Among the people who knew that this was a lie was Mitchell’s wife. When he returned to Washington on Monday he persuaded her to stay in Los Angeles, where, she said afterward, she was held as a “political prisoner” by Baldwin’s successor as her bodyguard. According to her, the guard yanked the phone wires out of the wall when she was telling a UPI reporter that “they don’t want me to talk”; then he held her down while another man injected a sedative into her buttocks. There was no way to keep Martha Mitchell quiet, though. Three days later she was calling the reporter again, saying, “I’m not going to stand for all those dirty things that go on.” It made a good story, but Martha’s credibility was low, and most Americans accepted the official line, which was that the administration had not known anything about those dirty things. Tuesday morning Ronald Ziegler, the former adman who served as Richard Nixon’s press secretary, spelled it out. In a scornful mood, he declined even to add to Mitchell’s statement. “I am not going to comment from the White House on a third-rate burglary attempt,” Ziegler said. “This is something that should not fall into the political process.” However, when a handful of Post men continued to pursue the story, Ziegler did comment from the White House. He said, “I don’t respect the type of journalism, the shabby journalism, that is being practiced by the Washington Post.” And Mitchell, referring to the paper’s publisher, told one of its reporters, “Katie Graham is going to get her teat caught in a big fat wringer.”
***
In a sense the campaign which followed was the story of Richard Nixon’s growing invincibility. Early trial heats had suggested a standoff. Then, as the summer progressed, the President moved ahead until all the polls conceded him about 60 percent of the vote. From then on he was beyond reach. CREEP’S tremendous financial advantage—60 million dollars compared to 25 million for the Democrats—had little to do with the outcome. Watergate had even less. He had been elected four years earlier on a tide of protest against the Vietnam War. Ending the hostilities seemed to take him forever, and some 17,000 Americans had been killed there while he was doing it, but by the beginning of 1972 he had reduced the U.S. troop commitment in Vietnam from 549,500 to 139,000, and the Pentagon’s weekly casualty list, which had been running at about 300 when he entered the White House, would on September 21, 1972, reach zero and remain near there. Being a political animal, he was quick to exploit this and other opportunities as they arose. In the Florida Democratic primary, for example, George Wallace campaigned on the slogan, “Send them a message,” promising that if Floridians voted for him, “President Nixon will do something to halt this busing within thirty days.” Wallace knew his Nixon. The President didn’t wait thirty days. He demanded a busing moratorium just two days after the returns from there.
The sum of Nixon’s skills was a united party led by a nominee who, his past notwithstanding, was now identified as the candidate of peace and detente. His only two rivals for the Republican nomination were Congressmen Paul N. McCloskey Jr. of California on the left and John M. Ashbrook of Ohio on the right. They merely served to point up the President’s preemption of the GOP center. McCloskey arrived at the Republican convention—switched to Miami Reach after Dita Beard and ITT had made San Diego too embarrassing—with a single vote, pledged to him by New Mexico’s primary law. He expected to have his name placed before the convention, thereby giving critics of Nixon’s racial and military policies a chance to be heard, but the Rules Committee limited nominations to candidates controlling the delegations of at least three states. The final vote on the first ballot was: Nixon 1,347, McCloskey 1. The lone New Mexican apologized to the hall.
As a piece of stage management it was awesome. The President had eliminated any possibility of suspense by announcing his intention to keep Agnew on the ticket. Everyone in the party seemed eager to do his bidding. Ronald Reagan chaired the convention, Nelson Rockefeller put Nixon’s name in nomination. Knowing the President’s passion for order, floor managers limited the demonstration in his behalf to exactly twenty minutes, and to refute claims that the Democrats represented young America, 3,000 conservatively dressed youths were brought to Miami Beach on chartered buses. The boys wore their hair so short that they appeared to belong to another era—which was, of course, the idea.
