Despite all the assembled talent—this “jolly bunch of amateurs” as one reporter called it—the challenge was enormous. Everyone knew what the polls showed. When McGovern’s pollster Pat Caddell broke down the numbers, they seemed even worse. Large percentages of normally Democratic voting groups—Catholics, blue-collar workers, and the “white ethnics”—had gone over to Nixon in droves. McGovern had so alienated the Democratic rank and file that the McGovern-Shriver campaign now had to focus its effort on recapturing a large portion of its core constituency, rather than chasing after Republicans or swing voters. Of all the Democratic constituencies, only African Americans seemed staunchly in the McGovern camp—and this served to alienate much of the George Wallace voter bloc, mainly blue-collar white Southerners who felt threatened by blacks. In a campaign memo on August 24, Mickey Kantor told Doris Kearns and Bill Josephson that they had to start from the premise that fully twenty-six states had to be completely written out of the Democratic column; the only hope was to cobble together enough electoral votes from some of the remaining twenty-four, which fortunately included such large-population states as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
The mission of the vice presidential campaign, as Mark Shields recalled, was “to bring home wayward Democrats. I don’t think we saw three white Protestants in the whole campaign. Everywhere we went it was ethnic Catholics, Southerners, and union members.” A Democratic presidential candidate couldn’t hope to carry a state without enlisting various of these groups. What made this especially challenging for the Shriver campaign, according to Shields, was that certain staffers on the McGovern campaign, intent on defining a “new” Democratic politics, viewed any association with those traditional groups “as proof of moral cowardice.”
In some ways, Shriver was well equipped to go after these traditional Democratic constituencies. He was a prominent Catholic. And he, unlike McGovern, had not severed his ties to the Daleys and the LBJs of the party. As a Marylander from a Confederate family, he had more credibility than McGovern south of the Mason-Dixon line. He was also a more dynamic campaigner than McGovern and possessed more of what might be called “the common touch.” McGovern could go after the Northeastern liberals and the new suburban Democrats, where his support was strongest; Shriver would be sent out to the factories and the slaughterhouses and the wharves to mingle with the working man.
However, Shriver’s “common touch” tended to be swaddled in Pierre Cardin suits. Shriver’s feeling of fellowship with the blue-collar ethnics was genuine; his powerful innate curiosity about other people was entirely sincere. When he mixed with crowds on the campaign trail, it was as one among equals—not, as so often appears to be the case when candidates meet the throngs, the politically anointed patronizing the unwashed masses. But this genuine feeling of connection to the voters tended to blind Shriver to how different from them he appeared. Rather than seeking to dress and act like the people he was meeting, he dressed and acted like the person he was: an intellectual, and a man of some affluence who liked to dress with fashionable panache. Mingling with factory workers in their standard-issue work shirts, or with coal miners in their soot-stained coveralls, Shriver looked out of place in his double-breasted French suits and his fancy Italian shoes. The people he met liked him. But the images that appeared on television and in press photos showed what looked like a man out of touch with the people he was trying to lure back to the party.
Shriver didn’t help matters when, on at least one occasion, he fumbled when explaining to fellow Catholics why he sent his eldest son, Bobby, to Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite WASP preparatory school. Nor did it help that AFL-CIO president George Meany, believing he had once been snubbed by Shriver in Paris, made no secret of his dislike for both McGovern and Shriver; it looked as though the AFL-CIO was going to forgo its traditional allegiance to the Democrats and stay neutral—or perhaps even endorse Nixon.
