Almost President

by Scott Farris

  One group of movement voters previously ignored by both parties, and never targeted for inclusion in politics until McGovern’s campaign, were gays and lesbians. The McGovern campaign had issued a statement, courageous for the time and likely still controversial in some quarters, that said, “Sexual orientation should cease to be a criterion for employment by all public and governmental agencies, in work under federal contracts, for service in the United States armed forces, and for licensing in government-related occupations and professions.”

  It is impossible to know what percentage of gay and lesbian voters supported McGovern in 1972—no one in those days would have polled such a question or even known whom to poll, even though we now know that roughly 3 percent of voters are gay or lesbian. But it was clear to many gay activists that McGovern had at least given them a voice at a time when they were expected to stay silent and in the closet. While the number of gays who voted for McGovern is unknown, polling data suggests that Obama won about 80 percent of the gay vote in 2008.

  One group that proved to be a disappointment to McGovern, however, was the youth vote. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the legal voting age to eighteen, was approved in 1971. The McGovern campaign believed that millions of young voters, motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War, would flood the polls and give him a decided advantage. It was an illusion.

  Young voters were no more a monolithic bloc than any other age group. Among young voters not attending college, McGovern was no more popular than Nixon or even Alabama governor George Wallace. While anti-war protesters, hippies, Yippies, and dissidents of all stripes received most of the media coverage, there was an unnoticed concurrent increase in conservative activism among other young people, as exemplified by the founding of such groups as the Young Americans for Freedom. McGovern did win the eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old age group, but with only 55 percent of their support—and that age group had the lowest voter turnout of any demographic. In what must have been a shock to McGovern and his aides, Nixon won the twenty-one- to twenty-four-year-old age group. Obama, by contrast, won 66 percent of the votes of those under age thirty. While young voters still have the lowest turnout of any age group, it is estimated that more than 50 percent of all Americans under thirty voted in 2008, accounting for nearly a third of Obama’s total vote, and voters under thirty in 2008 were almost twice as likely to identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans.

  While younger voters, women, activists, and minorities provided a large part of the McGovern campaign’s energy and volunteer base, their involvement also caused headaches. The McGovernites learned that issue-oriented voters often cared more about their causes than the candidates. Some McGovern aides thought the movement people “were crazy,” pushing McGovern to take positions that would clearly cost him support from more traditional voters in the general election.

  The cost of assembling this new coalition was McGovern’s failure to receive the endorsement of that critical Democratic constituency, organized labor, most particularly the AFL-CIO, whose leadership became one of McGovern’s chief nemeses. Organized labor had been in decline prior to 1972. In 1955, 33 percent of the nonagricultural labor force belonged to unions, but by 1972 that number had slipped to 27 percent. Urban Democrats, the ethnic voters who typified the New Deal coalition, were also a smaller factor. Urban Democrats had represented 21 percent of the vote in 1952, but just 14 percent in 1968.

  Labor was, therefore, already feeling defensive and protective of its status within the party even before McGovern further limited labor’s influence by squelching the type of backroom deal-making in which labor excelled. Then there was the growing cultural divide. Labor represented men who did not want to see women enter the workforce and compete for jobs, who did not approve of a perceived assault on traditional moral values, and who were sending a seemingly disproportionate share of their own sons to fight in a war that McGovern was proclaiming to be morally wrong.

  While there were dissenters who stayed loyal to the Democratic ticket, labor attacked McGovern privately and publicly. The AFL-CIO anonymously put out anti-McGovern literature, implying he was a Communist sympathizer and questioning his alleged “Blind Trust in Moscow.” In a speech before the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO president George Meany expressed outrage that the 1972 Democratic National Convention included “the gay lib people—you know, the people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys and legalize marriages between girls and girls.”

  Labor’s refusal to endorse McGovern “dramatically influenced the perception of McGovern” as a radical far outside the American mainstream, said McGovern campaign organizer Carl Wagner. McGovern’s Democratic competitors, particularly Hubert Humphrey, were first to hammer home that perception, and Republicans gleefully picked up the theme in the general election.

  The conservative magazine First Monday hyperbolically charged that McGovern was “a dedicated radical extremist who as president would unilaterally disarm the United States of America and open the White House to riotous street mobs.” The National Review added that though McGovern’s “quiet demeanor, flat dull voice and square clothes is not like the standard caricature of the demagogue . . . when we look more closely we see that he is in the classic American demagogic tradition.”

  It was a wildly distorted portrait of a man who was the son of a fundamentalist minister, who had himself been a war hero, and who enjoyed political success representing a predominantly Republican and conservative state in the Midwest. As McGovern put it, “Ordinarily, we don’t send wild-eyed radicals to the United States Senate from South Dakota.”

