Five years ago this week, Senator Gene McCarthy died on December 10, 2005. After 10 years in the House of Representatives and in his second term in the Senate, he stunned the American political and media establishment on March 12, 1968, by winning 42% of the New Hampshire primary vote -- and a majority of the Democratic convention delegates -- to incumbent President Lyndon Johnson's 49%.
Robert F. Kennedy then entered the race on March 16, and Johnson withdrew on March 31. But if McCarthy had not announced his challenge in November 1967, the Democratic Party's path to reincarnation as the anti-imperialist party -- the transformation into which continues, slowly, even today -- would have taken even longer and begun later.
McCarthy was a working poet as well as an effective Senator with a seat on the Finance Committee. Both LBJ and RFK knew him as a formidable opponent and an honorable man; neither of them, judging by their records, cared about the poetry.
But beyond the history-changing actions McCarthy took, and inspired, his poetry is well-crafted, resonant and founded on the vision of a mordant eye. It may vivify his political record long after most such accountings are obscured by time, neglect and entropy.
Few now remember that Gene McCarthy was the first US House member to debate Republican anticommunist icon Sen. Joe McCarthy head-to-head, the first Congressman to call for Congressional oversight of the CIA, the first to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment in the Senate, and the first to lead a Senate subcommittee on remedying hunger in America.
But his poems from the Vietnam war years have not perished with those times but now shed new light on them. His lament for the missing spirit of the GIs, embodied in WWII and Korea as the figure of Kilroy who was everywhere in those wars but not in Southeast Asia, is particularly powerful.
KILROY
by Eugene J. McCarthy
Kilroy is gone,
the word is out,
absent without leave
from Vietnam.
Kilroy
who wrote his name
in every can
from Poland to Japan
and places in between
like Sheboygan and Racine
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.
Kilroy
who kept the dice
and stole the ice
out of the BOQ
Kilroy
whose name was good
on every IOU
in World War II
and even in Korea
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.
Kilroy
the unknown soldier
who was the first to land
the last to leave,
with his own hand
has taken his good name
from all the walls
and toilet stalls.
Kilroy
whose name around the world
was like the flag unfurled
has run it down
and left Saigon
and the Mekong
without a hero or a song
and gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.
--from Eugene J. McCarthy, Selected Poems, (Rochester MN: Lone Oak Press) 1997 [ISBN 1-883477-15-8]