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Obituary

Antiwar maverick McCarthy dies at 89

Former Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy's opposition to the Vietnam War played a role in President Lyndon Johnson not seeking a second term.

WASHINGTON - Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday (Dec. 10, 2005). He was 89.

Sen. McCarthy died in his sleep at an assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.

Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.

The former college professor, who ran for president five times - in 1968, 1972, 1976, 1988 and 1992 - was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.

"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.

When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."

Sen. McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.

Helped by his legion of young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," Sen. McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. Sen. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid strife on the convention floor and in the streets.

Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect politics ever since.

"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," Sen. McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.

"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway - the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.

"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions . . . each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."

Although he supported the Korean War, Sen. McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because "as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on."

In recent years, Sen. McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sen. McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.

"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen," he said in an interview at the time.

In a 2004 biography, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of Sen. McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. Sen. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, "willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick."

Sen. McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.

He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.

He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. Sen. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.

With a sardonic sense of humor, Sen. McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan, saying anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

Sen. McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Sen. McCarthy also blamed politics for America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the failure of Johnson's Great Society social programs.

Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, Sen. McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."

A private burial for Sen. McCarthy is planned for this week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.

[Last modified December 11, 2005, 02:15:36]