Former senator, '68 presidential candidate dies

WASHINGTON -- 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.\nMcCarthy 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.\nMcCarthy 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.\nThe 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.\nHelped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.\nSen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.\nHumphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.\n"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.\n"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway -- the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.\n"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."\nAlthough he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because "as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on."\n"I admired Gene enormously for his courage in challenging a war America never should have fought," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said Saturday.\nFormer Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., said McCarthy's presidential run in 1968 dramatically changed the antiwar movement.\n"It was no longer a movement of concerned citizens, but became a national political movement," McGovern said Saturday. "He was an inspiration to me in all of my life in politics." \nMcGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when McCarthy ran a second time.