favorov's Journal

RIP: Senator Eugene McCarthy
To hardened observers it seemed extraordinary that so fastidious a man - a poet
who described himself as "mired in complexity", an intellectual who recoiled
from the crude slogans of electioneering - should have proved such a force. "How
is the Senator this morning?" someone asked McCarthy's daughter Mary in 1968.
"Oh! Alienated as usual," she replied.
Moreover McCarthy resolutely declined to give tub-thumping radical speeches.
"I've grown a little disturbed," he would tell an assembly of agriculturists,
"that almost everything the Church tried to give up at the Vatican Council has
been picked up by the Defence Department - the idea of grace in office, a little
hint of infallibility, a kind of revival of the ideas of heresy and of holy
wars, the Inquisition, a kind of index on publications. The Pentagon is even
beginning to talk Latin, and has given a contract to a Californian company for a
study entitled Pax Americana."

Senator Eugene McCarthy, who died on Saturday aged 89, was one of
the most intelligent and witty American politicians of the post-war period, and
the leader of the Democratic revolt against the Vietnam War which forced the
withdrawal of President Johnson in 1968.

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