"The Georgetown retirement residence bills itself as 'assisted living for independent people' in a fashionable part of town. It's got 24-hour nurses, chauffeured transportation, a beauty parlor and a barbershop, a chapel and a library and a concierge to arrange personal shopping.

This is where you'll find Eugene McCarthy, the former Minnesota senator who's best known for his 1968 Democratic presidential campaign-the campaign that fueled the antiwar movement and sped LBJ's exit from the White House.

The woman at the front desk directs me to his apartment.

He is 86, with a thin shock of white hair. Slow gait, fast mind. He lifts himself out of a beige corduroy easy chair for a handshake, then quickly plops back down. 'I'm reading about what a great man Henry Kissinger is,' he says sarcastically, holding up an issue of the New Republic. Have a seat, he offers. He is wearing a rather hip, casual gray jacket, gray sweat pants and brown loafers.

He spends much of his time now at the typewriter in his kitchen, writing articles he titles himself-such as 'The Need for an Established Church' and 'Overwork and Unemployment.' In the living room, on the table next to his chair, are various magazines--his chief reading pleasure these days and a copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey,' as translated by Robert Fagles.

It's a quiet life.

'I don't do much,' McCarthy says. 'I've given a couple of speeches, friends who want me to speak to Democratic clubs.'

With war looming in Iraq, what does he think of today's antiwar movement?

He shrugs. 'I've never seen a war where we can put it on hold--it can start anytime.' Unlike during the Vietnam era, there's not much activism on college campuses, and nobody in Congress is driving opposition.

'I don't think the Congress knows how to deal with Bush,' says McCarthy. 'It goes back to what I've been saying for years. The worst thing is to elect a governor president--they're used to sending out the National Guard.' He pauses, as if to let that shot settle in the dust. Then: 'The next worst thing is electing a vice president.'

The phone rings, and he quickly answers. 'I'm having somebody interview me,' he tells the caller. `And, my God, I don't get interviewed much anymore.'

He used to get interviewed all the time. He ran for president four times--if you include a barely noticeable 1992 effort--was elected to the House five times, served in the Senate for 12 years. He's been called heretical, courageous, a man ahead of his time and a crazy of fool. But Gene McCarthy is still here, still a blunt-spoken original after all these years.

'The Department of Homeland Security? Well, I think it's ridiculous. We've got about 10 levels of security already in the government. They're starting to investigate each other.'

You don't have to look far in American politics these days to find elected officials who never say anything worth repeating and never do anything worth following. Conviction before calculation? Uncommon. More common: Throw the rock, hide the hand. Too many politicians are afraid of their shadow's shadow. For all the bravos heard around the nation over the disposal of Trent Lott as Senate majority leader, the truth is that most politicians connected to the episode--the ousters and the condemners--simply acted out of self-interest. And what's remarkable about that?

Whatever you want to say about Gene McCarthy, he has been different for quite some time. He stood up to Redbaiters when other liberals fled, and advocated welfare reform before it was popular.

'We're kind of in a governmental crisis,' he says. 'There's no real difference between the two parties, other than on irrelevant issues. We need a third party.'

Does he still follow politics? 'Oh, I kind of follow it,' McCarthy says. But not in the newspapers, which is where the daily skirmishes of national politics are played out through leaks and trial balloons. 'Not much I can do about anything.'

In the introduction to McCarthy's 1998 book, No-Fault Politics, editor Keith C. Burris wrote that he 'remains a rebel and something of an apostate within the Democratic Party: a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems. One might call him the first neoliberal ... But he is really something more complicated: a liberal Catholic and a conservative human being.'

I'd just call him: not your ordinary politician." (Kevin Merida, Washington Post Magazine, January 12, 2003)