Eugene McCarthy
1968 Presidential Upstart McCarthy Dies, proclaims the headline of the AP story in the Guardian, Yahoo, and no doubt other news outlets.
But trivializing Eugene McCarthy as an "upstart" is an injustice.
In the tumultuous year of 1968, Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic Senator running for president, won 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire presidential primary against the sitting president of his own party, Lyndon Johnson.
In 1968, McCarthy electrified the nation as an anti-war candidate — the first presidential candidate in either of the two major parties to take that bold stand.
Four days after McCarthy's surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire, another anti-war Democrat, Robert Kennedy, declared his candidacy for president.
Two weeks after that, President Johnson stunned the nation when, in a televised address, he announced that he would not run for re-election, using the now-famous words, "Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party, for another term as your president."
Eugene McCarthy legitimized the anti-war movement. He accelerated the opposition to the war in Vietnam into what became massive resistance, which would have ended the war years sooner were it not for the stubbornness of the Nixon administration, which succeeded Johnson's, and the arrogance of the American people, who refused to believe America could lose a war to the Vietnamese, who were seen as our military and cultural inferiors.
But then in June, 1968, Kennedy was assassinated. McCarthy was marginalized by the media. Hubert Humphrey, who was Johnson's Vice President, won the Democratic nomination but lost the election to Nixon. The war dragged on for years.
In 1968, the media dismissed McCarthy as a one-issue candidate. But that is also an injustice. In fact, a McCarthy presidency may have profoundly changed the course of world events, and not just in Vietnam:
After the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, [McCarthy] said the US was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen... No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."
Once again, the marginalized Senator McCarthy exposed one of the great injustices of the 20th century. Only this one is still being felt, and will continue to be so well into the new century.
