- Ran for Secretary of State in Illinois in 1997.
- Retired from the United States Secret Service in 1993 to be a police chief in a suburb of Chicago.
- One of two Secret Service Agents credited with saving President Ronald Reagan's life during the 1981 assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr.. In the famous footage, McCarthy is the agent in the blue suit who turned and faced the assassin, and took a bullet in the chest which traveled into his lung, liver and diaphragm. As stated by McCarthy, "the common picture shows me grabbing my abdomen, but that's down where the liver was when it went through the liver. That's where the pain was at the time, but actually I was shot in the chest." The second agent credited with saving the president is Jerry Parr. The other victims of Hinckley's assassination attempt were Reagan's Press Secretary, James Brady, and Washington Police Officer Thomas K. Delahanty.
- Participated in a joint-brief, filed in federal court, with other previous Secret Service Agents of assassination attempts, to block independent counsel Ken Starr from questioning President Bill Clinton's Secret Service agents regarding private conversations relating to the hearings about Clinton's impeachment. The concern was that if the agents were forced to testify, subsequent Presidents could place themselves at a distance from their agents to talk in private, forcing a protection gap. (June 1998)
- Personally believes that President Ronald Reagan didn't actually know his name until he was shot/wounded along with him.
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