Louis Menand reviews Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook, a young British historian:

“In 1970, McCarthy retired from the Senate and embarked on one of the weirder and (to those who had been his admirers) more distressing afterlives in American politics. He entered the 1972 Democratic primaries, intent on defeating Muskie, who was the initial front-runner. McCarthy put most of his money and energy into Illinois, and Muskie trounced him there, sixty-three per cent to thirty-six per cent. In 1973, McCarthy explored the possibility of running for Congress from Minnesota’s Sixth District, the part of the state where he was born, but he was made to understand that the Democrats of the Sixth District did not find the possibility thrilling, and he didn’t run. In 1976, he ran for President in the general election as an independent. In 1980, he endorsed Ronald Reagan, a perversity motivated by his loathing for Jimmy Carter. He ran for the Presidency in 1988, as the candidate of the Consumer Party, and again, as a Democrat, in 1992, when he was seventy-six. He received two hundred and eleven votes in the New Hampshire primary. Some of those who voted for him may have believed they were casting their ballot for Joe McCarthy (a confusion from which McCarthy probably benefitted throughout his career). McCarthy now lives in a retirement home in Washington, D.C…” —The New Yorker