Eugene McCarthy
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The death on Saturday of Eugene McCarthy at the age of 89 comes at a moment when Americans appear torn over the same fundamentals that fueled his quixotic 1968 bid for the presidency.
McCarthy seized the standard of the anti-Vietnam War movement from the far left, planting that instinct firmly – and to judge by the recent turn of events, permanently – inside the Democratic Party.
Viewed as a game of chess, nothing so resembles McCarthy’s attempt to capture the Democrats 1968 presidential nomination as Uzi Landau’s recent failed attempt to capture the Likud leadership from Ariel Sharon.
Running from the right to oppose Prime Minister Sharon’s Gaza disengagement policy, Mr. Landau was overtaken by the candidacy of the less forthright, but more established Benjamin Netanyahu. Protests by Mr. Landau and his supporters that Mr. Netanyahu had waited too long to jump into the fray, cynically watching the polls, couldn’t save Mr. Landau’s candidacy, which he formally ended last week, throwing his support to his leading rival.
Likewise, McCarthy’s claim was that he had courageously moved early against Lyndon Baines Johnson, a president from his own party, over the escalation of American military involvement in South Vietnam. This was meant to contrast his boldness with the lengthy hesitation of the anti-war movement’s natural standard bearer, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, the next brother-in-line following the assassination five years earlier of LBJ’s predecessor, the martyred saint of the liberal movement, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Messrs. Netanyahu and Landau succeeded, at least thus far, in driving Mr. Sharon out of their party, only to watch as that party appears to collapse around them.
McCarthy succeeded in forcing Johnson to blink and drop out of the race. When the nomination went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, McCarthy withheld endorsement until it was too late, and in any case expressed only lukewarm support, sitting on his hands as it were, a tactic widely practiced by his followers who voted for marginal left wing parties or boycotted the election.
The result: Richard Nixon became president, ushering in an era in which Republicans will, by 2008, have dominated the White House for 28 of 40 years. Meanwhile the Democrats, even when led by a saluting former Naval officer, John Kerry, appear chronically less confident on national security matters.
McCarthy gave expression to forces that were fatally dividing the Democrats, driving a nail (though not the final one) into the coffin of the liberal anti-communists whose conceptions of the world were on trial in Southeast Asia. By the end of March, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. Having waited to check on McCarthy’s progress, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York jumped in three days later; with his wide acceptance in the labor and civil rights movements, Kennedy’s appeal was far broader than McCarthy’s.
McCarthy gained political traction during the weeks leading up to the March 12 New Hampshire primary and began to slip after RFK entered the race. He won four additional primaries before the steam ran out of his campaign – and into Kennedy’s.
Kennedy’s momentum built to a crescendo when, on June 5, he was shot to death in a Los Angeles hotel after accepting his victory in the California primary. His assassin was a young Arab, Sirhan Sirhan, incensed at RFK’s appearance a few weeks earlier sporting a yarmulke as he professed his commitment to the State of Israel.
Kennedy’s untimely death was the second blow in a few months to the left liberal movement; Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot to death two months earlier, on April 4, in Memphis.
McCarthy proved unable to rally the broader forces galvanized by Kennedy, and when delegates gathered in Chicago for the party convention in late August, the nomination was clearly Humphrey’s. The anti-war standard had fallen inside the convention center – in vain, Senator Ribicoff of Connecticut denounced the Chicago police for their “Gestapo” tactics as the legendary Mayor Daley was caught on screen replying with an unprintable epithet. Outside on the streets of the Second City, the banner was reclaimed by the radical left as they battled tear gas and Chicago’s finest.
In reporting McCarthy’s death, the Sunday Washington Post reported that “To the Democratic convention in Chicago came thousands of McCarthy partisans and war protesters bent on making their voices heard.” But the demonstrations were organized by the pacifist National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam along with S.D.S. members tripping on the fantasy of violent revolution and Jerry Rubin’s Yuppies, tripping on the fantasy of hallucinatory drugs.
While the radical left fizzled within a few years, the long-term impact of the events of 1968 was virtually to hand the Democrats over to the youth movement that had come of age backing McCarthy’s campaign.
In his recent attacks on President Bush’s Iraq policy, the national chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, might have been channeling the spirit of McCarthy who, upon entering the race in 1968, said the Johnson administration “seems to have set no limit to the price which it is willing to pay for a military victory.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.