Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver

by Scott Stossel

  The impulse that created this quota system was a noble one, but the short-term effect it had on the party was devastating. It brought radicals of various flavors (New Left, black militant) into the party leadership; more important, it kept many more-experienced Democratic Party regulars out. This had the effect of isolating McGovern from his own party’s local machines. McGovern’s own campaign managers were later appalled at what they had wrought. “We were always subject to this pressure from the cause people,” Mankiewicz recalled. “We reacted to every threat from women, or militants, or college groups. If I had to do it all over again, I’d learn to tell them when to go to hell.”

  Still, for a brief moment after the nomination had been won, it seemed as though McGovern had a chance. As Theodore White put it, “It seemed barely possible, just faintly possible, in the exhaustion, the giddiness, the evangelical moment, that this George McGovern, the prophet, was indeed a serious candidate for the Presidency.”

  THE EAGLETON DEBACLE

  When Shriver returned from the Soviet Union on July 18, this “evangelical moment” seemed as though it might persist. And had the next two weeks unfolded differently, it just might have. But, unbeknownst to anyone at that point, the forces that would undo McGovern for good—and that would suddenly bring Shriver back onto political center stage—had already been set in motion by the selection of Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton as the Democrats’ nominee for vice president.

  On Thursday morning, July 13, the day after McGovern was nominated, about twenty-five of his aides gathered in a conference room at Miami’s Doral Hotel to discuss the matter of a running mate. Frank Mankiewicz, who chaired the meeting, was dismayed at how many people the candidate had invited. But McGovern had requested that a list of possible running mates be submitted to him by noon, just two hours away, so Mankiewicz pressed ahead, gathering a preliminary list of names. “We had no framework for our discussion,” Gordon Weil, one of McGovern’s top campaign aides, recalled. “McGovern had indicated no preferences.” All they knew was that McGovern’s pollster had determined that Ted Kennedy would help the ticket.

  When the initial brainstorming turned up twenty-three names, it was agreed that only those candidates for whom someone in the room was willing to make an aggressive case would be preserved on the list. By the end of the meeting, the list had been narrowed to seven names. The precise order of the list (from most highly to least highly recommended) has been disputed over the years, but according to Theodore White it went: Boston mayor Kevin White; Sargent Shriver; Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff; Wisconsin governor Patrick Lucey; Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson; Idaho senator Frank Church; and, finally, Eagleton. (According to Pierre Salinger, Shriver was first on the list.) Ted Kennedy was not on the list, but everyone knew that if he could be persuaded to accept it, the vice presidential nomination would be his.

  No one in the room knew Kevin White or Tom Eagleton personally, so aides set about trying to gather what information they could on these men and to do quick background checks on all the others. In previous election years, the list of running mates would have been vetted by a group consisting of the Democratic Party leadership, spokespeople for different regional blocs, labor leaders, and the candidate’s closest advisers. But McGovern was an avatar of the New Politics, so he chose to have his list vetted not by the usual suspects but rather by representatives of the women, blacks, and young people in the party. Hart, Mankiewicz, Pierre Salinger, and McGovern met with representatives from each group in the candidate’s suite. Salinger repeatedly made the case for Shriver to each group. “My arguments,” Salinger recalled, “were that he was strongest where McGovern was weakest.” Shriver was popular with blacks, Catholics, and “white ethnics”—and, although he could serve as a useful bridge to the Old Politicians, he wasn’t tainted by association with them, having never himself held elective office. Also, of course, he would bring the “Kennedy mystique.” “Senator McGovern appeared impressed with my arguments,” Salinger later wrote, “and I was strongly supported by Frank Mankiewicz.” When the black leaders indicated their enthusiasm, McGovern halted the meeting and asked Salinger to call Shriver’s office.

  Salinger and Mankiewicz called Shriver’s Watergate office from the telephone in the living room of McGovern’s suite. “Could I speak to Mr. Shriver?” Salinger asked.

  “I’m sorry, but Mr. Shriver is out of the city,” someone in Shriver’s office said.

  “Is there anywhere he can be reached?” Salinger asked.

  “Well, he’s in Moscow.”

