Unforeseen Eugene

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He was laughed off as a windmill tilter, shrugged off as a lackluster campaigner, written off as a condescending cynic. But last week, when the votes in New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary were counted, Minnesota's Democratic Senator Eu gene J. McCarthy came off--to practically everyone's surprise--a hero. THE UNFORESEEN EUGENE, proclaimed a placard toted by one of his fans after the balloting, and that said it all.

McCarthy's entry into the primaries against an incumbent President was unforeseen. His appeal on the stump, despite a low-key approach, was unforeseen. Most unforeseen of all--by the pollsters, by newsmen and by a shaken

Lyndon Johnson--tfas his showing on election day. When McCarthy first ventured into New Hampshire, Democratic Governor John W. King, a Johnson loyalist, predicted that the President would "murder" him. Opinion samplers gave him 10% to 20%. Instead, he polled a stunning 42.2% of the Democratic vote to Johnson's 49.4%. With an addition al 5,511 Republican write-ins (McCarthy, astonishingly, ran third on the G.O.P. ticket), he trailed the President in the overall tally by a scant 230 votes, 29,021 to 28,791.

Galvanic Effect. Despite the fact that L.B.J. was a write-in candidate while his challenger's name was printed on the ballot, the narrowness of the President's lead amounted in all but figures to a victory for McCarthy. "I think I can get the nomination," the Senator said later. "I'm ahead now. There's no point in being anything but optimistic." His showing had a galvanic effect, particularly on the legions of enthusiastic students who poured into New Hampshire to help him (see box opposite). Outside his once moribund New York offices appeared a crude sign: WELL

DONE, CONQUERING HEROES! MCCARTHY v. NIXON IN NOVEMBER. In the Sen ate, Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield, who shares McCarthy's doubts about the war in Viet Nam, and several colleagues wore McCarthy buttons--but on the inside of their lapels.

And then Bobby Kennedy entered the picture. Would the appearance of so formidable a foe force McCarthy out of the running? "Look, what do I have to do to convince you that I have no intention of withdrawing?" he snapped at the question. "I have said at least 20 times: I don't have in mind becoming a dropout."

Man For All Seasons. The quiz afforded ample evidence that there is a broad and hitherto little-appreciated streak of steel in the man, just as his showing in New Hampshire called to mind the usually overlooked fact that in 20 years of electoral politics he has not yet lost a race. All of his previous contests, however, have been waged in his native Minnesota.

Son of an Irish-descended livestock dealer and a German-descended moth er, he was born 52 years ago next week in the farm hamlet of Watkins, Minn. (pop. 744). Gene whipped through St. John's prep school and university at Collegeville in a total of six years instead of eight, getting A's in everything but trigonometry, starring in hockey and baseball. One of the few mementos in his office is the bat that he used to win a Senate-House baseball game for the upper chamber with a home run. Another is a bas-relief plaque of St. Thomas More, the man who, for all seasons, is the Senator's hero.

McCarthy gulped deep draughts of liberal politics and theology from the Benedictines at St. John's, later returned to the order as a novice. After a year of isolation, he left the novitiate to marry Abigail Quigley, a handsome, brilliant girl from Wabasha, Minn., whom he met while teaching high school in North Dakota. She has since be come a leading advocate of ecumenism, is one of the two Catholics on the National Board of United Church Women.

McCarthy's Mavericks. McCarthy returned to the secular world during a time of political ferment in Minnesota. Hubert Humphrey, Orville Freeman and other liberal Democrats were engaged in a bitter struggle to coalesce the Democratic and Farmer-Labor parties and root out the Communists who infested both. McCarthy, then teaching sociology and economics at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, joined the struggle. By 1948 he had helped Humphrey's coalition take command of the new party, decided to run for Congress, went on to win the first of five terms.

In 1952, he had the temerity to debate his namesake, Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy, on a radio program. "The moderator told me that the only reason he asked me to oppose McCarthy was that he could not get anybody else," recalls Gene. When campaign time rolled around, the Minnesotan was smeared as a Communist by supporters of his opponent. Nevertheless, he won by 37,000 votes.