  If not a radical, McGovern was certainly a moralist. Born July 19, 1922, and growing up in Mitchell, South Dakota, McGovern was the son of a strict Wesleyan Methodist minister. “Movies were off-limits to good Wesleyan Methodists, as were dancing, card-playing, smoking or drinking,” McGovern recalled. But McGovern rebelled, sneaking off to movies at a young age, yet retaining his father’s Manichean view of the world, a trait that seldom endeared him to those on the other side of an argument.

  Interested, even as a young man, in the problems of hunger and world peace, McGovern read widely on the Social Gospel and briefly attended seminary before deciding a ministerial career was not for him. He instead turned to the study of history. McGovern did not subscribe to the mid-twentieth-century consensus view of American history. He saw the arc of American history as a series of conflicts and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the bloody Colorado coal strike of 1913–1914.

  He earned a PhD at Northwestern University where his faculty advisor was Arthur Link, one of the nation’s foremost scholars on Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was also a historian (and a moralist), and he and McGovern remain the only two presidential nominees to have earned a PhD. Foreshadowing his approach to the Vietnam War, McGovern deeply admired Wilson’s attempts to apply moral principles to foreign policy.

  World War II interrupted McGovern’s undergraduate studies at Dakota Wesleyan University. Even though he had a fear of flying, McGovern had taken flying lessons while a student, and when war broke out, he volunteered to be a bomber pilot. Nixon, who never saw combat himself during the war, later directed his presidential campaign to try to portray McGovern as a coward, making the claim that McGovern had refused to fly his final mission. This was a lie. McGovern flew thirty-five missions in his B-24 in the Italian campaign, the number required before a pilot earned a ticket home, and he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. McGovern’s heroism and that of his colleagues is chronicled in the Stephen Ambrose book The Wild Blue.

  McGovern, despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, was no pacifist. He never regretted his role in the fight against fascism, and later in life he would support President Clinton’s decision to use force to stop genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet, he seldom used his war record to full political effect, making no mention of it in his nomination acceptance speech. It was 1972, and his young camp
aign advisors convinced him it was incongruous, even hypocritical, for the anti-war candidate to boast of his military record, so many Americans remained unaware that the anti-war candidate was a war hero.

  McGovern’s willingness to fight for causes he believed in is what drew him into politics. Inspired by Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign and determined to battle the followers of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, McGovern abandoned his teaching career and became the executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party, a job with extraordinary challenges. In 1953, Democrats held only two of South Dakota’s 110 legislative seats. After two years of McGovern’s fundraising, speechwriting, candidate recruiting, organizing, and strategizing, Democrats in 1954 picked up an additional twenty-two state legislative seats. Two years later, in 1956, McGovern used the party organization he had built to defeat a three-term incumbent congressman by a comfortable margin, and he won re-election in 1958 by an even wider margin. South Dakota voters forgave McGovern his unconventional foreign policy views as long as he fought in Congress for farm subsidies and policies that promoted high crop prices.

  In 1960, McGovern ran for the U.S. Senate but lost to longtime Republican senator Karl Mundt by a single percentage point in a year when Nixon walloped John F. Kennedy in South Dakota’s presidential voting. As consolation, Kennedy made McGovern his special assistant in charge of an upgraded Food for Peace program. McGovern gained national attention by expanding the program’s Third World development program six-fold and developing a humanitarian school lunch program that fed thirty-five million children around the world.

  In 1962, McGovern ran for the Senate again, this time winning by just 597 votes out of a quarter million ballots cast. He would always be wary of his precarious position in heavily Republican South Dakota and, belying his image as a radical, carefully avoided taking positions that ran counter to his constituents’ interests. Always looking out for South Dakota’s agricultural interests, he persuaded the Senate to establish a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. Co-chaired by Kansas senator and future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, the committee greatly expanded the school lunch program, making it free to low-income students, added a federally funded school breakfast program, and expanded and improved the food stamp program, all humanitarian programs that also benefited Midwestern farmers.

  Taking care of his farming constituents allowed McGovern to stake out risky foreign policy positions without too much fear of ballot box retribution. McGovern, along with Oregon senator Wayne Morse, became an early critic of President Kennedy’s policies in Southeast Asia, and he heightened that criticism as President Lyndon Johnson escalated American military involvement in Vietnam. In March 1965, McGovern predicted in an interview on CBS News, “I think there will be a staggering loss of human life out of all proportion to the stakes involved, and I see no guarantee that once we go through that kind of a murderous and destructive kind of military effort that the situation out there will be any better. In fact, I think it will be a lot worse.” Later that year, McGovern made his first trip to Vietnam, and said that after visiting military and civilian hospitals filled with amputees and overworked staffs, he “left . . . determined to redouble my efforts against the war . . . to do whatever might persuade Congress and the American people to stop the horror.”