To be sure, they were not the only young Americans there. Over 5,000 scruffy antiwar militants had camped in the city’s Flamingo Park. During the Democratic week they were relatively quiescent, but when the GOP arrived they erupted, and 1,200 were arrested for slashing tires, blocking traffic, smashing store windows, setting bonfires in the streets, and trying to prevent delegates from attending the convention. The Republicans were elated. This, they seemed to be saying to those who objected to their tidy sessions, is what happens when you allow untidiness in politics. During the campaign which followed (in which Nixon hardly participated; he left most of the politicking to surrogates and never mentioned his opponent’s name) GOP speakers spoke proudly of their unity and hammered away at the disarray on the other side.
They had a point. Riven in Chicago four years earlier, the Democrats were still absorbed in savage internecine feuds. The new presidential sweepstakes opened all their old wounds and inflicted new ones. At one time or another during the primary months the party’s nomination was being sought by Muskie, McGovern, Humphrey, George Wallace, Eugene McCarthy, Fred Harris of Oklahoma, Vance Hartke of Indiana, Henry Jackson of Washington, John Lindsay of New York, Sam Yorty of Los Angeles, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, Shirley Chisholm of New York, and Edward T. Coll, a young poverty worker from Connecticut who scared the pants off a Democratic National Committeewoman by dangling a rubber rat in front of her during a televised debate. The battle to head the ticket was a melee. Harry Truman, who had called the primaries “just so much eyewash,” was vindicated. Like the Republican struggle in 1964, this one routed promising candidates and left the field in the possession of a nominee who would prove hopelessly weak in the general election and whose vulnerability had, in fact, been demonstrated in the very process which had brought him the prize.
Speaking in New Hampshire early in the year of his ill-starred race, Barry Goldwater had sunk a nail in his own coffin by calling, in effect, for the end of social security. On January 13, 1972, eight years later almost to the day, George McGovern told a college audience in Ames, Iowa, that he favored giving every American $1,000 from the federal treasury and limiting inheritances to $500,000 each. The speech didn’t attract much attention at the time because McGovern was still a minor figure; in one recognition poll a few months earlier he had scored exactly 2 percent. But later it would return to haunt him, alienating millions who thought the government was too generous already and vast numbers of others who dreamed that one day they would hit the lottery, or something, big.
Part of McGovern’s strength lay in the skill with which his organization exploited his obscurity. In New Hampshire, the first test, they successfully established the line that since Muskie was the front runner and from a neighboring state, any showing below 50 percent would be a defeat for him and a McGovern victory. That put the pressure on the Maine senator, who was hurt by the spurious “Canuck” letter and by the Manchester Union Leader’s tasteless charge that Mrs. Muskie told dirty jokes. In a televised speech outside the newspaper’s office Muskie called its publisher William Loeb a “gutless coward,” said “It’s fortunate for him he’s not on this platform beside me,” and wept—perhaps the most expensive tears ever shed by a public man. Even so, Muskie won 46.4 percent of the vote on March 7 as against McGovern’s 37 percent. The margin was a sweep, if not a landslide, yet so adroitly had the South Dakotan’s aides depicted him as a dark horse that the spotlight was on him.
Florida, the next joust in the primary tournament, had eleven entries. McGovern sensibly said that it was not a state where he “expected to do well,” and in fact he did poorly, receiving 6.1 percent of the vote. Wallace was the big winner, surprising everyone, including himself—“We beat the face cards of the Dem
ocratic deck,” he crowed—and he was trailed by Humphrey, Jackson, and Muskie. The following week Muskie won in Illinois, taking 63 percent to McCarthy’s 37 percent. Wisconsin came next. McGovern’s troops were superbly organized there, and he led the pack of twelve candidates with 30 percent, followed by Wallace, Humphrey, and Muskie. McGovern won in liberal Massachusetts; Humphrey took Ohio and Indiana; in Nebraska McGovern beat Humphrey by six percentage points; Humphrey walloped Wallace in West Virginia 67 to 33 percent, and North Carolina went to Wallace.
