Shedding light on liberalism through the prism of Eugene McCarthy

Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism
By Dominic Sandbrook
Knopf, 397 pp., illustrated, $25.95

When galleys of Dominic Sandbrook's biography of Eugene McCarthy landed on reviewers' desks back in the winter, Howard Dean's campaign, with its echoes of McCarthy's 1968 "children's crusade," was flying high. But by the time the book arrived on bookstore shelves, that boisterous parallel had become a political footnote. And, as it turns out, Sandbrook passes rather quickly over that earlier crusade, still remembered, as he notes, "with enormous affection."

Instead, this young British historian has undertaken -- and accomplished with style and distinction -- a more daunting and rewarding study, one that tracks the rise and fall of liberalism in the postwar years through the prism of McCarthy's political career.

McCarthy seems so frozen in time and so associated with one grand moment that it requires some stretching of the mind to give him a broader personal and political context. For, as Sandbrook writes, as seen in the early 1960s, he "was not a maverick, an eccentric, a peacenik or a rebel; he was a cool, competent and determined political operator."

Born in 1916, he has been living in a retirement community in Washington, D.C. Sandbrook, who conducted two interviews with McCarthy in 1999, reports him as being "as breezily self-confident and caustic as ever."

McCarthy gave up a settled teaching career to run for Congress from Minnesota in the 1948 "Fair Deal" election and, under the patronage of the Southern Democratic leadership, rose rapidly up the ranks. He was on the House Ways and Means Committee and "seemingly set for a career of success and influence" when he ran for the Senate in 1958. His rise there was equally swift; he joined the prestigious Finance Committee as a freshman.

Perhaps Sandbrook's most important achievement is to place McCarthy in an intellectual context. McCarthy attended St. John's University, associated with the Benedictine abbey in Collegeville, Minn. In the 1930s, Sandbrook writes, St. John's was "a hotbed of Catholic thought," encompassing both medievalism and social radicalism, liturgical reform and economic justice.

Its values of "prudence and realism" found their place in McCarthy's own writings and in his political positions -- at least up to 1968. "Prudence," he wrote in 1954, "may require the toleration of evil in order to prevent something worse, and may dictate a decision to let the cockle grow with the wheat for a time." The politician "must be realistic, anticipating that in the [real] world the simple choice between that which is altogether good and that which is altogether bad is seldom given."

That "intellectual heritage," Sandbrook writes, "is therefore not readily comprehensible in terms of the conventional New Deal liberal-conservative dichotomy. Politically, he stood with the liberals; philosophically, he seemed much more conservative." As McCarthy put it, the liberal "need not always advocate something new; he can support elements of the status quo, or he may even advocate a return to conditions known in the past."

In attempting to reconcile the philosopher with the politician, it is useful to focus on the turning points in McCarthy's career.

"As significant . . . as any other," Sandbrook writes, was McCarthy's "blatant hostility" to his Senate colleague John F. Kennedy. It was "rooted in sheer jealousy," he writes, for McCarthy saw Kennedy "as a threat to his ambitions" to be the first Catholic president -- and, as he "recklessly" told Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, "I'm a better Catholic."

That hostility led McCarthy to support first his Minnesota colleague and mentor Hubert Humphrey, then Adlai Stevenson, for the 1960 Democratic nomination. During Kennedy's presidency, McCarthy's "career was moribund," his Senate office jokingly described as "Sleepy Hollow." And with Lyndon Johnson's choice of Humphrey, rather than McCarthy, as a running mate in 1964, "a promising future" seemed to lie "behind him."

That was to change when he took, in typically casual fashion, an opening on the Foreign Relations Committee. McCarthy, along with many of his fellow Senate liberals, had been a Cold War hawk, a position based on their firm 1950s anti-Communism. But by the time McCarthy joined the committee, its chairman, J. William Fulbright, "had become an incisive critic of the anti-Communist consensus" and the committee had become "the single most important forum in Congress for criticism of the Vietnam imbroglio." In short, Sandbrook writes, "it was hardly surprising that McCarthy, like his colleagues, came to oppose the war. It would in fact have been astonishing had he not done so."

Sandbrook passes unsparingly over McCarthy's long political exile, during which he periodically resurfaced as an increasingly embarrassing candidate for president, or to return to Congress.

"There is not always honor in failure," writes Sandbrook in a conclusion that deepens in its ambiguity the longer one considers it. As written, it is applied to Eugene McCarthy, but as Sandbrook's narrative suggests, it applies equally to the American liberalism whose "energies," he writes, "were spent" even as McCarthy was uniting middle-class liberals and younger activists in support "of an undefined `New Politics.' "