What the losers won: the McCarthy campaign of '68.

"Yet, who would not have at least one time in a life when the leader was the lost leader and the followers the lost followers, and all things being impossible were possible?" Roger Rosenblatt, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the McCarthy presidential campaign - a campaign, he said, of "special fire" with a "reckless purity" not seen since ("MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour," October 6, 1993).

On September 10 of this year there was a symposium at Georgetown University celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of that campaign - the McCarthy presidential campaign of 1968. It was apparent to the participants that the historical facts of that campaign and its precedent-making character have been largely lost in the murk and myth of the docudramas and the journalistic and personal accounts of that eventful year. It was, after all, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, of the violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago and the election of Richard Nixon.

But it was also the year of what George Grayson, John Marshall Professor of Government and Citizenship at William and Mary, has called "a political earthquake" that activated young people, women, and other previously ignored groups by giving them a vehicle for changing policy. "They toppled a sitting chief executive, cracked the foundation of the imperial presidency, and sensitized leaders from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan to the enormous cost of resorting to military solutions to problems rooted in social, economic, and cultural factors."

The committee members who organized the symposium elaborated on this theme. They were historians, political scientists, legislators, and others who had participated in 1968, and they called the campaign "a unique experience" shared by students and adults that had a profound effect on all who took part in it. It was the intent of the committee to illustrate this effect by recognizing especially the many McCarthy campaign workers who have continued their involvement in governmental and nongovernmental public service. Many of the campaigners, said the announcement, quoting a Washington Post piece by Curtis Gans (December 20, 1987) have remained "liberal in values, disciplined in tactics, persuasive in approach," and productive of "substantive changes."

The symposium recognized former campaigners who are in office today from city governments to the White House, from state legislatures to the U.S. House and Senate. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, campaigned as a Wellesley college student in New Hampshire; Vice-President Al Gore led students in Tennessee. It recognized as equally important the campaigners who have led nongovernmental groups and organizations of significant service to society and have provided an important number of dedicated teachers in our colleges, universities, and law schools.

Serious and as issue-oriented as they have ever been, the reunited campaigners, who had come from states as various and far away as California and New York, Oregon, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Iowa, and Florida, listened with concentration to, and held discussions with the speakers on three panels. The keynote panel on "Participatory and Movement Politics" was composed of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Haynes Johnson, assistant to the president and director of the Office of National Service, Eli Segal, Congressman Don Edwards, and historian Joan Challinor.

As they spoke, each seemed to recapture the feelings of a quarter century ago and the atmosphere of the time became almost palpable to everyone in the room - a nation desperately divided, a peace movement whose fringe groups were becoming ever more violent in demonstrations, young men going to prison or leaving the country in protest of the draft, other young men mired thousands of miles from home in a hopeless war. "Do we remember," said one of the speakers, "what it took to issue a political challenge to a president in wartime, and how important it was to take the protest from the streets into the political process?"

Other speakers that afternoon spoke of the belief they had carried from 1968 that government could be an agency of change, and of their efforts to see that it was. They included Yale law professor Harlon Dalton, who had been a member of the National Commission on AIDS, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, deputy undersecretary for global affairs in the Department of State, and John Podesta, staff secretary to President Bill Clinton. They were not wholly hopeful but they had kept trying.

The same was true of those who represented '68ers involved in service to society, the third panel: Martin Peretz, editor and publisher of the New Republic, Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, and Taylor Branch, chronicler of the civil rights movement and also a Pulitzer Prizewinner. Midge Miller, the last speaker on that panel, now director of the Madison Institute and a long-time state legislator, may have spoken for all of them when she said, "I was an activist before that campaign but I am glad that my time in public office came after it. I served then with an entirely different perspective."

Perhaps that difference had its roots in Roger Rosenblatt's words about the effect of a lost cause, "What a lost cause does for the individual's soul is to free it from everything but principle. One does something because one believes it is right, there is no other reason for doing it." A cause cannot truly be "lost" it seems to me, however, if it had that effect on so many people.