THREEFER?:

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who challenged LBJ, dies at 89 (FREDERIC J. FROMMER, 12/10/05, Associated Press)

Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.

McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.

Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.

The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.

"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said. [...]

In McCarthy's 1998 book, "No-Fault Politics," editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as "a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems."

McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.

He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.

He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books. [...]

The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.

Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."

His best line came at the expense of Mitt Romney's Dad, who said that he'd been "brainwashed" by generals on a Vietnam visit and that's why he'd supported the war: "Brainwashed? A light rinse would have done."
Pathbreaking Comedian Richard Pryor Dies (JEREMIAH MARQUEZ, 12/10/05, Associated Press)

Richard Pryor, the groundbreaking comedian whose profanely personal insights into race relations and modern life made him one of Hollywood's biggest black stars, died of a heart attack Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. [...]

Pryor once marveled "that I live in racist America and I'm uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can't do much better than that."

'Michael Jackson in serious condition' (Ynet, 12/10/05)
According to the report, associates of the Jackson family reported to the Santa Barbara police in Los Angeles that the singer had recently taken an overdose consisting of Demerol and Jack Daniels.
Except that it's impossible to imagine Jack is his drink of choice. Chambord & Demerol we'd buy.

MORE:
RICHARD PRYOR | 1940-2005: Richard Pryor; a Groundbreaking, Anguished Comedian (Lynell George, December 11, 2005, LA Times)

At one point the highest-paid black performer in the entertainment industry, the lauded but misfortune-dogged comedian inadvertently became a de facto role model: a lone wolf figure to whom many an up-and-coming comic from Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock to Robin Williams and Richard Belzer have paid homage. Pryor kicked stand-up humor into a brand new realm.

"I've been trying to figure out the analogies to what Richard Pryor meant, and the closest I can come to is Miles Davis," said Reginald Hudlin, the film and TV director and president of entertainment for Black Entertainment Television. "There's music before Miles Davis, and there's music after Miles Davis. And Richard Pryor is that same kind of person.

"Every new piece kind of transformed the game," Hudlin said. "He was a culturally transcendent hero. His influence is bigger than black comedy; it's bigger than comedy. He was a cultural giant."

Comedian Keenen Ivory Wayans once said: "Richard Pryor is the groundbreaker." He "showed us that you can be black and have a black voice and be successful."

Pryor had a history both bizarre and grim: self-inflicted burns (1980), a heart attack (1990) and marathon drug and alcohol use (that he finally kicked in the 1990s). Yet he somehow — often miraculously, it seemed — continued on, even after being diagnosed in 1986 with multiple sclerosis, a disease that robbed him of his trademark physical presence.

Former Senator Eugene McCarthy Dies at 89 (FRANCIS X. CLINES, 12/10/05, NY Times)

He was a disarming stump presence as he mixed a wry tone and a hard, existential edge in challenging the White House, the Pentagon and the superpower swagger of modern politicians.

As an acid-tongued campaigner, Mr. McCarthy was sometimes a puzzlement, veering from inspired speechifying to moody languishing. But he was the singular candidate of the Vietnam War protest who served up politics and poetry, theology and baseball in a blend that beguiled the "Clean for Gene" legions who flocked to his insurgent's call.

"We do not need presidents who are bigger than the country, but rather ones who speak for it and support it," he told them. His candor delighted supporters, yet some were troubled by the diffidence that marked his public persona.

"I'm kind of an accidental instrument, really," he said, "through which I hope that the judgment and the will of this nation can be expressed."

Typically, he only frustrated his followers when he allowed that he was at least "willing" to be president and, yes, might even be an "adequate" one. Questions arose about his passion on the campaign as he built a reputation as an unapologetic contrarian.

In his 1968 challenge and for decades thereafter, Mr. McCarthy played the self-outcast of the Democratic Party, even shunning Jimmy Carter to endorse Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for president in 1980. He became a chronic presidential campaigner himself, in 1972, 1976 and the last time in 1988, 18 years gone from the Senate, when he endorsed trade protectionism, the vast Star Wars space defense theory and, most passionately, the junking of the two-party Establishment whose rules he came to despise.

