Joseph Bottum reflects

So, Clean Gene is gone, slipping away at age eighty-nine. The death of Senator Eugene McCarthy on Saturday has already touched the newspapers and Sunday morning political-talk shows with the usual obituary moment—the obligatory hiccup of reflection in which everyone old enough to remember pauses for a moment to realize that we have no real explanation for how we got here from all the way back there.

No explanation, that is, but time and the slow fading of what once seemed so important. Erosion can sometimes make things clearer, as biographers all know: washing away the incidental, exposing the deeper structure of a landscape. But mostly erosion obscures the details and thins down the emotions that once made it all seem so alive. The talking heads on the Sunday programs clearly remembered they had felt deeply about Eugene McCarthy, but their faces showed a strange puzzlement, as though they couldn’t quite remember exactly what it was they had felt so deeply, those long years ago.