To combat the Republican-Southern Democratic coalition that flourished in the House in the mid-1950s, McCarthy formed a liberal discussion group that later evolved into a formal bloc. Reminiscent of a similar group founded in the 1930s by Texas Congressman Maury Maverick, it was tagged "McCarthy's Mavericks." After McCarthy went to the U.S. Senate in 1959, having ousted a two-term G.O.P. incumbent, the McMavericks evolved into the still-functioning Democratic Study Group.

Though the more baronial Senate sniffs at the feet-on-the-desk atmosphere of the House, McCarthy remained his old self, relaxed, languid, sardonic and urbane. Many of his colleagues, however, resented his occasionally professorial air. "He gives the impression that we aren't quite as smart as we ought to be," said one. He focused on a few major issues--taxation, agriculture and congressional overseeing of the Central Intelligence Agency--but no major bill bore his name.

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.

Finally, at the end of November, he took the plunge himself. The Administration, he told newsmen, evidently intended "to escalate and to intensify the war in Viet Nam," and showed no disposition "for a compromise or for a negotiated political settlement."

Courageous or Foolhardy? His colleagues did not exactly flock to his banner. Of 247 House Democrats, only one--California's Don Edwards--came to his support immediately. Despite the sizable dovecote in the upper chamber, not one Senator endorsed him; McCarthy was alone in the arena. He might well have recalled a fourth-grade treatise that his son Michael,* now 16, had written about the early Christian martyrs--from the viewpoint of the Colosseum lions. "Who was that we had for dinner?" asks the first lion.

"Christians," replies the second. "Well," muses the first, "I admire their courage, but I'm glad I'm a lion."

After his initial forays into New Hampshire, McCarthy seemed less courageous than foolhardy. His dry, scholarly addresses turned off audience after audience. He seemed impatient with the routine requirements of campaigning. In the midst of a handshaking session, he blurted, "This is sort of a strange ritual." Several 6 a.m. factory-gate tours were scrubbed because, he protested, "I'm not really a morning person." When former White House Speechwriter (for John F. Kennedy and Johnson) Richard Goodwin joined the entourage in February, he found that "there wasn't a single reporter, no speechwriter, no secretaries, not even a typewriter."

McCarthy was more interested in the issues than in the mechanics of the cam paign. At first there was only one theme --the war. He urged a bombing pause (except, possibly, against enemy supply lines), a halt to search-and-destroy operations, a pullback to populated enclaves and determined efforts to open negotiations. "I don't know how you negotiate this thing," he said candidly. "But the alternative is worse."

Later, McCarthy began exploring the whole galaxy of problems troubling the U.S., from the economy to the urban crisis. Said he: "The great issue in this contest between President Johnson and myself is not Viet Nam. It is not rising violence in the cities or rising prices. It is one of leadership and the direction of our nation."

Low Crouch. Slowly, his campaign gathered momentum. "You fight from a low crouch," he explained. "You wait for events." Sure enough, events began breaking his way: the Communists' bloody Tet offensive; rumors that upwards of 200,000 more U.S. troops would be sent to fight in the war; a new round of Viet Nam hearings in the Senate and talk of higher taxes.

The President's inept operatives also helped. Johnson "pledge cards," designed to ensure a big write-in, irked many voters. Capitalizing on the resentment, McCarthy posters proclaimed:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO SIGN ANYTHING TO VOTE FOR GENE MCCARTHY. As the balloting neared, L.B.J. loyalists began hitting below the belt, offending Hampshiremen's sense of fairness. When McCarthy supported "selective conscientious objection" to the draft, Senator Thomas Mclntyre described him as one who would "honor draft dodgers and deserters." Governor John King declared that any significant vote for McCarthy "would be greeted with cheers in Hanoi." Radio commercials at tacked "peace-at-any-price fuzzy thinkers who say 'Give up the goal, burn your draft card and surrender.' "