  Salinger mumbled a discouraged thank you and hung up.

  As Salinger recalled, “When I reported to the meeting that Shriver was in Moscow there was a moment of silence. It was already 1:30 in the afternoon in Miami. Everybody agreed that if you couldn’t get the candidate back to Miami Beach in time to appear before the convention that evening there was no use pursuing his name.”

  As there was no easy way to reach him in Moscow—and since it wouldn’t do for McGovern, already seen as too liberal by many Americans, to have his running mate fly in from the Kremlin—Shriver’s name was dropped from the list. Some thirty years later, McGovern would tell an interviewer that “if we could have somehow located him … in the Soviet Union, he’d have been the nominee.” “He was a good candidate,” McGovern recalled. “If we had started with him, we’d have been just fine.”

  Kevin White was considered next. Everyone seemed to be in favor, and a preliminary background check found no skeletons in his past. Word was sent to White that he was likely to be selected. But when McGovern called to clear the selection with Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator gently indicated his opposition. He said he wanted some time to “think it over.” This raised McGovern’s hopes that maybe, after all, Kennedy himself was thinking of joining the ticket. While McGovern waited for Kennedy to call back, he got word from John Kenneth Galbraith that Mayor White was unacceptable to the Massachusetts delegation. White’s name was dropped.

  McGovern, growing anxious, next called his old friend Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin senator, to offer him the nomination. No way, Nelson said; he had promised his wife he wouldn’t. But, Nelson said, if you’re set on picking a senator, have you thought about Tom Eagleton?

  McGovern barely knew Eagleton, but he possessed many of the attributes Shriver would have brought to the ticket. He was youthful and attractive—and Catholic. McGovern consulted with the aides gathered in his suite—Hart, Mankiewicz, Fred Dutton, among others—and found none of them especially enthusiastic about Eagleton. But none of them had anything against him, either; they could see that selecting Eagleton made a certain amount of sense.

  “Well, I guess it’s Eagleton,” McGovern said.

  At the morning meeting, someone had mentioned rumors that Eagleton had a drinking problem. But McGovern’s aide Gordon Weil had quickly checked these out and found them to be untrue. In his research on Eagleton, Weil did find reference to mental health problems “in his background,” but Weil had assumed this meant that someone in the senator’s family had had problems, not the senator himself.

  When McGovern called Eagleton, the Missouri senator said, “George, before you change your mind, I hasten to accept.” McGovern handed the phone over to Mankiewicz, who talked briefly to one of Eagleton’s aides. Mankiewicz then had Eagleton come back on the line, so he could ask the senator if he had “any skeletons in his closet” and gave some specific examples of what sort of skeletons he was worried about. Eagleton said he did not. Mankiewicz went downstairs to announce that McGovern had made his selection. The convention endorsed the McGovern-Eagleton ticket by acclamation.

  That night, calls from various news outlets began streaming into McGovern’s suite, asking about rumors of Eagleton’s mental illness. About four o’clock on Friday morning, on his way to a victory party in the Doral’s Starlight Lounge, Gordon Weil pulled Eagleton’s aide Douglas Bennet aside and asked him if there were any truth to the rumors he had been hea
ring. Bennet repeated that although the stories of alcoholism were not true, Eagleton had once checked himself into a hospital with “mental exhaustion and depression.” Weil alerted Mankiewicz, who talked to Bennet the next day. At this point, Bennet reported that the senator had in fact been hospitalized for mental illness on at least two separate occasions.

  The campaign continued, but McGovern was troubled. What was the real story about Eagleton’s past? It wasn’t until the following Wednesday, July 19, when Hart and Mankiewicz had breakfast with Eagleton in the Senate dining room, that the McGovern campaign finally got a full accounting. Eagleton explained that he had been hospitalized for depression three times, in 1960, 1964, and 1966, that he had been treated with electroshock therapy, and that he still occasionally took tranquilizers. Mankiewicz and Hart urged McGovern to drop Eagleton from the ticket.

