by Scott Farris
The immediate impact of the commission’s work was clear at the 1972 convention. Eighty percent of the delegates were attending their first convention, and women now made up nearly 40 percent of all delegates. But the greatest initial impact of the commission’s work was that it allowed McGovern to win the nomination, a feat that, given the antagonism of the regulars to his candidacy, would likely have eluded him had the old rules remained in effect.
Early polling showed McGovern receiving less than 3 percent of the Democratic vote, and the famous odds-maker Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder put McGovern’s chances of winning the party’s nomination at 200-1.24 But under the new rules, having high profile endorsements, the support of powerful special interest groups, or even a lot of money mattered far less than being able to organize supporters and get them to turn out for caucuses and primary elections. Because attendance for caucuses and primary elections was generally low, a cadre of dedicated supporters could easily determine the outcome. The organizing phrase was “grassroots”—which, not coincidentally, became the title of McGovern’s autobiography. The other Democratic candidates for president in 1972 did not seem to realize the rules had changed. McGovern, co-author of the new rules, did, and he surrounded himself with aides who knew everything there was to know about the new delegate selection process.
McGovern’s chances were also boosted because the man who might have dominated the nomination process in 1972, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, had disqualified himself to run because of his bizarre behavior following a 1969 traffic accident that had killed a young woman on Chappaquiddick Island. The remaining favorite for the nomination was Maine senator Edmund Muskie, who had been Humphrey’s running mate in 1968. Some have attributed Muskie’s later fall from frontrunner status to a series of sophomoric “dirty tricks” played on the Muskie campaign by Nixon operatives, but in truth Muskie proved, as McGovern had predicted he would be, “a bland and unexciting campaigner” who was out-hustled by McGovern and his grassroots army.
McGovern made a stronger than expected showing in the opening Iowa caucuses, and it was soon clear that Muskie was simply not attuned to the electorate’s new mood, which demanded more openness from candidates. When McGovern made all his public and personal finances public, Muskie declined to follow suit; when McGovern challenged Muskie to debate, Muskie refused. Muskie also misplayed the expectations game. A campaign staffer had guaranteed that Muskie would get 50 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, but he received 46 percent, so even though he won, the media spun it as a loss.
With Muskie no longer seeming the inevitable nominee, Humphrey got into the race, joining a host of other candidates that also included Wallace, who was still running a racially divisive campaign but who won the Florida primary and finished a strong second in Wisconsin. After McGovern defeated Muskie in the Massachusetts primary, and after Wallace was shot and paralyzed on the eve of the Maryland primary, the race for the nomination came down to McGovern and Humphrey.
McGovern, who considered Humphrey a political mentor and a friend, expected a civil, even friendly, contest. But Humphrey, now sixty-one years of age and seeing yet another opportunity to become president slip away, went on the attack. He pummeled his fellow Democrat as a dangerous leftist radical whose supporters included even more dangerous radicals.
After McGovern narrowly defeated Humphrey in the California primary and won all the state’s delegates (because the unit rule had been left in place for primary states), Humphrey challenged the “winner-take-all” results. McGovern was astonished that he was now mired in an intraparty squabble when it was clear he had won enough delegates overall, even without California, to be the nominee. He needed time before the convention to pull the party together and prepare for the general election, but all his campaign’s energy was now spent on beating back the Humphrey challenge.
While Humphrey and the other regulars within the party resented that the new politics meant their own influence was reduced, many also sincerely believed that McGovern was not only unelectable, but he would also be a disaster for down-ticket races. This fear turned out not to be true; while Nixon won in a landslide, Democrats actually gained two Senate seats in 1972.
