One of a kind.

Eugene McCarthy

The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism

Dominic Sandbrook

Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95, 397 pp.

During Eugene McCarthy's first major political campaign, to become the 1948 Democratic-Farmer-Labor nominee for a congressional seat, the College of St. Thomas professor gathered his supporters on election night in his campaign headquarters. As friends phoned in the final tallies from St. Paul's City Hall, McCarthy led his family and closest supporters in a recitation of the rosary.

Twenty years later, battling for the Democratic presidential nomination, McCarthy received a request for a personal interview from James Reston of the New York Times, then the eminence grise of the Washington press corps. McCarthy granted the request, but made Reston cool his heels outside his office while he composed a lengthy poem about wolverines.

Among the virtues of Dominic Saybrook's thoroughly researched, engaging, and crisply written biography of McCarthy is that it makes sense of both rosaries and wolverines.

Saybrook himself seems startled by the pervasive role Catholicism played in McCarthy's career. Born in 1916 in the tiny town of Watkins, Minnesota, McCarthy enrolled at the age of fifteen in St. John's Preparatory, the boarding school attached to St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, and when high school classes bored him, St. John's University.

Something of a loner, with a sharp tongue, McCarthy was also a superb student, captivated by the writers of the early twentieth-century Catholic revival, notably Francois Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton, and Jacques Maritain. (Even three decades later, references to Maritain peppered McCarthy's speeches.) He became a protege of the most intellectually adventurous of the monks at St. John's, Virgil Michel, who attempted to inoculate students against laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other.

After leaving St. John's, the future politician thrashed about for a few years. First, he tried his hand as a high school principal in the metropolises of Tintah and Kimball, Minnesota, followed by two years of the same in Mandan, North Dakota. "If I were to graph my personal advancement during [these years]," he later wrote, "the line would be as flat as is the topography of the Red River Valley."

At Mandan he met his future wife (and much later, Commonweal columnist), Abigail Quigley, also an English teacher. (She remembered Mandan more fondly, and writes in her own memoir of her astonishment upon learning that the parish priest, a German Benedictine, ordered the latest Catholic books direct from London.) Salvation of a sort came when McCarthy was invited back to St. John's as an instructor. After an ill-fated stint as a Benedictine novice, he married Abigail (finally) in 1945 and promptly moved with a group of Catholic couples to an agricultural commune formed in his hometown of Watkins. (Their delayed honeymoon trip, presumably unlike that of any other twentieth-century presidential candidate, included visits to friends at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto and the Grailville Catholic settlement in Ohio.) In 1946 he secured another teaching position, this time at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul.

Inspired by a group of young instructors at the college, and one distinguished German-Catholic emigre on the faculty, Heinrich Rommen, he quickly became drawn into local politics. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1948, he became the leader of an informal group of young Catholic politicians, including Michigan's Philip Hart, Maine's Edmund Muskie, and John F. Kennedy (although McCarthy's jealousy of Kennedy's success and wealth soured this friendship). McCarthy's immersion in Catholic social thought distinguished him from these American contemporaries, but he much enjoyed his episodic contacts with international Catholic political figures such as Chile's Eduardo Frei, also a disciple of Maritain. Like other Democratic liberals of the 1950s, McCarthy blended an intense anticommunism with support for racial desegregation, the expanding social welfare state, and labor unions. His fascination with agricultural cooperatives stemmed from his experience with the Benedictines as did a distaste for overt religiosity in public life.

In 1958, he was elected to the Senate. By this time McCarthy had become a minor national figure, repeatedly discussed as a vice-presidential nominee, a favorite of the Southern Democratic barons who ran the Senate. When asked whether he might support Hubert Humphrey (his fellow Minnesotan) or Kennedy (his fellow Catholic) in 1960, McCarthy remarked that he was "twice as liberal as Humphrey [and] twice as Catholic as Kennedy."

The problem was that he disliked politics. He was, in fact, only a middling congressman and senator, detached from the day-to-day business of the Capitol. McCarthy's wit and occasional eloquence--when he could rouse himself--made him a favorite with the national press. Rumors that he would abandon Congress for a college presidency were widespread. When he ran for reelection in 1964, even the Minneapolis Star worried that he was only "casually interested in the political and economic affairs of his own state."

