I'm not alone, certainly, to feel a twinge at the passing of Eugene McCarthy. I remember walking the hallways of my Bronx apartment building canvassing for McCarthy at the age of 12. For a long time afterwards, I kept my McCarthy button. I was part of the "children's crusade" against the Vietnam War which led me to other leftist political movements, then after Ronald Reagan's success (and interestingly, Reagan was endorsed by Gene McCarthy) like a pendulum to the right, before I settled into the independent middle-of-the-road where I hope to remain forever.I crossed paths with McCarthy after I had achieved the age of reason. I was a student at Swarthmore College when McCarthy came to speak in the mid 1970s, in the cavernous Clothier Hall, that in those days resembled a Quaker gothic cathedral. McCarthy seemed depressed. He read some poetry and made sour comments about politics. I remember I asked a smart aleck question about him being a sore loser and letting down those who had believed in him when he quit the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and resigned from the Senate. It may have been the only hostile question. He didn't have much of an answer, and the audience gave me hostile glares. Now that I'm older, I guess I understand a better that maybe he wasn't a sanctimonious fraud, he just ran out of gas. It could have happened to anyone.
Still, if it hadn't been for Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan never could have become Presidents -- evidence of, as the Russians like to say, the "irony of life."
