By Bill Salisbury and Bob Shaw,St. Paul Pioneer Press

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Eugene J. McCarthy, a former U.S. senator from Minnesota, a writer and presidential candidate whose 1968 campaign toppled a sitting president and changed the course of politics for a generation, died Saturday. He was 89.

A poet and politician known for his keen intellect and caustic wit, McCarthy died of complications of Parkinson’s disease at a retirement home in Washington, according to his son, Michael McCarthy.

Funeral arrangements were pending, but burial is expected to be in his hometown of Watkins, Minn.

“He was a giant of Minnesota and national politics,” said former vice president Walter Mondale. Along with former vice president Hubert Humphrey, McCarthy “changed the American view of Minnesota,” Mondale said.

McCarthy’s son Michael was with him when he died at 6 a.m. “What distinguished him was that he was thoughtful, principled and passionate,” the younger McCarthy said.

“Even though he was involved in the sharpest debates of the time, he never got personal. It’s hard to imagine – politics is very different today.”

Eugene McCarthy’s brother, 87-year-old Austin McCarthy of Wilmar, Minn., said, “He was a great, great man. He should be remembered as a statesman, not as a politician.”

“He didn’t kowtow to people to get a vote. He spoke his piece and if they accepted it, that was it.”

McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign was the high-water mark of his political career. President Lyndon Johnson was the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination that year, and McCarthy was considered a quixotic gadfly. Indeed, he didn’t expect to win.

Adamantly opposed to Johnson’s escalation of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, McCarthy launched a grassroots campaign that rallied the anti-war movement in the Democratic Party.

A legion of college students went “clean for Gene,” cutting their hair and dressing conservatively to canvass New Hampshire before the nation’s first presidential primary on March 12.

When it was over, McCarthy lost to Johnson by a mere 230 votes. The press and political establishment treated the primary as a McCarthy triumph.

Stunned, Johnson withdrew from the race by the end of the month. McCarthy eventually lost the nomination to a fellow Minnesotan, Hubert H. Humphrey, who was then beaten by Richard Nixon.

When no other Democrat in high office was willing to challenge a sitting president, McCarthy stepped forward.

“He was the only one who had the courage to stand up to LBJ and the war. Because of it, he was a hero,” said Marilyn Gorling of Minneapolis, who in 1968 was the second-highest Democratic Party officer in the nation to endorse McCarthy.

McCarthy also discouraged subsequent presidents from committing American troops to unpopular wars.

“Part of his legacy is the wars we didn’t get involved in … in Honduras, Nicaragua, Bosnia, Uganda” and a dozen other countries, said Vance Opperman, a Twin Cities businessman and McCarthy campaign organizer in 1968.

“An awful lot of Americans are walking around today who would be buried under (war) memorials if it weren’t for him.”

Born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a farming community about 70 miles west of the Twin Cities, McCarthy was a product of Minnesota’s “Lake Wobegon” country.

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An exceptional student, he completed the 11 grades offered at St. Anthony’s School in his hometown by age 15, then enrolled at St. John’s Preparatory School in nearby Collegeville, Minn. He stayed in that community for four years, earning his bachelor’s degree in English from St. John’s University in 1935.

During his college years, McCarthy returned home each summer to play semi-pro baseball – he was a lanky, 6-foot-4 first baseman – for Watkins in the Great Soo League.

After St. John’s, he taught high school in Tintah and Kimball, Minn., and Mandan, N.D., while earning a master’s degree in economics and sociology from the University of Minnesota in 1939. He returned to St. John’s in 1942 and spent nine months as a Benedictine novice, training to become a monk.

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An acute case of bursitis in his feet kept him out of combat in World War II, so he worked at the War Department in Washington deciphering Japanese codes. After the war, he moved to St. Paul to teach economics and sociology at the College of St. Thomas.

An activist in the recently formed Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, McCarthy launched his political career in 1948 with his election to the U.S. House from Minnesota’s 4th District.

McCarthy was one of five Minnesota DFL congressmen swept into office that year on a ticket headed by Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey, who won his first election to the U.S. Senate.

In 1952, he was the first member of Congress to oppose Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the fierce anti-communist from Wisconsin, in a television debate.

When he sought re-election later that year, his Republican opponent, Roger Kennedy, accused him of being soft on communism. McCarthy considered that a smear campaign, and blamed Kennedy’s campaign manager, St. Paul Republican attorney Warren Burger, for masterminding it.

When Burger was nominated to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, McCarthy voted against confirming him, saying it was “one of the best votes” he ever cast.

His most impressive accomplishment in the House was his organization of a coalition of about 80 liberal Democrats, known as “McCarthy’s Mavericks,” whose early position papers led to the formation of the Democratic Study Group. They conceived many of the social welfare programs of Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative.

McCarthy won five terms in the House, then was elected to the Senate in 1958. As a senator, he focused on alleviating unemployment and poverty.