Nor did McGovern believe himself unelectable. He and his advisors, who included his thirty-five-year-old campaign manager, future Colorado senator and presidential aspirant Gary Hart, had concluded that McGovern had an excellent chance to defeat Nixon based on six assumptions that proved to be mostly false. As author Bruce Miroff outlined them, they were:
One, there was a widespread feeling of political alienation among the electorate;
Two, Nixon was an unpopular president;
Three, George Wallace would eventually become a third-party candidate, as he had in 1968, and siphon votes away from Nixon in the South and Midwest;
Four, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen would spur a huge turnout among youth, most of whom were anti-war;
Five, the Democrats were the natural majority party; and
Six, Democrats were united in their animosity toward Nixon—no matter whom the nominee might be.
McGovern and his advisors could not have foreseen, of course, the assassination attempt that ended Wallace’s presidential bid. But the other assumptions suggested that McGovern’s team was out of touch with the prevailing sentiments in America.
In addition to misreading the youth vote, McGovern also misread the public attitude toward Nixon. Because McGovern had despised Nixon since the latter’s Red-baiting days began in the late 1940s, he assumed most Americans shared that feeling. The hard part of the election, McGovern thought, would be winning the Democratic nomination. After that, “it should be comparatively easy to defeat Richard Nixon by appealing to the decency and common sense of the American people.” One of the cruel twists of McGovern’s campaign was that the election ended up, as Time magazine noted, “turning not on Nixon’s character and credibility, but on McGovern’s.”
This was thanks to the way McGovern mishandled the Thomas Eagleton affair.
Prior to the Democratic National Convention, McGovern and his campaign had been consumed with Humphrey’s challenge of the California primary results. They were left little opportunity to consider whom McGovern’s running mate should be. Despite Chappaquiddick, McGovern still wanted Ted Kennedy as his running mate and was certain he could persuade Kennedy to accept the nomination. He couldn’t. Kennedy declined, and so did Walter Mondale.
Because McGovern failed to finally put the California challenge to rest until the national convention was well under way, he found he had only a single day to decide whom his running mate would be before presenting the name to the convention. That day, July 13, would be among the worst in the history of presidential campaigns.
Weary campaign staffers gathered early that morning and developed a list of three dozen potential running mates, a sign of how little forethought had gone into the decision to date. The ridiculously lengthy roster was finally winnowed down, and McGovern first focused upon Boston mayor Kevin White. An urban Catholic, White might have appealed to the old guard of the party and been a force for party unification. Ted Kennedy, however, did not want the nomination to go to a rival Massachusetts politician.
McGovern then offered the nomination to an old friend, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, but, like Kennedy and Mondale, he, too, declined. It was then, with only an hour left before the deadline to give the convention a name, that the campaign concentrated on Thomas Eagleton, a senator from Missouri and another urban Catholic with appeal to labor who had also been a Muskie supporter. Eagleton immediately accepted the invitation to join the ticket.
Eagleton had been asked point-blank by a McGovern aide if he had any skeletons in his closet that should cause the campaign concern; Eagleton said no. His nomination went forward. What Eagleton failed to mention was that he had p
reviously undergone treatment, including electro-shock therapy, for a mental illness. He later explained that he felt he had been cured and so felt no more need to disclose that condition than he would have mentioned he had once had a broken leg that healed.
Because Eagleton was a last-minute selection, convention delegates had not had time to rally around him and make his nomination pro forma. Punchy delegates decided to have some fun instead and nominated or cast votes for nearly eighty vice presidential nominees. Some were serious offerings, such as the feminists’ nomination of Texas state legislator Frances “Sissy” Farenthold. Other votes for Archie Bunker or Mao Zedong were pure silliness.
To that point in the process, the McGovernites had done their best to ensure an orderly convention to counter their image as radical amateurs. The convention had adopted a moderate platform, and the most radical ideas and unsettling images had been kept out of the convention’s television coverage. Washington Post columnist David Broder praised the type of delegates and convention the McGovern reforms had created: “Purposeful, decent, demonstrative, good-humored, indefatigable, and, above all, diverse.”
But this single lapse in discipline concerning the selection of a running mate had two fateful consequences.
