What does Eugene McCarthy have to do with GW? Nothing. But that didn’t stop me two years ago from interviewing him for The Hatchet. The result was a simple and sympathetic look at the former Minnesota senator’s career and subsequent decline into obscurity. You can read it here.
Senator McCarthy died Saturday at age 89 in his apartment at the Georgetown Retirement Residence (see NYTimes story). He was living there in November 2004 when I interviewed him.
It was ridiculously easy to score an interview with the former senator, who in his last few years lived alone and answered phone calls patched through to his room from the main desk. I called on a whim, asked to speak to Senator McCarthy and within two minutes had a date with a man who four decades before harnassed the frustration and anger Americans were feeling over the Vietnam War.
In 1968, the dovish Senator McCarthy pulled off the unthinkable: in the Democratic New Hampshire primary, he effectively beat Lyndon Johnson, forcing the sitting president to drop out of the race (Johnson actually won the primary, but so narrowly that it embarassed him). McCarthy’s victory in New Hampshire compelled Robert Kennedy to enter the presidential race. By the late summer of 1968, Kennedy was dead, McCarthy lost the Democratic presidential bid to fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon closed in on victory. The parallels to 2004 are unavoidable: like Howard Dean 36 years after him, McCarthy briefly became the poster boy for America’s anger over a war only to lose to a more veteran, more mainstream political operator, who in turn lost to a Republican who waged war for several more years before withdrawing (I’m assuming that President Bush will take American forces out of Iraq by the time his term is up).
Senator McCarthy lived in a dilapidated, three-room apartment, toiling in anonymity only a few miles from the Capitol, a place where he shined for many years. It’d be difficult to imagine some of his political peers — Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon — meeting the same fate. Something happened to McCarthy after 1968 — that was abundantly clear even in my hourlong interview with him. Had I, then a sophomore, not been so grateful to him for granting me an interview, I would have written a more probing piece about a former luminary who, like Salieri, only came away with bitterness and regret from his brief flirtation with immortality.
