Ghosts of 1968

Abstract

Dominic Sandbrook. Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xiii + 397 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $25.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Dominic Sandbrook's biography of Eugene McCarthy paints what should prove a definitive portrait of this enigmatic American. There may be more to say about McCarthy, a successful if undistinguished politician who earned a place in the history books by launching a presidential candidacy in 1968 as a protest against the Vietnam War and doing as much as anyone to push Lyndon B. Johnson out of the White House. But Sandbrook leaves little more to say about McCarthy's politics. This is very much a political biography and that is part of its pleasure, at least for those deeply interested in politics. McCarthy witnessed momentous events as much as he played a key role in them. He saw the Democratic party torn apart in the convention hall, hotel rooms, and streets of Chicago in 1968. McCarthy, true to the persona he cultivated, seemed a kind of participant-observer amid these events, which he had done something to precipitate. Neither McCarthy's party, nor the liberal politics whose evolution Sandbrook traces by following McCarthy's career, ever really recovered from the tumultuous events that came to a climax in 1968. Sandbrook puts much of the blame for this on McCarthy, probably more than any individual should bear. But Sandbrook's zealous judgments on his subject are in part what make his study such a compelling reading experience. McCarthy's famous campaign always gets brief coverage in histories of the 1960s. Some mention of college students trimming their hair or donning skirts—going "Clean for Gene"—and tramping through the winter snow in New Hampshire is typical, but that's usually about it. Historians have produced surprisingly little scholarship on his antiwar effort up to now. Still, most who teach about the 1960s probably know some of the deflationary details of McCarthy's amazing "victory" in that state's 1968 primary: McCarthy didn't outpoll Johnson, but instead received some 42.4 percent of the vote to Johnson's 49.5 percent; many who voted for McCarthy likely were unaware of his antiwar stance, and some may have wanted to rebuke Johnson for pursuing a too-dovish approach to the war, not for being too hawkish.1 The [End Page 93] neglect of this pivotal story by scholars of the 1960s is likely due to the more intense interest that historians in this area have shown in grassroots social movements and protest activity than in "mainstream" or electoral politics. In 1968, a time of militancy and radicalism, militants and radicals tended to view McCarthy's "kids" as hopelessly naïve, and their man as no hope at all for peace or progress. If those disaffected legions had known what Sandbrook knows about McCarthy, it is hard to say whether their distaste for the Minnesota senator would have been greater, lesser, or just the same. Sandbrook places great store in McCarthy's Roman Catholicism as a factor shaping McCarthy's outlook early and permanently. He attended St. John's University, a Benedictine institution in central-northern Minnesota and ground zero for Catholic intellectuals in that state, in the early 1930s. Later he became engaged to his future wife, Abigail Quigley, but he broke off the engagement to enter the abbey at St. John's as a novice. After less than a year McCarthy was eased out and he went back to Abigail. He had become accustomed to the role of smartest boy in school, the pride of his teachers, given already to witty comments that sometimes came at others' expense, and he could not shake that role; he was deemed too proud to submit to the discipline of the order. McCarthy's style was classic mid-century cool and dry, to the point where he often appeared diffident. But his fierce ambition, like his disturbingly vicious jealousies (both of...