The most egregious example of Shriver’s apparent disconnection from the blue-collar constituency he was trying to woo occurred in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1972 Youngstown was a classic rust-belt working-class steel town—just the sort of place in which Shriver should be campaigning if he wanted to reach the factory-worker vote. The story of what happened in Youngstown the day Shriver campaigned there has been told so many times over the years that it has achieved the status of myth; it is no longer easy to separate fact from legend. But according to Mark Shields, what happened was this:
Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, a longtime Massachusetts congressman (he would soon become House majority leader and then Speaker of the House) with stalwart credentials among working-class ethnic Democrats, agreed to accompany Shriver on a campaign trip to Youngstown. On the plane, Shriver and O’Neill talked about Jack and Bobby Kennedy. “Ya know, your brothers-in-law were cheap bastards,” O’Neill said affectionately. “They never bought a round.” This, claimed O’Neill, an orotund Irishman with a classic drinker’s nose, had hurt them with the white working-class voter. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he told Shriver. “We’ll go to the local saloon, right outside the steel mill.” Drinking in a bar, O’Neill assured him, is the way to relate to the working man.
O’Neill and Shriver arrived with some aides at a local dive near a Youngstown steel mill and sat down at a table to await the end of the next shift. Soon, the bar was filled. O’Neill was in his element. So, in his way, was Shriver; the rapport between the candidate and the people was good. Then it came time to order another round. Everyone yelled out his choice of beer: Schlitz! Budweiser! Pabst! Then it was Shriver’s turn. “Make mine a Courvoisier!” he yelled, calling for an elite and expensive liqueur.
“That’s it,” O’Neill said. “I’m getting back on the plane and going back to Boston. There’s no hope here.”
“WE HAVE TO DESTROY SHRIVER NOW”
One of a vice president’s jobs is to be his running mate’s attack dog, the mudslinger who allows the presidential nominee to remain above the fray. Aggressive personal attacks, generally speaking, were not Shriver’s style—this was one reason old-school machine politicians perceived him as lacking an instinct for the jugular. But in this instance, he launched his attacks with evident relish. He called Nixon “Tricky Dicky,” a “psychiatric case,” “power-mad,” “the greatest con artist,” and “the number-one bomber of all time.” He attacked Nixon for his economic policies, his nuclear policies, and his social policies. These attacks were to be expected from a vice presidential candidate, and although they could arouse partisan crowds, they didn’t attract much media attention.
His attacks on Nixon’s Vietnam policy, however, did. A few days into his campaign, Shriver told a group of reporters that Nixon had “blown” the opportunity for peace in late 1968 and early 1969. Nixon, Shriver said, had had “peace in his lap” when he took office in 1969 and could have signed an acceptable negotiated treaty ending the war, but he opted instead for his policy of Vietnamization, continuing to support the war but with a declining number of US troops on the ground.
This was a serious charge. Among other things, 20,000 additional American lives had been lost in Southeast Asia between the winter of 1969 and the summer of 1972. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger’s talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, no longer secret, had increased in frequency through July and August, as Nixon strove (as LBJ had in 1968) to achieve a peace settlement before November, in order to boost his already highly favorable reelection chances. Shriver’s allegation added fuel to Democratic claims that Nixon’s pursuit of peace was motivated entirely by politics; if the president could have had the same settlement in 1969, as Shriver claimed, why did he wait until he was up for reelection to try to take advantage of it?
Coming from just about anyone else, such a charge would have been predictably inflammatory, but it could have been effectively handled by rote denials from Nixon. But because Shriver had been ambassador to France in 1968 and 1969, and had been privy to State Department cable traffic during the
Nixon administration, his allegation was instant front-page news. Why, Nixon’s defenders asked, did Shriver accept a position in the Nixon administration if he believed the president had already blown a chance for peace? Because, Shriver said, in January 1969 he still thought Nixon would do what Eisenhower had done when he took over from Harry Truman, ending the Korean War. “It wouldn’t have been hard” for Nixon to achieve peace in 1969, Shriver said.
