Democrats: Unforeseen Eugene

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To complaints that he is lazy, he points out that he has written four books since 1960 and averaged 125 major speeches a year outside the Senate. "Did they expect me to go to the Senate and do hand springs?" he asks. "To fulminate like Wayne Morse? Or to listen to the same speeches on the same issues?" He refuses to worry about roll-call votes "just to get on the record." And though he scorns fence-mending chores that can devour a Senator's time, Minnesotans don't seem to mind; they seek out Senator Walter Mondale or Congressman John Blatnik instead, and continue to vote for McCarthy.

Twice in recent years McCarthy found himself in the national limelight —and both times he came across as an engaging, articulate partisan in a losing cause.

The first time was at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 1960. There were those who thought he wanted the nomination for himself; though he vigorously denied it, he was credited with having said that he deserved to be President because "I am twice as liberal as Humphrey, twice as Catholic as Kennedy and twice as smart as [Senator Stuart] Symington." But at the convention, McCarthy, no fan either of the Kennedys, whom he accused of "lavishness and ruthlessness" in the primaries, or of Lyndon Johnson, rose to nominate a man who had no chance at all to win the nomination: Adlai E. Stevenson. "Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be called Democrats!" cried McCarthy. "Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party." It was an electrifying speech—and an entirely quixotic gesture.

The second time occurred in 1964, when Johnson dangled the vice-presidency before McCarthy (and Connecticut's Senator Thomas Dodd) before throwing it to Fellow Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey. Lyndon lavished praise on McCarthy, called him "the kind of man—as we say in the ranch country of Texas—who will go to the well with you." McCarthy went to the well with Lyndon—and got dunked.

The Wildest. Unlike many of his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was neither an outspoken critic nor an eloquent defender of Viet Nam policy until January 1966. Then he joined 14 other Senators in an appeal to the President to continue a pause in bombing raids against the North. Four days later, Johnson ended the 37-day pause, and by mid-1966 McCarthy had become an unremitting opponent of the war.

Last August, when Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach imprudently told the Foreign Relations Com mittee that Johnson did not need any congressional declaration to conduct the war, McCarthy stormed out of the hearing. "This is the wildest testimony I ever heard," he told a newsman in the corridor. "There is only one thing to do —take it to the country."

Two months later, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk suggested that U.S. policy in Viet Nam was a response to the threat of Communist China, McCarthy condemned him for injecting the "yellow peril" issue into the debate. "This was the point when I decided that someone had to challenge the Administration," he says. Nobody seemed anxious to undertake that chore.