Eugene McCarthy
Sandbrook, Dominic & McGreevy, John T.
t 'a' 3",+s:.V.sV A. tPt t ".:•ri:h". h. r~iU~S.., .n r$S.w-z,. ~~,'.i;: z•'QaMi~?1t3~'A'T3lTiR One of a kind Eugene McCarthy The Rise and Fall of l'ostwar American Liberalism I )rrnri;tit...
...McCarthy did thrive on television, where his laconic, relaxed style showed off to best effect...
...John's as an instructor...
...If I were to graph my person-al advancement during [these years]," he later wrote, "the line would be as flat as is the topography of the Red River Valley...
...Or another: McCarthy's marriage collapsed just after the 1968 presidential campaign...
...This strikes me as a rare moment of overreaching...
...John's Abbey...
...Something of a loner, with a sharp tongue, McCarthy was also a superb student, captivated by the writers of the early twentieth-century Catholic revival, notably Francois Mauriac, G. K. Chester-ton, and Jacques Maritain...
...McCarthy's immersion in Catholic social thought distinguished him from these American contemporaries, but he much enjoyed his episodic contacts with inter-national Catholic political figures such as Chile's Eduardo Frei, also a disciple of Maritain...
...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...
...He was, in fact, only a middling congressman and senator, detached from the day-to-day business of the Capitol...
...By this time McCarthy had become a minor national figure, repeatedly discussed as a vice-presidential nominee, a favorite of the Southern Democratic barons who ran the Senate...
...There he and many of the monks were saddened to learn the contents of Humanae vitae...
...Vietnam catapulted him into the national spotlight...
...He became a protege of the most intellectually ad-venturous of the monks at St...
...To take one example: after Robert Kennedy's assassination, Mc-Carthy retreated to St...
...But McCarthy's timing was perfect...
...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...
...In 1958, he was elected to the Senate...
...John's University...
...Even three decades later, references to Maritain peppered McCarthy's speeches...
...Among the virtues of Dominic Say-brook's thoroughly researched, engaging, and crisply written biography of McCarthy is that it makes sense of both rosaries and wolverines...
...Mc-Carthy'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 with-in the growing peace movement—and perhaps especially its Catholic component—made him a skeptic...
...T Commonweal 3 0 August 13, 2004...
...Dawn campaign stops at factory gates did not appeal because "I'm not really a morning person...
...As friends phoned in the final tallies from St...
...Like Other Democratic liberals of the 1950s, McCarthy blended an intense anticommunism with support for racial desegregation, the expanding social welfare state, and labor unions...
...i;: z•'QaMi~?1t3~'A'T3lTiR One of a kind Eugene McCarthy The Rise and Fall of l'ostwar American Liberalism I )rrnri;tit tiantll,rook John T. McGreevy uring Eugene McCarthy's first major political campaign, to become the 1948 Democratic-Farmer-Labor nominee for a congressional seat, the College of St...
...Mc-Carthy's wit and occasional eloquence—when he could rouse himself—made him a favorite with the national press...
...Sandbrook's demolition of McCarthy's post-1968 career, in which he left the Senate and be-came 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 significancefor American politics...
...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...
...Saybrook himself seems startled by the pervasive role Catholicism played in McCarthy's career...
...What stands out in retrospect is McCarthy's diffidence, even his eccentricity...
...Kennedy, not McCarthy, mobilized and inspired African-Americans, Latinos, and (to an extent) working-class Catholics...
...Elected to the House of Representatives in 1948, he be-came the leader of an informal group of young Catholic politicians, including Michigan's Philip Hart, Maine's Edmund Muskie, and John F. Kennedy (although McCarthy's jealousy of Kennedy's success and wealth soured this friendship...
...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...
...In 1946 he secured another teaching position, this time at the College of St...
...After leaving St...
...But they never divorced...
...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...
...Salvation of a sort came when McCarthy was invited back to St...
...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...
...I've come to think of Gene as a relative," Abigail explained in 1987...
...Thomas professor gathered his supporters on election night in his campaign headquarters...
...McCarthy came late to opposition to the war, but then almost all senators from both parties supported Lyndon B. Johnson until 1966...
...John's Abbey in Collegeville, and when high school class-es bored him, St...
...In 1968, after more vocal opponents of the war had declined to challenge Johnson, McCarthy decided to run...
...And Sandbrook's own telling, given its importance for McCarthy's career, is almost too succinct, scarcely two short chapters...
...Rumors that he would abandon Congress for a college presidency were widespread...
...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...
...When he ran for reelection in 1964, even the Minneapolis Star worried that he was only "casually interested in the political and economic affairs of his own state...
...The problem was that he disliked politics...
...Twenty years later, battling for the Democratic presidential nomination, McCarthy received a request for a personal interview from James Reston of the New York Times, then the eminence grise of the Washington press corps...
...he tale of the extraordinary 1968 presidential campaign is oft told...
...He doesn't even want to be senator...
...John's Preparatory, the boarding school attached to St...
...The decision took genuine courage, and most of his colleagues were astonished...
...At Mandan he met his future wife Not a morning person HISTORYCENTRAL.COM (and much later, Commonweal columnist), Abigail Quigley, also an English teacher...
...Their delayed honeymoon trip, presumably unlike that of any other twentieth-century presidential candidate, included visits to friends at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto and the Grailville Catholic settlement in Ohio...
...This candidate's name was Ronald Reagan, author of a genuinely new chapter in American political history...
...Mc-Carthy granted the request, but made Reston cool his heels outside his office while he composed a lengthy poem about wolverines...
...Thomas in St...
...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...
...After an ill-fated stint as a Benedictine novice, he married Abigail (finally) in 1945 and promptly moved with a group of Catholic couples to an agricultural commune formed in his hometown of Watkins...
...Paul's City Hall, McCarthy led his family and closest supporters in a recitation of the rosary...
...One told the press, "It's not in his nature to be president...
...First, he tried his hand as a high school principal in the metropolises of Tintah and Kimball, Minnesota, followed by two years of the same in Mandan, North Dakota...
...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...
...But he never built a strong political organization or honed a message appealing to those beyond his antiwar, white middle-class base...
...Mc-Carthy 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...
...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...
...Inspired by a group of young instructors at the college, and one distinguished German-Catholic emigre on the faculty, Heinrich Rommen, he quickly became drawn into local politics...
...When asked whether he might support Hubert Humphrey (his fellow Minnesotan) or Kennedy (his fellow Catholic) in 1960, McCarthy remarked that he was "twice as liberal as Humphrey [and] twice as Catholic as Kennedy...
...Over time, the onetime Mandan schoolteachers again became friendly, even cordial...
...His Commonweal 2 9 August 13, 2004 fascination with agricultural cooperatives stemmed from his experience with the Benedictines as did a distaste for overt religiosity in public life...
...John's, Virgil Michel, who attempted to inoculate students against laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other...
...Born in 1916 in the tiny town of Watkins, Minnesota, McCarthy enrolled at the age of fifteen in St...
...Paul...
...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...
...She remembered Mandan more fondly, and writes in her own memoir of her astonishment upon learning that the parish priest, a German Benedictine, ordered the latest Catholic books direct from London...
...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...
...John's, the future politician thrashed about for a few years...
Vol. 131 • August 2004 • No. 14
