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EUGENE MCCARTHY: Being war out of war, what are you going to do about peace? And I took that rather seriously. And I supported the various minor moves that were made.

It was like we write letters to the president, he wouldn't answer them. And people did talk to him like Dick Russell, Mike Mansfield. We knew that was happening and he wasn't responding.

Then in '67, we had a vote to repeal the Tonkin Gulf resolution. And the leadership tried to keep it from coming to a vote. But when it did, there were only five votes in favor of reviewing Vietnam.

And I concluded that the Senate wasn't going to do anything about it. They were going to avoid responsibility. And the only thing you could do-- was left to do was run against him. And that's what we did in '68.

You wouldn't recall, but I said, look, I'm not challenging Lyndon Johnson. I think he's been a pretty good president. But when he began to talk about not being the first president to lose a war, he was going to do anything and ask you for 250, 300, 500,000 troops. And the casualty rates were coming in and we knew they were not telling us the truth. The only way you could challenge was to do it by entering the primaries against Johnson.

GARY EICHTEN: And so run he did, managing to energize and mobilize legions of young people, many of whom had all but given up on the political system. It was billed as the outsider against the establishment. And in large measure, that's how it played out. This gentleman called in during a program in 1999. Chris, your question for Senator McCarthy?

CHRIS (ON PHONE): Hi, I'm a senior at University of Minnesota, Duluth, and I'm actually doing a special independent study class on the elections of 1968. And I just think that Mr. McCarthy is a fascinating individual. And I'd like to hear in his own words what it was like to go into New Hampshire with an overwhelming victory and have America's youth pretty much on his side? And I'd just like to hear a reflection of that.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, there are several things about it. One, they almost lost hope, the young people. And we gave them at least a faint hope by becoming the candidate, even though the prospects of victory were pretty limited.

Their feeling was that they didn't, until that time, even have a chance to react or to do anything. So by running as a candidate, why at least we gave them a campaign. It might be an action that failed, but it was not-- there was not the frustration of being precluded from any kind of political action. And the response was significant. I think that was-- if you're looking at the country and its potential responsiveness to problems, what happened in '68 is probably the most significant response that we've had in probably the history of the country.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator McCarthy's 1968 campaign generated lots of enthusiasm and lots of bitterness as well.

EARL (ON PHONE): Senator McCarthy, my name is Earl. I was combat in Vietnam. And I was very much-- I supported the war because we had troops involved there. Even though inside me, I was very much against it.

Compared to most of the people there, I was a very old man at 25. So I saw a lot of death and destruction in Vietnam. And when you ran in 1968, I was very angry at you.

And sometime later on from then, one time you were in an airport, and I saw you and I started staring you down. You didn't see me at first. I made you feel very uncomfortable. And I really would like to apologize to you for that.

I still think about this, and I have a lot of anger from Vietnam. I have a lot of anger at former President Johnson. I'm on a lot of medication and I've had some time to reflect my life. And I just wanted to say that to you personally.

GARY EICHTEN: That Vietnam vet who called in to talk with Senator McCarthy in 2000 was not the only Vietnam vet who was deeply affected by the McCarthy campaign. Senator McCarthy recalled an incident from 1968.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: One of the first that I noted particularly, it was either early '68 or late '67 in New Hampshire. And I'd spoken in a-- a young non-commissioned officer soldier came up and he gave me what I thought was a book. And I took it back to the motel or hotel and opened it. It was a case. It had his Medal of Valor in it.

And he said, I don't want this. He said, I wanted it in Vietnam, and I'm ashamed of what we're doing in Vietnam. The first real testimony I got against the war, and he was either enlisted or a draftee.

And the note was scratched out and words were misspelled and scratched out and rewritten. And it was his-- it was his Medal of Valor. And I said, well, this is enough almost to justify what we're doing. And this is comparable to what this young man said.

But I didn't blame them for questioning what we were doing because everybody was being misled. And McNamara was going over and coming back and offering optimistic returns. I think he went over about 10 times.

And I think what he told us 8 times out of 10 was either pure deception or it was that he was misreading what he was-- what he was observing. And we couldn't keep up with him in the Senate. Why it was too much to expect the public to-- or especially to expect men in the field to be prepared to challenge, as was obviously the case with this former Vietnam soldier.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator, why do you suppose it was that so much of the anger against the war ended up getting directed at the troops, the US troops who were sent over there to fight the war?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. Part of it was the people who were primarily responsible for running it were not accepting any responsibility. And part of our campaign was to really redirect criticism away from the troops who were, in a sense, innocent victims. Although they did some things that they shouldn't have done, but they were put in an impossible situation.

