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Remembering Gene McCarthy
 When
famous people die, they are usually
overpraised in fulsome superlatives, well-meant but losing all proportion.
I’ve complained about this before, and I try to resist the temptation.
I’ll try to resist it today; it won’t be easy but respect for the
man himself forbids exaggeration of his
virtues.  He
wouldn’t have welcomed compliments he didn’t deserve;
I’m not sure he relished even the ones he did deserve.
I barely knew of Gene McCarthy
until he created a sensation by challenging Lyndon Johnson in the 1968
Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire; he lost, but his strong
showing against a sitting president stunned the country and caused Johnson
to withdraw from the race a couple of weeks later.
McCarthy’s theme was
simple: the Vietnam war was a mistake. Suddenly the anti-war movement had
a major candidate, a liberal with an attractively conservative demeanor.
Shaggy college students, getting “clean for Gene,” got haircuts
— hair was a big cultural issue in 1968 — and adopted
middle-class camouflage, including even neckties, in order to serve his cause
among ordinary voters. “Working within the System,” it was
called. Opposition to the war no longer seemed subversive or radical.
No sooner had McCarthy shocked
Johnson than Bobby Kennedy was emboldened to jump into the race; he and
Johnson hated each other anyway. McCarthy regarded them both with cool
contempt, but that was his problem: his cool, aloof personality wasn’t
to every taste. Bobby had star power inherited from his assassinated
brother, plus lots of money, with no inhibiting scruples. He pretty much
muscled McCarthy out of the race, and it looked as if the contest for the
nomination would be a duel between him and Hubert Humphrey.
Kennedy crushed McCarthy in the
California primary, delivered his short victory speech, and went backstage,
where Sirhan Sirhan was waiting for him. When Kennedy died early the next
day, Humphrey’s nomination was assured. In November Richard Nixon
narrowly beat him in a three-way race, George Wallace taking a fat chunk of
the vote, while McCarthy seemed not to care who won. By 1980 he was
favoring Ronald Reagan and heading in a libertarian direction.
![[Breaker quote for Remembering Gene McCarthy: The quiet enemy of bombast]](2005breakers/051213.gif) I
met McCarthy briefly in Minneapolis
about that time and told him how much I’d admired him in 1968,
something he no doubt heard thousands of times for the rest of his life.
When I told him I was now writing for Bill Buckley’s National
Review, he smiled: “I’ve always thought Bill was playing
poker with Monopoly money.” It was the kind of gently barbed, slightly
enigmatic witticism you’d expect from him.
I met him again in Baton Rouge a
few years later, where I was supposed to debate him; but the debate turned
into an all-out tribute from the moment he was introduced. Everyone
remembered him as the hero of 1968. I could only join the roar of the crowd.
Earlier that day he’d invited
me to join him for breakfast, where we had a long conversation about that
wonderful year. He recalled the dirty tricks of the Kennedy people; on the
day of the California primary, they’d tried to scare voters with
leaflets claiming he had a plan to bus blacks from Watts to Orange County. It
was a preposterous lie, but there had been no time to rebut it. Bobby was
even more cynical than I’d always thought! So much for Camelot. But
that night he was murdered anyway, and McCarthy told me the story not with
bitterness, but with something like amusement, ironic and philosophical. No
wonder he’d gotten out of politics after his moment of glory.
Politics, I reflected, was a strange
business for a man like Gene McCarthy to have been in at all. George Will has
written of his “condescension” to the public, but I think his
appeal was just the opposite of that: he never talked down to you, whether
you were part of a cheering crowd or a companion at the breakfast table. He
was that rare thing, a politician without bombast. After an hour with a man
like that, you realize how inflated John McCain’s “straight
talk” really is.
So in Gene McCarthy’s
honor, I think it’s enough to say that he spoke with intelligence and
candor, he raised our expectations of politicians, and, once upon a time, he
was there when we really needed him. No hyperbole is necessary. He is gone
now, and it hurts.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the Griffin
Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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