Eugene McCarthy dies at 89

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, December 10, 2005

WASHINGTON – Eugene McCarthy, who took on a sitting president from his own party in a challenge that epitomized the political chaos of 1968, died Saturday. He was 89.

McCarthy died in his sleep at an assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past several years, said his son, Michael.

McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War, leading to Johnson’s withdrawal from the race and forcing the Democratic Party to take McCarthy’s anti-war message seriously.

The former college professor, who ran for president five times, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.

“He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor,” his son said.

When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: “They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view.”

McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state in which he had helped change history 24 years earlier.

Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as “clean for Gene kids,” McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state’s 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey.

Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.

Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.

Associated Press

Eugene McCarthy, shown in a 2003 interview, was a key figure in the political chaos of 1968.