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By Root 875 0

he wanted his obituary to say, McCarthy answered without the least suggestion of irony, “He died, I suppose.” His tremendous popularity on college campuses and among the youth who did not like conventional politics initially arose because, until Kennedy entered the race, he was the only candidate committed to an immediate end to the Vietnam War. Early in his campaign, the antiwar leftists such as Allard Lowenstein, who had constructed his candidacy, were so frustrated by the senator’s ambiguous style and lack of passion that they started to fear they had picked the wrong man. Some thought they should appeal to Bobby Kennedy, Lowenstein’s first choice, one last time. But McCarthy’s style appealed to young people who disliked leaders and appreciated a candidate who didn’t act like one. They talked about him as though he were a poet who later became a senator, although the less romantic truth that he was able to reinvent himself as a poet in midcampaign may be a more impressive stunt.

It was Life’s Shana Alexander who had labeled him a “conundrum,” explaining, “One’s first response to him is surprise. Admiration, if it comes, comes later.” Perhaps part of his appeal to college students was that he looked and sounded more like a professor than a candidate. Asked about the riots in the black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, he mystified everyone by comparing them to a peasant uprising in 1381.

“McCarthy for President” campaign poster, 1968

(Chicago Historical Society)

Norman Mailer, in describing the candidate’s faults at the campaign’s final hours in Chicago, may have hit on exactly the source of his appeal to young antiwar activists of 1968:

He spoke in his cool, offhand style, now famous for its lack of emphasis, lack of power, lack of dramatic concentration, as if the first desire of all men must not be the Presidency, but the necessity to avoid any forcing of one’s own person (as if the first desire of the Devil might be to make you the instrument of your own will). He had insisted after all these months of campaigning that he must remain himself, and never rise to meet the occasion, never put force into his presentation because external events seemed to demand that a show of force of oratorical power would here be most useful. No, McCarthy was proceeding on the logic of the saint, which is not to say that he necessarily saw himself as one (although there must have been moments!) but that his psychology was kin: God would judge the importance of the event, not man, and God would give the tongue to speak, if tongue was the organ to be manifested.

Given how unusual a year this was, it may have made sense for McCarthy to publish his poetry in midcampaign, but the contents of the poem seem ill chosen. Why would someone running for the office of president of the United States volunteer that he felt mired in Act II and could not write Act III? Asked to explain his poem, why he could not write the third act, he said, “I don’t really want to write it,” which for many supporters, reporters, and political professionals confirmed the suspicion that he did not really want to be president. But the senator mused on, “You know the old rules: Act I states the problem, Act II deals with the complications, and Act III resolves them. I am an Act II man. That’s where I live. Involution and complexity.”

McCarthy mused further about everyone from Napoleon to FDR and finally came to his rival Robert Kennedy. “Bobby is an Act I man. He says here’s a problem. Here’s another problem. Here’s another one. He never really deals with Act II, but I think maybe he’s beginning to write Act III. Bobby’s tragedy is that to beat me, he’s going to have to destroy his brother. Today I occupy most of Jack’s positions on the board. That’s kind of Greek, isn’t it?”

Whatever similarities existed between Gene McCarthy and the late John Kennedy, they were seen by few other than the Minnesota senator himself. On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy, many hoped, might be like his brother. But others appreciated that he was not in any way like his older brother