Former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who died last week at the age of 89, belonged to a breed of politician that has become increasingly rare as our public discourse has become increasingly polarized. He was a true maverick.

McCarthy achieved national prominence as the anti-war candidate who forced Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the presidential race of 1968. But he went on to back Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and to endorse President Reagan’s strategic defense initiative at a time when liberals were widely deriding the proposal as the “Star Wars” defense.

Senator McCarthy’s independent streak was also evident in his strong opposition to the campaign finance amendments enacted after Watergate.

Does that mean that “clean” Gene was in favor of letting “dirty” money corrupt politics? Not at all. He merely recognized that restricting campaign contributions would, paradoxically, make American politics less participatory and less democratic.

McCarthy’s quixotic challenge to Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary is a case in point. It was impossible that a little-known political outsider could have beaten a sitting president in that election. But in 1968, a few wealthy liberals could club together and fund an obscure anti-war candidate as a matter of principle. The result was that McCarthy polled 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent, and two weeks later a humiliated LBJ took himself out of the running.

Had post-Watergate campaign rules – which limited the size of individual contributions -- been in effect a few years earlier, McCarthy’s presidential bid would never have gotten off the ground. How would he have funded his campaign? Johnson and the political establishment controlled the Democratic party’s war chest, so McCarthy would have had to go hat in hand to the political action committees. Had he done so, it is unlikely that he could have raised enough money to run for dogcatcher, let alone for president.

So the American people had more fat cat contributors in politics in 1968 – but they also had a wider choice of candidates and more democracy.

I heard Senator McCarthy speak in person only once. It was in the mid-1970s, at some Washington seminar on the recently-enacted restrictions on campaign contributions, which McCarthy so vigorously opposed. During the Q&A period, McCarthy was asked if he favored public funding of political campaigns as a way of curbing the influence of the special interests.

He replied with a quip that I have never forgotten. “No,” he said. “The American Revolution was not financed with matching grants from the British crown.”

He had a point. The American Revolution itself was financed by fat cats like Robert Morris and Haym Solomon. And a good thing, too. If the Continental Congress had been forced to rely on the PACS for money, we might still be under the Union Jack instead of the Stars and Stripes.