One of the worst things about the war was that we asked soldiers or sent them out to do things which they should have never been asked to do. And when the French were turning against the war, the officers in their military took the initiative. In our case, the officers didn't do it. The hard moral decisions were left to be made in the field by the soldiers and the people directing the war were excusing themselves. McNamara is a case in point.

GARY EICHTEN: The debate over the Vietnam War continues to this day. And we often talked with Senator McCarthy about why the US got involved in that war and why the US stayed involved. Something I've always wondered about, Senator, from your perspective, we all know that there were innumerable problems with the way the war turned out, the way it was conducted, the way it turned out. But in your mind, do you think we got involved there in the first place for noble reasons, or was the whole thing some kind of scam?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, they really weren't very noble. Our first involvement was under the Truman administration when we provided aid to the French to try to perpetuate their colonial system in Vietnam and Algeria. And all the other nations that held colonies gave them up after World War II, but the French tried to hold on. And we provided indirect aid to the French to pursue the war in Vietnam and the war in Algeria, which we shouldn't have done.

That was the Truman administration. And it was followed by Eisenhower who refused to send in bombers at the time of Dien Bien Phu, 1954, '56. Eisenhower could have said no. He said no to the bombers, but he put in 700 advisors. So we were militarily involved then.

Kennedy came on and sent in 17,000 special forces, which was the first commitment of real fighting men to the Vietnam War. He could have said no. You can move 700 people out in about two airplanes. But when you put 17,000 in, you have to stay or evacuate.

And Johnson came on and said he was just continuing what Kennedy had advanced and sent in-- eventually, he had over 500,000 people in Vietnam and a million or more committed to the war. So it got out of control until Nixon, when he sent the troops into Cambodia. He said he was just taking Johnson another step farther. There was no point at which any one of them who could have said no did say no.

It was an accretion and it was without responsibility. And I was at a program in Ann Arbor, Michigan for Gerry Ford, who was the first one to say no, and took the troops out, and proposed amnesty and pardoned Richard Nixon. In that short time he was president, he took care of a lot of things simply by saying no, which the others would refuse to do.

GARY EICHTEN: You were serving in the House and then in the Senate during the '50s and early part of the '60s, at any point along the way there as we were incrementally getting involved in Vietnam, was there any talk in Washington that, gosh, we were getting into something here that maybe we shouldn't be involved in? Or were people looking elsewhere?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, the numbers weren't so significant. It wasn't until Johnson came in and said, we're going to put in 160,000, and 250,000 and finally something over 500,000 that they got deeply concerned. And also, it developed that we begin to question the reports they were giving us.

The Tonkin Gulf resolution was passed on the basis of false information. The advancement of the war, the request for new troops was also advanced because they were not telling us the truth. And it wasn't just the government. The newspapers, the press, Washington Post and The New York Times we're almost house organs.

On the 17th of March in '68, The Times had a front page story about how two American companies had surrounded 128 Viet Cong and held them in a pincer movement while they were destroyed by helicopter fire. That was, in fact, the My Lai massacre, as it was reported by The New York Times when it occurred. A year and a half later, we discovered what really had happened.

But The Times had simply taken-- and The Post had taken the handouts from the Pentagon or from the State Department and reported it as a significant military victory with no reference to what actually happened at My Lai. So there was a whole pattern of deception really. The military sustained by the press.

And it was hard for Congress, too. We don't really have the machinery to check on something like a war. We have to depend on the reports the government puts out up to a certain extent. And that was allowed to run on.

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy was not elected president in 1968. He didn't even win his party's nomination. But he did change history.

SPEAKER 1: I just want to thank Eugene McCarthy. I don't know that anyone else has. If he never did anything else in his life, the fact that he shortened and helped to stop the Vietnamese conflict and saved thousands of Vietnamese and our men's lives is forever to his credit.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, thank you very much.

GARY EICHTEN: Are you comfortable being called a hero?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. I didn't think I was one. I think I was acting not just in my own capacity, but as any member of the Senate should have acted. That it was a projection of the Senate constitutional responsibility. And those of us against the war had tried to dissuade Johnson after he was re-elected and there was no response.

GARY EICHTEN: Former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy speaking on our Midday program, October 22, 1999. During this hour of Midday, we're featuring Eugene McCarthy in his own words, excerpts from his many appearances on this program over the years. Of course, Senator McCarthy died on Saturday. He was 89 years old.

