Former Senator Eugene McCarthy, 89
Posted: Saturday, December 10th, 2005 5:06 pm
Eugene J. McCarthy, the sardonic Senate dove who stunned the nation by upending President Lyndon B. Johnson’s re-election drive amid the Vietnam War turmoil of 1968, died on Saturday. He was 89.
A courtly, sharp-witted presence in capital politics for a half century, Mr. McCarthy, a Minnesota Democrat, died in his sleep at an assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, where he had lived for the last several years. …
The senior Mr. McCarthy left his mark in a generation’s skepticism toward the willfulness of political leaders.
“There is only one thing to do - take it to the country!” an angry Senator McCarthy declared in a Capitol corridor 15 months before the 1968 election, after hearing the Johnson administration bullishly defend its right to reinterpret the Constitutional war-making powers of Congress. … Read full obituary
