He was 89 years old. This after, just moments ago, CNN also announced that Richard Pryor died at age 65 of cardiac arrest, after battling multiple sclerosis for years.
Eugene McCarthy. Where to start … well, I worked on his campaign. Until I heard Robert Kennedy speak, in person, in Seattle. And I was touched when I recently heard Seymour Hersh say that he dropped out of journalism for a while to work on McCarthy’s campaign. That’s just how important McCarthy’s campaign was to Hersh and to so many of us. There was, just to begin the list, the courage it took for a Democratic U.S. Senator, to run against a sitting president (Lyndon Baines Johnson) who was also a Democrat.
Please share your thoughts and memories.
Update [2005-12-11 14:39:34 by susanhu]: CSPAN2 is replaying a 2001 interview with Eugene McCarthy. It’s hilarious and wonderful.
Courage, integrity, intelligence, an abiding commitment to justice, honor, self-depricating humor, a love for the English language and an ability to use it well–what more could you want in a political leader? What more do we need right now? What more are we, for the most part, sorely missing?
He was the first politician with national standing to oppose LBJ and the Viet Nam war, while so many Democrats like Hubert Humphrey simply went along.
I wonder how many establishment Democrats will read of McCarthy’s death, compare what they have done when confronted with an unjust war with to he did, and feel some shame. I hope more than a few do.
Eugene McCarthy made all the difference. He showed the 60s young as well as the Democratic party that there were possibilities. He gave everyone hope at a very dark time. I wasn’t a clean for Gene kind of guy, and I supported RFK in the primaries. But I always admired him.
I met him and did a brief interview with him during the 1972 campaign. He loved engaging ideas. Later in the decade when I was editor of Washington Newsworks, one of the many alternative weeklies that led up to the successful one of today, we published an interview with him. I headlined it “What kind of America do you want?” which is something he said in the interview, and shows the level of his thinking.
It’s a real good question to ask ourselves today. Because every decision we make, every position we support, contributes to that. That I believe is how Eugene McCarthy thought about things.
We got the interview partly because his son, Michael, was our photographer. He and I had some good times, so my thoughts are with him today.
Wow, that is sad. What an inspiration Clean Gene was. I was in high school in western Mass during his campaign and walked the hills and back roads of a rural area..no car of course and door to door meant several hundred yards. Looking back, how lucky could I be to have him as my first national candidate. Been no one like him since until Dean put together a similar insurgent campaign. RIP Gene, you made such an impact for many.
More – Poems by Eugene McCarthy Here
THE MAPLE TREE
The maple tree that night
Without a wind or rain
Let go its leaves
Because its time had come.
Brown veined, spotted,
Like old hands, fluttering in blessing,
They fell upon my head
And shoulders, and then
Down to the quiet at my feet.
I stood, and stood
Until the tree was bare
And have told no one
But you that I was there.
…of my SDS pals, I joined the “Clean for Gene” troops and eventually wound up as an alternative delegate from Colorado to the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I was 21. Seven of us from various parts of the country rented a hotel room together.
It was clear from long before the convention that McCarthy was going to lose, and after a day of watching Chicago’s Finest beat antiwar protestors in the streets, several of us decided to join the demonstrations. Along with scores of others, I was arrested, booked and released five times and clubbed to the ground by the cops twice in the next three days.
Three months later, because the Democrats were split on the left by those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hubert Humphrey because of the war and even more on the right by the Wallaceites who hated Humphrey for his civil rights activism, Richard Nixon won the presidency.
I can’t tell you how many times over the intervening years that I heard people – including Democrats – say McCarthy was a coward. Nothing could be further from true. Although my politics were far to the left of his and remain so, his courage and principles made him a hero in my eyes.
I’ll miss him.
Were you at the SDS convention in Chicago in the summer of 1969?
I was.
…time – I had attended two others previously. When we kicked out the Weatherman faction that June – a good thing – we were unfortunately left with a bunch of SDS splinter groups who couldn’t agree against the juggernaut of Progressive Labor, and that’s what decided me to leave the organization. Come December, I started my 13-month prison camp term for refusing to be drafted.
You paid some dues.
Have you written up your draft and prison experiences in a diary?
If so, it’d be so great if you’d reprint it here. I think a lot of us would like to read it, and let you know how much we appreciate what you did.
(I left the scene forever about a month after that trip to Chicago. Moved to Seattle and got a job at a broadcasting company. I didn’t like the scene much. It was getting too crazy and the talk of violence and guns really freaked me out. :()
…bother me, but when they started talking “bombs,” well, I knew they were nuts, and thugs.
