An unlikely challenger
Eugene McCarthy was a senator from Minnesota, a former college teacher and poet-minded politician who had served in Congress since 1949, first in the House and then in the Senate from 1959. He was known for a dry wit and a somewhat detached manner. He had been considered as a possible running mate for Johnson in 1964, and in the years afterward he had supported most of the president’s domestic program. His opposition to Vietnam policy grew gradually, and by 1967 he was among the senators who argued that the war could not be won at an acceptable cost.
He was not the first choice of the people who wanted to oppose Johnson. A movement known as “Dump Johnson”, organised largely by Allard Lowenstein, a New York activist, spent much of 1967 looking for a prominent Democrat willing to run. Their first hope was Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who declined, saying that a challenge from him would look like a personal feud and would probably fail. Other possible candidates also said no. McCarthy, after some persuasion, agreed.
The announcement
McCarthy announced his candidacy on November 30, 1967, at the National Press Club in Washington. He said he intended to enter several Democratic primaries in 1968 and to bring the war into the open as a campaign issue. He explained that his purpose was to test whether the party would permit a real debate on Vietnam. He did not suggest at first that he expected to win, and many newspapers described the effort as a long shot with little chance of success.
The timing matters. Only weeks earlier General William Westmoreland had given an optimistic assessment of the war to American audiences, and the March on the Pentagon in October had shown how deeply the issue divided the country. McCarthy’s candidacy gave opponents of the war a place to direct their energy within the regular political system, as opposed to the street protests of the antiwar protests that year.
Building a campaign in New Hampshire
McCarthy chose New Hampshire, which held the first primary of the season, in March 1968. The state was small, and its voters were known for their independence. The campaign was underfunded and, at first, poorly known. What it had in abundance was volunteers. Large numbers of college students traveled to the state in the winter to knock on doors, many of them cutting their hair and dressing more conventionally, a move that led to the slogan “Clean for Gene”. Their efforts were an example of how the student movement was beginning to move from protest toward electoral work.
Johnson did not enter his name on the ballot. His supporters ran a write-in campaign for him instead, which kept him from appearing as a candidate but also meant that his name had to be written in by voters, which is harder to organise. New Hampshire’s governor and most of the state’s party leaders supported the president. The Johnson campaign mostly emphasised loyalty and warned that a vote for McCarthy would help the enemy, a line that some voters found unconvincing after the shock of the Tet Offensive at the end of January.
The result
The primary took place on March 12, 1968. According to the final tallies, Johnson received about 49.6 percent of the vote through write-ins, and McCarthy received about 41.9 percent. Johnson thus won, by roughly seven or eight points. Yet the result was widely treated as a political earthquake. A sitting president had been expected to prevail by a wide margin against a challenger with little money and little national recognition, and McCarthy had come within a few percentage points.
There is an important qualification. Many of McCarthy’s voters were not committed doves. Some, according to surveys at the time, were unhappy with the way the war was being fought and wanted a more forceful approach rather than withdrawal. The meaning of the vote was therefore less clear than the headlines suggested. But the political effect was unmistakable: the president looked weaker than anyone had thought.
What followed
The consequences came quickly:
- Robert Kennedy, who had said he would not run, entered the race on March 16, four days after the primary.
- The Wisconsin primary on April 2 loomed over the president, and polls suggested he might do badly there.
- On March 31, before the Wisconsin vote, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election, an episode covered in the article on Johnson withdrawal.
- Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the contest in late April, relying mainly on party delegates, not primaries.
McCarthy won Wisconsin and later Oregon, but Kennedy won Indiana and Nebraska, and then the California primary on June 4, shortly before he was shot in Los Angeles. McCarthy remained a candidate through the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, where Humphrey was nominated amid street clashes and bitter divisions over the war.
A mixed legacy
McCarthy’s later career did not match the drama of that winter. He left the Senate in 1971, ran again for president several times, and never regained the national position he held in early 1968. He died in 2005. Historians often assess his role as that of a catalyst: the candidate who showed that a challenge to the president was possible and thereby helped other Democrats, including Kennedy, to enter. His campaign also demonstrated how much a single primary could change perceptions of a political leader, and how quickly the arguments of 1967 about the war moved from the margins to the center of American politics.