One of a kind

Commonweal, August 13, 2004 by John T. McGreevy

Vietnam catapulted him into the national spotlight. McCarthy came late to opposition to the war, but then almost all senators from both parties supported Lyndon B. Johnson until 1966. McCarthy's seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he listened to administration spokespersons (such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk) evade tough questions, and his contacts within the growing peace movement--and perhaps especially its Catholic component--made him a skeptic. "The serious problem today," he explained in 1966, "is that we are called upon to make a kind of moral commitment to an objective or to a set of purposes which we do not clearly understand."

In 1968, after more vocal opponents of the war had declined to challenge Johnson, McCarthy decided to run. The decision took genuine courage, and most of his colleagues were astonished. One told the press, "It's not in his nature to be president. He doesn't even want to be senator." But McCarthy's timing was perfect. The Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese army in early 1968 marked a turning point in American public opinion, and McCarthy stunned the nation by nearly defeating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Four days later, to the everlasting bitterness of McCarthy supporters, Robert Kennedy belatedly joined the race, and by the end of the month Johnson had withdrawn as candidate, only to be replaced by his vice president, and McCarthy's old rival, Humphrey.

The tale of the extraordinary 1968 presidential campaign is oft told. (And Sandbrook's own telling, given its importance for McCarthy's career, is almost too succinct, scarcely two short chapters.) What stands out in retrospect is McCarthy's diffidence, even his eccentricity. Not only did he find time to compose poems about wolverines, but he repeatedly skipped campaign appearances and made almost willfully obscure references to Arnold Toynbee and Charles Peguy in major speeches. Dawn campaign stops at factory gates did not appeal because "I'm not really a morning person."

McCarthy did thrive on television, where his laconic, relaxed style showed off to best effect. But he never built a strong political organization or honed a message appealing to those beyond his antiwar, white middle-class base. Kennedy, not McCarthy, mobilized and inspired African-Americans, Latinos, and (to an extent) working-class Catholics. By July 1968, after Kennedy's assassination, the die was cast for Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee, and McCarthy began a long, often embittered shuffle off the national political stage.

Sandbrook reads McCarthy's career as a turning point in the history of the Democratic Party, and as crucial to "the rise and fall of postwar American liberalism." This strikes me as a rare moment of overreaching. Sandbrook's demolition of McCarthy's post-1968 career, in which he left the Senate and became a kind of second coming of Harold Stassen, running for president in 1972, 1976, 1988, and 1992, is the best evidence against McCarthy's pivotal significance for American politics.