More wag than Washington man

Over the years, whenever the name Eugene McCarthy was mentioned to a member of the Kennedy family, a groan inevitably ensued, quickly followed by a put-down. This always struck me as odd. After all, the Minnesota senator is known in history as both a crusading liberal Democrat and a brave anti-Vietnam War dove. One would assume that during the 1960s the Kennedys would have embraced him. But McCarthy, whose irreverence is legendary, had developed a disdain for John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. In fact, when RFK was assassinated on June 6, 1968, while giving a victory speech after the California presidential primary, fellow candidate McCarthy, who was holed up in a hotel room planning a concession speech, turned callous. “He brought it on himself,” McCarthy was heard to say. “Demagoguing to the end.”

For those Americans who got “Clean for Gene” in 1968, campaigning throughout the snowy tundra of New Hampshire for McCarthy with heartfelt conviction, such unpleasant anecdotes must be hard to fathom. The man they canvassed for was, in their memories, politically astute and cleverly charming, always tweaking the nose of power brokers with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. These qualities are in short supply in historian Dominic Sandbrook’s “Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism.” Instead, McCarthy is portrayed as an unlikable self-promoter brimming with jealousy and void of generosity. When Lyndon B. Johnson chose Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey over McCarthy to be his running mate in 1964, for example, Sandbrook quotes the deeply embittered also-ran as calling the president, a former mentor, a “sadistic son of a bitch.” One learns that McCarthy didn’t write speeches he claimed to have, prohibited his children from campaigning for him, probably cheated on his wife and was an awful poet. “After Eugene McCarthy left the Senate in December 1970,” Sandbrook writes, “his reputation entered into a long and apparently irreversible decline, thanks almost entirely to his own arrogant and unconventional behavior.”

This is a loaded, mean-spirited line. Although Sandbrook, a former lecturer in American history at the University of Sheffield in England, is correct that McCarthy’s political influence ended in 1970 and that he became something of a public gadfly, the senator’s candor continued to be a welcome contribution to our national discourse. The great mistake he makes in this workmanlike biography is analyzing McCarthy solely through the lens of American liberalism. From that perspective, he is correct: McCarthy failed as a standard-bearer. But in truth, McCarthy was never a real player in the liberal movement. He was by nature an iconoclastic contrarian and high-minded satirist, lampooning politicians of every stripe. One could even say that he had more in common with comedian Lenny Bruce than with liberal politicians. So as a biographer, Sandbrook, who is a conscientious researcher, fails in his primary task. His McCarthy, for the most part, is a one-dimensional jerk whose single moment of meaningful glory occurred in 1968 when he came within a few hundred votes of beating Johnson in the New Hampshire presidential primary, helping to trigger Johnson’s decision not to seek a second term. This is a shortsighted analysis. McCarthy’s astonishing wit alone is worth honoring.

Born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, Minn., McCarthy had a happy childhood. After attending public schools in Watkins, where he was the brightest boy in town, McCarthy studied at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn. “McCarthy’s Catholicism, refined and reinforced by his years at St. John’s, was the single most important influence on his intellectual life,” concludes Sandbrook, who engages in an interesting digression about the revival of the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas, papal encyclicals and the radio rants of populist Father Charles E. Coughlin. A true intellectual, McCarthy went on to study at the University of Minnesota, eventually becoming a professor of economics at St. John’s, where he was a seminarian for nearly a year. During World War II, while serving as a civilian technical assistant in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, McCarthy got politicized. He learned about Minnesota’s Farmer Labor Party, the Americans for Democratic Action, or ADA, and the Catholic Worker.

What seems to differentiate McCarthy from Humphrey, Sen. Walter F. Mondale and other so-called Minnesota liberals is his abiding faith in Catholicism. When one reads pages from McCarthy’s 1960 book, “Frontiers in American Democracy,” he sounds like Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr opining that the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world. “It is absurd to hold that religion and politics can be kept wholly apart when they meet in the conscience of one man,” McCarthy wrote in that volume. “If a man is religious and if he is in politics, one fact will relate to the other if he is indeed a whole man.”

The only significant Democratic politician from the Cold War era who could write such a line besides McCarthy is Jimmy Carter. And neither, I would argue, should be studied as avatars of American liberalism. Both men brought Christian morality into the public arena with authentic zeal, making their opponents seem corrupt for their Beltway babble, backroom deals and compromising ways. McCarthy’s true party affiliation, in other words, was Midwest Catholicism, just as Carter’s was Southern Baptist. They weren’t, in the truest sense, New Dealers or Fair Dealers or New Frontiersman. They were public moralists, Christian crusaders who believed they knew the difference between right and wrong. Politics is a dirty business and McCarthy, like Carter, fancied himself as intellectually above such a reprehensible vocation.

But the McCarthy in this book seems more muttonhead than maverick while serving in the House (1949-59) and the Senate (1959-71). Voting the party line usually earns a politician friends, but McCarthy, it seems, annoyed all the other liberal stalwarts of his era. As Sandbrook points out, McCarthy started distancing himself from the ADA and the Kennedys as early as 1960. Even Humphrey grew “embarrassed” by McCarthy’s “constant show of blatant superiority and disdain, not only for the Senate body but for individual senators,” Sandbrook writes, adding that Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge complained that McCarthy was “mentally and physically lazy.” Other Senate colleagues commented on his aloofness and undependability, his preference for “delivering bon mots to infatuated reporters” instead of legislating.

Here is what should have been Sandbrook’s central thesis: That McCarthy was not a true-blue liberal -- he was an island unto himself. His cultivated penchant for garnering invective from Democratic friends was his roundabout way of staying pure. He enjoyed being the fly in the sherbet. More than anything, the Catholic moralist could never conceive of himself as being co-opted. Essentially, he never fit into Johnson’s Great Society or the Kennedys’ Cape Cod club.

Although it’s true that in 1968 McCarthy was the first politician to promise “an income distribution system that would guarantee to every American a minimum livable income,” he is best remembered for his anti-Vietnam crusade. It was an honorable endeavor. But dozens of other leading Democrats, including Sens. George McGovern, Robert Kennedy and Ed Muskie, were essentially saying the same thing. His dissent differed in that, like Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, who ran as a third-party candidate in 1968, the Minnesota senator was rallying against the status quo. McCarthy, in other words, wasn’t just anti-Vietnam but anti-Washington insiders. Like Howard Dean, he was an elite blowing the whistle on other elites.

Truth be told, the Senate bored McCarthy, who preferred discussing poetry with Robert Lowell to swapping barnyard yarns with Lyndon Johnson. Unfortunately, Sandbrook focuses more closely on McCarthy’s post-1970 political failures -- including two half-hearted runs for president in 1972 and 1976 and an unsuccessful bid to reclaim his Senate seat in 1982 -- Sandbrook sees McCarthy as an exemplar of the decline of liberalism. But McCarthy never had any intention of winning. He simply wanted to stir things up, to cause a little trouble in the name of unflinching honesty.

Too often we judge the political careers of politicians by whether they’re elected to the offices for which they run. We tend to celebrate winners. But sometimes -- as in the cases of William Jennings Bryan, Eugene V. Debs and McCarthy -- losing is winning over the longer scope of time. Long after former Democratic presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Walter F. Mondale are forgotten, McCarthy’s unruly legend will continue to matter. If you don’t believe me, look his name up in a U.S. history textbook index or Bartlett’s book of quotations: The rascal from Watkins always appears. *