Bloodless Coup

Sen. Gene McCarthy as the Butterfly Flapping Its Wings

Mark Kleiman thinks the late Sen. McCarthy (the Minnesota Democrat, not the Wisconsin Republican) has a lot to answer for:

McCarthy's major political accomplishment was the election of Richard M. Nixon to the Presidency, and thus, among other disasters, the prolongation of the War in Vietnam and its expansion into Cambodia, along with the ascendancy of the Strom Thurmond wing of the Republican Party and the replacement of Earl Warren by William Rehnquist. For a man whose two primary political commitments were advocacy of civil rights and opposition to the war, that's a sad epitaph, but it's the truth.