Eugene McCarthy: poet & patriot.

The last time I saw Senator Eugene McCarthy, a week before his death this past December 10, I suggested that recent history may be repeating itself. I was referring to the fact that Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha's call for an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq had sparked an intense debate about an unpopular war, just as McCarthy had done thirty-seven years earlier when he denounced the Vietnam War as "morally indefensible" and called for an end to American military involvement in Southeast Asia.

The eighty-nine-year-old Minnesota Democrat was lying in bed in his book-strewn apartment in a Washington, D.C., retirement home. He was frail and his voice was so faint that I could hardly hear it, but McCarthy appeared to be in good spirits and responded with a weak wave that I took to be an affirmative gesture.

It was not an unreasonable assumption. After all, McCarthy's conviction that no president can wage war without the consent of Congress and the American people had never wavered from the time he walked out of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on August 17, 1967, after hearing Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach declare that Congress was "compelled" to support President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam policy. As McCarthy told me that day, "This is the wildest testimony I have ever heard. There is no limit to what he says the president can do. There is only one thing to do--take it to the country."

He did exactly that, and changed history in the process. His daring--some called it suicidal--challenge of a president of his own party catalyzed public opposition to the war in Vietnam and forced Johnson from office. McCarthy's short-lived campaign expired in the violence and chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it helped lead to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam after some fifty-four thousand Americans had died there.

McCarthy would have appreciated the exquisite irony of events at the time of his death. Only hours before, another president from Texas was in McCarthy's home state defending a war in a far-off land that threatened to cripple his presidency and divide the nation: Speaking at a thousand-dollar-a-person fundraiser in Minneapolis for Republican Congressman Mark Kennedy (who is running for McCarthy's old Senate seat), President George W. Bush echoed LBJ in 1968, warning that those calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq "would embolden the enemy, would confuse the Iraqis, and would send the wrong signal to our young men and women in uniform."

McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and went into a kind of political limbo. For the next thirty-five years, he wrote poetry and his memoirs, advocated reform of the political process, and mounted four more increasingly futile presidential campaigns as an Independent. While he did not live to hear Bush's speech, there was no misunderstanding his views on Bush's foreign policy.

I had known Eugene McCarthy for more than forty years. As a Washington correspondent for Minnesota newspapers, I covered his Senate career, his 1968 campaign, and his years as a very public private citizen. In going back over my many interviews with McCarthy and those who knew him best, including the Benedictine monks at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he became deeply imbued with Benedictine values as a student, teacher, and briefly, a Benedictine novice, I am reminded of the qualities that made him one of the most distinctive figures in American public life. He was, to use a Latin term, sui generis, literally "of his own kind." Here are several qualities I observed that justify that assertion.

First were McCarthy's honesty and integrity. I know of few politicians (especially in today's partisan atmosphere) who have been as unwilling to compromise on matters of principle. It was no accident that Thomas More, Adlai Stevenson, and Senator Phil Hart were among his heroes. He was, as he said in eulogizing Hart, "a man out of his proper time, a man meant for the Age of Faith ... when men like Thomas More could make their last defense, beyond the civil law, in religious belief."

Second was his belief that government should serve the people, not the other way around. He exhibited that quality throughout his life, leading a group of Democratic reformers who pushed in the House of Representatives for civil rights and social justice, and working for more oversight of the intelligence community and to limit executive power during his twelve years in the Senate.

Third was McCarthy's insistence that the actions of government be based on high moral standards. In November 1967, when he was still deciding whether to challenge President Johnson, he expressed that belief in a speech at Macalester College in St. Paul. "We must raise the essential moral question as to whether there is a proper balance in what we may gain in what is projected as victory, in contrast with the loss of life, the loss of material goods, the loss of moral integrity and moral energy which goes with the effort," he said. "The answer, I think, is that it is not."

Fourth were his formidable political skills. McCarthy was often described as a kind of detached poet-philosopher who dabbled in politics. He was, indeed, a fine poet who campaigned with Robert Lowell and could--and did--quote Yeats at length. He was familiar with Plato and Aristotle. He was a Catholic intellectual who knew his Aquinas and incorporated the papal encyclicals on social justice in his own political philosophy.

But McCarthy was also a superb politician who wrote his own speeches, and knew how to count votes, and campaigned as effectively in bars in South St. Paul or South Boston as he did in the salons of Fifth Avenue or Hollywood. Yet there was a toughness underneath his cool cerebral exterior. I have a copy of a letter that New York Times columnist Russell Baker wrote in 1989 to a former McCarthy aide. "I like and admire Gene McCarthy," Baker wrote, and then added what he called an "interesting footnote" concerning a conversation with then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson shortly after McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1958. "LBJ told me in 1958 when there was a quarrel whether to give the better committee assignment to McCarthy or [Wisconsin Sen. William] Proxmire: 'How could I give it to Proxmire? McCarthy is tough. He'd cut my heart out.'" (Then Baker added, in an obvious reference to 1968, "He finally did, sort of, I suppose.")

A fifth quality overlooked in much of what has been said and written about McCarthy was his warm and human side. As Kitty Kelley, the best-selling biographer who once worked in his Senate office, told me after his death, "I remember when I caught unshirted hell from Washington's media mandarins for describing myself on my resume as McCarthy's 'press assistant.' The senator came to my defense--sort of. 'In my office,' he said, 'people took whatever title they wanted as long as they left me the one of senator.'"

Kelley added, "McCarthy stood up alone in 1968 to protest what he saw as an immoral war. He galvanized young people throughout the country. They gave up their jobs and set aside their educations to work for his campaign. You saw them [at a Washington memorial service for McCarthy], grey and wrinkled but still proud of having once been a part of something decent and honorable."

Still, McCarthy's "warm and human side" was coupled with a caustic wit not always appreciated by its targets. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962, he jibed, "The Kennedy administration is not going to make any little mistakes." And when Michigan Governor George Romney complained in 1972 that he had been "brainwashed" by American military officials in Vietnam, McCarthy said, "I would have thought a light rinse would be sufficient."

A sixth quality that made McCarthy sui generis was his unquestioned courage. He won his first elections to the House and Senate by taking on entrenched Republican incumbents. And he was the first member of Congress to publicly oppose Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin for his witch hunt for Communists in government. (In fact, some of the votes Eugene McCarthy got in the New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries in 1968 came from people who thought they were voting for Joe McCarthy.)

Finally, there was his skill as author, political commentator, and social critic. He wrote more than twenty books, filled with intelligent and insightful commentary on politics and government, and some with wonderful memories of his Minnesota boyhood and life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where he had a home and is now buried. All are still worth reading.

I like to think the words I wrote more than three decades ago about Senator McCarthy are still relevant: "The man who recognized that the Vietnam War was a great moral evil and stood up at a critical moment in American history to warn the nation of it was Eugene McCarthy. His stand against the Vietnam War was a singular act of courage that grows larger in retrospect and guarantees him a secure place in the history of his country.

"Eugene McCarthy showed that it is possible for one man to make a difference in a democratic society, and that not even the immense power of the presidency can withstand the opposition from a public aroused by a man who speaks out against what he sees as an immoral action by government. Whether he is destined to be remembered as the midwife of a new day in American politics, or merely as a brilliant gadfly of the old, it is clear that American politics in the future will reflect the dedication to reforming political processes and limiting executive power that is the common denominator of Eugene McCarthy's public career."

Albert Eisele, former press secretary to Vice President Walter F. Mondale, is editor-at-large of The Hill, a newspaper covering Congress. He is presently updating and revising his 1972 dual biography of Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey.