There will be plenty of tributes to the anti-war candidate Gene McCarthy. Here's how the paths of McCarthy and Common Cause crossed in the 1970's.

• McCathy helped found Democratic Study Group (DSG), a group of liberal Democratics in the US House of Representatives, then dominated by conservative Southern Democrats. DSG was the center of reform in the House, working with Common Cause to open up the House and pass landmark campaign finance reform in the early 1970s.
• McCarthy joined conservatives opposing the new 1974 campaign finance law in the Supreme Court. McCarthy's campaign received key initial funding from several wealthy liberal donors. The new law placed limits on contributions -- and, McCarthy claimed, would have made his outsider campaign impossible.
• He led* an extraordinary presidential campaign based on opposition to the Vietnam War, but let that slip away and the war lasted six more years.
• Two years after that 1968 campaign, Common Cause was founded. One of its early issues was ending the war -- lobbying in Congress to cutoff funding. That effort succeeded in 1974 -- years after McCarthy's campaign and Lyndon Johnson's resignation had seemingly turned the political tide on support of the war.

* Not much of a political leader, McCarthy rambled through the campaign, his followers often becoming the actual leaders.