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My Secret Relationship with Eugene McCarthy

by William McGaughey

One my proudest accomplishments in life is having cowritten a book with former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. (Nonfinancial Economics: The Case for Shorter Hours of Work, Praeger, 1989) I was a beneficiary of McCarthy’s generosity and good will. The book grew out of a common interest in the shorter-workweek proposal. Though best known as an anti-war campaigner, Senator McCarthy also had a keen interest in economics. Few today remember that he was chairman of the 1959 Senate Special Committee on Unemployment. The shorter-workweek proposal was one of the options under consideration to address that problem.

I have resided in Minnesota since January 1965. Eugene McCarthy represented that state in the U.S. Senate between 1959 and 1971 when Hubert Humphrey replaced him. McCarthy by that time was living in the Washington, D.C. area. I therefore had little or no contact with him. However, I had a favorable impression of him dating back to the 1960 Democratic National Convention when McCarthy made an eloquent speech backing Adlai Stevenson. A network commentator called him an “intellectual”, which, to me at least, had a favorable ring.

(Incidentally, I watched McCarthy’s speech on television in a rented apartment in the Bronx. In the summer of 1960 I was working as a copyboy in the New York headquarters of the Wall Street Journal. A friend from camp in Deep Springs, California, in the summer of 1957 had referred me to his aunt, who might have a spare room to rent, after a chance meeting in the New York subway. She was an elderly Jewish woman named Margaret Fielding - “Aunt Margaret”. I mention this because years later, in the summer of 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis was nominated for President by the Democrats. The issue came up that the Governor’s wife, Kitty Dukakis, was daughter of a woman who had been adopted by a wealthy Boston family and had some lingering personal problems. It turned out that Margaret Fielding was the mother of Kitty Dukakis’ mother who had put the child up for adoption in a day when inter-faith relationships were not tolerated. The child's father was an Irish Catholic. I remember Margaret Fielding as a kind-hearted woman with a sense of humor.)

I heard McCarthy speak once or twice at the University of Minnesota in the heyday of his political career but had little contact with him or his campaign because I was a Republican. I became an active member of the young Republicans because of my interest in a possible presidential candidacy of George Romney, my father’s friend and former employer. After Romney pulled out of the race, my support went to Richard Nixon. Though my role in the campaign was limited, I was an usher at a Nixon rally in Minneapolis as well as an election judge. I thought of myself as a political conservative.

My views on the Vietnam war were mixed. On one hand, I could understand where the antiwar protesters were coming from since news reports suggested that the Johnson administration was bungling the war effort. On the other hand, I bought into the idea that the war was a result of North Vietnam’s invasion of the south. I wanted the United States to win the war, if possible, and I wanted our troops to be protected. In other words, I had more sympathy with young Americans being sent to die in Asia than with the comparatively privileged college kids who were protesting the war at home. I had once quit college to join the Army - admittedly, more out of desire to satisfy my military obligation than to fulfill patriotic ambitions - so I was not necessarily antiwar.

I say this to make the point that I was not part of Eugene McCarthy’s army of youthful supporters in the 1968 presidential campaign. I was not even a Democrat. From a distance, I had a generally favorable impression of McCarthy and his antiwar crusade where poets, as well as more practical political types, made contributions to the cause. In later years, when I became personally acquainted with McCarthy, I never spoke of my Republican background. If he wanted to assume that I was a supporter of his from the beginning, that was fine with me. (This was my first secret, but not the main one.) We connected because of our common interest in the shorter-workweek issue.

Now let me tell you about a quirky experience I had while a college student at Yale. It happened in 1963 or 1964. I was basically alienated from the liberal brand of politics that dominated the Yale campus and, indeed, the nation. I was loyal to my father and the Detroit business class. It happened, then, that the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, held a public reception to honor one of the nation’s political leaders: Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Joe Lieberman was editor of the paper then. I, like hundreds of other students, crowded into the building that housed the Yale Daily News (donated by Time Magazine in honor of its two co-founders, Britton Hadden and Henry Luce, who had been editors of the student newspaper) but was unable to get close to the Senator. He was presumably somewhere inside conferring with the top editors and other bigwigs on campus.

In my frustration, both political and immediate, I had a weird idea. I pretended to be a left-wing protester from New York who resented the appearance of “Senator McCarthy” on my college campus. I was against “McCarthyism”, you see. I started talking about this to some people near me. We ought to demand that Senator McCarthy leave. Some well-intentioned people, one man in particular, tried to point out to me that this Senator McCarthy was Eugene McCarthy, who was a good Senator, not Joe McCarthy, the communist witch hunter. I pretended not to believe him. I was against Senator McCarthy being given this honor at Yale.

