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December 12, 2005
Afterglow
Eugene McCarthy, who died Saturday, was the ideal and the reality of my political education.
In the fall of 1968, I was in the Army in Germany. Voting for president for the first time, I wrote in McCarthy's name. My calculation was simple. I didn’t trust Richard Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, had failed to break the shackles of his boss’s Vietnam War policy. McCarthy was the peace candidate; I was a peace voter. That was all that mattered to me, even though I knew McCarthy’s candidacy had foundered after his 41 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary drove President Lyndon B. Johnson out of office.
Looking now at the 1968 general election results, I see that mine was one of just 25,552 votes cast for McCarthy that November. He finished not only behind Nixon (31.8 million), Humphrey (31.3 million) and George Wallace (9.9 million) but also behind Dick Gregory and Eldridge Cleaver. Heck, he even lost in a landslide to two Socialist candidates, Henning Blomen and Fred Halstead.
Twenty years later, McCarthy had become something of a perennial candidate for president. It was hard to tell why – simply to bask in the afterglow of 1968, probably. But by 1988, I was the Monitor’s editor and welcomed the chance to meet the man for whom I had cast my first ballot.
It proved to be a sad awakening. McCarthy had little relevant to say and no charisma. He seemed insular, halting and given to tangents. I had interviewed and scouted an array of presidential candidates during the preceding weeks – Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, Jack Kemp, Alexander Haig, Pat Robertson and more. McCarthy was not in their league. I concluded he would have made a feckless president had he been elected in 1968.
But in my journal that night (Feb. 4, 1988), I did not focus on McCarthy's performance. Instead, I wrote about how, just after he left the old Monitor building on North State Street, I impulsively raced down the stairs after him. It had been snowing all day, and when I reached street level, I looked left and right in the misty white streetlit night. McCarthy, a tall form even with age bending him at the shoulders, wore a trenchcoat and a tan broad-brimmed hat. Walking alone, he was just disappearing around the corner.
I caught him a few steps up Pleasant Street. I told him he was the first person I had ever voted for for president. “Good man,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get in this one and give you a chance to write me in again.” I knew by then how electric New Hampshire primary politicking could be, and I could imagine how surprising and energizing it had been to be Eugene McCarthy in the winter of 1968. For me and many others of my generation, he soon became the wilted flower of idealism. But as he and I shook hands in the silent empty street 20 years later, with the snowflakes fluttering between and around us, I felt lucky to have such a fulfilling moment.
Posted by Mike Pride at December 12, 2005 09:21 AM
Comments
Mike: Yes, McCarthy did come to represent for some the wilted flower of idealism -- good phrase. But for many, his heady campaign was what powered their interest in politics. You can still look around New Hampshire and identify those who got their start on the campaign, even though some subsequently soured of electoral poltics and turned inward.
McCarthy could be peevish for a long-timer in Congress. At the time, I briefly shared his resentment of Bobby Kennedy for opportunistically entering the race. But Kennedy certainly was the one who could have beaten Nixon. And McCarthy, who promoted fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey's start in politics in 1948, withheld his endorsement of presidential candidate Humphrey in 1968 until the last week. No wonder not many others voted as you did.
On Saturday, the day McCarthy died, the Democratic Party at least preserved the N.H., primary, though in a diminished form. The promise lives on.
If ever there should have been a Republican peace candidate challenging a deceitful war president, it was in 2004. Yet there no Pete McCloskey willing to take on George Bush.
McCloskey, by the way, is at it again, at age 78. He may establish residency in a nearby district to challenge U.S. Rep. Richard Pombo, the Paleolithic Republican who wants to dismantle the Endangered Species Act and other environmental bills. Anyone from Concord want to come West to return the favor of McCloskey's 1972 challenge of Richard Nixon in New Hampshire. Be "neat for Pete"? You won't need thermal soles.
Posted by: John Fensterwald at December 12, 2005 12:07 PM