At the midpoint of this biography by a young British historian of former Sen. Eugene McCarthy and the “rise and fall” of American liberalism, Shakespeare’s King Richard II appears unbidden on the page, as it were. As the king resists the usurping Bolingbroke, he laments, “And must I ravel out / my weaved-up follies?” To appropriate that forlorn sentiment to the subject of this biography, Dominic Sandbrook could retort, “No need for you to lay out the dreadful details, Senator — I shall fully ravel out your follies — my pleasure.”
The former Minnesota senator’s early life is recounted in fairly straightforward fashion by Mr. Sandbrook. He is thorough about the precocious young man’s Catholic education and Benedictine novitiate, which infused profound respect for tradition and institutions, as well as the insistent claim of social justice — with the bleakness of the Great Depression adding its shaping influence.
The author offers minute details about the fractious 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, so inflamed by Vietnam, and the bruising collision of Democratic party politics of the period.
This is not, however, an engaging book. Indeed, it does not take long to realize that Mr. Sandbrook regards Eugene McCarthy as neither a likable fellow nor at all an admirable public figure. The author is consistently condescending, occasionally nasty, and too intrusively mines for the scarce metal of motive.
In the introduction, Mr. Sandbrook notes that his biography is “no hagiography,” an understatement so tidal it could wash away islands. Eugene McCarthy’s career, he continues astringently, has been largely forgotten or neglected by historians, “not least because he himself willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick.” That’s a facile judgment, certainly for anyone who vividly recalls the 1960s.
The book also wobbles in its assigned theme of “The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism,” whether the intent is to imply that the senator was emblematic, or that he was significantly contributory to the “wilderness” years for progressive politics after he left the Senate in 1970. Such intellectual stretches are of course a historian’s challenge to go beyond the historical moment in time, but it is an elusive chase and often as not marches to the author’s ideological cadence.
That Mr. Sandbrook has a honed political perspective is evident early in the book, describing the years when a young Mr. McCarthy and a young Hubert Humphrey were active in ridding the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer Labor Party of its strongly left-wing policies after World War II. “McCarthy and his fellow Democrats were to be the victims as well as perpetrators of anti-Communism of the early Cold War,” he writes.
Perpetrators? Anti-communism in these pages usually is punched up by “aggressive” and “belligerent” and the like.
Then, in one of the nastier swipes in the book, Mr. Sandbrook recalls Eugene McCarthy’s strong support after his election to the House of Representatives for Humphrey’s 1954 bill to outlaw the Communist Party. The author quotes Mr. McCarthy: “The Communist Party cannot claim the protections and privileges given to other political parties because of its international conspiratorial character and because of its continued and determined use of the methods of deception, falsehood and subversion.”
To which Mr. Sandbrook gratuitously adds, “Joseph McCarthy could hardly have put it better.” To pair the Wisconsin demagogue with the young Minnesotan who was expressing what many Americans then believed and has been proven since to have been a genuine Soviet threat to America’s national security is vicious, not to put too fine a point on it.
To run down a partial list of characteristics Mr. Sandbrook attributes to Eugene McCarthy, either declaratively or by quoting a range of political figures: He is jealous, unruly, disloyal, lazy, vain, undependable, treacherous, arrogant, detached, ambitious, obsessive.
Finally, and well into the book, Mr. Sandbrook bumps into an adjective that might offer a marginally more useful insight than the lash of unappetizing traits he applies to Eugene McCarthy — “quixotic.”
The knight of La Mancha in Cervantes’ classic was a man of fiercely independent spirit. Likewise, Mr. McCarthy, if he could be deluded (and one might contend that the then-former senator comparably tilted against windmills in running as a fringe presidential candidate in 1972, 1976 and 1980), also sustained a lonely dignity.
It didn’t matter whether one shared his increasingly gossamer policies. Eugene McCarthy’s profound sense of privacy contended with intense ambition; his embrace of principle and the appropriate was seldom at the service of the expedient. His reflective nature and recognition of the absurd indeed could overwhelm the forms of office and even civility, and the senator’s lacerating wit could make him an uncomfortable presence.
He also could bear a grudge. Mr. McCarthy came to regard Lyndon B. Johnson bitterly after the 1964 Democratic convention when the president with his usual callousness dangled the vice-presidential slot before both Mr. McCarthy and Humphrey to the very day of nomination, before tapping Humphrey — without the courtesy of letting Mr. McCarthy know in advance.
Neither were the Kennedy brothers on Mr. McCarthy’s short-list of estimable figures. Mr. McCarthy hardly could be pleased, for example, when after he came within an electoral whisker of defeating LBJ in the New Hampshire primary in 1968, Bobby Kennedy four days later decided also to seek the Democratic nomination. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder and the chaotic Chicago convention, of course, Vice President Humphrey was nominated and lost the election to Richard Nixon.
Mr. Sandbrook argues that had Eugene McCarthy gotten behind his old friend and spent his considerable political capital on Humphrey’s behalf in the campaign, the liberals might have avoided the desolation of loss of power. Further, in the author’s desideratum, they might have bypassed the pitfalls of more liberal social-welfare legislation. That gets into the realm of crystal ball, given the ebbs of American politics.
There’s more in Mr. Sandbrook’s biography that can annoy a reviewer, notwithstanding that his politics are not at all Mr. McCarthy’s. The author, to note one sneaky device, likes to invoke “perhaps” when fact is elusive. For in but one of frequent examples, as the dispute over Vietnam increased Mr. McCarthy was under pressure from family and friends to oppose the war, and “Perhaps there was also a slight sense of guilt; after all, he had hardly made a great moral contribution to American public life during his twenty-year career.”
Mr. Sandbrook concedes that Eugene McCarthy is an uncommonly complicated character, but one whose flaws trumped and thumped his merits. Well, to be flawed is the nature of man, and it is wearying to navigate as dense a narrative as this with hardly a centimeter of slack cut by the author for his subject — though victim might be the appropriate word.
This book originated as Mr. Sandbrook’s doctoral dissertation in 1998 at the University of Cambridge. Whatever it was that so entirely soured the author on Eugene McCarthy, this is a biography that better had been left on the shelf of dusty dissertations.
Woody West is associate editor of The Washington Times.
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