Eugene McCarthy Takes Issue Still

Thirty-two years ago, Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy (D-Minn.) was braving the New England snow in an audacious bid to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, a campaign that inspired thousands of young Americans and ultimately made history.

Today, the 83-year-old McCarthy watches the 2000 presidential race with a jaundiced eye.

The new crop of Republican and Democratic candidates does not fare very well in McCarthy’s view. GOP front-runner George W. Bush “has no qualifications,” he says. Vice President Al Gore is dismissed as so-so. Nor is McCarthy impressed by Democratic challenger Bill Bradley.

President Clinton? Nothing to write home about, McCarthy argues. Much of Clinton’s two terms has been focused on issues such as education, welfare and crime that ought to be left to the states, he notes. “He has made a good governor,” he says by way of faint praise.

Indeed, while many of McCarthy’s old supporters remember him fondly as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, his pronouncements nowadays seem decidedly conservative:

* He opposes reforming the nation’s campaign finance laws, arguing that restricting political donations would violate the right of free speech. (His views on this subject recently were honored with an award from the Conservative Political Action Conference.)

* He vigorously rejects liberals’ current push for bilingualism in the nation’s school systems, contending that it is likely to result in “illiteracy in two languages.”

* After having “reluctantly” supported Republican Ronald Reagan for president in 1980, he now lauds the hard-line positions of Reform Party presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan--such as protecting U.S. borders against drug trafficking and an excess of imports and immigration.

Buchanan is connecting with the voters on these kinds of issues, McCarthy asserts. “These are kind of normal feelings,” he says.

McCarthy actually came in second in New Hampshire’s 1968 Democratic primary, but he garnered such a large share of the vote--a hefty 42.1%, compared to Johnson’s 49.8%--that he stunned the political establishment and much of the electorate as well.

Four days later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who earlier had shied away from challenging the incumbent, announced that he would be entering the race--a formidable threat to LBJ’s candidacy. Johnson withdrew, and McCarthy became a liberal icon.

Ironically, McCarthy says he never expected to win more than about 25% to 30% of the New Hampshire vote--just enough to prod Johnson into changing his policy and begin a gradual withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam.

Instead, McCarthy’s big splash backfired, emboldening Kennedy to run and scaring Johnson out of the race. “We probably would have been better off if we hadn’t done so well,” he muses in retrospect.

That June, Kennedy was assassinated and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey became the Democratic nominee.

But with the Democratic Party riven by the dispute over Vietnam that McCarthy helped galvanize, Humphrey lost the general election in a squeaker to Republican Richard Nixon.

Even after all these years, McCarthy remains plainly bitter over the way that ’68 campaign played out. He refuses to forgive Kennedy for jumping into the Democratic presidential race and stealing his thunder.

“Once Bobby came in, we weren’t able to run the kind of campaign we wanted to, which was to focus on the war,” McCarthy said in an interview with The Times in his pine-paneled library in a renovated stone farmhouse he occupies here in the Virginia countryside.

“He changed the whole complexion of the campaign,” the former senator recalled.

An inveterate maverick, McCarthy eventually found the Senate boring and gave up his seat in 1970. He ran for president several more times, but never got far, blaming the press in part for not covering him adequately.

McCarthy now leads a quiet life about 70 miles west of Washington. But he hasn’t lost his iconoclastic bent--or the caustic wit that once made him the darling of American youth.

White-haired, stooped, but decidedly unbowed, McCarthy spends much of his time writing books and poetry and telephoning old friends. He’s a regular at the smallish F.T. Valley country store, where he stops each morning to have coffee and chat with locals.

“It’s kind of interesting--the game warden and the sheriff stop in there in the morning,” he says. “There are a lot of colonels retired around here. They tell World War II stories.”