He also got involved in the presidential aspirations of Humphrey, who was seeking the 1960 Democratic nomination in a field that included Sens. John Kennedy of Massachusetts and Stuart Symington of Missouri.

But McCarthy wondered why he wasn’t the Democrats’ choice.

“I’m twice as liberal as Humphrey, twice as Catholic as Kennedy and twice as smart as Symington,” he was quoted as saying in Time magazine, revealing his biting wit and large ego. McCarthy later denied making the remark.

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That wit earned him the nickname “The Needle” among his Senate colleagues. “His sense of humor was unique in U.S. politics,” former state DFL Chairman George Farr of Minneapolis has said. “Of all the people in politics, he was one I never wanted to debate because he could cut you apart with his rapier wit.”

One such victim was Walter Mondale, of whom McCarthy said in 1984: “He has the soul of a vice president.”

McCarthy and Humphrey were allies, if not close friends, through their early years together in the Senate.

But Johnson made them rivals in 1964 by dangling the vice presidential nomination before both of them. Heading into the Democratic convention in Atlantic City, Johnson let it be known that he was considering one of the “Minnesota twins” to be his running mate. Even after he picked Humphrey, LBJ maintained the fiction that McCarthy was under consideration.

“I only lost by one vote,” McCarthy quipped in later years. “There was only one vote.”

McCarthy was humiliated by Johnson’s toying with him. While he swallowed his pride and nominated Humphrey at the convention, he never forgave Johnson.

Four years later, he challenged the president in New Hampshire. Many Democrats suspected it was McCarthy’s way of getting even.

“New Hampshire was less about Vietnam and more about his antipathy toward LBJ,” Doug Kelm of Chanhassen, a DFL activist and lobbyist once allied with McCarthy but always loyal to Humphrey, had said before his own death.

Initially, McCarthy supported Johnson’s war policy, voting in 1964 for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave the president a legal basis for starting the massive U.S. military buildup in Vietnam.

But as the war escalated, McCarthy’s doubts grew, and by early 1967 he became an outspoken opponent. That fall, angered that the Senate had suppressed debate on Johnson’s Vietnam policies, he decided to “take it to the people.”

On Nov. 30, 1967, he announced that he would challenge Johnson in the presidential primaries. The rest is history.

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“We provided a way by which a moral judgment was passed on the war,” McCarthy said in an interview in the 1990s.

But reflecting his ambivalence about the results of his campaign, he added: “I sometimes think the war would have ended pretty much as it did if we hadn’t made the fight.”

After his defeat in 1968, McCarthy lost interest in the Senate. In 1970, he gave up his seat, making room for Humphrey’s return to the chamber.

He once said Humphrey was the only foe for whom he had any respect.

But McCarthy didn’t retire from politics or public life.

He continued to write books of political commentary – completing 14 – as well as five collections of poetry and numerous magazine articles and essays.

He made five more quixotic runs for president, often as a third-party candidate. But the political establishment and the news media didn’t take him seriously, and he got little notice.

He was frequently compared to the late Harold Stassen, another Minnesotan whose token campaigns invited ridicule. Like Stassen, McCarthy was a thinker, often out of step with his own party, who used his campaigns to raise issues and spark public debate.

St. Paul filmmaker Mike Hazard produced the film “I’m Sorry I Was Right” for McCarthy in 2001.

“He had a complex take on life – he could see shades of gray,” said Hazard. “He was standing up for all of us, and not at all shy about being called a liberal.”

Hazard made the documentary for McCarthy for the Center for International Education, a St. Paul nonprofit agency that produces films for public television.

“He’s a Renaissance man squared,” said Hazard. “He plays Mozart on the clarinet, writes poetry, he’s a medieval and ecclesiastical scholar, an economist and historian, a nature lover, gifted orator, baseball fan and much more.”

St. Paul poet Carol Connolly said several years ago that McCarthy used to joke that the “true reason he ran for president was to get his poetry read.”

Other poets took his work seriously. The late James Dickey, one of America’s most distinguished poets, said, “His poems will stand the test of time.”

And Minnesota’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Bly said: “I have always loved Gene McCarthy’s sly and musical poems, so lively and so generous to human foolishness.”

A complicated man, McCarthy may have been describing himself in his poem “Lament of an Aging Politician.” Referring to Greek plays in which the first act exposes a problem, the second complications and the third a resolution, he wrote:

I have left Act I, for the involution

And Act II. There, mired in

Complexity

I cannot write Act III.

Surviving McCarthy are daughters, Ellen and Margaret, son Michael and six grandchildren. McCarthy married his wife, Abigail, a writer and editor, in 1945.

He was preceded in death by one daughter, Mary, and his wife Abigail. They separated in 1969, but were never divorced.

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(Knight Ridder Newspapers correspondent Lee Egerstrom contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2005, St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.).

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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