McCarthy's political career peaked with that 1968 campaign. He ran several more times for president, both as a Democrat and an independent, but he never again had the kind of impact that he did in 1968. He also left the Senate choosing not to seek re-election. He told Midday listeners that he had simply burned too many bridges. Do you regret leaving the Senate in, I guess, 1971 was your last year in the Senate?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: No, I didn't. I was disappointed in the Senate. I thought the Senate should have acted more strongly against Vietnam as early as 1966. And that I would have had trouble getting re-elected anyway. Because before that campaign was over, we had antagonized the Kennedy forces, we'd antagonized the labor movement, we'd antagonized the Humphrey liberals and the Johnson Democrats.

It didn't leave you much of a base in the Democratic Party after. And we hadn't expected that to happen, not in the degree to which it had happened. And I felt that the Senate wouldn't respond to something which I thought was so obviously demanding of its response that one might as well be out of it and try to influence it by-- politics, by writing books and giving lectures.

GARY EICHTEN: McCarthy's 1968 campaign split the Minnesota DFL party right down the middle. On one side of the divide were the Minnesota supporters of favorite son, Eugene McCarthy. On the other side of the divide, the Minnesota supporters of favorite son and former Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey.

McCarthy was the brilliant, aloof, philosophical, anti-war candidate. Humphrey, LBJ's vice president, was the talkative, friendly, happy warrior branded as the establishment pro-war candidate. Humphrey beat McCarthy for the nomination and came within an eyelash of beating Richard Nixon in the 1968 general election. Some Minnesota Democrats still pin Humphrey's loss on McCarthy's peak.

SPEAKER 2: Given the closeness of the race in 1968, the fact that you withheld your support, public support for Hubert Humphrey until the night before the election.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, it was actually 10 days before, which is different from the night before. I don't think there was anyone who was waiting for me to endorse him that didn't know that I had endorsed him. And I haven't found anyone who said if I had endorsed Hubert earlier, they'd have been for him or if I had endorsed him more enthusiastically.

GARY EICHTEN: Don't you think it would have given his-- because he was trailing badly in the polls. He made a little rush right at the end.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Why I'll tell you what he had to do. I tell you what he had to do. He had either to come out against the war, which was very difficult for him, because he'd been for it. And we started our campaign not against Hubert Humphrey and not even against Lyndon Johnson, but against the war.

And so it was the same war after Johnson withdrew as it was when he was still in it. He just passed the burden of responsibility onto to Humphrey. And Humphrey, as I said, he couldn't repudiate the war. But he could have one or two occasions at the time-- we were waiting-- indicate that he was at least independent of the Johnson influence.

And we were almost ready to endorse him. In the middle of September, he made a speech indicating that he was thinking of some kind of troop withdrawals. He made it in Salt Lake City. And I think two days later, Johnson made him retract it.

It was a very modest statement. We said, that's all we need is a sign of independence from Johnson. And Humphrey withdrew his position from the position he'd taken. So we just were holding out to see whether we couldn't get some sign from him of an openness with reference to Vietnam policy. We weren't asking for very much.

So I don't feel-- the burden was really on the side of the Humphrey people to make some concession to it. After all, we beat him in every primary in which they faced us, whether it was me alone or Bobby Kennedy. And when that happens, it was what we set out to prove was that almost a majority, even if it wasn't a majority of the Democratic party, wanted some change in policy. And they refused to do it.

GARY EICHTEN: Many Minnesota Democrats, McCarthy's long-time political allies, essentially disowned him after 1968, but McCarthy never apologized. A documentary in 2001 about Eugene McCarthy was tellingly titled, I'm Sorry I was Right. We talked about that estrangement. Do you ever have any second thoughts about that? about running that campaign? It led to such a huge rift between you and your old buddies back here in Minnesota.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Personally, I just wouldn't-- you had no reason to have second thoughts because everything that's developed proved that we were right. And I hesitated about the title of the film, but we charged they were misrepresenting what was happening over there. And no one was taking responsibility. And we were asking soldiers in the field to make political, moral decisions which they shouldn't have been asked to do.

I think, Gary, when you have patriotism that's as strong as that of America, you have to be very careful not to exploit it. And the war in Vietnam was an exploitation of patriotism, asking soldiers to put aside their own moral judgments and just respond to either direct commands or commands that leave you only one option, which is killing people. And so I haven't had any second thoughts.

