Remembering Gene McCarthy

I was too young to be “clean for Gene,” but I always respected Eugene McCarthy, the populist candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 (and three times thereafter), who died Saturday at age 89.

I met McCarthy only once, on the steps of a conference hall at Rutgers University in 1976. By then, McCarthy had been eclipsed by others in the party (like Jerry Brown, whom I voted for in the primary), and so no more than a dozen Rutgers students turned out to hear him. But I remember him as being warm, gracious and funny, not at all perturbed at such a small turnout. He was a class act.

Here’s a tribute in The Nation.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.