I've been thinking a lot today about the late Gene McCarthy and the war he tried to stop, and the politics of 1968. I should note at the outset that this was five years before I was born, and so all these thoughts are based on second-hand observations. But my belief is that Senator McCarthy--an honorable man and a very good progressive in both his beliefs and his philosophy of politics--along with his fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, who beat McCarthy for the 1968 presidential nomination, inadvertently helped create problems for the Democrats that we've never completely solved.
McCarthy was fascinating in a "character" sense because one could read into his motivations both personal pique and burning idealism. (That this was also true of Bobby Kennedy, and that each believed the other of the worse motivation, seems to have made them particularly fierce rivals.) Through the early part of his Senate career, he had been a Lyndon Johnson ally, and in 1964 he pushed hard behind the scenes to be chosen as LBJ's vice-presidential running mate. Soon after he lost out to fellow Humphrey, McCarthy began to turn against the president; by 1967, he was among the leading critics of the Vietnam War. As a cadre of Democratic activists led by a New Yorker named Allard Lowenstein began searching for a prominent national Democrat to oppose Johnson in the 1968 primary contest, McCarthy indicated his interest.
The man the activists wanted, of course, was Kennedy. Kennedy hated Johnson and by then was an outspoken opponent of the war, but didn't believe he could win and feared the consequences, for the party, the country, and his subsequent career, of a break with the administration. McCarthy, who arguably should have had the same concerns, evidently did not; by all accounts, he was bored in the Senate. With virtually no institutional support within the party and even less hope of victory, he declared toward the end of 1967.
If McCarthy had fared as poorly as was universally predicted then, the last 38 years of American history might have developed very differently. But his campaign caught unexpected fire in New Hampshire, fueled by the tireless efforts of his college-age volunteers, the uncharacteristically maladroit political work of the Johnson administration, and--perhaps most important--the national trauma of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which seemed to disprove the administration's claims that victory was imminent. McCarthy won 42 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote and a majority of the state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention to be held that summer; within a few weeks, Kennedy had joined the race, and Johnson had dropped out of it.
The ensuing three-way race for the presidential nomination between McCarthy, Kennedy and Vice-President Humphrey split the Democrats and cost them the 1968 election: nearly half of those who supported McCarthy or Kennedy, millions of otherwise-solid Democrats, stayed home in November as Humphrey lost a very close race to Richard Nixon. But it also helped create two perceptions of the party that I don't think have ever been fully disproved.
It's easy to frame McCarthy as the supremely arrogant and condescending figure who both never saw the value of compromise and refused even to fully engage, to fight for something flawed . After Kennedy's assassination in June 1968, he might have had a second chance to capture the public imagination; he passed it up, staying mostly silent. At the disastrous Chicago convention, he refused to work the delegates. After the convention, he essentially disappeared, writing about the World Series for Life magazine before offering an exceptionally tepid endorsement of Humphrey.
He left the Senate two years later, and then commenced an increasingly pathetic series of half-assed quadrennial runs for the presidency--the last time, in 1992, when he was 76. Along the way, he nearly threw the 1976 election to Ford, endorsed Reagan in 1980, and bashed most every prominent Democrat in sight. In his idealism, he might have been a forerunner of Paul Wellstone; in his inflexibility and evident contempt for the notion that something was better than nothing, he was surely a prototype for Ralph Nader.
Humphrey embodied the other problem: the notion that Democrats have no core principles, and will waver, and will shift with the political winds. Consider Humphrey on the war and on the political scene in general. He came to prominence as a domestic liberal--very strong on civil rights in particular--and a Cold War hawk. In the course of his quest for the vice-presidency in 1964, he compromised the first trait by intervening at the convention against the integrationist Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. On the second, he was torn (like other Cold War hawks, including Robert Kennedy) between his attitude toward resisting Communism and the increasing evidence that the Vietnam War was just a bad idea.
This might have been what did him in for 1968. He vacilated between the first and second poles depending on whether he was trying to cultivate Lyndon Johnson, liberal Democrats, or the entire electorate. He tried to go where he thought voters were, rather than to bring them to where he was. Maybe he wasn't anywhere. If this doesn't foreshadow complaints against Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Democratic "leaders" to the present day, I don't know what would.
When you add McCarthy's arrogance and certitude, and his unwillingness to fully engage with politics as "the art of the possible," with Humphrey's perceived lack of core principle and seeming eagerness to pander, you have both sides of the modern Democratic perception problem. (That these two memes are logically incompatible might bother the hell out of you and me, but strangely it never even seems to occur to the right-wing punditocracy.)
I believe McCarthy demonstrated the one political trait Americans now find truly unforgiveable: indifference, or at least the perception of it. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both won two terms in the White House, despite being detested by large segments of the electorate, in part because they came across as driven men. The individuals they defeated did not: think of George H.W. Bush looking at his watch in a 1992 debate, or John Kerry letting the Swift Boat attacks go unanswered for months in the summer of 2004. What Gene McCarthy viewed as fatalism, the world might have seen as passivity.
Personally, I find a lot to admire in McCarthy's stated view that he was merely the standard-bearer for a popular movement, who should not and would not campaign as a personality. But it showed an ignorance of how American politics worked then, and works now--or, more likely, an unwillingness to accept and operationalize that understanding. His hated rival Robert Kennedy, though derided as opportunistic and unprincipled, came on as a fighter; if he'd lived, I believe the many compromises he might have made would have enraged many liberals--but nevertheless would have added up to a much greater liberal legacy. Sometimes a realistic willingness to engage and commit outweighs every other consideration.