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Dictionary of American Politics
Paperback
- GenresReference
182 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
7 people want to read
About the author
Eugene J. McCarthy
51 books1 follower Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy was an American politician, poet & a long-time member of the Congress from Minnesota. He served in the House from 1949 to 1959 & the Senate from 1959 to 1971.
In the 1968 presidential election, McCarthy was the first candidate to challenge incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president, running on an anti-Vietnam War platform. The unexpected vote total he achieved in the New Hampshire primary led Johnson to withdraw from the race & lured Robert F. Kennedy into the contest. He would unsuccessfully seek the presidency five times altogether.
In the 1968 presidential election, McCarthy was the first candidate to challenge incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president, running on an anti-Vietnam War platform. The unexpected vote total he achieved in the New Hampshire primary led Johnson to withdraw from the race & lured Robert F. Kennedy into the contest. He would unsuccessfully seek the presidency five times altogether.
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September 3, 2011
When Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota announced his candidacy as the antiwar candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1967, I, a sixteen year old high school junior in conservative Park Ridge, Illinois, was galvanized. Two years previous, while a freshman, I had written a report supportive of the war in Vietnam, a report based primarily on the major media and the accounts of American military men about the conflict. Two events changed my mind in the intervening months.
The first was our invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. Even Time and Life Magazine could not mask the fact that our intervention there was opposed to a popular movement. This was the first time that it entered my mind that United States foreign policy was not always beneficial to other people.
The second was a conversation which occurred between me, my dad and my step-grandfather at the latter's home, probably in 1966. I was a fourteen or fifteen year old know it all, quite comfortable about arguing with my elders. I wasn't surprised that Dad, a veteran, was against the war, but Christian Stousland's opposition surprised me. Together, they met my arguments in favor of intervention with facts, some of which were new to me. I fought manfully, never one to give in or to reveal my ignorance, until I got home that night and had time to reconsider. Checking into matters like the Geneva Accords which had ended French involvement in Southeast Asia, accords which the U.S.A. had broken, I came to acknowledge that they were right and that I had been wrong. I began thereupon a very intense transformation from the boy of Kennedy's New Frontier to the teenager of the New Left.
Once McCarthy announced, I was already self-identified as an anti-imperialist, torn between the new radicalism of the Students for a Democratic Society, the old radicalism of the Socialist Party and the handful of antiwar Senators in the Congress such as Gruening, Morse and Fulbright. Although the opportunity to work in the system for McCarthy did not resolve the tension, it gave an outlet. A nascent group had organized in Park Ridge around a housewife, Shirley Sivick, her friends and a few youngsters like myself. I joined up, became a precinct captain, polled every house in my district twice and went to McCarthy events throughout the metro-Chicago area.
Meanwhile, I continued my political education, reading the press, pulling out books from the library, starting subscriptions to progressive publications like The New Republic and Harpers and supplementing them by regular trips to the public library's magazine section for copies of The Nation, Commonweal and the Congressional Record. I even read the far-right National Review regularly.
Not knowing much of anything about Eugene McCarthy, I picked up the only two books of his which had now become available everywhere, his Dictionary of American Politics and A Liberal Answer to the Conservative Challenge. I read them both.
The Dictionary is just that, an alphabetical listing of terms like "cloture" used in American political science. McCarthy had been a social science professor in a liberal arts college and it read like just the kind of thing such a one would produce--in other words, nothing special, but for me, then, useful as part of my political education.
The first was our invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. Even Time and Life Magazine could not mask the fact that our intervention there was opposed to a popular movement. This was the first time that it entered my mind that United States foreign policy was not always beneficial to other people.
The second was a conversation which occurred between me, my dad and my step-grandfather at the latter's home, probably in 1966. I was a fourteen or fifteen year old know it all, quite comfortable about arguing with my elders. I wasn't surprised that Dad, a veteran, was against the war, but Christian Stousland's opposition surprised me. Together, they met my arguments in favor of intervention with facts, some of which were new to me. I fought manfully, never one to give in or to reveal my ignorance, until I got home that night and had time to reconsider. Checking into matters like the Geneva Accords which had ended French involvement in Southeast Asia, accords which the U.S.A. had broken, I came to acknowledge that they were right and that I had been wrong. I began thereupon a very intense transformation from the boy of Kennedy's New Frontier to the teenager of the New Left.
Once McCarthy announced, I was already self-identified as an anti-imperialist, torn between the new radicalism of the Students for a Democratic Society, the old radicalism of the Socialist Party and the handful of antiwar Senators in the Congress such as Gruening, Morse and Fulbright. Although the opportunity to work in the system for McCarthy did not resolve the tension, it gave an outlet. A nascent group had organized in Park Ridge around a housewife, Shirley Sivick, her friends and a few youngsters like myself. I joined up, became a precinct captain, polled every house in my district twice and went to McCarthy events throughout the metro-Chicago area.
Meanwhile, I continued my political education, reading the press, pulling out books from the library, starting subscriptions to progressive publications like The New Republic and Harpers and supplementing them by regular trips to the public library's magazine section for copies of The Nation, Commonweal and the Congressional Record. I even read the far-right National Review regularly.
Not knowing much of anything about Eugene McCarthy, I picked up the only two books of his which had now become available everywhere, his Dictionary of American Politics and A Liberal Answer to the Conservative Challenge. I read them both.
The Dictionary is just that, an alphabetical listing of terms like "cloture" used in American political science. McCarthy had been a social science professor in a liberal arts college and it read like just the kind of thing such a one would produce--in other words, nothing special, but for me, then, useful as part of my political education.
Displaying 1 of 1 review