McCarthy honored by Dayton, Harkin

12/14/2005

(AP)—Senators from Minnesota and Iowa paid tribute to the late Eugene J. McCarthy on Tuesday, recalling him as a genuine article who helped inspire young people to action.

Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., said McCarthy, the former U.S. senator and presidential candidate from Minnesota who died Saturday, once defined patriotism this way: “To serve one’s country not in submission, but to serve it in truth.”
“He used his pen and his tongue to speak his own truth, regardless of the political consequences,” Dayton said in a Senate speech. “In that respect, he was a true patriot.”

McCarthy, who was 89 when he died, was buried Tuesday in a private family service in Virginia. Family members said they plan memorial services for McCarthy next month in Washington and Minnesota.
On Tuesday, Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, compared McCarthy to Mark Twain.

“Like Mark Twain, he could say very succinctly what it would take others a paragraph to say,” Harkin said, adding that McCarthy “could puncture the inflated egos of pumped up politicians.”

Harkin recalled returning to the United States after serving in the Navy, convinced that the war in Vietnam was wrong.

“I was looking for someone to give me a voice,” Harkin said. “I was looking for someone out there who would stand up and take the lead on it. Gene McCarthy was the first politician that I ever met who was not afraid to say, ‘The emperor has no clothes.’ “

In the 1968 presidential race, McCarthy, then a senator, won 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary as an anti-war candidate, forcing President Lyndon B. Johnson to not seek re-election.

“He gave a lot of young people encouragement that they could change the system,” Harkin said.

Later, McCarthy would run against Dayton and Harkin. In 1982, he unsuccessfully challenged Dayton for the DFL Senate nomination, and a decade later, in his last campaign, he and Harkin sought the Democratic nomination for president.

In an interview, Dayton said he was surprised when McCarthy decided to take him on.

“I was sorry that he ran against me, because I had such high regard for him,” said Dayton, who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

“He was a former two-term United States senator, so I took him seriously.” Dayton won the nomination but lost the general election to GOP Sen. Dave Durenberger.

In the ‘82 primary, McCarthy called Dayton “the most under-prepared candidate ever endorsed by the DFL.”
But Dayton said he didn’t have any hard feelings, noting he wasn’t the only victim of McCarthy’s acerbic wit.

“We exchanged barbs, but it was a congenial race,” Dayton recalled.

Harkin, in his Senate speech, recalled McCarthy pulling him aside during the 1992 presidential campaign and asking him if he ever wondered why they still were in the race.

Answering his own question, McCarthy told Harkin they were there because the liberal position needed to be fought for, regardless of who the nominee was.

Former U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who died Saturday, will be honored with an Irish wake at 5 p.m. Sunday at Kieran’s Irish Pub, 330 Second Ave. S., in Minneapolis.

The event is being organized by Mike Hazard, who made a documentary about McCarthy. Among those expected to attend is writer Bill Holm.

Hazard’s film, “Eugene McCarthy: I’m Sorry I Was Right,’’ will be screened by Minnesota Film Arts at noon Saturday and Sunday at the Bell Auditorium, 10 Church St. S.E., in Minneapolis.

Those wishing to read more tributes to McCarthy can go online at the Web site of his alma mater, St. John’s University, http://www.csbsju.edu.