  For the moment, however, McGovern did nothing. On Sunday, July 23, McGovern appeared on national television, on Face the Nation, and talked about what kind of campaign Eagleton would run. That same day, reporters for the Knight newspaper group approached Frank Mankiewicz and said they had good evidence that Eagleton had been hospitalized for “severe manic depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies.” It was clear the story would break soon. But McGovern evidently believed the story would not have a lasting effect. The next morning in South Dakota, he discussed the situation with Eagleton over breakfast. Immediately afterward, Eagleton held a press conference in which he revealed to reporters his three hospitalizations and his electroshock treatment. With that, Eagleton thought the matter settled, and he took off for Los Angeles and Hawaii to campaign.

  But in the days following Eagleton’s press conference, McGovern’s Senate office was flooded with letters, phone calls, and telegrams urging that Eagleton be dropped from the ticket. By midweek, major newspapers—the New York Post and the Los Angeles Times, followed by the Washington Post, and, finally, the New York Times—editorialized in favor of dropping Eagleton. What would McGovern do?

  He kept telling his aides privately that he was waiting to gauge public reaction before making a decision one way or the other, but they urged him to do something emphatic soon. The Eagleton affair was becoming a major distraction from the campaign. People were beginning to question McGovern’s competence. What did it say about his own intelligence-gathering operations that he had selected a running mate whose background would clearly raise such troubling questions?

  On Wednesday night, July 26, it seemed that McGovern had made his decision. “I’m 1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton,” he declared in a statement he released to the press. One could argue with the wisdom of this position—and most of McGovern’s own staff disagreed with it—but one could not fault McGovern for his boldness and conviction. Despite the doubts and questions, he was going to stand firmly by his man. Party regulars who had once thought McGovern too “soft” to support now wondered if they had gotten him wrong; maybe he had some backbone, after all.

  Pressure to drop Eagleton persisted, however, and by Friday, July 28, McGovern’s aides had persuaded him to change his mind. On Sunday morning, in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Democratic chairs Jean Westwood and Basil Patterson stated that Eagleton should withdraw. Since Westwood acknowledged that she had just talked with McGovern, the meaning was clear: The candidate had decided he wanted his running mate dropped. Embarrassingly, no one had informed Eagleton—in fact, the night before, McGovern had reiterated his “1,000 percent” support. Thus, at almost exactly the same time that Eagleton was being publicly dumped from the ticket on one network, he was appearing on another network (CBS), on Face the Nation, defending his presence on the ticket.

  For the moment, though, the axe did not officially fall. On Monday, McGovern flew to Louisiana for the funeral of Senator Allen Ellender. He sat next to Ted Kennedy on the flight back and spent most of the time trying to persuade the Massachusetts senator to join his ticket. Again, Kennedy demurred. Back in Washington that night, Eagleton and McGovern met in Gaylord Nelson’s Senate office. McGovern told him that his health had come to dominate the campaign. Eagleton argued that the issue would die down soon, but McGovern responded that he couldn’t afford to lose any more time or any more distance in the polls. Eagleton would have to go. All things considered, the meeting was cordial. The two men made separate statements and Eagleton was gone.

  But the damage was done. In the mind of the public, not only had McGovern shown astoundingly poor judgment in selecting (what was perceived to be) a defective running mate in the first place, he had also shown himself not to be a man of his word. The about-face could not have been any more dramatic: from “1,000 percent” to “good-bye” in less than five days.

  McGovern’s campaign was premised on his image as a different kind of politician. Now, with his botched running-mate selection he had shown himself to be as bad as the rest of them. For the next several weeks, the press coverage of the McGovern campaign was not just conventionally negative; it made him “look like a fool.” “Lost,” Theodore White wrote, “was McGovern’s reputation as politician somehow different from the ordinary—a politician who would not, like others, do anything to get elected. McGovern by this time had already antagonized many Americans by his stand on issues. For the first time, after Eagleton, he would incur not merely antagonism but—far worse in politics—contempt for incompetence.”