Gradually, McCarthy perked up as a campaigner, too. He even suggested that he play a few minutes of hockey for the cause (his supporters later distributed thousands of 70 auto windshield scrapers showing him on skates and saying "McCarthy Cuts the Ice"). Big names rallied to him. Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who as chairman of the Americans for Dem ocratic Action helped throw the group's endorsement to McCarthy, turned up. So did Poet Robert Lowell, who told listeners that the Republicans offered no alternative because "they cannot sink and they will not swim." Actors Robert Ryan and Tony Randall took to the stump, but Paul Newman's appearances had to be circumscribed for fear of a riot among Hampshirewomen.

Alienated & Uncommitted. And, of course, there were the kids. They came from as far south as the Carolinas and as far west as the Great Lakes. Not only the alienated but the merely uncommitted were drawn by McCarthy's antiwar stand and by a hope of revitalizing a political system that many had been at the brink of disavowing. "We're almost afraid to ask them what their intelligence quotients are," said McCarthy, "because they open with M.A.S and an I.Q. of 150 and go on from there." On the final weekend, his headquarters had to turn away 2,500 volunteers, including a group that was ready to charter a plane from California.

Thanks to the unpaid youths, McCarthy's staff was able to ring some 60,000 doorbells, reaching most of New Hampshire's 89,216 registered Democrats, and to mail out some 700,000 pieces of literature at a minimal expense. As it was, the campaign cost anywhere from $170,000 (McCarthy's figure) to $300,000 (the Administration's figure). Key moneymen: Dreyfus Fund President Howard Stein, who is said to have raised some $100,000; Arnold Hiatt, executive vice president of Boston's Green Shoe Manufacturing Co.; independently wealthy Harvard Social Scientist Martin Peretz; and San Francisco Heiress June Degnan.

"Anti" Votes. On election eve, Johnson Campaign Manager Bernard Boutin declared that anything under 40% of the vote would be a defeat for McCar thy--figuring that he had chosen an unattainable figure. He had not. The following night, an anguished Boutin sat in Johnson's Manchester headquarters, reluctant to put through the telephone call that White House Aide Marvin Watson was waiting for in Washington. The picture would improve, Boutin kept saying, as soon as the results came in from Berlin. McCarthy carried Berlin. By 10:40 p.m., one of the two bars that had been set up hours earlier in the Sheraton-Carpenter motel had to close, since the L.B.J. "victory" crowd had only 26 patrons.

In a record Democratic turnout, McCarthy outpolled Johnson in the state's 224 towns and in suburban areas, and showed surprising strength in a few cities. He carried Rochester, Concord and Portsmouth, did better than expected in Nashua, Keene and Dover.

He fared worst in the labordominated cities, such as Manchester, whose blue-collar French Canadian population gave the President a 4,000-vote margin--enough for victory--despite McCarthy's Catholicism. Because Johnson's operatives unaccountably allowed 45 candidates to run in the President's name for 24 convention slots, thereby splitting up one another's votes, McCarthy walked off with 20 of the delegates.

Was the vote a repudiation of the war? An NBC poll showed that more than half of the Democrats questioned were not aware of where McCarthy stood on Viet Nam. Clearly, the vote was as much anti-Johnson as antiwar.

Everybody a Winner. Whatever it was, it was flowing to McCarthy. Johnson tried to dismiss it as "insignificant." The New Hampshire primaries, the President scoffed on election night, "are the only races where anybody can run--and everybody can win. New Hampshire is the only place where candidates can claim 20% as a landslide, and 40% as a mandate and 60% as unanimous."

At McCarthy's headquarters in Manchester students shouted "On Wiscon sin!" as the candidate came in from a heavy snowfall. "I'm feeling somewhat better," beamed McCarthy. The youths began chanting: "Chicago, Chi-ca-go!" Said McCarthy: "If we come to Chicago with this strength, there will be no violence and no demonstrations, but a great victory celebration."

