Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers

Garth Brooks was first up on the radio programme after the news bulletin this weekend announcing the death of US Senator Eugene McCarthy.

“Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers,” Brooks warbled.

As an epitaph for McCarthy, it couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Because, even more than that other chronic presidential candidate, Ralph Nadar, Eugene McCarthy was that most fascinating of political figures, the hook on which a generation hangs its hopes. What’s frightening, in retrospect, is how disastrous a US president he would have made.

McCarthy was a devout Catholic and Democrat from Minnesota who became a Professor of Economics at a non-Ivy League university and a senator. Had the Vietnam war not coincided with his 50s, he might have moved into retirement as an intellectual on the fringes of politics.

Instead, he cost a president his job.

The President was Lyndon Johnson, who had succeeded John F. Kennedy when the latter was assassinated and who had become the focus of national hatred because of the war in Vietnam. Johnson was a Democrat, but he was not a Democrat for the younger, East Coast generation of Democrats, who saw him as an obstinate manipulative redneck who used agricultural analogies and thought it amusing to lift his dogs up by their ears.

McCarthy, in part, ironically, because he had never set out to end poverty and discrimination right across America, was the Democrat for that substantial tranche of dissatisfied young Democrats. McCarthy was in the Adlai Stevenson tradition of pre-TV politics. He was intellectual, witty and self-deprecatory, describing himself as “kind of an accidental instrument, really, through which I hope the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed”.

1968 was the year when he first became a threat to the incumbent, entering the early primaries to try to roll back the Johnson administration’s determination to bring the Vietnam war to a conclusion in its own time. He was the right man in the right place at the right time. Or perhaps he was just THE ONLY man in the right place at the right time, because, trawling through the memoirs of the generation who cut their teeth on politics through involvement in his campaign, it’s clear that most of them had huge doubts about him from the very start but saw him as the political personification of the anti-war movement.

He was ironic and self-deprecating on the one hand, but prickly and self-righteous on the other. He attracted the dissidents, but never managed to sum up in words precisely why they should stay with him. He once observed that it’s dangerous for a national candidate to say things people might remember and kept pretty closely to that rule himself.

Which does illustrate an under-examined aspect of political leadership.

Sometimes, as in McCarthy’s case, all the times require is “conduit” leadership. Conduit leadership happens when dissidents are on the loose in such numbers that all that is required is the creation of a conduit through which their commitment can find expression. McCarthy was that conduit.

In a sense, the “followers” of Eugene McCarthy were actually the leaders.

It was not McCarthy who pointed out to thousands of willing volunteers covered in hair, flowers and marijuana from the hippie generation that their presence in his campaign might do him more harm than good, bearing in mind the importance of first impressions.

The volunteers (including a bespectacled big brain named Hillary Rodham, later Clinton) worked it out for themselves that voters do not vote for people who look weird or are supported by those who look weird. So the “Clean for Gene” campaign started. If you wanted to volunteer for McCarthy - and in 1968, every young Democrat who wanted to avoid the draft or remove Johnson, did want to volunteer for McCarthy - then the guys needed to shave, cut their hair and get into suits, and the girls needed to avoid looking as if they lived in a hippie commune.

They scrubbed up well and their well-informed idealism created a wave of support around McCarthy so strong as to compensate for his deficits. One of those deficits was an old-politician’s cynicism which slid out occasionally.

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game. And dumb enough to think it’s important,” was one of McCarthy’s less inspirational observations. His followers glossed over that kind of comment at the time, just as they ignored a key theme in his mindset, which was that the greatest enemy of liberty is bureaucracy. Instead, they focused on the fact that he wrote poetry and talked theology, turning a somewhat ambivalent figure into a clear-cut hero stuffed with their own hopes and dreams. For one brief shining moment - or at least for one brief shining year - the brightest and best in the US saw in him the great possibilities of the American Dream, and drove him to a success he could never have achieved at any other point in modern history.

When McCarthy won in the early primaries, Johnson knew his goose was cooked, and announced that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination for election. McCarthy was widely seen as the man who had brought down a president. Logically, the end result should have been President Eugene McCarthy as America entered the 1970s.

It didn’t happen. Bobby Kennedy entered the presidential race and, having split the protest vote, was assassinated. To his last days, McCarthy could not bring himself to admire the dead man. He had contempt for the Kennedys - Jack Kennedy was just about bearable, Teddy did no harm except to himself, but Bobby was venal and dangerous.

Instead of harnessing the energies that had gathered around him, McCarthy opted instead for the Nadar role: unappreciated prophet. He outraged Democrats by supporting Ronald Reagan’s candidacy, and irritated many who had once adored him by becoming a chronic and hopeless presidential candidate, running decade after decade for no good reason other than the chance to revive a now-shadowy memory.

One of his good friends, this weekend, described him as a man who needed to reject and be rejected.

The need to be rejected, the need to be victimised by an unappreciative nation, is a deadly disqualifier for high office. Many cleaned-up hippies who supported Eugene McCarthy in 1968 now resignedly acknowledge their nation was perhaps equally served by his initial success and eventual defeat.

And that’s why Garth Brooks’ song is unexpectedly apposite: “Sometimes we thank God for unanswered prayers.”