Writers cannot shake their fascination with Eugene McCarthy, the moody Minnesotan who had the courage to challenge his party's President, then seemingly lacked the spine or energy to wage more than a languid, token campaign against Hubert Humphrey for his party's nomination. What kind of a man, they wonder, can reject frantic calls from campaign aides at key moments, first because he is watching the All-Star baseball game on television, next because he is playing softball with a group of nuns? What about his pettiness toward opponents, his long refusal to endorse Humphrey after the Vice President won the nomination, or his peculiar reaction to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia as something one should not get excited about? It has the elements of deep fiction or psychological drama, so perhaps it is fitting that two critic-novelists think that they have found the answers.
Writing in the New American Review, Wilfrid Sheed offers the intriguing, if overly pat explanation that McCarthy is a "Commonweal Catholic." This is Sheed's term for those members of the generation of U.S. Catholics, now aged 35 to 60, who combine "oldfashioned religious training" with progressive politics shaped by unionism and papal encyclicals on the worth of labor. This kind of Catholic clings to "an abstract, quasi-scholastic style" marked by witty references to arcane books and thinkers. The type is "congenitally mistrustful of ambition and scornful of those who push themselves beyond their merits." When such a Catholic finds himself tempted by ambition, Sheed claims, "he reminds himself over and over that he isn't that hot." Since U.S. society tends to honor ambition, this Catholic avoids criticism by feigning laziness.
Crazed Frivolity. McCarthy's training as a seminarian and a professor fits him neatly into Sheed's category. "Anyone who has ever sat around a rectory, or even an Irish living room, will have heard many duplicates of McCarthy's wit," Sheed writes. But for a presidential candidate, the McCarthy humor was a handicap, Sheed says, since it made him sound like "a 13th century eccentric, a man of crazed frivolity." Too often, his bookish metaphors made "a man of rather direct and earthy intellect seem vague and woolly." He appeared to be "a lofty bumbler, sacrificing precision for the sake of a cute reference."
A Commonweal Catholic, as Sheed sees it, cannot believe that his personal feelings are relevant to the issues. He has only contempt for "weeping politicians," who either confess their political sins or flaunt their virtues. "McCarthy could not, if life depended on it, act out his compassion for the poor," says Sheed. "Politically, this subject demands a certain amount of Mammy-singing. You can denounce the war calmly, and the emotion will take care of itself. But when you come to poverty, you must perform. McCarthy spoke precisely as strongly about both subjects; yet he was felt to be passionate about Viet Nam, indifferent about race."