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy did not have any second thoughts about challenging Humphrey in 1968, but he was pleased that he and his old DFL buddy were able to bury the hatchet. Here's an excerpt from a Midday program in 1994. What with the contest with Humphrey, relations with the DFL party here in Minnesota have not been the best. DFL Party's 50 years old now. Have you been officially rehabilitated now?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: I haven't been. I was invited to speak to a subgroup here last week, but the main party hadn't had me, I was going to say, since '68. But they didn't even let me speak in '68 so I have to go back to '67.

And currently, the followers, Humphrey and I, we really never had even had to be reconciled because we knew what was involved. The last thing he said to me was about two weeks before he died. They had him out for some kind of fundraiser for his program here. And he said-- and the speeches where they didn't let me speak, they had a lot of bad speeches.

And he said-- Gene, he said, I wish we could have one more of those good nights. He said, you could give a few jokes and philosophy. And he said, I'd give the politics and the pep talk. He said the guest speaker would be afraid to come on.

[LAUGHS]

GARY EICHTEN: Former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. Senator McCarthy died on Saturday. During this hour of Midday, we are remembering all those times when he was our guest here on Midday. We're titling this hour, Eugene McCarthy in His Own Words.

Over the years, we talked a lot about the old days with Senator McCarthy, but he didn't live in the past. He was always very interested in current events. We talked about 9/11, for example, and whether it permanently had changed America, as some people claimed.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. They say things like that. And you say it often enough, it's accepted as being truthful.

I think the Americans responded as anyone would have expected them to. And they're still what they were before because they were solid persons before. To say there was this experience that all of a sudden we became responsible and we became patriotic is nonsense. The patriotism in America is so strong that a president has to be very careful not to exploit it.

GARY EICHTEN: In 2003, just a week after the war in Iraq began, Senator McCarthy took listener questions about that war.

SPEAKER 3; Yes, thank you, Senator, for sharing your insight here with us in Minnesota. There are many of us in the state that want to support this war. And we're dealing with trying to support it and then being very suspicious at the same time, particularly when we learn that the vice president's former oil company has received contracts for the oil wells in Southern Iraq. I'd like to hear your take on that. Thank you, sir.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, it's a curious thing. De Tocqueville talks about the problem of a democracy, saying we're fighting to establish it somewhere, but you destroy your own in the process. So what you're trying to do for other people, you undo in your own country or in your own laws. And I think that's essentially what we're caught in, in all of these new protective actions that are being taken.

And a thing like Cheney, I don't understand how it is tolerated. Because it's so clearly-- it seems to me, a conflict of interest that you treat the vice president differently from what way you treat other people. Or do you just continue to do what actually-- the Bush administration is sort of like an intruder. He doesn't care whether what he does is legal, or traditional or not. He just goes ahead and does it. And there's nothing you can do about it unless you call out the Air Force or the Army and they're busy.

And I don't know, half a dozen of our institutions have been, not destroyed, but undercut. The Supreme Court has been corrupted. The Army has been corrupted. The vice presidential office has been corrupted.

And Bush almost said, well, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to me? put me in jail? If not, you just go right ahead.

And as I said to Gary earlier, we were lucky in '68 because we had a presidential election where we could put the president to the test. There's no such opportunity now. And the administration and the attorney general seemed to say, well, we'll just run this the way we want to and you see what happens when the next election comes around. And the Cheney is-- the grossest example, I think, is Cheney. You really shouldn't have to give that much away of constitutional law and government just to get Cheney as vice president.

GARY EICHTEN: There was much more about the war in that day in 2003. I want to come back to this because the caller raised this earlier, in this particular instance, and we've heard this even from members of congress, many of whom voted against giving the president authority to use military force. They have argued that, well, we certainly do not agree with the president's policy.

We're not going to agree with it. We will criticize the president. But for the meanwhile, the war is underway. The troops are in the field and we should keep our mouth shut for a little while. And then let this get over with and then we can renew the debate.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, that was pretty much the same argument was being made in '68 and '67 and '61.

GARY EICHTEN: But at that time, there had been-- several years had rolled by. And presumably, you could have waited forever.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Yeah, that's right. Well, it's harder, I think, to do it in this year than it was in '68. And there's some justification for those arguments that are made.

But on the other hand, the same old language is coming around. You don't challenge the government when it's fighting a war. And these were all made in the Vietnam case.

