What accomplishments did McCarthy become famous for during his political involvement?
He was most famous for his challenge to Johnson in 1968 over the issue of the Vietnam War, but I think it does him a disservice to concentrate just on that. From 1948 onwards he was a very consistent champion of liberal policies at home: he voted for all the major reforms of the Sixties, and he was particularly associated with efforts to help Mexican migrant workers, who had a pretty tough time of it in those days. He was also a keen supporter of the Cold War and that makes his stance on Vietnam especially interesting. Many of his friends and colleagues, however, felt that he should have achieved much more. McCarthy was without doubt an extremely talented man, but he was often accused of being arrogant, lazy or waspish, and by the mid-1960s he wasn’t really contributing that much to the Senate. He was evidently very bruised and disappointed by the outcome of the 1968 campaign, and he left the Senate two years later to write and teach before embarking on a series of quixotic independent
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