In an age in which American presidential elections are contested by two barely distinguishable dummies - Dukakis, Bush, Clinton, Dole, Gore and Bush Junior spring to mind - it is often refreshing for the connoisseur of American politics to reflect upon a happier age of electoral competition. Indeed, for the true aficionado of the 1960s and 1970s, there is much material from which to choose: the shameless sentimentality of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey; the glamour and cold ruthlessness of the Kennedy brothers; the sinister posturing of Richard Nixon; the comic-opera blustering of George Wallace; the doomed idealism of George McGovern; even (God save us!) the toothy fawning of the Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. This observer's particular favourite, however, (notwithstanding a sentimental and no doubt misguided fondness for Robert Kennedy) is the maverick monk of American politics, Eugene McCarthy, Senator from Minnesota, poet, author and critic, and presidential candidate in 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1992. Eugene McCarthy did not do things by halves. Most prominent American politicians run for President once or twice. He ran so many times that even his biographer has difficulty keeping track. In 1972 he ran on a platform advocating the legalisation of marijuana, and sadly fared rather badly. In 1976 he ran as an Independent (on all other occasions he ran as a Democrat), his platform consisting of little other than an insistence upon his own personal fitness to be President. Needless to say, he did not do well - but had Gerald Ford done a little better, he might have cost Carter the election. In 1992 he unexpectedly reared his head in the New York primary between Governors Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown and, at the age of 74, forced his way into a debate between the two in Buffalo where, once safely installed on the platform, according to the New York Times, he 'spent much of the debate doodling on a pad', rousing only to call President Bush 'a travelling salesman' and accusing him of trying him to 'destroy the English language'. What Slick Willy made of this clowning we do not know. Yet McCarthy's pedigree is unimpeachable. Born in rural Minnesota in 1916, he studied at the Benedictine foundation of St John's Abbey and even trained to become a monk - being ejected after a year for 'intellectual pride', a failing for which he was to be frequently criticised in the future. Undaunted, McCarthy and his proto-feminist wife Abigail attempted to set up a Catholic agricultural commune far removed from the corrupting influences of industrial capitalist modernity that they loathed. Sadly, there were no takers, and after a year he accepted a job as a teacher in the state capitol, St Paul, from which he moved into Democratic politics as a Congressman in 1948. While McCarthy's record as a congressman was quintessentially liberal, it was hardly that of a future crusader and maverick. True, he was the first major political publicly to debate his namesake, Joseph McCarthy, the notorious red-baiter. But his shy, intellectual, introspective temperament was not suited to the role of a firebrand - so he restrained himself to quiet speeches, support for liberal measures for health-care reform and civil rights, publishing volumes of poetry, and contemplation of the careers of his heroes, Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More. As the years passed so McCarthy - like many intelligent men - became frustrated with the superficiality of partisan politics; he became famous for his barbed, bitter wit and contempt for the majority of his colleagues. Confronted with the choice of three Democratic presidential nominees in 1960, he quipped, 'I'm twice as Catholic as Kennedy, twice as liberal as Humphrey, and twice as intelligent as Symington.' By now McCarthy was a Senator, but he felt his career was heading nowhere. His scorn for Senate procedure was legendary, his inattendance notorious. Colleagues respected his intelligence, laughed at his jokes, and feared his witticisms. But, particularly after he was passed over for the Vice Presidency by Lyndon Johnson in favour of his less talented but more ingratiating fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, McCarthy seemed a busted flush. Johnson was to regret his decision - one of the most unlikely mistakes in modern American politics. Four years later, in early 1968, his presidency was struggling, beset by domestic unrest at the human cost of the slaughter in Vietnam and the racial injustice in American cities. Johnson, the titan of post-war politics, was still expected to retain the Democratic nomination and face Nixon that November. Yet while Robert Kennedy refused the entreaties of anti-war left-liberals desperate for a Democrat to oppose Johnson in the upcoming primaries, McCarthy was not so bashful. In the intervening period he had become, if anything, even more bitter, even more waspish, but the war brought out the Catholic moral outrage that had impelled him (albeit temporarily) to abandon modern society for monastic retreat and rural solitude in the 1940s. In December 1967, encouraged by the wealthy liberal grandees of New York City, he announced that he would challenge Johnson for the Democratic ticket. His motives remain obscure. Personal jealousy? Possibly. Moral abhorrence of the Vietnam war? Probably. At the very least, he yearned to copy his hero Thomas More, to make a stand against authority for a just cause and write his name into history. Johnson, needless to say, was unperturbed. No sitting President had ever been unseated by a would-be saint. There then followed one of the most extraordinary periods in American political history. In January 1968, two months before polling in the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy commanded no more than 7% of the Democratic vote. Over the next few weeks, students poured out of the colleges of the East to volunteer for his campaign, sleeping on rough New Hampshire floors, the women eschewing their mini-skirts for more conventional dresses and the men reluctantly abandoning their long-cherished beards. 