Of Wisconsin's April 2 primary, he declared: "I expect to win." Indeed, several factors will help him. It is a neighboring state, more than one-third Catholic, traditionally fertile ground for progressives (as well as isolationists). Both Wisconsin Senators and two of its three Democratic Representatives are on the fence and refuse to support the

President. Moreover, registered Republicans can cross over to vote for Mc Carthy in the Democratic column instead of writing his name in the Republican column, as they had to in New Hampshire. Said McCarthy's Wisconsin manager, Jay Sykes: "If we can't do 12% better than his vote in New Hampshire, we'd better quit." Initially, at least, New Hampshire also gave him a big boost in fund raising. "After what happened here," McCarthy said, "we'll be able to pay our hotel bill, I'm told."

Another Dog's Bone. Bobby Kennedy's entry had McCarthy supporters furious. Growled Actor Newman: "It's a shame Kennedy chose to take a free ride on McCarthy's back." Bobby was called a "claim jumper" and a "cow-bird." Said a student: "Hawks are bad enough. We don't need chickens." Commented New Hampshire Attorney Eugene S. Daniell Jr.: "It is something like trying to steal another dog's bone." Pulitzer-prizewinning Historian Barbara Tuchman (The Guns of August), whose daughter Jessica worked for McCarthy, fired off a telegram accusing Bobby of "cynicism and opportunism" and voicing "outrage" at "Kennedy's indecent rush to exploit another's efforts." One of the things that prompted Kennedy's belated decision to take on Johnson was the evidence that his "squealers and jumpers" were growing up and drifting away from him. Since 1964, at least 12.6 million Americans have reached voting age, and Bobby once laid claim to a large percentage of them. "Kennedy thinks that American youth belongs to him as the bequest of his brother," noted ardently pro-McCarthy Columnist Mary McGrory. "Seeing the romance flower between them and Mc Carthy, he moved with the ruthlessness of a Victorian father whose daughter has fallen in love with a dustman." McCarthy was not about to submit meekly. The morning after the election, he flew to Washington for a meeting with Bobby. Aboard the plane, he ran into Johnson Loyalist Tom McIntyre, and unleashed one of the sly barbs of which he is a master. "You shouldn't be traveling first class this morning, Senator," said McCarthy.

After 20 minutes with Kennedy, McCarthy emerged with another sardonic quip. "Now," he said, "at least three people in Washington are reconsidering their candidacy." Later, he urged Kennedy to "leave the primaries to me," hinted that at the convention "some kind of settlement" might be arranged. He also announced plans to enter two more primaries--in Indiana and South Dakota--in addition to those in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon and California.

Cluttered Track. Before Kennedy took the plunge, he sent Brother Teddy, the Senator from Massachusetts, winging out to Wisconsin to inform McCarthy. Teddy reached Green Bay's Northland Hotel shortly after midnight, spent three-quarters of an hour with a drowsy, just-awakened McCarthy. Said the Minnesotan afterward "It was hard ly worth the trip. It was a courtesy on his part and I appreciate the effort, but there was no offer of any concession from me."

Watching Bobby the following day on television, a tight-lipped McCarthy smiled only when Kennedy lauded his "remarkable victory" in New Hampshire. He stood firm on his own can didacy. "There's room for us both, yes," he said. "But it may clutter up the track a bit." For a while, he added, "I had begun to look as though I was the front runner, and I'm not sure I liked that. Now I am back in the race again, looking like a challenger, beset on both sides. I think it's a slight plus."

*Who calls himself "the family mute" because he alone declines to make speeches for Daddy. The other three McCarthy children: Ellen, 20, who graduates next year from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service; Mary, 18, who took leave from Radcliffe to campaign for her father; Margaret, 12, a seventh-grader in the Catholic Stone Ridge school in Maryland, whom McCarthy calls his "secret weapon." Says he: "I'm going to bring her on at the right time. She's been thinking and not saying very much."

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