Lyndon said, they cut and run. And Rusk said we were causing joy in Hanoi. And there was a shower of shells that you had to go through to run, but it's a slightly different war. But what we we're letting ourselves in for, I think, it's a clearer example of a war which is supported by the industrial military complex than even Vietnam was. And either you have to be ready to challenge it the minute it starts, or else to pick it up along the way or otherwise wait for another presidential election.

GARY EICHTEN: Jim, your question, please?

JIM: Thanks for the program, Senator McCarthy. I just wanted you to comment on what you think of the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, and I'll just listen off the air. Thank you, sir.

GARY EICHTEN: All right. Thanks, Jim.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I think it's unconstitutional, but it's the thing that happens every time you get into war. The constitutional protections all wither away pretty fast. But again, I do like to quote de Tocqueville because he thought about things in our Constitution that no one else has really talked about, and one of which was that in the name of protecting your liberties, you prejudice them and lose them.

And he said that what you get is a republic within the republic and it doesn't pay any attention to the Constitution. It says, look, we're in danger and so we change the law anyway we have to. And the citizens and the patriot-- the Patriot Act, just using the name is inexcusable because they're patriots on both sides. But to claim that your program is the patriotic program is indefensible, I think.

GARY EICHTEN: Former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy speaking on Midday in March of 2003, just a week after US troops invaded Iraq. Over the years, we talked about several other issues in the news, the US Supreme court, the presidential selection process and the Senate filibuster. I think the Senate ought to do away with the filibuster rule. We hear a fair amount about that given all the talk of gridlock.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, its-- it's the new filibuster rule. This is the reformed rule, which was a bad rule. The old one, I really held with slight modifications in the old rule, which was a very serious matter when you filibustered under the old rule. It was trial by ordeal, life or death. You really had to be prepared to suffer physical disorder if you started a filibuster and were serious about it.

And what they did in the reform was to allow the technical filibusters you have now where one guy, without suffering any distress, can filibuster and obstruct. And I'd rather have them go back to the old rule or else to modify this one significant because it's a bad rule. And of course, I don't say it's being abused. If you get a bad rule and use it, it's not abuse. They should have had sense enough not to pass it.

I'll give you an example of Lyndon. This was the way he operated. It has to do with the-- he was against changing the filibuster rule to keep it. And when circumstances are right, you can really always break the filibuster.

And it was early in '63 and some reason there were five of us in his office, Senator Humphrey, and I, and Senator Muskie and two senators from Michigan. And Johnson said we should have a civil rights fight right now. Apparently, the Kennedy administration had decided to finesse it through the '64 election before we'd have a legislative showdown.

And Johnson said we ought to do it right now. He said, we have the strength to do it. And he started down the list of anti-civil rights senators, the Southerners. And I don't remember just what illness went with each senator, but he had a medical judgment on every one of them.

[LAUGHS]

And he said, Harry Byrd just got out of the hospital. He was from Virginia. And he said, Ellender is in the hospital. He said, Dick Russell of Georgia thinks he's got cancer of the throat. Somebody had diabetes and somebody had high blood pressure.

And he said there are only two anti-civil rights senators who are able-bodied. And he said we could break them down in two weeks with a filibuster. And that's a short filibuster. And Lyndon, that's the kind of thing he was good at. He'd size up a situation even if it meant killing a couple of them.

[LAUGHS]

He said, hit them. Hit him while they're weak. And that was it. He was pretty ruthless when he-- he said we got to do it sometime, we might as well do it when they're weak instead of doing it when they're strong.

GARY EICHTEN: Cull the weak ones from the herd.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Yeah, run them out. That's right.

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy took his battle over campaign finance laws all the way to the US Supreme Court, in the process, solidifying his reputation as a maverick politician who defied stereotypes. McCarthy was a liberal, but he was not a supporter of the campaign finance reform laws so popular with liberals after Watergate. It was a theme that came up over and over, over the years. Senator, you've spoken frequently about your disdain really for these campaign finance reform proposals. But the people who advocate it say that what we've got now is nothing more than legalized bribery.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. Common Cause started this movement about 1970. And they were looking at congresses that I'd been a member of and there was no real corruption. These were the-- they didn't point out any corruption. They just said money corrupts and contributions were pretty minimal then.

And the Congress supposedly were the basis for their moving on corruption had passed the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights, and minimum wage and half a dozen other issues which were fundamental issues. And they made no distinction. They just said, you're corrupt, the Congress is corrupt and they're corrupted by money.

I've looked at what I think is a real corruption in presidents, especially of presidential candidates, is not money. It's power. Richard Nixon didn't want money. He wanted power.