'Clean for Gene!' was the slogan - and the Granite State had never seen anything like it. With their relaxed, ironic, intellectual candidate, the anti-war forces began to claw back Johnson's advantage and on polling day McCarthy won an unprecedented and incredible 42% of the vote. Johnson was finished. On March 31, with McCarthy the heavy favourite in the next primary in Wisconsin, he pulled out of the race. Now McCarthy had to face two fresh rivals: Robert Kennedy and the Vice President, his old rival, Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey, like some would-be Alun Michael, preferred to stay out of the primaries, piling up votes in smoke-filled back rooms. Kennedy and McCarthy battled it out for the protest vote, the vote of the young, the black and the poor. McCarthy won in Wisconsin and Oregon; Kennedy in Indiana and Nebraska. It all came down to the richest state of all: California. There Kennedy's money, his glamour and his surname tipped the balance. Yet just minutes after his victory he was murdered by a crazed gunman in the kitchen of his Los Angeles hotel - another shock for the progressive forces in America who had already seen that spring the almost unimaginable bombshells of Johnson's withdrawal and the murder of Martin Luther King. Kennedy's death left McCarthy as the sole leader of the reform wing of the Democratic party - an unlikely one at that. But McCarthy, who loathed Kennedy, was profoundly affected by his murder, even blaming himself for the harsh rhetoric with which he had attacked Kennedy's late, opportunistic entry to the race. He retired to St John's Abbey in Minnesota for the summer, playing softball with the monks and narrowly escaping an gun attack by one excitable divine who resented McCarthy for ignoring his views on economic policy. By August, meanwhile, the beaming, rotund, inane figure of Hubert Humphrey had piled up enough backroom votes to be close to victory at the Chicago convention. McCarthy and his youthful army came to the Loop anyway to fight their corner. It was the most dramatic convention in American history. While McCarthy's advocates pressed their case in the convention hall, thousands of anti-war demonstrators marched through the streets. The Chicago police, controlled by the intemperate Mayor, Richard Daley, were unimpressed with their long-haired and garishly attired visitors. On the night of Humphrey's nomination - the crowning victory of the corrupt party machine over the democratic process - the cops ripped off their badges and charged into the crowds, clubbing and tear-gassing hundreds, including watching television journalists. The networks cut from Humphrey's victory to the carnage in the streets outside, associating the Democratic Party for years with the images of bloody violence, clouds of tear gas, rampaging policemen and injured demonstrators. It was the end of any Democratic chance of victory that November - and to rub salt in the wounds of the defeated McCarthy, on the final night of the convention the cops stormed his headquarters and beat up his workers - behaviour unimaginable in the anodyne American politics of today. The events of 1968 may not have radicalised the American masses, but they certainly radicalised McCarthy. In 1970 he left the Senate and after a desultory effort to win the nomination in 1972 he quit the Democratic Party. The way he had been treated in 1968 convinced him that it was no longer an effective vehicle for bringing about real change in the United States. Henceforth this man, who had once been the darling of organisations like Americans for Democratic Action which epitomised corporate, Cold War liberalism, became the most trenchant and incisive critic of American institutions. In 1972 he pleaded for massive federal action to rebuild the black ghettos of the inner cities and for a radical reappraisal of national drugs policy. In 1976 he ran against the two-party system, pointing out that it only offered the electorate the choice of the unimaginative stolidity of Gerald Ford and the ineffectual simpering of Jimmy Carter, for whom he harboured the utmost contempt. As McCarthy moved away from conventional political wisdom, so he abandoned any hopes of advancement through the party structures, spurning the opportunity to lead the reform wing of the Democratic Party that had seemed his for the taking. Handsomely paid lecture tours to the Caribbean and jaunts to watch avant-garde theatre in Moscow did not impress the Washington establishment, but this did not deter McCarthy from producing dozens of books and articles attacking the political system, the role of big business in American life and the perceived inadequacies of his political successors. McCarthy now lives in rural Virginia, frequently firing broadsides at the likes of Bush and Clinton, demanding that Clinton 'sack all the Rhodes scholars and everyone from Arkansas' and that Fidel Castro be offered the job of national baseball commissioner. Yet behind the joking is one of the most original and thoughtful minds in American politics. McCarthy is perhaps the most seriously Catholic politician, or ex-politician, in the country, drawing inspiration from the likes of Aquinas and Jacques Maritain, and his intellectual background lies in a kind of neo-medieval rejection of modern capitalism. He remains a curious combination of fundamental conservatism, with a deep faith in the value of organic community, and moral urgency, epitomised by his emphasis on social justice - a phrase he employed as long ago as the 1940s to justify his insistence on the kind of comprehensive welfare state from which Clinton and Gore seem to recoil as if by instinct. His Minnesota constituents used to describe him as 'Thomas Aquinas in a suit'; in 1968 he was dubbed the 'Pied Piper' for his galvanising effect on a generation of American students, including Hillary Clinton. If today his critique of American democracy is largely forgotten, he is still remembered at least for forcing Lyndon Johnson from office. Even now, however, he gives speeches to audiences convinced that he is the anti-communist McCarthy; it is entirely in character that very rarely does he bother to disabuse them.
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