President Nixon immediately dispatched both Secretary of State Bill Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to defend his administration and to ridicule Shriver’s claim that he had been privy to any secret information. Rogers went on the attack, telling a press conference that Shriver was engaging in “political fantasy”; the notion that Nixon “blew” the chance for peace was “bunk.” Rogers said, “Certainly if the President of the United States is sitting with peace in his lap, as Mr. Shriver says, and Mr. Shriver knows that peace is in his lap, he could pick up the phone and call me, or call the President, or talk to [Henry] Cabot Lodge, or the other negotiators and say, ‘My God, peace is in the President’s lap.’ He didn’t mention anything of that kind.” Then Rogers cracked up reporters by pretending to be Shriver, holding an imaginary phone up to his ear and saying, “Bill, this is Sarge Shriver. The President has a historic opportunity for peace. Peace is in his lap. Why don’t you do something about it?” Rogers’s State Department also announced that it had combed through Shriver’s own cables from Paris and claimed to find nothing about a “historic opportunity for peace.”
But behind the scenes, Nixon worried. He knew that the story of his interventions with the South Vietnamese delegation, if it got out, would be extremely damaging to his reelection chances. Through Anna Chennault and President Thieu, Nixon had actively sought to sabotage the chance for a settlement in 1968. If the blown-chance-for-peace story gained momentum, it would add force to a series of stories that had recently been appearing in the Washington Post.
The week after Shriver’s nomination to the ticket, long articles in both Time and Newsweek about the Eagleton debacle were immediately followed by much shorter articles about a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. On June 17, five men had been arrested when they were found trying to implant bugging devices in the DNC offices. Now evidence was growing that the men had ties to the GOP and specifically to the Committee to Reelect the President.
For Nixon, the Eagleton debacle had been a godsend: not only did it gravely damage McGovern’s image but it also pushed the breaking Watergate story off the front pages. Even when the story did appear on the front pages, as it was now doing with some regularity in the Washington Post, no one seemed to pay much attention. Although Shriver kept mentioning it in his speeches, voters didn’t take an interest.
The Vietnam story, in contrast, had legs. Unfortunately for the Democratic ticket, Shriver didn’t quite know what he had stumbled onto yet. He, along with Humphrey, LBJ, and Johnson’s peace negotiators, all knew that Nixon had been involved in some funny business, making direct overtures to the South Vietnamese to impede a peace settlement in late October 1968. But the full story of Nixon and Anna Chennault’s skullduggery would not emerge for a decade. So in his attacks on Nixon, Shriver focused more on the situation in Paris—and on the situation on the ground in Vietnam—after Nixon took office in January 1969.
Shriver was on solid ground here, as well. At the time Nixon took office, North Vietnamese troops had withdrawn from the two northernmost provinces in South Vietnam, where most of the fiercest combat had taken place. It was the first such withdrawal since full-scale combat engagements had begun in 1965. The Americans, meanwhile, had 500,000 troops on the ground in South Vietnam. This gave the United States the strongest negotiating position it had had for years—and the active withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops seemed to many to signal that they were ready to come to the negotiating table. But when Nixon, already enmeshed in his relationship with President Thieu, took office, he focused more on acceding to South Vietnamese demands than on working toward a settlement.
The day after Rogers mocked Shriver to reporters, Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance, the two leading American negotiators in 1968, issued a joint statement backing up Shriver’s claim of a “blown” peace. “We support completely Sargent Shriver’s view that President Nixon lost an opportunity for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam when he took office,” they declared. The North Vietnamese withdrawal of troops was a clear signal, Vance and Harriman argued, that Hanoi was ready to talk seriously about peace. When Rogers’s State Department again denied this, Harriman told the New York Times, “There’s no use in the department trying to deceive the American public. This was a fact. We had the same information in Paris that they had in the State Department.” Harriman acknowledged that some “hard-liners” may have refused to recognize the troop withdrawal as a peace signal, but he and Vance, as well as Clark Clifford, then secretary of defense, had clearly seen the withdrawal for what it was. The Times published an editorial blasting the disingenuousness of Rogers, Nixon, and company in denying that such an opportunity for peace had ever existed.
When reporters asked Harriman why, if the signal from the North had come before November, President Johnson hadn’t reached a settlement, Harriman replied: “We couldn’t carry on discussions because President Thieu would not permit his representatives to negotiate.” What Harriman did not fully know even in 1972 was that Thieu had refused to negotiate at least partly because of instructions from Nixon, which had been conveyed to him through Anna Chennault and Bui Diem.
