Saturday, December 10, 2005

Clean for Gene

Former Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy died earlier today in Washington DC.  He was 89 years old.

Gene was the first political hero of my “grown-up” years.  I was a high school senior, still 17, when he announced that he was challenging incumbent president Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination, based entirely on his distress over the course of the Vietnam War.  Though I couldn’t go up to New Hampshire to work for him, and at that point didn’t need to “get clean” to be a supporter, I did whatever a kid from several hundred miles away could do to help McCarthy’s efforts.  I believe I attended a McCarthy rally in Philadelphia.

From everything that has been said about that primary on March 12, 1968, you’d think that McCarthy had won an overwhelming landslide over Johnson.  In fact, Lyndon got somewhere between 48 and 50 percent of the vote while McCarthy’s tally was in the 40-42 percent range.  Not only that—expecting little opposition, Johnson hadn’t even filed for the New Hampshire primary!  All of his votes were write-ins. McCarthy did win more delegates than LBJ, but that didn’t mean much.  What McCarthy’s challenge demonstrated, though, was a grassroots groundswell of war opposition that was strong enough to surprise a sitting president in rock-ribbed, solidly Republican (in those days) New Hampshire.  Nineteen days later, at the end of another tortured apologia for the war, Lyndon Johnson withdrew himself from consideration for the Democratic nomination.

For a while, it looked to us grassroots rubes as if erudite, professorial, whimsical, droll Eugene McCarthy could actually be nominated for president.  How naive we were!  Four days after Gene knocked off Lyndon, Bobby Kennedy entered the race and stole away with many of the progressives.  Fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, the VP, took over the administration’s/machines’/insiders’ side of the party’s political process.  The world-shaking events of 1968—assassinations, police riots, worldwide student rebellions, and more—ensued.

McCarthy decided not to run for reelection to the Senate in 1970, becoming a syndicated columnist and writing books and poetry.  He briefly ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972, then became an independent candidate for president in 1976, garnering far more votes than any other minor candidate (one of his 740,460 votes was mine).  He continued to occupy the fringes of the presidential election process for many years thereafter.

As I said earlier, Gene McCarthy was my first real political hero.  I may have been a naive idealist at the time, but I’m proud of my participation in his 1968 campaign.  Only two others have inspired me as strongly since then ... Mo Udall in 1976, Howard Dean in the 2004 campaign.  Whatever those three share, whatever it is that drew me to them, I am immensely appreciative.

Thank you, Gene.  Requiescat in pace.