By the middle of May Muskie was out of it and the marathon was settling down to a three-way contest between Wallace, Humphrey, and McGovern. Support for the Alabaman was generally interpreted as a protest vote; he said he would use it to win concessions at the national convention. Then came May 15 in Maryland. Wallace was successively hit by a rock in Frederick, eggs in Hagerstown, popsicles in Salisbury—and six bullets in Laurel. Next day he won both the Maryland and Michigan primaries, but for him, wounded and paralyzed, it was all over. It was, in fact, the end for all the Democratic candidates; without the third-party threat of Wallace siphoning off votes on the right, a Nixon victory was assured. But few realized that at the time, and the winner-take-all California primary on June 6 loomed as a titanic battle between the two survivors. The results were 1,527,392 votes, or 47.1 percent, for McGovern; 1,352,379, or 41.7 percent, for Humphrey. After that plums began toppling into the South Dakotan’s lap, and he went to Miami Beach with 1,492.75 delegates—for all practical purposes, the nomination.
What was unappreciated at the time was the impact of the California campaign on McGovern’s popularity. Until then no one had cast a harsh light on his program. He was seen as a handsome, decent, plainspoken man who was outraged by the Vietnam War. In three bruising televised debates, Humphrey had destroyed that image, pointing to McGovern’s sometimes inconsistent and often quixotic stands on Israel, defense spending, welfare, labor law, unemployment compensation, taxation, and even, in the beginning, on Vietnam. “It was Hubert Humphrey who put McGovern away; no other Democrat could have done it to him like Hubert,” pollster Robert M. Teeter said afterward. “Not only did Hubert give it to him, but it was the first time McGovern got adversary treatment.”
The second time was at Miami Beach, when the watching nation saw what had happened to the Democratic party. Four years earlier, on the humid night of August 27, 1968, the Chicago convention had approved by voice vote a Credentials Committee resolution calling for a reform of the process by which convention delegates were chosen. Under the chairmanship of George McGovern, a reform commission had approved by a 10–9 vote a resolution which established a quota for blacks, and then—on a motion from a member who said, “There is no reason why our national convention shouldn’t have 50 percent women, 10 to 15 percent young people”—quotas for women and youth. A majority of the commission thought that made sense, but it didn’t. The quotas were a denial of the whole principle of representation. Worse, they had the effect of legitimatizing discrimination against all classifications who had no quotas—for example, the elderly, ethnic groups, and organized labor, three traditional sources of the party’s strength.
In his keynote address Governor Reubin Askew of Florida declared, “It is impossible to look upon this group without feeling that one has seen the face of America.” Certainly he was looking at newcomers to politics. Eight of every ten delegates were attending their first convention; 15 percent were black, 36 percent were women, and 22 percent were under thirty years of age. “Don’t pass up any hitchhikers, they might be delegates,” said one candidate. There were some hitchhikers—and some others. In their anxiety to assure representation to the underprivileged, the California delegation had included eighty-nine people who were on welfare. McGovern was so determined to offend no minority that he ordered kid-glove treatment of Gay Liberationists, who chanted—on television—“Two-four-six-eight, we don’t overpopulate” and “Three-five-seven-nine, lesbians are mighty fine.” At the same time an extraordinary number of elected Democrats were being excluded from the floor: 225 of the party’s 255 congressmen and the Democratic mayors of Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Inevitably, the amateurs committed blunders which professionals would have avoided. The few politicians left in the hall were painfully aware of them. “I think we may have lost Illinois tonight,” Frank Mankiewicz said glumly when that state’s elected delegation was expelled from the convention by McGovern enthusiasts, and on the platform committee Ben Wattenberg sighed, “They just lost Michigan to the Republicans today with their busing plank. No one seemed impressed by the fact that in Macomb County they voted against busing in a referendum last fall by fourteen to one.” Hugh Scott chided McGovern as a “triple A” champion who advocated “Acid, amnesty, and abortion.” That was unfair, but at one time or another various McGovern supporters did speak well of all three, despite the anguished remonstrations of observers like David Riesman, who pointed out that the floor of a national political convention is not the best place to discuss so sensitive an issue as abortion. The impact of all this on the national television audience cannot be determined with precision, but subsequent events suggest that the number of blacks, women, and youths won over by the requirement that delegations “reasonably” reflect their constituencies by race, sex, and age was overwhelmed by the swarms of voters who were offended by the spectacle in Miami Beach. Of the three groups, only the Negroes went for McGovern in November, and they had been for him long before.