  THE LUCKY SEVENTH

  The Eagleton affair was a disaster. McGovern’s long odds were now longer than ever. There was only one thing that might be able to repair the damage: Ted Kennedy joining the ticket. Again McGovern implored Kennedy to reconsider; again, Kennedy said no. Kennedy had personal reasons for not wanting to run. He was still nervous about the impact of Chappaquiddick, and he was trying to serve as surrogate father to the children of his slain brothers. Even had he been inclined to join the ticket before the Eagleton debacle, there was little incentive for him to do so afterward. McGovern had dug himself a hole so deep, anyone could see it would be impossible to climb out of it.

  What politician in his right mind would join the McGovern ticket? This was the Democrats’ question as August began, and McGovern made an increasingly frantic series of phone calls to prospective candidates, each of whom turned him down. The Eagleton disaster threatened to become an embarrassment of even more epic proportions: What if no credible candidate could be persuaded to run for the vice presidency? “Who’d take it?” mused one Democratic worker. “It’s a suicide mission.”

  On Wednesday, McGovern tried to get Senator Ribicoff to persuade Kennedy—yet again—to join the ticket. When this didn’t work, McGovern asked if Ribicoff himself would join. Ribicoff said no. On Thursday at breakfast, McGovern tried to talk Hubert Humphrey into joining him. Humphrey said no. Later that day, McGovern asked Reubin Askew, governor of Florida. Askew said no. That night, McGovern turned to Edmund Muskie. Muskie said he would think about it.

  Earlier in the week, about the time McGovern was making his overture to Ribicoff, Frank Mankiewicz and Pierre Salinger once again began pressing the case for Shriver. At first, McGovern had resisted. (One report had him saying, “Shriver! Who wants him? All that Shriver talk is coming from Shriver himself.”) McGovern wanted to curry favor with his fellow senators by selecting one of them. An additional concern, as Gary Hart recalled, was that selecting Shriver would alienate the Kennedys, whose support was crucial if McGovern were to make the race competitive. But sometime during the week, according to Hart, the Massachusetts senator signaled to McGovern that it would be okay with him if Shriver were on the ticket.

  Meanwhile, a draft-Shriver movement had sprung up among the members of Congress who had recruited him to head the CLF in 1970. Led by George Mitrovich, an aide to New York congressman Lester Wolff, the movement peppered McGovern headquarters with phone calls and telegrams. Shriver himself remained oddly diffident. Once, when Mitrovich called him, Shriver declined to take the call, saying he didn’t want to interrupt his dinner with Rose Kennedy. Anot
her time, he refused to come off the tennis court to take a call. Mitrovich left an angry message: “What do you want to be—Wimbledon champ or Vice President of the United States?”

  While Muskie mulled whether to join the ticket, McGovern and his staff agreed that if Muskie turned them down, they would turn next to Shriver. They did not want to be rejected by a seventh candidate, however, so they decided that before McGovern called, Mankiewicz would sniff around to gauge Shriver’s interest. Shriver got wind of this and asked his friend Donald Dell, who had worked with Mankiewicz on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, to alert the McGovern team that he would accept the nomination if offered. Dell went down to McGovern’s Senate office on Friday and pulled Mankiewicz out into the hall. “Frank,” Dell said, “I’m just here to pass a message that if asked, Sarge would accept the vice presidency.” As Dell recalls, Mankiewicz explained that McGovern was really scrambling and could not afford to get turned down again. “Is that absolutely clear?” Mankiewicz asked. Dell’s reply: “I’m here to tell you that, if asked, Sarge will accept.” As Dell recalled, Mankiewicz said, “Donald, just go back and tell Sarge he has a ton of credit in my bank account.”

  The news that Mankiewicz had encouraged Shriver to be on call in case Muskie said no was reported as the lead story in Saturday’s New York Times—a fact that may have influenced Muskie finally to decline McGovern’s offer.

  While Shriver waited to see what Muskie would do, he contemplated his own situation. His main concern was whether Teddy would block him from joining the campaign, as he had in 1968. If Ted wanted to vie for the Democratic nomination in 1976, Shriver’s presence on the McGovern ticket could pose a problem, because even if (as seemed likely) McGovern-Shriver lost in November, Shriver would stand to become the de facto Democratic front-runner for 1976, as Muskie had been for 1972.