One of a kind

Commonweal, August 13, 2004 by John T. McGreevy

Better perhaps to identify McCarthy with a certain political style--cool, ironic, informed by the anticommunism, concern for social justice, and veneration of the family that so marked mid-twentieth-century Catholic social thought--and its buffeting in the theological and cultural cauldron of the late 1960s. McCarthy never recovered his balance after the 1968 campaign, and the dizzying mix of religious and political change left in the campaign's wake may explain his disorientation. To take one example: after Robert Kennedy's assassination, McCarthy retreated to St. John's Abbey. There he and many of the monks were saddened to learn the contents of Humanae vitae. Or another: McCarthy's marriage collapsed just after the 1968 presidential campaign. He had a long involvement with a devout Catholic woman who had covered that campaign, and Abigail's memoir (Private Faces/Public Places), published in 1972, ends with a bleak reference to McCarthy's abandonment of the ideal of "life-long fidelity and shared life." Over time, the onetime Mandan schoolteachers again became friendly, even cordial. "I've come to think of Gene as a relative," Abigail explained in 1987. But they never divorced.

Unarguable is Sandbrook's conclusion that the collapse of postwar liberalism--of which the McCarthy campaign in 1968 was one important episode--requires further study. But by 1968 the more significant story about the blending of religion and American politics was already underway, in Orange County, California, not Stearns County, Minnesota. To the horror of his friends, McCarthy chose in 1980 to endorse a presidential candidate who had mobilized millions of religious supporters (this time Evangelicals) and who could sustain this support with a winning campaign style. This candidate's name was Ronald Reagan, author of a genuinely new chapter in American political history.

John T. McGreevy is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton), and chair of the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.