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Eugene Joseph McCarthy was born on March 29, 1916 in Watkins, Minnesota. He came from a deeply religious Irish-Catholic family, one of four children. McCarthy was described as a bright student who read the classics. He considered joining the priesthood and spent nine months as a novice before leaving the monastery. When he left, one of his fellow novices quipped, "It was like losing a 20-game winner." McCarthy graduated from Saint John's Preparatory School in 1932 and from Saint John's University in 1935. He earned his master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1939 and taught in public schools in Minnesota and North Dakota from 1935 to 1940, when he became a professor of economics and education at Saint John's University. He taught there from 1940 to 1943. During the war McCarthy was a civilian technical assistant in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department and after the war he became an instructor in sociology and economics at the College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota from 1946 to 1949.
McCarthy joined the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and in 1948 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, representing Minnesota's 4th congressional district, serving in the House until 1959. In 1952 he engaged Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (no relation) in a nationally televised debate in which he used the Senator's arguments to facetiously argue that General Douglas MacArthur was a communist pawn. In 1958 he won election to the U.S. Senate.
While in the Senate McCarthy served as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. In 1960 he supported twice-defeated Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic nomination. During the campaign he was quoted as saying "I'm twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey, twice as intelligent as Stuart Symington, and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy." He was briefly considered as a possible running mate for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In 1965 he was one of the co-sponsors of the Immigration Act of 1965. He met with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in New York City in 1964 to discuss repairing relations between the US and Cuba.
In 1967 Allard K. Lowenstein, leader of the anti-Vietnam War Dump Johnson movement, recruited McCarthy to run against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. Lowenstein first tried to recruit Robert F. Kennedy, and then Senator George McGovern, but both declined to run against Johnson. When McCarthy entered the race and almost defeated Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, he became a catalyst for anti-war Democrats. College students and other activists opposed to the war from across the country came to New Hampshire to support McCarthy's campaign. Those with long-hair were convinced to change to a more clean-cut appearance in order to campaign for McCarthy. This led to the informal slogan "Get clean for Gene".
McCarthy had declared his candidacy on November 30, 1967. He said "I am concerned that the Administration seems to have set no limit to the price it is willing to pay for a military victory." At first he was given little chance of making any impact against Johnson in the primaries. Following the Tet Offensive, when the communist Vietnamese forces inflicted significant losses on the South Vietnamese, many Democrats grow disillusioned with the war. When McCarthy received 42% of the vote in New Hampshire, second to Johnson's 49%, it became clear that the war issue was creating divisions within the Democratic party. Just four years after winning the highest percentage of the popular vote in modern history, Johnson's popularity had plummeted.
On March 16 Robert Kennedy announced that he too would run for President. Many Democrats saw Kennedy as a stronger candidate than McCarthy. The folk trio Peter Paul and Mary released a record "Eugene McCarthy For President (If You Love Your Country)" endorsing McCarthy. On March 31, in a surprise move, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.
McCarthy won the Wisconsin primary, where the Kennedy campaign was still getting organized. He also won the Oregon Primary, despite facing a well-organized Kennedy campaign. The two fought intensely in a series of races that made a later reconciliation of the two camps difficult.
One humorous moment during the campaign occurred when Michigan governor George Romney made a controversial comment that he had been "brainwashed" about the Vietnam War by some of the generals. This ended Romney's presidential hopes. Asked for comment about this, McCarthy remarked, "I think in that case a light rinse would have been sufficient."
When Kennedy joined the race, many of McCarthy's supporters jumped ship to join the Kennedy campaign, urging McCarthy to drop out and support Kennedy for the nomination. McCarthy resented the fact that Kennedy had refused to do what McCarthy called the "dirty work" of challenging Johnson, but only entered the race once it became apparent that the President was vulnerable.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with the support of labor unions and the party establishment. He entered the race too late to enter any primaries, but many convention delegates were selected by old style party bosses and many of them backed Humphrey. Kennedy and McCarthy planned to win the nomination through popular support in the primaries. They squared off in California, each looking at the state as being one which would decide the contest. At first Kennedy refused to debate McCarthy, but when the two finally participated in a televised debate, undecided voters appeared to favor Kennedy, especially after McCarthy made two gaffes. He said that he would accept a coalition government including Communists in Saigon. He also said that the relocation of inner-city African-Americans would solve the urban problem. Kennedy used these remarks to portray McCarthy as soft on communism, and as planning bus tens of thousands of ghetto residents into conservative Orange County.
Kennedy won the crucial California primary on June 4. But he was assassinated after his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Even after Kennedy supporters were left leaderless, McCarthy was unable to garner their support. Despite strong showings in several primaries, McCarthy received the support of only 23 percent of the delegates at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Many Kennedy supporters chose to vote for George McGovern rather than McCarthy.
McCarthy was slow to endorse Hubert Humphrey in the general election campaign. The anti-war "New Party" ran several candidates for President that year, and listed McCarthy as their nominee on the ballot in Arizona, where he received 2,751 votes. He also received 20,721 votes as a write-in candidate in California.
Following the 1968 election, McCarthy returned to the Senate, but announced that he would not be running for reelection in 1970. He declined to take a leadership role in Congress against the war. McCarthy returned to politics as a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1972, but he fared poorly in New Hampshire and Wisconsin and soon dropped out.
After the 1972 campaign, he left the Democratic Party, and ran as an Independent candidate for President in the 1976 election. During the campaign, he promised to create full employment by shortening the work week, and came out in favor of nuclear disarmament. He appeared on the ballot in 30 states. Nationally McCarthy received 740,460 votes for 0.91% of the total vote finishing third in the election. His best showing came in Oregon where he received 40,207 votes for 3.90% of the vote.
In 1980, McCarthy campaigned against incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter, calling Carter "the worst president we ever had". He appeared in a campaign ad for Libertarian candidate Ed Clark, and eventually endorsed Ronald Reagan for the presidency, as a Reagan Democrat. In 1982, he ran for the Senate but lost the Democratic primary to businessman Mark Dayton. In the 1988 election, his name appeared on the ballot as the Presidential candidate of a handful of left-wing state parties. He received 30,905 votes. In 1992, returning to the Democratic Party, he entered the New Hampshire primary and campaigned for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He received 108,679 votes in the primaries, with his best showing being 4% of the vote in Louisiana.
McCarthy died of complications from Parkinson's disease at the age of 89 on December 10, 2005, in a retirement home in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. His eulogy was given by former President Bill Clinton.