Such conversation continued for at least twenty minutes. My conversation partner was sure that I could not confuse the two Senator McCarthys; this must be some kind of spoof. Indeed it was, but I could not bring myself to admit it. I left the gathering in the newspaper office with the other man sadly shaking his head. I myself felt bad that I had let my little joke go on too long. Maybe I was psychotic. Viewing the incident more kindly, it was a joke that had gone sour.

Senator Eugene McCarthy was an intellectual, a man with a razor-sharp wit. He was a political commentator and a poet of some distinction. A target of one of his sharpest witticisms was my father’s old friend, George Romney. Romney, the Governor of Michigan, was a prominent contender in the race for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

One might say that Governor Romney was the front runner until, in the late summer of 1967, he confided to a television interviewer that he had changed his mind about the Vietnam war because his earlier support of the war came after a trip to the Vietnam battle front where he had been “brainwashed” by Johnson Administration officials. “Brainwashed” was the wrong word to use. Commentators pounced on it as evidence that Governor Romney was intellectually so weak that U.S. military officials in Vietnam could make him believe anything. And the death blow was struck by Senator Eugene McCarthy who said that it was unnecessary to “brain wash” Governor Romney: “A light rinse would do.”

Now this remark was totally unfair. George Romney had proven his considerable powers of intelligence in a distinguished career both in politics and the business world. No intellectual lightweight could have led the nation’s fourth-largest automobile manufacturer in head-to-head competition with the Big Three automakers and have won. No such person could have helped orchestrate the conversion of the entire auto industry from automobile to war production in the early 1940s. No such person could have been elected Governor of Michigan in a heavily Democratic state and been a successful three-term Governor. And George Romney’s innate personal intelligence is confirmed in the accomplished career of his son, Mitt. The Romney family is super smart.

But never mind: All’s fair in love and war - and in politics. Governor George Romney, perhaps inexperienced with the political media, had given a television interviewer and other ill-intentioned types an opening that politically savvy opponents could exploit. Eugene McCarthy simply did what any partisan Democrat would do - delivered the coup de grace to Governor Romney's presidential aspirations - and he did it well.

I got to know Eugene McCarthy years later. In 1982 - fourteen years after the Minnesota Senator had blazed across the political landscape in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries, causing President Johnson not to seek reelection - McCarthy came back to Minnesota to campaign for his old seat in the Senate. By then, he was damaged goods. He was a man who had been around the political block a few times, running for President as an independent, endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, and generally not being a Democratic team player.

Democrats hate this sort of person and they took it out on Senator McCarthy. He was running an uphill campaign for the DFL senatorial nomination competing with a young man who had plenty of money, Mark Dayton. (If being an heir to the Dayton department-store fortune were not enough, he was also married to Alida Rockefeller.) Great wealth combined with compassion for downtrodden groups is an aphrodisiac for Democrats. Mark Dayton defeated McCarthy handily in the DFL primary.

At the same time, his declining political fortunes gave me an opportunity to meet Eugene McCarthy. I read in the newspaper that one of McCarthy’s campaign issues was a shorter workweek. When I called the McCarthy campaign to ask for a copy of his position paper on the subject, I was told that the Senator wanted to meet me. I was invited to lunch with Senator McCarthy on the seventh floor of the old Northstar Center in downtown Minneapolis.

It turned out that Eugene McCarthy had read an Op-Ed piece of mine on the shorter workweek which had appeared in the New York Times on November 13, 1979. He said he had carried a copy of my article around in his pocket for some time. This was music to my ears. I readily volunteered to help with his campaign. McCarthy put me in touch with Andy Brown, his young campaign manager, who called him “Gene”. So I started calling Eugene McCarthy - that icon of American politics - “Gene” as well. It might have helped me develop a relationship with him. I’m often self-conscious around celebrities.

My biggest contribution to the campaign was to organize a meeting at the Labor Center in St. Paul in which Senator McCarthy discussed his advocacy of a shorter workweek. I and others created an attractive poster and placed it around town. We attracted, if not an overflowing, a sizable crowd and a fair amount of publicity. I dare say it was Senator McCarthy’s most successful campaign event in an otherwise dreary season for him.

I also had the opportunity to get to know Eugene McCarthy as a person when I rode up with him to Collegeville, Minnesota, with a small group of supporters for an event at St. John’s University. I could sense a certain bitterness in him at that time. Where twenty or thirty years earlier he had been a giant of DFL politics, along with Hubert Humphrey, he was now forced to campaign as an underdog to regain his old seat. He was running in the DFL primary against a first-time candidate at least twenty-five years his junior and, if he won, against a Republican incumbent, Senator Dave Durenberger, whose father had been a popular football coach at St. Johns.

