Exit Eugene McCarthy

Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy left the Congress last week with his rather studied enigma intact. Hubert Humphrey will take his seat, and McCarthy will move his base of operations from the old Senate Office Building to the Carroll Arms Hotel across the street.

Visibly grayer, older and as sardonic as ever, McCarthy allows: "It won't make much difference. I can do everything from the Carroll Arms that I can do from the Senate building." He cannot even have a cocktail without making philosophical distinctions. Sitting recently in a Washington restaurant, he observed: "Gin damages the liver. Vodka affects the brain." Then, with a wink, he ordered a vodka martini.

He has spoken of working for political reforms and may yet command a fourth-party movement, even another and barely possible children's crusade. In any case he is not letting on about his specific intentions. He challenged Lyndon Johnson against all odds in the 1968 campaign--winning by losing and losing by winning, a perverse and somehow peculiarly American dance. He led some of the best of America to what seemed a last faith in the American political process and then, after Chicago, seemed to drop out. He is slipping off now into a sly oblivion, electric with possibility but somehow still wreathed in boredom.

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