And Lyndon Johnson didn't want power unless it would make a reputation for him. So the classical temptations are much more serious than the temptation to be answered by large contributions. The record didn't show it. And they just harp on that it's not enough, not enough.

And you never can say that there's no corruption. You can always hear a whispering sound. It's Kafka stuff. You hear the scratching sound saying there's corruption out there. And I think Common Cause has done as much harm to American politics and legislative history as any force in the country.

GARY EICHTEN: You think people who aren't rich or aren't beholden to wealthy special interests still have an opportunity to advance in politics?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, yes. And you just-- if it affects freedom of speech, it drops the curtain on you. You got to take a chance on it.

And the record isn't even good. The big contributors for the most part have been supporting lost causes. The American Revolution wasn't fought with matching funds.

We didn't say to George, we got a little action going here. You want to match the money and make a contribution? The abolition movement was financed by large contributions.

My campaign in '68, it wasn't a whole lot of money, but they were big, big contributions by standards of Common Cause. We couldn't have done it if we'd had the federal election law in effect in 1968. But the record just doesn't sustain what Common Cause charges.

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy from a Midday program in 2001. Senator McCarthy died on Saturday. Today, we are remembering him in his own words.

Gene McCarthy cut a wide swath through the world of politics, no doubt about it. But he was much more than just a politician. Among other things, he was a well-known, widely-respected poet and lover of language.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: The good thing about poets, once you're declared one. And to get that, you have to get three established poets to say you're a poet. It's like being installed as an Episcopal bishop.

[LAUGHS]

So then you're a poet forever. And you can't be a former poet, which is a good place of retreat. You can be a former politician, and a former senator and former a lot of things, but you can't be a former poet. So you're always a threat.

GARY EICHTEN: Can you declare yourself a poet or does somebody else have to bestow them on you?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: You can't really do it yourself. Some people do. But as I've worked out the rules, you have to get three people at least, who are established as poets, to say you're a poet, like the bishop thing.

And I was lucky I had Robert Lowell, who campaigned with me in '68, said I was a poet. So then almost other poets, lesser poets, rushed to say that I was a poet because Lowell had said I was a poet. It's like the pope. So I've been a poet since.

But I've never lent my name to a trio approving someone else. I don't think I'm quite ready for that. I was asked to do it for Jimmy Carter, but I said I didn't think I would.

GARY EICHTEN: On the face of it, it doesn't seem like poetry and politics have a lot in common with each other. They seem to be different tracks. Are they more similar than they appear to be?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, in the United states, poets haven't received much political recognition. But in the Irish tradition, you practically had to be a poet before you could be a politician. So you had a lot of bad politicians and a lot of bad poetry.

[LAUGHS]

But the principle was established. There was no contradiction there. And actually, in some of the European countries like France, not necessarily poets, but they have people who are academics and literary people.

But our tradition is pretty much one of prose. And it isn't just a question of poetry-- I'm going to talk about that-- but our politics is pretty much without images or metaphors. And you really can't have good politics unless there are some images and metaphors that people can look to. You can't run a government on adjectives.

And I'm going to talk about language as well as about poetry. But I say about Senator Humphrey that he got into trouble because he would say things in such a manner that people remembered he'd said it. Whereas, a lot of poets-- or a lot of politicians can talk on it. You don't know who said it after about a year, for example.

GARY EICHTEN: So the good turn of the phrase can get you in big trouble?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: You can really die for a metaphor, but not for an adjective.

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy had a great sense of humor. In 1997, he talked about politicians and their role in helping the victims of natural disasters. Does it serve a useful function to have a lot of politicians out looking at flood damage? We have quite a group coming around these days, of course, you might imagine.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Yeah, well, I was looking at some of the pictures. And I don't know whether the people expect it, but the practice is pretty well established. If there's a disaster, the politician, the senator has to go out and look at it, or at least the remains.

And I didn't mind going out to look at what was left after a tornado because you could act as though if you'd been there, you could have stopped the wind. But when you go to look at a flood, it's going on by, and you say, god, there goes my pig. And you say I should jump in and save it.

So we had a picture here of a flood one year and it was a very sad picture. Rolvaag was the governor and Estes Kefauver was running for president. And I was there and I think Hubert was there.

And the four of us were standing on the bank. And the stuff was going by us and we looked very sad. It was raining. So I usually try to stay away from the flood observation.

[LAUGHS]

I'll see how Gore does. I think he's coming out to look at the water and we'll see what happened. But it's a high-risk appearance to come to look at a flood.

