The first spoiler: before Ralph Nader, there was Eugene McCarthy.

• Author: Clymer, Adam
• Position: Book Review

Thirty-six years ago in March, Eugene J. McCarthy stood the political world on its head in the New Hampshire primary, earning a place in history by his willingness to take on Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War.

Though it did not end the war, that brave, principled candidacy remains a telling event in the history of American politics. It legitimized challenges to incumbent presidents, and its aftershocks have altered the way presidential candidates are nominated, putting that power in the hands of the political descendants of the hackers of McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy who felt that professional politicians had thwarted the will of the people of the Democratic Party by ultimately nominating Hubert H. Humphrey.

But McCarthy himself became a bad joke, only quarter-heartedly supporting Humphrey, his old mentor, in 1968 when he could have helped him win. The war probably lasted longer under Richard Nixon than it would have under a liberated Humphrey. Then McCarthy almost derailed the candidacy of Jimmy Carter in 1976 with an independent campaign that was only thwarted by New York State's wretched ballot-access laws. He also ran for president in 1972, 1988, and 1992, in the meantime endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980 and losing a Senate primary in 1982.

But this election year, you cannot read Dominic Sandbrook's careful biography, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, without thinking of Ralph Nader.

Not so much in the years leading up to their major political moments, though Nader's own acetic personal life has a distant parallel to McCarthy's years as a Benedictine novitiate. But in the years that followed, they share a sky-scraping, grandiloquent self-importance that argues against everything they stood for before they became infatuated with the presidency, the bloviated notion that their own ideas are so perfect, so far above anyone else's, that in comparison there really is no significant difference between Democrats and Republicans. McCarthy's diffidence helped give the nation President Nixon, just as Nader's self-absorption opened the gates at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for George W. Bush and now bids to keep him in residence.

Sandbrook's biography is most illuminating in the early chapters, as he narrates and explains the religious faith that McCarthy drew from the Benedictines and from wide reading in Protestant theology. Social activism was a major field at St. John's College in Collegeville, Minn., where...