MCCARTHY, EUGENE J.

born March 29, 1916, Watkins, Minn., U.S. McCarthy in full Eugene Joseph McCarthy U.S. senator whose entry into the 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination ultimately led President Lyndon B. Johnson to drop his bid for reelection. McCarthy graduated from St. John's University (Collegeville, Minn.) in 1935, then taught high school while working on his master's degree at the University of Minnesota. He returned as a faculty member to St. John's (194043) and subsequently served in the War Department's military intelligence division until the end of World War II. After the war McCarthy again taught school, eventually becoming chairman of the sociology department at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn. In 1948 he ran successfully on Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party ticket for the U.S. House of Representatives, where he remained for 10 years, compiling a decidedly liberal voting record. In 1958 McCarthy was elected to the Senate, where he remained a relatively unknown figure nationally until Nov. 30, 1967. On that day, he announced his intention to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Democratic state presidential primaries. Although in 1964 he had supported the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (which gave the president broad powers to wage the Vietnam War), by 1967 McCarthy had become an outspoken critic of the war. At first McCarthy's challenge was not taken seriously, but his candidacy soon attracted the growing numbers of Democrats who opposed further American involvement in the Vietnam War. After the Minnesota senator, with his trenchant wit and scholarly, understated manner, captured 20 of the 24 New Hampshire delegates in the March 1968 primary, Johnson made the dramatic announcement of his withdrawal from the race. McCarthy went on to sweep three primaries but then lost four of the next five to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Following Kennedy's assassination, McCarthy lost the nomination at the convention in Chicago to Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who had declined to run in a single primary. In 1970 McCarthy decided not to run for reelection to the Senate. Humphrey won his seat, and McCarthy turned to a career of writing and lecturing. In 1972 he conducted a lacklustre campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, which was won by Senator George S. McGovern. Four years later he made a much more vigorous, but again unsuccessful, attempt to win the presidency as an independent. In 1980 he endorsed Ronald Reagan for the presidency, and in 1982 he made an unsuccessful bid for the Senate seat from Minnesota.