Eugene McCarthy, an odd Odyssey

My first sight of Sen. Eugene McCarthy was in 1967 when he visited the University of Michigan in a short exploratory tour of campuses to put his toe in the political waters testing anti-war sentiment. I was very impressed and became selected head of the Students for McCarthy at the U. of Mich. We raised $20,000 to send several busloads of students to the Wisconsin Primary where Gene won. On a bus on the way back, during a stop in Battle Creek Mich, the TV announced LBJ’s decision not to run that Fall. It was one of the happiest moments of this man’s life.

Subsequently, I was invited to join McCarthy’s National Staff and worked in the Indiana, Nebraska, California and New York Democratic primaries, as well as the Chicago Convention that summer. I had been invited to the RFK victory celebration at the Commodore[?], but stayed at the Beverly Hilton Hotel where Bobby’s assassination was announced amid general pandemonium.

I had a chance during the California primary to meet Gene and to spend a day with his daughter Mary, who I read today died in 1990. I drove Mary to several “Meet the Candidate’s Daughter” events and have the memory of an intelligent, socially superior young woman.

I first had second thoughts about Gene during the Chicago Convention, when the “Prague Spring” was brutally suppressed by the USSR and McCarthy enigmatically called this disaster “unimportant.” There was a certain aloofness about him which disdained involvement in the mundane pettiness that comprises daily life for the hoi polloi. His reported ability to recite Yeat’s long poem Wanderings of Oisin, pronounced Usheen, I believe, at the end of a long cocktail party was uncanny, as most memories begin to fade with a drink or two. I believe that poetry, and W. B. Yeats in particular, was his personal passion.

Later, in the '80s I ran into him in a dry-cleaning establishment in DC, where I handed him his plane ticket, which, absent-minded professor fashion, had fallen out of his suit-pocket. He was friendly, but as always, had an air of wanting to be somewhere else.

Fundamentally, McCarthy had much of the Benedictine monk in his nature. I lived in Minnesota for several years and once visited St. John’s College, a beautiful school that appears to have sprung out of the Middle Ages full-blown onto the Northern prairie. I believe that his quirky nature springs from the Minnesota climate, where so many populist/philosophers have sprung up.

Subsequently, I worked in several Democratic campaigns, including a Senate race in New York and Fritz Mondale’s 1984 presidential race. I have since become a conservative independent, and retain much of Gene McCarthy’s dislike of BOTH political parties, though I am still fascinated by the overall process of bi-party governance, flawed though it may be.

But, in 1968 after New Hampshire there was a true grass-roots “movement” that made it seem wonderful to be part of a national process, ill-fated though it eventually became, as a country shrugged off the repulsive LBJ only to end up with a repulsive RMN.

What a long strange trip it’s been!