Former senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and comedian Richard Pryor died yesterday. Here are McCarthy’s NY Times and WaPo obituaries, and here are Pryor’s NY Times and LA Times obituaries, along with this rather touching and sad post by Roger Simon. Moreover, Riehl World has this compilation of links to some very funny Pryor stand-up routines.
McCarthy’s first and only serious Presidential campaign came during the tumultuous year of 1968. McCarthy’s campaign was based primarily on opposition to the Vietnam War and it effectively ended the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who elected not to run for the Democratic Party nomination after McCarthy’s anti-war campaign showed unexpected strength early in the campaign. After fellow Democratic Party candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June (which occurred just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King), the Democratic Party convention that year took place in Chicago amid riots and civil strife, and ended up nominating Senator Hubert Humphrey, who lost a close election to Richard Nixon. Although McCarthy went on to become somewhat of a Democratic Party gadfly over the ensuing decades, there is no question that his 1968 Presidential campaign sparked societal forces that changed the American political landscape dramatically — the Democratic Party held the White House for 36 of the first 68 years of the 20th century, but has held it for only 12 of the past 37. McCarthy was 89 at the time of his death.
Pryor was a talented stand-up comedian and comedic actor whose career was cut short by self-destructive behavior. He almost died in 1980 after he set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine, but he ended up using the incident as a joke in his routine — “You know something I noticed? When you run down the street on fire, people will move out of your way.” Pryor was 65 at the time of death and had been suffering from the effects of multiple sclerosis for many years.