"It's much easier for me to understand politicians who don't walk away from it," he explained at the age of 71 as he once more knew he could not win but ran anyway, hectoring the latest Beltway incumbents. He stayed busy writing poetry and books about the decline of American politics, and kept his eye on Washington from his farmhouse in bucolic Rappahannock County, Va., 70 miles to the west, on 14 acres set amid the Blue Ridge Mountains.

"I think he has a rejection wish," Maurice Rosenblatt, a Washington lobbyist who was a longtime friend, once said of the senator's perplexing mix of quixotic impulse and lethal hesitancy. "He wants to reject others and be rejected by them."

But others, conceding his quirks, rated Mr. McCarthy the one stand-up, cant-free politician of their generation. "Besides his conscience, there is his civility," Joe Flaherty wrote in the antiwar heyday of the Village Voice. [...]

Mr. McCarthy, an old semi-pro baseball player, liked to burnish a kind of knuckleball oddness. In one of his own later poems, "Lament for an Aging Politician," he wrote:

I have left Act I, for involution
And Act II. There, mired in complexity
I cannot write Act III.

He identified simplistic partisanship as the ultimate enemy in the domestic strife of the Vietnam War. Invoking Whitman's call to human goodness - "Arouse! for you must justify me" - candidate McCarthy's basic message to Americans was Daniel Webster's dictum to never "give up to party what was meant for mankind." As crowds rallied to him, he promised no new deals or frontiers. Rather, he slowed his baritone for a plain definition of patriotism: "To serve one's country not in submission but to serve it in truth."

He showed more passion as contrarian than as dogged campaigner. At the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Senator McCarthy showed that speaker's fire so longed for by his later followers when he boldly nominated Adlai E. Stevenson, a twice-defeated candidate for president, one more time despite - or because of - John F. Kennedy's lock on the nomination. "Do not reject this man who made us all proud to be Democrats," rang Mr. McCarthy's electrifying loser's plea.

As a senator, Mr. McCarthy was an unabashed liberal unafraid to take on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and his alarmist warnings about the Communist menace. More often, as he restlessly paced the backs of committee rooms or brought a tome to read during hearings, Eugene McCarthy was viewed by peers as something of a ruminator and a curmudgeon.

Yet he was the one who dared to step forward and bell the White House cat when other Democrats would only complain. Grasping the unpopularity of the deepening war, he sought to make a divisive party issue of it, announcing his primary candidacy against President Johnson, a fellow Democrat, in the hope of building pressure for a policy change.

"There comes a time when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag," declared the senator, a onetime novice monk whose political role model was Sir Thomas More, the English statesman martyred in resisting Henry VIII's seizure of church power.

Mocked by Johnson loyalists as a mere "footnote in history," Senator McCarthy prevailed well enough in his time to observe, after driving President Johnson into retreat, "I think we can say with Churchill, 'But what a footnote!'."

EUGENE J. MCCARTHY | 1916-2005: Eugene McCarthy; Candidacy Inspired Antiwar Movement (Art Pine, December 11, 2005, LA Times)

"McCarthy essentially knocked Johnson out of the race," Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin, coauthor of "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s," told The Times on Saturday. "McCarthy made it politically palatable to start moving toward ending the war." [...]

[H]istorians regard his 1968 candidacy as a turning point: a campaign that focused Americans' previously scattered opposition to the war and pushed successive administrations to try to extricate U.S. forces from Southeast Asia. It also stands as one of the most vivid examples of successful grass-roots activism in U.S. politics.

It also helped inspire an overhaul of the political process, particularly within the Democratic Party. After antiwar demonstrations disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention, damaging the party politically, Democratic leaders revamped party rules to pare back the power of political professionals to determine candidates and platforms.

"It opened the way for major changes in the party that pushed it toward the left and enabled Republicans to capture the White House through most of the next several elections," said Marshall Wittmann, a 1968 McCarthy volunteer and now a senior fellow at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in Washington.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2005 5:54 PM