Eugene J. McCarthy, the sardonic Senate dove who stunned the nation by upending President Lyndon Johnson’s re-election drive amid the Vietnam War turmoil of 1968, died early Saturday. He was 89.
A courtly, sharp-witted presence in capital politics for a half-century, the former Democratic senator from Minnesota died in his sleep at an assisted-living home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, where he had lived for the last several years.
His son, Michael McCarthy said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Sen. McCarthy left his mark in a generation’s skepticism toward the willfulness of political leaders.
“There is only one thing to do–take it to the country!” he said angrily in a Capitol corridor 15 months before the 1968 election, after hearing the Johnson administration make its case for the legality of the Vietnam War.
A man of needling wit, Sen. McCarthy ignited one of the most tumultuous years in American political history. With the war consuming thousands of American and Vietnamese lives, he rallied throngs against this “costly exercise in futility.”
He was a disarming presence on the stump as he mixed a wry tone and a hard, existential edge in challenging the White House, the Pentagon and the superpower swagger of modern politicians.
He also was sometimes a puzzlement, veering from inspired speechifying to moody languishing. But he was the singular candidate of the Vietnam War protest, serving up politics and poetry, theology and baseball in a blend that beguiled the “Clean for Gene” legions who flocked to his insurgent’s call.
“We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it,” he told them.
In his 1968 challenge and for decades thereafter, Mr. McCarthy played the self-outcast of the Democratic Party, even shunning Jimmy Carter to endorse Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for president in 1980. He became a chronic presidential campaigner himself, running in 1972, 1976, 1988 and 1992.
In the last race, he endorsed trade protectionism, the strategic defense initiative advocated by Reagan that often was referred to as “Star Wars” and, most passionately, the junking of the two-party Establishment whose rules he came to despise.
“It’s much easier for me to understand politicians who don’t walk away from it,” he explained at the age of 71 as he once more knew he could not win but ran anyway, hectoring the latest Beltway incumbents.
“I think he has a rejection wish,” Maurice Rosenblatt, a Washington lobbyist who was a longtime friend, once said of the senator’s perplexing mix of quixotic impulse and lethal hesitancy. “He wants to reject others and be rejected by them.”
In Congress, Mr. McCarthy was an unabashed liberal unafraid to take on Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) and his alarmist warnings about the communist menace (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). More often, Mr. McCarthy was viewed by peers as something of a ruminator and a curmudgeon.
But grasping the unpopularity of the deepening war, he sought to make a divisive party issue of it, announcing his primary candidacy against Johnson, a fellow Democrat, in the hope of building pressure for a policy change.
“There comes a time when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag,” declared the senator, a onetime novice monk whose political role model was Thomas More, the English statesman martyred in resisting Henry VIII’s seizure of church power.
Mocked by Johnson loyalists as a mere “footnote in history,” Sen. McCarthy prevailed well enough in his time to observe, after driving Johnson into retreat, “I think we can say with Churchill, `But what a footnote!”‘
Mr. McCarthy’s challenge was intended to prod, more than destroy, the president. But in unnerving Johnson in office, he shook Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York from his irresolution about challenging the president.
The year’s critical moment came in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968, when Sen. McCarthy beat the pundits’ predictions and won 42 percent of the vote. Johnson, despite his incumbent’s grip, could score only 49 percent.
Within days, Kennedy entered the race, embittering McCarthyites, not to mention their champion. Two weeks later, Johnson pre-empted greater popular rejection and astonished the nation by announcing in a postscript to a televised speech that he wouldn’t seek re-election and would devote his energies to ending the war.
Kennedy was assassinated in June in California as he edged out McCarthy forces in a key round of the competition.
The Democrats staggered to their convention in Chicago, where civic mayhem erupted. The party machine forced the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the candidate to face Richard Nixon for president over the objections of war protesters, including draft-ripe college students.
Mr. McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, Minn., of Irish-German descent. He graduated from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., in 1935 and received a master’s degree in economics and sociology at the University of Minnesota.
He taught social science in Minnesota high schools for several years, then economics and education at St. John’s and sociology at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul.
Stirred to politics by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, he was elected to the U.S. House in 1948 from the 4th District of Minnesota (East St. Paul) and served for five terms before moving to the Senate in 1958, where he served 12 years.
As a young man, Mr. McCarthy thought he might want to be a Benedictine monk. But he left the monastery after a 19-month novitiate trial. He later married a fellow teacher, Abigail Quigley, and had four children. Soon after the 1968 campaign, the couple separated after 24 years of marriage but never divorced. She died in 2001.