By the time McGovern won the nomination it was probably not worth much. He further devalued it by delivering his acceptance speech at 3 A.M., when most voters were asleep. The first in a series of disasters came less than twelve hours later at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee in the Fontaine Room of the Fontainebleau. McGovern began by announcing that Larry O’Brien had “reached a judgment that he will not stay on as the chairman of the party.” That was false—O’Brien was willing to remain—and a number of people there knew it. Mrs. Jean Westwood was chosen as the new chairman. McGovern nominated Pierre Salinger as vice chairman. Charles Evers rose to say that “inasmuch as we are going to try to stay in line with the McGovern rules, I would… strongly urge that if we are going to have a female chairman… I would like to place in nomination a black man to be co-chairman or vice chairman.” He then nominated an unknown Negro—whereupon McGovern said that was fine with him, thus publicly scuttling Salinger.
Unlucky Pierre was betrayed a second time. Later that same day, McGovern asked him to serve as his representative in talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris. Salinger flew to France, the story leaked to UPI, and McGovern issued a statement to the press saying, “Pierre Salinger had no instructions whatsoever from me. He told me he was going to Paris, and he said while he was there he might try to make some determinations of what was going on in the negotiations. But there wasn’t the slightest instruction on my part to him.” Once again there were people who knew better, among them David Dellinger, who had acted as liaison between McGovern and Hanoi. The nominee challenging Nixon’s integrity was himself losing credibility fast.
Then the Eagleton affair exploded. McGovern had just begun a pre-campaign holiday in the Black Hills when reporters learned that Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, his running mate, had twice been hospitalized for psychiatric care, including electroshock therapy. Up to that point the nominee could scarcely be held responsible for that calamity. He hadn’t known about Eagleton’s medical history at the time he picked him, and when Mankiewicz had asked Eagleton if there were any skeletons in his closet, the reply had been that there were none. The Missourian was at fault there. American ignorance of mental health being what it is, even a mild history of depression disqualifies a politician from running for national office, and the problems of a patient subjected to electroshock treatments are not mild. The obvious solution was to let Eagleton resign gracefully. McGovern didn’t do it.
Instead he i
ssued a statement saying that he was “1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton” and had “no intention of dropping him from the ticket.” The mimeograph machine in the Black Hills was still warm when the New York Post, the Washington Post, and the New York Times—the most liberal papers in the country—said Eagleton had to go. Matthew Troy, a prominent New York Democrat whose support for McGovern had been unwavering, was quoted as saying, “I have nine kids. I don’t want to see them destroyed because some unstable person might become President.” Democratic headquarters were deluged with mail, wires, and calls demanding that the vice-presidential nominee quit, and the head of the ticket decided that his support of him wasn’t 1,000 percent after all. He agreed to let Mrs. Westwood say on Meet the Press that it would be “a noble thing” for the Missourian to withdraw. Then, greeting Eagleton, he told him, “Tom, believe me I had no idea what she was going to say.” His running mate replied, “Don’t shit me, George.” According to Eagleton, “George smirked. Not a smile of faint amusement. Not a frown of slight irritation. A smirk, that’s what it was.” Eagleton retired from the ticket on July 31, and after five Democrats, including Muskie, had declined to replace him, Sargent Shriver consented. The episode had been one of the most disastrous in the history of presidential politics. McGovern would never recover from it.
From that moment on the Democratic campaign was on the skids. The nominee belatedly courted LBJ, Mayor Daley, organized labor, and the Jewish vote; all were cool. His Washington headquarters disintegrated. Important letters were unanswered. Speaking schedules disappeared. Distinguished Democrats who called with offers to help were insulted by shaggy young volunteers and turned away. At one time—in May—McGovern had been within five percentage points of Nixon. By July, the month of the Democratic convention, he was twenty points behind. After the Eagleton debacle he slipped farther behind. In October, as he furiously rushed back and forth across the country, logging 65,000 miles in the air, he gained slightly. It didn’t last. Both Gallup and Harris predicted on election eve that the vote would split 61 percent for Nixon and 39 percent for McGovern. Actually it was 60.7 to 37.5, with splinter candidates getting 1.8.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 193