GARY EICHTEN: Politics, poetry and sports. Eugene McCarthy was a very good athlete. He played on St. John's University's national championship hockey team, and he was a good player on the Watkins, Minnesota Baseball team. He was not, however, all that big of a football fan.

SPEAKER 4: The question I want to ask is about athletes and spectators. And I'd read about in an article either written by you or about you, it was about-- I think it's your opinion of baseball spectators. I know you like baseball so maybe it wasn't that specific. But maybe it was just sports in general. And you said you have to be smart enough to understand what's going on and dumb enough to think it's important.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: That was football.

SPEAKER 4: It was football. Thank you. I wanted to straighten up because I like it.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: No, baseball is different.

SPEAKER 4: I use that quite often. I like that.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: It was pretty good. I think what I said was the politicians were like football coaches. The best ones were smart enough to understand the game, but not smart enough to lose interest. So baseball, I have different respectful judgments.

GARY EICHTEN: Well, you were a very good player, amateur player.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Within my limits.

GARY EICHTEN: Amateur player. Now, if he would have had your druthers, if he would have had more talent, would you rather have been a big league ballplayer or the politician that you became?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I don't know. I would have considered the baseball before I thought anything about politics.

GARY EICHTEN: Could have done both, you think?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Could have done both, yeah.

GARY EICHTEN: Couldn't hit the curveball? Was that your problem?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I could hit it, but I hit the ball pretty hard. But my batting average left something to be desired, both on fastballs and curveballs.

[LAUGHS]

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy in his own words. Senator McCarthy died on Saturday. Now, before we wrap up today, we have a few more excerpts from Senator McCarthy's midday appearances.

Here's a segment from his last appearance in 2003 when we talked about religion and politics. It seems to be a fissure among Democrats as to whether or not to stake out a real liberal position, if you will, or more of a moderate position. Do you see it breaking down that way for Democrats?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: I don't think they're putting it in any kind of context, either of history or of intellectual judgment on the war or on the role of America. And until they do that, what you're going to have is just catch us, can't catch such as what we have now day to day, and faith-related politics, and faith-related religion and faith-related social welfare programs. And the attorney general, who's the chief apostle of conservatism, which is now presented almost as a religion, we had the same thing in the '52 election when Eisenhower ran.

They said that the Democrats were agents of the devil. And they were fighting against the Crusader, and against God, and put the change of Pledge of Allegiance and had required the money to carry "In God We Trust." It was a God thing in the post office too that promised better delivery.

[LAUGHS]

But it prevented the whole campaign. They had a God float. They put a God float in the inaugural parade. And we said, we figured when they said in God we trust on the money, that it was not a vote of confidence in George Humphrey, who was the secretary of the treasury. And it just got everything confused.

And same thing is shaping up now. Even an element of religion with reference to nuclear weapons. Bhutto, the president of Pakistan 25 years ago, I guess it was, said Pakistan had to have a nuclear bomb because Islam at that time was the only religion that didn't have a bomb. All they had was Allah.

So the Christians had lots of bombs. The Israelites had Jehovah and they had nuclear bombs. And the Hindus had a bomb and the Buddhists had a bomb.

Buddhists had a bomb, but they didn't have a missile, which was representative of their religion was one of intensity. You didn't need a deliverer, you just be. And this has all come feeding back into the politics of our time. And I don't think the Democrats are making the distinctions they ought to.

GARY EICHTEN: We said earlier that Senator McCarthy was a lover of language. Well, in several programs, we talked about the intersection of language and politics.

SPEAKER 5: Senator, for over 20 years, the word liberal in the United States has been held in contempt. In your opinion, what will it take for the word liberal to be politically favorable again?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, I think there's kind of a vacuum now. It could be brought back. The campaign with Dukakis, why the liberals rejected liberalism. It took about 20 years for it.

It was a good word when I first ran for Congress in '48. And it was still all right in 58. But progressively, it deteriorated.

And it was a good adjective. The problem is you should never make an adjective into a noun. If you do, it's subject to all kinds of attack. And that's what happened.

Liberal was a good adjective back in '48. You could be a liberal Democrat, or a liberal Republican, a liberal Presbyterian, a liberal, whatever. But eventually, it became a pure liberal, just a liberal.

There was a woman in Wisconsin who wrote a poem we derived from. It was a little bit like what happened to the goat. She said the goat was a useful animal at one time, milk, and pulling carts, and hides and stuff.

