Eugene McCarthyEugene McCarthy, the senator for Minnesota between 1959 and 1971, who has died at the age of 89, occupies a strange niche in American history. In 1968, with the backing of just 28,791 electors from one of the country's smallest states, he effectively unseated President Lyndon Johnson, who had been returned to the White House by a 60 per cent landslide only three years earlier.
Between these two events, Johnson had been prosecuting the disastrous war in Vietnam. The most dramatic indicator of its eventual outcome - America's first military defeat - had come on January 30th, 1968, with North Vietnam's Tet offensive against 36 Southern towns.
This attack not only caught US forces by surprise but brought to America's domestic hearths almost unbelievable television pictures of US marines fighting within the grounds of their own embassy in Saigon to prevent its being overrun by the Vietcong.
Six weeks later came the New Hampshire primary. It had been preceded by frenzied activity from a small group of anti-war campaigners who called themselves the Alternative Candidate Task Force.
Rather than embark on a forlorn third-party campaign to stop the war, they had decided to find a senior Democrat prepared to oppose Johnson's renomination as the party's candidate.
In October 1967, having been turned down by some 20 senators and representatives, they finally persuaded the maverick Senator McCarthy to take his political life in his hands.
McCarthy had never been in the Democratic mainstream, although he had come to national attention with a speech at the party's 1960 convention urging Adlai Stevenson's nomination (the delegates preferred John Kennedy). He had also shown notable hostility to his fellow Minnesotan, Johnson's vice-president Hubert Humphrey. How much that feud figured in his decision to stand was never clear.
McCarthy had not previously opposed the war and had voted in 1964 for the Tonkin Gulf resolution that gave Johnson almost unfettered authority to escalate the conflict.
Later, on the New Hampshire stump, McCarthy was to comment: "Escalation is a word that has no point of interruption. By the time you raise the question the flag has gone by." Indeed, as the war ground on, the mood in the country had shifted dramatically, particularly among those most closely affected: university students liable for conscription.
As the postwar baby bulge moved through the education system it had provided America with some seven million students by 1968. As a political lobby they outnumbered almost every other single group and comprised, therefore, a powerful force for any candidate to mobilise. When McCarthy formally announced his candidacy on November 30th, 1967, students began to flock to his colours.
The shock of the Tet offensive, combined with the proximity of Harvard and Yale universities to New Hampshire, brought McCarthy a seemingly endless flood of young campaigners. McCarthy offered almost the ideal hero figure.
Of Irish-German descent, he had been raised in a Minnesotan hamlet and retained an appealing knowledge of and love for its local flora and fauna. Educated at St John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota, and with a master's degree from the University of Minnesota, he briefly became a high school teacher.
He then worked as a professor of economics in Minnesota, until the second World War pushed him into military intelligence. Initially he resumed his academic career after the war but then moved into politics and stood for the House of Representatives in 1948.
Ten years later he was elected to the senate, to become a member of two influential committees: foreign relations and finance. In 1964 he withdrew from the nomination as Johnson's vice-president in favour of Humphrey.
On November 5th, 1968, Richard Nixon won the election against a totally divided Democratic party by a margin of 0.7 per cent, and Eugene McCarthy found himself enshrined as a footnote in the history of one of America's most traumatic years.
Eugene Joseph McCarthy: born March 29th, 1916; died December 10th, 2005