Lordy, 1967 and 1968. I was trying to finsish college, the riots and the killings were all around me, and the Viet Nam war was madness. Gene McCarthy actually came out and said it just like Martin did (’til they gunned Martin down). Gene’s opposition was the big visible one in the north, the one that would grab the northern liberals as a symbol. I saw Gene as the necessary symbol. Gene wasn’t a particularly good speaker, he just said what was true. It was enough to start the ball truely rolling.
…wished then that he had RFK’s smoothness at the podium.
and ideals came from McCarthy. I worked for his campaign as a high school senior. There were quite a few kids working for that campaign even though we couldn’t vote. We all knew that it was hopeless but it felt very good (and very adult) to work for someone who made us want to believe that politicians and politics could make us and the world better.
“Police degrade you. I don’t know, you know, it’s often you wonder why a nigger don’t go completely mad. No, you do. You get your shit together, you work all week, right, then you get dressed–maybe say a cat make $125 a week, get $80 if he lucky, right, and he go out, get clean, be drivin’ with his old lady, goin’ out to a club, and the police pull over, `Get outta the car, there was a robbery–nigger look just like you. Alright, put your hands up, take your pants down, spread your cheeks!’ Now, what nigger feel like havin’ fun after that? `No, let’s just go home, baby.’ You go home and beat your kids and shit–you gonna take that shit out on somebody.” from That Nigger’s* Crazy, 1974
I was in high school and walked for Gene MCarthy. I’d heard RFK speak and was impressed, but also knew that the Kennedys were very savvy politically and so there was always a little piece of me which held back from him. So I continued to walk for Gene with my other High school friends. I guess at that stage it was about loyalty. I figured he’d kicked the door in and had the right to walk through it.
IIRC, I was coming back from more walking for Gene when RFK was assassinated. McCarthy is still a hero for me and a model for what other politicians should be like. Kinda why I liked Dean whose meetups reminded me of the old gang walking for Gene.
Tearing up now…..
I, too, was in high school (junior year). Eugene McCarthy’s presidential run really embodied my political awakening. I had been opposed to the Vietnam war, and his courage in speaking out against really entrenched power endeared him to me forever. Tonight is just very sad.
This makes me very sad. I was one of “Clean Gene’s” loyal early followers. I even enlisted to work for him in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention where I got my first whiffs of tear gas. I went to Chicago full of naive thoughts that McCarthy would ultimately win the nomination because the Democrats, after all, wanted to win, and they had to know that Humphrey could not run on LBJ’s record and hope to emerge victorious (I was half right). Chicago was a pretty radicalizing experience.
After the convention I returned to New York and joined an effort to put McCarthy on the ballot there. We got way more than the required number of signatures but were knocked off the ballot at the eleventh hour by a questionable court ruling that said we were not entitled to a line on the ballot because McCarthy had not explicitly endorsed our efforts (questionable because we vote for electors in this country, not candidates. The petitions contained the names of 26 electors who were running for a line on the ballot).
It wasn’t until Howard Dean came along that I was again motivated to throw myself into a political campaign.
McCarthy was that rare politician who possessed the qualities of intellect, passion, honesty, humor, and a sense of real decency. When no one else came forward to challenge LBJ’s presidency, Eugene McCarthy stepped forward and electrified the anti-war movement.
He will be missed.
I was going to make the comment that Gene McCarthy was the Howard Dean of 1968. I wouldn’t want to take the analogy too far, but I think there’s quite a lot of truth in it, especially in terms of how he shook up the entrenched Democratic establishment. But there are downsides to such revolutions, as Humphrey couldn’t quite take down Nixon (RFK would have smoked him, IMO), and we got hit with the rest of the bullshit of those years. In some ways, I think one can look back to the campaign of 1968 as a real watershed in American politics, from which we’ve been trying to recover ever since.
I have been reading about the election of 1968 – I wasn’t born yet, then – but it does seem there are a lot of parallels, then and now, especially in the battle between the party “insiders” and the grassroots, for lack of a better way to put it.
The grassroots got spanked, back then. I haven’t yet reached any conclusions about what we might do differently, this time.
I have compared every other political figure to Gene McCarthy. He was witty, articulate, intelligent, and principled. I was a junior in college when I went to work for him. I never forgave Bobby for undermining his campaign (although I wept at his funeral). I saw him at the Palestra in Philly in 1968 and I went door to door and worked the polls in West Chester, PA.
I had the draft breathing down my neck then, but he made me (and others) understand why a war could be wrong. I haven’t been the same since.
He made me proud then and I never forgot the pride I felt. I wish I could feel that way again.
He was the best.
I played a fundraiser at the Ashgrove in West Hollywood with Taj Mahal for the good Senator and after the performance my new wife and I drove downtown Los Angeles to have a late dinner at a funky LA eatery named “The Pantry”. Early in the morning we were shocked to have the police raiding the restaurant in effort find anyone connected to Sirhan and the shooting of RFK at the nearby Ambassador hotel. I believed wholeheartedly in McCarthy’s point of view but was very upset at the Kennedy tragedy. We need someone of McCarthy’s progressive political persuasion now.