But progressively it worked its way up and finally it became a deity. And then people began to attack the goat and it became reduced to presiding over lower-order religious ceremonies. Eventually, it became the person responsible for losing the ballgame and eating tin cans and all that stuff.

And the same thing happened to the word liberal. Once it became a noun, they began quoting, well, I'm not a liberal. I'm an old fashioned liberal-- And conservatives like Buckley said, egghead liberal until even the liberals began to apologize for the word.

And I said in this speech-- it was the editor of the National Review. He was saying about what kind of a conservative he was. He wasn't a traditional one and he wasn't a new liberal.

And he said, what kind of a-- a new conservative. And he said, what kind of a liberal are you? he said to me. I said, I'm a neo. But I'm not a neoliberal, I'm a pure neo.

I said, what you've done to the word liberal, I think we ought to retire it for seven years. And everybody who wants a position to hide can be a neo for seven years. And then you can come back and be a liberal neo if you want to be.

But the word has been disgraced. And I think it's time for it to come back. There are few people who are saying they're liberals now. And I think there's a readiness for it.

GARY EICHTEN: Eugene McCarthy changed history. True, he did not succeed in ending the Vietnam war, but he did mobilize and inspire a generation of Americans who cleaned up for Gene. And he did much more during his years in Congress and after he left Congress.

In 1997, we asked him about his role in history. Senator, does it ever bother you that so many people, about the only thing they know about you is the fact that you ran for president on the anti-war platform? Because you, of course, you were in politics long before 1968. You've been active in many, many things since 1968. But for a lot of people, that's the one thing they know about you.

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Well, it's the one thing they remember. I think that's part of it. It was an overwhelming act and that the reputation that was building before that was pretty well overcome.

Beyond that, I just blame it on the press for not having appreciated what I was doing. But I don't want to-- I didn't really choose this title for this documentary, I'm Sorry I was Right. But I had done in the House of Representatives pretty much what Gingrich had done with his contract. It was not as flamboyant.

But in '57 we put out-- John Blatnik and I and a few others put out something called the liberal manifesto, in which we laid out a program of legislative action for the Democrats because they were drifting along, getting along with Eisenhower and so on. And it really established the basic platform that the Democrats pursued through the 1960s. And it's fair to say that the initiative was principally mine.

And there were half a dozen other legislative matters in which I provided significant leadership. In the critical areas, I did two or three things that tried to stem the tide of McCarthyism and the anti-communism. In fact, a campaign against me here in 1952, the whole issue was that I was soft on communism and the dupe of communists, which was insulting. I didn't mind if they'd called me one, but to say I was a dupe was pretty offensive.

[LAUGHS]

That I thought was a significant effort. We weren't very successful. But it was difficult to do it because the academic community was hiding on the communist thing. They were informing on each other, and covering up and making excuses.

And the press, I talk about The Times particularly and the Washington Post, headlined almost every charge that Joe McCarthy made, whether it was accurate or not. Until he was wounded, then they came into the battle and shot the wounded man and said, look at us, we finished the fight. But they weren't there when the going was tough.

The same thing was true of the war in Vietnam. And I suppose since that time, the most significant effort I've been making was first of all, to carry the Federal Election Act as far as the Supreme Court in 1975 and '76 with other people. We really predicted all the complications and difficulties they're having with the electoral process now is almost certain to follow if the federal election law was passed.

GARY EICHTEN: Former Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, a frequent and favorite guest here on our Midday program. He was a terrific public servant, a terrific American, and a heck of a nice guy. Senator McCarthy died on Saturday. He was 89 years old. A memorial service for Senator Eugene McCarthy will be held at Saint John's University next month.

I'm Gary Eichten. Thanks for tuning in. If you had to pick one thing, what would you be most proud of in your public life?

EUGENE MCCARTHY: Oh, I don't know. I think I did what I should have done in the case of Vietnam. I was, I guess, primarily responsible for the extension of Medicare, Medicaid to mental illness, which was being left out until we took it up. And I would generalize that I was pretty consistent in trying to make application of constitutional rules to every procedure in the Senate and the House, but especially in the Senate.

And the Vietnam challenge stands out, but we did other things. It was a pretty good record.

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For which it stands Vote for Gene McCarthy and bring peace to this our land if you love your country.

GARY EICHTEN: That does it for our midday program today. Gary Eichten here again. Thanks for tuning in. We'd like to remind you today's programming is sponsored in part by Identification Services, whose employees wish everybody a happy holiday season.