, and campaigned for him in
the primaries of 1960.

There had been far more personal animus in McCarthy's relations
with Kennedy, and the bitterness between the two camps could not be healed.
Though McCarthy scored a resounding victory in the New York primary, the Kennedy
machine swung behind the candidacy of George McGovern. McCarthy, meanwhile,
seemed to make of point of snubbing members of the Democratic machine who might
have helped him.

Yet when he arrived at the Democratic Convention in Chicago that
August, the polls showed that McCarthy had a far better chance than Humphrey of
beating Nixon. "All we're asking," he volunteered, "is a modest use of
intelligence."

He never believed it would be forthcoming. The party apparatchiks
hated him; they knew that his triumph would be the ruin of their own power. And
whatever slim chance McCarthy had as the leading anti-war dove, it vanished when
the Russian tanks rolled in Prague on August 22. He offered to turn over his
delegates to Ted Kennedy - but once more a Kennedy eschewed a doubtful
opportunity.

McCarthy did not take Humphrey's selection as Democratic
candidate with good grace. Refusing at first to support him, he signed a
contract with Life magazine to report the world baseball series. It was a sour,
but characteristic end to the most extraordinary campaign in modern American
politics. The voters elected Nixon.

Eugene Joseph McCarthy was born into a farming family at Watkins,
Minnesota, on March 29 1916. Both his parents were Roman Catholic, Irish on his
father's side, German on his mother's.

Young Gene was educated at St John's, a small Catholic college 25
miles from Watkins, where he performed brilliantly, not only at his studies, but
also at baseball and as an ice-hockey player.

Subsequently, he taught in high schools for four years, and then
returned to St John's to teach Economics. In 1942 he went to Washington as a
coding clerk in Army intelligence; after the war he tried his vocation as a
novice at St John's.

""I was inclined to give it a test," he said. "On the other hand,
if it didn't prove out, it doesn't really hurt to spend eight or ten months away
from it all."

Rejecting the monastic life in favour of matrimony, McCarthy
found a job in the sociology department of St Thomas's, another Roman Catholic
college in St Paul, where he soon became chairman of the moribund county
Democrat party. In 1949 he was elected to the House of Representatives for the
Fourth Minnesota District.

In Congress he became the ringleader of a group of young
liberals, mostly from the Mid-West, known as McCarthy's Marauders. He was also
an early opponent of Senator Joe McCarthy's Communist witch-hunting; and in a
memorable television debate in 1952 parodied Joe McCarthy's selective way of
using of facts to "prove" that General Douglas MacArthur was a Communist pawn in
Asia.

In 1958 McCarthy was elected to the Senate. By now he was widely
recognised as the most intelligent man in Congress. But despite achieving
membership of the key Finance and Foreign Relations committees, he grew
increasingly bored and restive.

At the Democratic Convention of 1960 he had proposed Adlai
Stevenson as the party's presidential candidate in an eloquent speech. But he
was beginning to think of running himself: after all, he jested, "I'm twice as
liberal as Hubert Humphrey, twice as intelligent as Stuart Symington, and twice
as Catholic as Jack Kennedy."

For a while in 1964 Johnson considered McCarthy as a
Vice-Presidential candidate, but the choice fell upon the other Senator from
Minnesota, Humphrey.

So in 1967 McCarthy was a man waiting for a cause. That year he
published The Limits of Power, an incisive critique of American foreign policy,
and of the involvement in Vietnam in particular.

He also took up writing poetry. "If any of you are secret poets,"
he recommended in the light of his vastly increased sales in 1968, "the best way
to break into print is to run for the presidency."

But after the high point of 1968 the rest of his life was an
anticlimax. Despite his declared intention, he stood as a candidate in the
Democratic primaries of 1972, and was well financed by prominent Chicago
liberals. But he made no impact and was obliged to turn over his vote to George
McGovern.

In 1976 McCarthy offered himself as an Independent candidate. He
had some fun demanding the same television time as President Ford and Jimmy
Carter, plus half-an-hour without sound to match the sound failure that had
taken place when Ford and Carter were being interviewed. But he received only
0.2 per cent of the vote, and barely beat the Communist.

Subsequently, he dabbled in journalism and published various
books, including volumes of poetry and Up 'til Now: A Memoir of the Decline of
American Politics (1987).

Eugene McCarthy married, in 1945, Abigail Quigley, who died in
2001; they had a son and three daughters.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of
Telegraph Group Limited

Comments

[moody-warthog.livejournal.com]

читать все нет сил, но шутка о Пентагоне и Ватикане - чудесна.

[mtyukanov.livejournal.com]

Да, это очень примечательно.
Интересно, как телеграфовцам удалось показать человека самовлюбленным идиотом и перемежать свидетельства его собственной глупости с восторженными отзывами интеллектуального фан-клуба. Издевка? Tongue-in-cheek в некрологе? Или разгон муровской команды дошел и до этого отдела?