ROGER SIMON COLUMN
DECEMBER 12, 2005
WASHINGTON - - Gene McCarthy walked into the hotel dining room in Manchester, N.H., and then paused for a moment.
Though the years had taken a certain toll - - this was 1992 and he was 76 - - he was still an imposing figure: tall, white-haired and dressed in a long black coat.
I watched him stand there and look around the room. The New Hampshire primary was just a few days away, and dozens of national political reporters were eating in the dining room.
McCarthy waited for a moment, as if expecting someone to hail him, to wave him over, to invite him to sit down and talk about old times.
In 1968, Gene McCarthy had changed the course of American history. He won more delegates in the New Hampshire Democratic primary than President Lyndon Johnson and forced Johnson to drop his plans for re-election.
Johnson, perhaps for reasons of ego, had refused to allow his name on the primary ballot in New Hampshire, and though a write-in campaign garnered Johnson 50 percent of the vote to McCarthy's 42 percent, McCarthy got 20 of the 24 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
The actual numbers did not really matter. An anti-Vietnam war candidate had beaten the sitting president who was waging that war.
But all that had happened in 1968. And it hadn't been 1968 for quite a while.
And this night, nobody invited Gene McCarthy to come over and sit down and eat dinner with them.
So he just walked over to a table and sat there by himself, staring into the menu.
"Jeez," a reporter at my table said, "didn't that used to be Gene McCarthy?"
Yeah. Used to be.
McCarthy might have been a more heroic figure in the Democratic Party had he accepted his defeat in 1968. (Bobby Kennedy entered the race four days after McCarthy won New Hampshire, for which McCarthy never forgave him. After Kennedy's assassination in California, Hubert Humphrey was nominated by the Democrats in Chicago.)
But McCarthy refused to accept defeat gracefully. By 1992, this was McCarthy's fifth campaign for the presidency.
And if anybody cared that he was running, they weren't showing it.
McCarthy had been denied access to the big, nationally televised debates. He was rarely interviewed. He was not a grand old man of his party.
While he was still remembered by the public (a few of them, anyway) for his anti-Vietnam War stand and his "Clean Gene" nickname and "The Children's Crusade,"
Democratic Party regulars remembered him for other things:
They remembered how he did not campaign for the ticket after losing the nomination to Humphrey in 1968 and how narrowly Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon.
They remembered how in 1976 when McCarthy ran on a third-party ticket, he almost sunk Jimmy Carter by denying him victories in four states. And many thought that
if McCarthy had not been kept off the ballot in New York, he would have drained off enough votes from Carter to give the state and the presidency to Gerald Ford that year.
And the Democrats especially remembered how McCarthy endorsed Ronald Reagan for president in 1980.
Yet, when I finally walked over to McCarthy's table, I found a man with few qualms.
"The party has never forgiven me," he told me. "I have never been asked to speak at a convention. But I'll make an offer to the Democrats: I'll say I'm sorry I was right about Vietnam if it makes them feel better."
Gene McCarthy died last week. He might have had a few regrets, but he was never sorry.
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