WHEN Eugene McCarthy was making his first and most famous attempt on the presidency, in 1968, he was often asked why he was running. It was a good question. And he had a good answer:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,





Nor public men, nor cheering crowds:





A lonely impulse of delight





Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

This fragment of Yeats seemed to epitomise the man who quoted it. Irishness, daring, puckish humour, wilful solitariness, a sense of the pervading importance of higher things, were all delivered with professorial elegance by a man once described as “Thomas Aquinas in a suit”. Two criticisms only could be made. First, that it was delivered in the white heat of one of America's nastiest election campaigns, to crowds chafing for more solid fare. And, second, that it was not true.

Mr McCarthy's peculiar political career was driven not by the impulse of delight but, in fairly equal measure, by principle and pique. His model of political behaviour was Thomas More, a witty but pig-headed martyr for his beliefs in Tudor England; his training ground was the hockey field at the various Catholic institutions at which he was educated, on which his desire to win could be shockingly intense. In political life, he kept his ambition well buried under layers of diffidence and urbanity. But he had some, and when he was slighted he did not forget.

His decision to oppose Lyndon Johnson in 1968 was a case in point. Mr McCarthy had come ardently to oppose the Vietnam war. He also could not help remembering that Johnson had humiliated him at the 1964 Democratic convention, choosing Hubert Humphrey, rather than him, as his running-mate at the last minute. He thought Johnson “a barbarian”, determined to barge his way through any kind of checks and balances to prosecute the war. But the Senate had no desire to curb him. Someone, therefore, had to take the debate to the public. That someone (no one else being brave enough) would have to be Eugene McCarthy.

His campaign was odd in the extreme. He did not call himself a candidate, but an “accidental instrument” to express the will of the country. He knew he could not win. By challenging Johnson, he simply hoped to force the convention open for someone else. In fact, he came so close to Johnson in the New Hampshire primary that the president realised he was doomed, and soon quit the race. The nomination went eventually to Humphrey, no improvement in Mr McCarthy's view. But he had managed to shake his party to its foundations.

He had also mobilised the young, inspiring them to shave off their beards and get knocking on doors in a way not seen again until Howard Dean's insurgency in 2004. The radicals of the anti-war movement did not take to him, however, nor he to them. As riots raged in the streets of Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention, Mr McCarthy, watching from the windows of the Hilton hotel, said the scene below reminded him of the Battle of Lake Trasimeno in the Punic Wars.

Politics as football

He was a politician, yet he despised politics. In the House, where he sat for Minnesota's Fourth District from 1949 to 1959, he would pointedly read books in committee meetings. In the Senate, where he served from 1959 to 1971, he seemed bored, and was often absent. Instinctively shy, he hated pressing the flesh or canvassing for money. He once compared politics to being a football coach: “You have to be smart enough to know the game and dumb enough to think it's important.”

Was it important to him? His opinions could be hard to sift, sometimes far to the left of his party, sometimes conservative. He believed in “redistributive justice”, a relic of his youthful days in the Catholic Worker movement, but endorsed Ronald Reagan. He also opposed all limits on political donations as crimps on freedom of speech. That freedom was his passion in politics. Accordingly he hated the stale old bunfight between Republicans and Democrats, and left the Democrats in 1972 to become an independent.

His three later forays into presidential politics were embarrassing and looked self-indulgent. But Mr McCarthy believed he could still shake Americans out of their political torpor. The irony was that the Democrats, responding in part to the shock he had administered, became increasingly a party of the elite and intellectual rather than the working man.

He might never have entered politics at all. As a young man, he almost became a monk. In his home town, a small German-Catholic community lost in the Minnesota prairie, to take orders was the highest career. He tried the novitiate for a year, but was thrown out for intellectual pride.

The same pride tortured him in politics. His mind was too acute and freewheeling to suffer its restrictions. Norman Mailer, meeting him in 1968 at a fundraiser in Harvard, found him drooping and baggy-eyed, longing to be rescued. Some weeks later, he saw him in Chicago. He had just definitively abandoned the race, and was dining and joking with friends. He was free. And Mr Mailer suddenly glimpsed in him then the perfect president, “harder than the hardest alloys of steel”.