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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1968, a day in the life of the candidate Eugene McCarthy
Eugene McCarthy, the dragon-slayer of American politics, belonged to a famous cohort of Minnesota Democrats who came together in the years after the Second World War and produced a governor, Orville Freeman, and two Vice-Presidents, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. He began his political career, in 1948, as a liberal anti-Communist congressman from Minnesota's Fourth District, which includes St. Paul. In 1958, after five terms in the House, he was elected to the Senate. Blessed with the patronage of the majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, he was soon identified, along with colleagues like Edmund Muskie, Philip Hart, and John F. Kennedy, as one of the ambitious young liberals prepared to take the stage as soon as Eisenhower could be wheeled off. Then his career suffered two minor abrasions. In 1960, he allied himself with Kennedy's rivals for the Democratic nomination--Humphrey, Johnson, and Adlai Stevenson--which put him at odds with an Administration in which he might have held a prominent position; and in 1964 he allowed himself to be the fall guy in a game of "Bachelor" played by Johnson at the National Convention, where Johnson pretended to be undecided until the last minute whether to name McCarthy or Humphrey as his running mate. Publicly spurned at the altar, McCarthy was then obliged, by Johnson, to deliver the speech placing Humphrey's name in nomination.
For another politician--the sort of politician who believes that it is better to be a player and lose than not to be a player--these wounds might have produced some scar tissue, but they would have stopped giving pain. McCarthy's skin was not so tough. Johnson, Humphrey, and even the Kennedys, who were certainly capable of holding a grudge, did not regard McCarthy as an enemy, but the experiences brought out in him the same politically dangerous emotion that later destroyed Richard Nixon--spite. McCarthy's subsequent actions were principled, but they had the tincture of vengeance.
His deconversion from the doctrines of interventionist anti-Communism followed the same sequence as that of many other Cold War liberals: distress at the American invasion of the Dominican Republic, in 1965; a growing awareness of the history of covert C.I.A. activities in other countries; and a conviction that the Administration was lying about the progress of the war in Vietnam. McCarthy was no pacifist, and he was hardly the first senator to oppose Johnson's Vietnam policies. But by 1966 he had joined the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party--with...
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