EUGENE MCCARTHY
The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism
by Dominic Sandbrook
Thoughtful biography of the quintessential American liberal who, toward the end of his political career, was “challenging the very premises of the liberalism that he had himself championed.”
Born in 1916 into an Irish-German Catholic family in rural Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy came to exemplify a political philosophy that, writes Sandbrook (History/Univ. of Sheffield), is “best understood in relation to European conservatism rather than American liberalism”: in the ’50s, he, like William Buckley and Eric Voegelin, would call for a “re-Christianization of social institutions” and publicly lament the decline of family values and old-school traditions. Yet McCarthy was squarely in the American liberal tradition by the beginning of the ’60s, when Democratic political leaders embraced New Deal activism domestically while advocating an aggressively anticommunist Pax Americana internationally. A few years later, when it became clear that Lyndon Johnson would accomplish neither, McCarthy found himself in opposition to his own party; as a US senator in 1966, writes Sandbrook, McCarthy’s score as a voter against the conservative coalition was “a creditable 86 percent, in 1967 it fell to 45 percent, barely half of the scores registered by Mondale, Muskie, and the Kennedy brothers” (when McCarthy bothered to show up, that is, for his roll-call attendance was at the bottom of the Democratic roster). Still, he also opposed the Vietnam War, and as a peace candidate gained a following large enough to threaten Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy in the 1968 presidential election. McCarthy effectively squandered any chance of taking the lead, however, through a number of missteps that Sandbrook attributes to arrogance: his loss “was not because of a lack of aptitude, but because of a failure of application.” That failure, Sandbrook suggests, is one reason so few politicos utter the l-word anything but scornfully today.
A worthy reexamination of the politician whom many remember fondly today—yet who is still likened to Harold Stassen as a born loser.