Despite the fact that he was still trouncing McGovern in the polls, Nixon became preoccupied with managing the attacks on Shriver. On the morning of August 14, Treasury Secretary John Connally told Haldeman they needed to broaden their attacks on Shriver. “We should make all our responses in the form of an attack, we should not defend against their charges,” Connally said, “and … we have to destroy Shriver now.”
Later that afternoon, Nixon briefly broke off a conversation with his aides Patrick Buchanan and Bob Haldeman about his acceptance speech for the upcoming GOP convention to say, as Haldeman recorded it in his diary, that he was concerned about “how we’re handling the Shriver and [former attorney general Ramsey] Clark attacks. Feels we should be hitting Shriver hard on the point that he didn’t know what was going on.… That he was not told anything, because LBJ didn’t trust him.… We have the chance to destroy Shriver. We should all attack him.”
The depth of Nixon’s eagerness to “destroy” Shriver here suggests how close the former ambassador had come to drawing real blood. (Never does Haldeman indicate that Nixon ever expressed so much concern about anything McGovern did.) Much of Nixon’s own staff was not aware of his role in pushing Thieu away from the negotiating table in 1968, but they, like the president, recognized that destroying Shriver’s credibility on the issue was the best way to render the “blown-peace” question moot. “Need to destroy Shriver and his credibility,” Haldeman wrote the next day in his diary. We’ve “got to keep hitting Shriver and build a factual chronology.”
One person who might have helped the Democratic ticket by defending Shriver’s credibility was Lyndon Johnson. He knew (from FBI wiretaps) about Chennault’s interventions with the South Vietnamese on Nixon’s behalf; he knew how close he had been to peace before the South Vietnamese backed away from negotiations at the eleventh hour before the elections in 1968. Why didn’t he say something now?
Mainly, it was because LBJ disliked George McGovern and everything he stood for. Whatever else Johnson was—a liberal or a conservative, a racist or a civil rights champion (and he was all of these)—he was unquestionably a politician of the old school. He loved the “smoke-filled rooms” of brokered conventions, thrived amid the horse-trading and log-rolling of Congress, lived for politics with a capital P—lived, in other words, for everything that the reformist George McGovern, with his commissions and his quotas and his radical supporte
rs, was against. Johnson also believed McGovern couldn’t win. “George McGovern couldn’t carry Texas if Dick Nixon were caught fucking a sow in downtown Fort Worth,” Johnson was telling reporters off the record.
When McGovern and Shriver flew to meet with LBJ at his ranch on August 22, Johnson insisted that the meeting be short and that there be no press and no pictures—nothing to signal that he approved of the South Dakota senator. (The official reason given for Johnson’s reticence was that he wasn’t feeling well.) After the meeting, LBJ called Billy Graham to say that Nixon had done much more for him (Johnson) than McGovern ever had. According to Haldeman, LBJ told Graham that “McGovern is associating with amateurs, that he ought to shake up his staff, and he ought to stand up and say what a wonderful place America is.” Johnson also—according to Haldeman’s notes about what Billy Graham reported—“told Shriver that he didn’t know what he was talking about on Vietnam. He had the documents to prove it, and he handed them to Shriver and told him to read them. He also told McGovern that he has letters in the library, and that he should go read them, regarding Vietnam.”
Shriver’s claims about the blown opportunity for peace “in 1968” indirectly tarred Johnson with the same damning brush that tarred Nixon. Concerned about his historical legacy, Johnson was not happy. He told John Connally he was “mad as hell” about it. But the story that LBJ told Billy Graham about yelling at Shriver and brandishing documents seems to have been a typical Johnson fabrication, concocted with the certainty that it would be conveyed from Graham to Nixon. No one present at the August 22 meeting at the LBJ ranch—including Shriver, McGovern, and their aides—has any recollection of Johnson producing any “documents.”
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 75