Vietnam catapulted him into the national spotlight. McCarthy came late to opposition to the war, but then almost all senators from both parties supported Lyndon B. Johnson until 1966. McCarthy's seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee where he listened to administration spokespersons (such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk) evade tough questions, and his contacts within the growing peace movement--and perhaps especially its Catholic component--made him a skeptic. "The serious problem today," he explained in 1966, "is that we are called upon to make a kind of moral commitment to an objective or to a set of purposes which we do not clearly understand."

In 1968, after more vocal opponents of the war had declined to challenge Johnson, McCarthy decided to run. The decision took genuine courage, and most of his colleagues were astonished. One told the press, "It's not in his nature to be president. He doesn't even want to be senator." But McCarthy's timing was perfect. The Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese army in early 1968 marked a turning point in American public opinion, and McCarthy stunned the nation by nearly defeating Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. Four days later, to the everlasting bitterness of McCarthy supporters, Robert Kennedy belatedly joined the race, and by the end of the month Johnson had withdrawn as candidate, only to be replaced by his vice president, and McCarthy's old rival, Humphrey.

The tale of the extraordinary 1968 presidential campaign is oft told. (And Sandbrook's own telling, given its importance for McCarthy's career, is almost too succinct, scarcely two short chapters.) What stands out in retrospect is McCarthy's diffidence, even his eccentricity. Not only did he find time to compose poems about wolverines, but he repeatedly skipped campaign appearances and made almost willfully obscure references to Arnold Toynbee and Charles Peguy in major speeches. Dawn campaign stops at factory gates did not appeal because "I'm not really a morning person."

McCarthy did thrive on television, where his laconic, relaxed style showed off to best effect. But he never built a strong political organization or honed a message appealing to those beyond his antiwar, white middle-class base. Kennedy, not McCarthy, mobilized and inspired African-Americans, Latinos, and (to an extent) working-class Catholics. By July 1968, after Kennedy's assassination, the die was cast for Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee, and McCarthy began a long, often embittered shuffle off the national political stage.

Sandbrook reads McCarthy's career as a turning point in the history of the Democratic Party, and as crucial to "the rise and fall of postwar American liberalism." This strikes me as a rare moment of overreaching. Sandbrook's demolition of McCarthy's post-1968 career, in which he left the Senate and became a kind of second coming of Harold Stassen, running for president in 1972, 1976, 1988, and 1992, is the best evidence against McCarthy's pivotal significance for American politics.

Better perhaps to identify McCarthy with a certain political style--cool, ironic, informed by the anticommunism, concern for social justice, and veneration of the family that so marked mid-twentieth-century Catholic social thought--and its buffeting in the theological and cultural cauldron of the late 1960s. McCarthy never recovered his balance after the 1968 campaign, and the dizzying mix of religious and political change left in the campaign's wake may explain his disorientation. To take one example: after Robert Kennedy's assassination, McCarthy retreated to St. John's Abbey. There he and many of the monks were saddened to learn the contents of Humanae vitae. Or another: McCarthy's marriage collapsed just after the 1968 presidential campaign. He had a long involvement with a devout Catholic woman who had covered that campaign, and Abigail's memoir (Private Faces/Public Places), published in 1972, ends with a bleak reference to McCarthy's abandonment of the ideal of "life-long fidelity and shared life." Over time, the onetime Mandan schoolteachers again became friendly, even cordial. "I've come to think of Gene as a relative," Abigail explained in 1987. But they never divorced.

Unarguable is Sandbrook's conclusion that the collapse of postwar liberalism--of which the McCarthy campaign in 1968 was one important episode--requires further study. But by 1968 the more significant story about the blending of religion and American politics was already underway, in Orange County, California, not Stearns County, Minnesota. To the horror of his friends, McCarthy chose in 1980 to endorse a presidential candidate who had mobilized millions of religious supporters (this time Evangelicals) and who could sustain this support with a winning campaign style. This candidate's name was Ronald Reagan, author of a genuinely new chapter in American political history.

John T. McGreevy is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton), and chair of the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.