  What set McGovern apart from other politicians opposed to the war was his visceral anger; his belief that war was corrupting the soul of America; and his equal anguish at American casualties and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians, “like us, children of God.” The certainty that he was right, and the moralistic streak he inherited from his father, made him a modern-day Jeremiah whose uncompromising rhetoric unsettled many Americans, including his fellow senators. Failing to persuade the Senate to cut off funding for the war, McGovern gave a remarkable speech before a packed Senate chamber on September 1, 1970, that offended a good many of his colleagues and their constituents:

  Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval (hospitals) and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor, or courage. It does not take courage for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war, those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

  McGovern’s deep hatred of the war led anti-war activists to first approach him about running for president in 1968. He initially deferred to the candidacy of another war opponent, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. But after Robert Kennedy had entered the race and was then assassinated, McGovern was prevailed upon to become a candidate in order to be a rallying point for Kennedy delegates, who were reluctant to switch their support to McCarthy.

  McGovern’s token candidacy was quickly forgotten in the turmoil of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Riots by anti-war protesters and what was later described in an official report as a riot by the police against the anti-war protesters split the party in two and so damaged its prospects that a Nixon win in the fall seemed inevitable.

  Despite the fact that he had not entered a single primary, the Democratic presidential nomination went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, which outraged both reformers who wanted a more open nomination process and also those opposed to the war, for at this point Humphrey was still supporting Johnson’s war policies. Only in late September did Humphrey break with LBJ in calling for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and the resurrection of peace talks in Paris. His new position allowed Humphrey to close the gap, but in the end he lost to Nixon by less than six-tenths of a percentage point in a three-way race that included George Wallace. Despite the narrowness of Humphrey’s defeat, the Democrats seemed in complete disarray.

  To help heal the wounds and bridge divisions within the party, Humphrey had agreed to let the Chicago convention’s delegates vote on and approve a proposal to create a Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection that would soon be known as the “McGovern Commission.” Humphrey had chosen McGovern to head the task force because he had credibility with the insurgents but was also a loyal Democrat who, unlike other insurgent leaders like McCarthy, had enthusiastically campaigned for Humphrey during the general election. McGovern was also acceptable to all party factions because no one thought he would be a serious presidential contender in 1972.

  Party regulars had no concept of how thoroughly the commission would change the Democratic Party. Organized labor declined to participate at all, thinking it a waste of time. Much of labor felt contempt for the insurgents, who were seeking to reduce labor’s traditional influence within the party, and they were convinced the college kids and highly educated professionals behind the mass movements felt contempt for them as well.

  With the party regulars sitting on the sidelines, McGovern and the insurgents dominated the commission, determined to open up the delegate selection process. In the commission’s final report, members listed expanding the level of popular participation as “more than a first principle. We believe that popular control of the Democratic Party is necessary for its survival.” In a period of intense social turmoil, over the war, over race, over gender, over morality, the commission warned that if the Democratic Party did not provide an avenue for people committed to change to find expression within the political system, the danger was not that they would become Republicans but that “they will turn to third and fourth party politics or the anti-politics of the street
.”

  State parties were encouraged to hold primaries rather than caucuses, but if the caucus was the method of selecting national convention delegates, then the meetings had to be adequately advertised so that any interested party member could attend. No longer could party chairs just decide who the delegates to the national convention would be, and no longer could a fee be charged as a requirement for a party member to be a convention delegate. Proxy voting was disallowed, and the unit rule, which bound delegates to back the candidate supported by the majority of their delegation, was ended—though an exception was made for states that selected delegates through a primary. This would prove to be an especially important exception in the state of California.

  The most controversial recommendation of the commission was to establish numerical targets for the inclusion of women and minorities in convention delegations. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in addition to only 13 percent of the delegates being women, only 6 percent had been African Americans, and just 2 percent were under the age of thirty. Party regulars on the commission argued that party rules should simply ensure that no representative of any group could be specifically excluded from participating, but McGovern and the insurgents did not want a passive plan of no exclusion, they wanted an aggressive program of inclusion.

  Under McGovern’s chairmanship, the commission recommended that each future convention delegation include women, minorities, and young voters “in reasonable relationship to their presence in the state as a whole.” After McGovern had left the commission to run for president, and a new chair took over, feminists pushed through additional language that committed the party to specific numerical targets for each previously underrepresented group—essentially quotas that have been ridiculed by critics ever since, but which over time increased the allegiance of women and minorities to the Democratic Party.