Let us remember Allard Lowenstein, who (before McCarthy) turned opposition to the Vietnam war into a movement…
Lowenstein’s movement convinced McCarthy that opposition to that war was both morally necessary and practically possible. McCarthy’s campaign then convinced RFK of the “practically possible” part.
Lowenstein’s writings and speeches are collected in Acts of Courage and Belief, co-edited by Gregory Stone.
Stone became known as a principle player in the movement to re-examine RFK’s assassination, an assassination the official story of which is far mure unlikely than the Warren Report.
Stone committed suicide — yes, he really did (it wasn’t, in other words, the CIA or something like that) — when he became convinced that he could not interest officials or the public into rationally examining this case.
Lowenstein, RFK, Stone, all dead.
At least Eugene lived to a ripe old age.
And this is what now is called “closure”.
I knew both Allard Lowenstein and Greg Stone. Many’s a time I met Al at the Yale Club (he was always late and his suits always looked as if he had slept in them) to receive marching orders on something he wanted me to do. And Al truly did start the “dump Johnson movement.” Without Al there could have been no Eugene McCarthy. Al was an inspiration to all who knew him.
Greg was never the same after Al died. He devoted his life to getting that book published and to trying to re-open the investigation into RFK’s murder (which Al had also worked feverishly to accomplish). It was largely through his efforts that the LAPD was forced to release its evidence in the case, though by that time much of it (including ceiling panels that might have proved that more bullets were fired than Sirhan’s gun could have accounted for) had been destroyed. Greg simply did not feel he could take the case any further at that point. I saw him two weeks before he killed himself, and he was very depressed. I never dreamed he would kill himself, but in hindsight I was not surprised.
I don’t agree that the official explanation of RFK’s assassination is “far mure unlikely than the Warren Report.” Both were conspiracies involving more than one assassin, and both were covered up. What many people do not know about RFK’s murder is that the fatal shot was fired from point blank range just behind his right ear, a shot Sirhan could not possibly have fired since he was several feet in front of the Senator. Lowenstein had been a close friend of Robert Kennedy, and he was convinced that both he and his brother had been victems of a plot.
I knew Greg too — not well — through some mutual acquaintances who worked with him in various capacities on “the case” (as they always called it). I liked him a lot and admired him even more, and the reports I heard (I wasn’t in LA at the time) of his growing depression, and eventually his end, saddened me immeasurably and still do. He lived (and eventually died) for that damned cause, with a single-minded, idealistic (in the best sense) passion unlike any I’ve seen elsewhere.
The really horrible thing is that he died feeling he had let “the case” down. Okay, now I’m starting to tear up again. How long has it been?
Granted, “far more unlikely” was perhaps hyperbolic. I just meant that, for reasons such as the points about the location of the fatal wound and the destruction of the ceiling panels that you mention (as well as others), I always thought the holes in this one were even more gaping. But that may be because I’ve learned more about it, thanks to Greg and his “team”.
I don’t think Greg thought he had “let the case down.” I really feel Al Lowenstein was almost his whole life (Al could have that effect on people). After Al died Greg’s sole mission was to get a book of his speeches et al published (which of course he did), and to take the pursuit of the RFK case as far as he could. The last time I saw him he expressed a real sense of accomplishment in having helped force the LAPD to release what remained of their evidence. He also told me that he did not believe there was anything else he could do on the case and that he needed to get away from it. I only realized later what he was telling me. I thought at the time that he was telling me he had decided to get on with his life.
I know that Dan Moldea’s book about the case also was a hard pill for Greg to swallow. They had been close friends and associates on the RFK case, and Greg felt a real sense of betrayal when Moldea’s book ended up supporting a lone assassin hypothesis.
I went to Greg’s funeral, and Moldea had told Greg’s sister he planned to attend. He did not attend, instead calling Greg’s sister again and telling her that he just could not handle it.
I do not believe Moldea really thought that Sirhan was a lone assassin. I can only speculate at what his motivations were for writing such a book. Based on what Greg’s sister told me about how broken up Moldea was over Greg’s suicide, I would not be surprised if he was a bit overwhelmed by guilt. I am not saying Moldea contributed to Greg’s suicide, but Greg certainly felt betrayed. In the end though, I really think Greg lost the will to live when Al Lowenstein died. We had a close mutual friend (she had also been a close friend of Lowentsein) who told me more than once that she was very worried about Greg. I think she saw it coming.
We all knew each other by the way because we were all involved in trying to reopen the JFK and RFK cases. Lowenstein only pursued the RFK case in public, but in private he was intensely interested in the JFK case as well.