Leadership Quote by Eugene McCarthy

A Hilton Hotel is supposed to smell like carpet shampoo and corporate certainty. Eugene McCarthy’s line spikes that bland promise with a single sensory detail: tear gas. The shock isn’t just that violence intruded into a luxury space; it’s that the memory lingers, stubbornly physical. “I can still smell” turns politics into something that gets into your clothes, your lungs, your long-term recall. It’s not an argument so much as an afterimage.

The context is the late-1960s Democratic Party implosion, when antiwar dissent collided with establishment control and police power. McCarthy, the cerebral senator who challenged Lyndon Johnson from the anti-Vietnam flank, is invoking the era’s signature contradiction: a party that branded itself as the vessel of liberal progress while presiding over batons, arrests, and chemical crowd control. Putting tear gas in the Hilton yanks the scene out of the street-and-campus mythology and drops it into the lobby of institutional respectability. The subtext is accusation by juxtaposition: the violence wasn’t an aberration at the margins; it seeped into the places where power sleeps, dines, and congratulates itself.

There’s also a veteran politician’s bleak humor here. The Hilton reads like shorthand for the convention circuit, backroom deals, and managed democracy. If tear gas is what he “still” smells there, the line implies that the party never fully aired out the room. The residue is moral: a reminder that order is often maintained with force, then quickly rebranded as normalcy.