Eugene McCarthy, the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, was born on March 29, 1916, in the small town of Watkins, Minnesota. He took degrees from St. John's University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a teacher. After a stint as a civilian War Department employee during World War II, he became a college economics and sociology professor.
McCarthy served 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives after winning election in 1948, then two terms in the Senate, elected in both 1958 and 1964. As a Congressman, McCarthy supported the U.S. intervention in favor of South Korea during the 1950-53 Korean Conflict, but he came out as an opponent of the Vietnam War.
In 1968, he threw his hat into the ring in the New Hampshire presidential primary as an anti-war candidate, opposing sitting President Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination. He stunned the nation and changed political history when he won the primary, racking up 42% of the vote. A humiliated Johnson soon withdrew from the race, leaving the field open.
A well-educated person, McCarthy was an extremely erudite individual, and he attracted support from not only anti-war youth but from intellectuals, and many celebrities, including movie superstar Paul Newman, who had actively campaigned for McCarthy in New Hampshire. McCarthy's chances at the presidency were diminished, however, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy came out against the war and joined the field.
Despite being denounced by many as an opportunist, Kennedy was an attractive candidate and represented the legacy of Camelot, his late brother John F. Kennedy's presidency. Some McCarthy supporters, like Richard Goodwin, defected to Kennedy. RFK was despised by Lyndon Johnson, and the president threw his support to his Vice-President and McCarthy's fellow Minnesotan, Hubert H. Humphrey, a mixed blessing at best as Humphrey, a noted liberal, was left with the job of defending Johnson's war in Vietnam.
Despite Johnson's support of Humphrey, the race initially evolved into a contest between the two Irish Catholic anti-war candidates, McCarthy and Kennedy, a struggle that was terminated by RFK's assassination.
Humphrey, with the backing of Establishment Democrats, won the Democratc nomination at the Chicago convention, which was the scene of what was later termed a "police riot" by Democratic mayor Richard M. Daley's law enforcement operations targeting the army of anti-war protesters that had descended on the City of Broad Shoulders and hard police batons.
The debacle was symbolic of the wider conflict between idealistic youth and other anti-establishment elements and the old guard of machine politicians and entrenched, pro-war government hacks that tore apart the party created by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.
Norman Mailer, in his book about the party conventions "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", said that during the mêlées that took place between protesters and police in Chicago, McCarthy worried that Daley might have his children imprisoned, beaten or murdered.
