(by Slugbug)
Eugene McCarthy has just died at age 89.
This was the heading of a TruthOut email and I haven't read a story about it yet, as I sit down to write this. I don't need a story, as this is a big part of the story of my life.
When I was sixteen years old, I wandered into a doorway where I saw a sign having to do with stopping the war in Vietnam. It was on Main Street in Mitchell, South Dakota. I went up those wooden stairs and signed up for the campaign of Eugene McCarthy. My supervisor was 21 years old. It was known as the "Chldren's Crusade." We were precursors to the Dean campaign, if anything, so I had many 'deja vu' moments when people seemed to think something new had been invented last year.
We recruited a guy who was old enough to drive - a farm kid with no political affiliation. We made our own posters because McCarthy's campaign didn't have much money. We rolled into little towns like Stickney and Storla, SD - Republican towns - and tried to spread the word. We read slogans into a bullhorn as we drove through these towns (they all had a Main Street, sometimes the only street with a name).
Often we would find that the Robert Kennedy Jr. people had come in ahead of us and had a nice headquarters. Their people got steaks, we got hamburgers. We were a little resentful. I also learned that we had one talk (when we canvassed door-to-door) for farm people, one for education-oriented people, one on health care etc. I also knew that McCarthy's political platform was very close to the of Robert Kennedy Jr. & he really was my 2nd choice, but Eugene was a poet and a visionary, an intellectual, a man with conscience.
Then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was assassinated and it was all over. Eugene McCarthy would not have gotten the nomination. When I think about it, he may have been more of a Dennis Kucinich than a Howard Dean, were I to make a comparison. It's the campaign enthusiasm of the young people that made me draw parallels to the Deaniacs.
& then Humphrey was the nominee, I watched that horrible DNC convention in Chicago - with Mayor Daley's cops beating not just on demonstrators but on delegates! & then there was Nixon. I would feel such disappointment again, with Reagan twice, with Bush Sr. and most of all, with Bush Jr. heading the country. Last year had to be the worst election night of my life, but second was no doubt the night McGovern lost and we were at the convention headquarters in Sioux Falls, SD, trying to drown our sorrows even though we weren't yet old enough to drink.
Not so long ago, I came across an interview with Eugene McCarthy and he was still very coherent and wise. Today, this is an end of an era for me. For some people, it was the death of Paul Wellstone. This is similar. I will definitely need to find ways to keep the dream alive. We have to carry it on.
Here is a small Eulogy and some background, with information excerpted from Forbes magazine:
Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.
Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.
The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.
"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.
When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."
McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.
Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.
Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.
Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.
"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.
"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway - the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.
"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."
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