McCarthy told me that he was planning to read from a book of his own poetry at the Renaissance Fair. I thought it rather undignified for such a distinguished political figure to stoop to being a carnival exhibit along with the jugglers and clowns. But Senator McCarthy just smiled and said: “I’ll try anything in this campaign.”

I also sensed in Senator McCarthy a personal vulnerability. His razor-sharp wit for which he was known in his prime was beginning to fail him. In public appearances, he, like most politicians, led with a few jokes. But occasionally McCarthy’s attempts at humor would misfire. I would not call them gaffes but they were embarrassing nonetheless. Sometimes his wit fired on all cyclinders, but sometimes it did not. Though harmless attempts to be funny, his little jokes did not quite hit the mark.

This is where I had a “secret” relationship with Senator McCarthy. I thought back to my own misfired humor when the Senator had been the guest of honor at the Yale Daily News. Out of my own bitterness and frustration, I made a joke out of confusing Eugene McCarthy with Senator Joe McCarthy, the communist hunter. My own misplaced humor was pathological. When McCarthy let loose a lame joke, it was simply a case of losing ones touch on that occasion.

If I were a religious person to the point of narrowminded animus and superstition, I would suggest that God was punishing Gene McCarthy for the joke he made about George Romney. It was a piece of unkind humor. After that incident, I would say, God took away some of McCarthy’s joke-telling ability. Now, of course, I do not believe that. God knows full well what goes on in practical politics where one politician tries to put another in an unfavorable light. McCarthy’s “light rinse” remark was well within the bounds of political propriety.

I also like to think that George Romney saw it that way. When I once published an article in the Star Tribune comparing McCarthy favorably to Walter Mondale, my father sent a copy to Romney and Romney replied. Though I have forgotten the content of that letter, I do recall that my father’s old boss looked kindly on my newspaper article and bore Eugene McCarthy no ill will. George Romney’s downfall as a presidential candidate occurred in the same year (1968) when McCarthy’s similar candidacy changed the political landscape and earned him a place in history. But the two men were professionals; they were inwardly secure, declining to waste time by taking offense at an old rival.

As far as I was concerned, I felt a bond with Eugene McCarthy which was strengthened, not lessened, by the tendency to lose our grip on humor. We were both intellectuals. I say this not to praise or disparage myself or him. Being an intellectual is not the same as claiming to be intelligent. It is a choice made in one’s personal values. An intellectual is someone who puts a value on discovering and expressing truth. This characterization certainly fit McCarthy. He graduated first in his class at St. John’s university, briefly became a monk, and then was a college professor at St. Thomas before running for Congress in 1948. McCarthy was also a poet by avocation. He was a person who took a special care in crafting words and ideas. This, too, is an aspect of being an intellectual. I have made similar choices in my life, but will not go into details here.

The dirty little secret of being an intellectual, however, is that one becomes personally vulnerable. One directs one’s attention toward words and ideas rather than making a skillful adjustment to life in other respects. For instance, one tells jokes that occasionally misfire. A professional joke teller like Al Franken would not make such mistakes but someone like McCarthy can when he is not at the top of his game. For my part, I am socially awkward and also unpolished with respect to telling jokes. I put much of my energy into written language. Bad choice or good, it’s who I am.

Curiously, the personal vulnerability of intellectuals was a theme of the Nobel Prize-winning German writer, Thomas Mann. In my senior year at Yale, I wrote a term paper about this in an English course. My professor, Robert Penn Warren, himself an intellectual of some note, gave me the best grade I received in any of my courses - an A minus. So I knew more about the vulnerability of intellectuals than about most other subjects that one might encounter in college courses.

Plato himself observed that "anyone who gives himself to philosophy is open to such mockery ... When he is forced to talk about what lies at his feet or before his eyes, the whole rabble will join the maidservants in laughing at him, as from inexperience he walks blindly and stumbles into every pitfall. His terrible clumsiness makes him seem so stupid." We intellectuals should therefore forgive each other and ourselves.

Having disclosed my “secret” kinship with Senator Eugene McCarthy - which I never discussed with McCarthy while he was alive - I have fulfilled the purpose to this narrative. Suffice it to say that there were other events involving the Senator, both before and after we wrote a book together in the late ‘80s. In his later years, Senator McCarthy mellowed and lost his bitterness from the political disappointments he experienced then. I may not have known the Senator as well as some other people but I did have the privilege of working with him on a project that we both valued: promoting the shorter-workweek concept.

Eugene McCarthy was more generous to me than what I had any right to expect. He was a friend. I continue to respect him and cherish his memory for who he was: a man of intelligence and personal kindness who did make a difference in this world.

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