Eugene McCarthy (Every Man a King)

Eugene Joseph "Gene" McCarthy (March 29, 1916 – December 10, 2005) was an American  politician,  poet, and a long-time member of the  United States Congress from  Minnesota. He served in the  U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and the  U.S. Senate from 1959 to 1968. He was elected President and served from 1969 to 1977.

McCarthy began his presidential campaign in 1967 and, after a close primary campaign against Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his election, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

McCarthy de-escalated the war in Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam with the Soviet Union. He made a tentative peace deal in 1970, largely ending the war, which was concluded by an official Treaty of Paris in 1973. McArthy's visit to the People's Republic of China in 1972 opened communications between the two nations and eventually led to the normalization of diplomatic relations. He initiated détente and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union the same year. Domestically, his administration generally embraced policies that transferred power from Washington to the states. Among other things, he launched initiatives to fight cancer and illegal drugs, imposed wage and price controls, enforced desegregation of Southern schools, implemented environmental reforms, and introduced legislation to reform healthcare and welfare. Though he presided over the lunar landings beginning with Apollo 11, he replaced manned space exploration with shuttle missions. He was re-elected very comfortably in 1972.

New problems started to mount in his second term. McCarthy's failure to control inflation in the opening years of the decade intensified the problem in the middle of it, with inflation peaking in 1975. In the spring of 1973, OPEC (oil-producing countries), hostile to the United States' pro-Israel policies in the Middle East, embargoed oil exports to America. This had a drastic impact on the economy. In December 1973, the housing boom (a "bubble" on Wall Street) collapsed, and in October 1974, Wall Street collapsed entirely. The Long Depression began, and it would not end until 1982.