First, the “convention horseplay” around the vice presidential choice threw off the convention schedule, and McGovern was not able to give his nomination acceptance speech until 2:45 a.m. EDT. Instead of a prime time television audience of seventy million who might have heard McGovern give one of the best speeches of his campaign, his audience was estimated at fifteen million—and, except for insomniacs, these were likely only die-hard Democrats who were going to vote for McGovern anyway.
But a botched opportunity to deliver his most considered pitch to the largest possible audience was only the second worst outcome of July 13. Within a day, rumors about Eagleton’s history of mental illness were circulating widely. Eagleton insisted to McGovern aides that he had only been hospitalized once for exhaustion, but it was soon confirmed that he had been hospitalized three times for what appeared to be severe depression and that part of his treatment involved electro-shock therapy.
It seemed to most observers, then, that McGovern would have no choice but to dump Eagleton from the ticket, not only out of concern for his mental stability should he be elevated to the presidency, but also because he had misled McGovern and withheld the truth. Yet, McGovern continued to back his choice publicly, at one point issuing a statement that he was “a thousand percent behind Tom Eagleton,” even as he privately sent out feelers to reporters to determine what the reaction would be if he dropped Eagleton. Six days after issuing his “a thousand percent” statement, McGovern asked Eagleton to withdraw from the ticket.
This complete reversal badly damaged McGovern’s credibility and remade Eagleton into a sympathetic figure. Eagleton was angry both at the damage done to his reputation and at how McGovern had publicly backed him while privately expressing doubts to others. In a face-to-face meeting, McGovern denied to Eagleton that he was the source of any of the stories that suggested McGovern was considering dropping him from the ticket. “Don’t shit me, George,” Eagleton responded.
In no mood to do McGovern any favors, Eagleton said he would resign only on the condition that he write McGovern’s statement announcing the decision. He told McGovern that if there were any mention of his alleged mental illness, he would refuse to resign and would fight for his place on the ticket all the way to November. McGovern, then, was forced to say only what Eagleton allowed him to say, which was that Eagleton was an able public servant who was in fine physical and mental health. McGovern explained that he was removing Eagleton from the ticket only because the furor over his past medical treatment “continues to divert attention from the great national issues that need to be discussed.” Such a disingenuous statement made McGovern appear indecisive and untrustworthy.
McGovern’s reluctance to drop Eagleton from the ticket was, he said later, deeply personal. McGovern had a daughter, Terry, who had battled depression and became an abuser of drugs and alcohol. Terry would later freeze to death in 1994 at age forty-five after passing out outside a Madison, Wisconsin, bar on a cold winter night, and McGovern would chronicle his daughter’s tragic life in a book titled Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism. McGovern later said that he felt that if he had jettisoned Eagleton, he would be sending a message to Terry that mental illness made a person a pariah.
McGovern had not only lost the character issue to Nixon, but the whole mess with Eagleton was considered the political story of the year, drawing media attention away from Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
Whatever small chance (and it was almost certainly infinitesimal) McGovern had had for victory in the general election was lost with the Eagleton fiasco. The search for Eagleton’s replacement was a farce played out in public view. Once again, a steady stream of prominent Democrats refused to board a rapidly sinking ship. Finally, Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver accepted. Shriver had run the Peace Corps under JFK and the “War on Poverty” under LBJ. Had he been a first choice, Shriver, who proved to be an effective campaigner, would have pleased party regulars and attached some of the Kennedy glamour to a charisma-challenged candidate now branded a “hapless loser.” Instead, Shriver was a bandage applied to a patient who had already bled to death.
When looking at 1972 in retrospect, McGovern aides have conceded that a McGovern victory would have been highly unlikely even if they had run a near perfect campaign. But had it not been for the Eagleton debacle, those same aides believe that McGovern would have carried ten or twelve states, instead of one, and he would have won 45 percent of the vote, instead of 37.5 percent.
Perhaps, but while Watergate would eventually color the view of what Nixon accomplished in 1972, his landslide win was not all about political dirty tricks and subversion of the Constitution. Nixon ran a masterful, disciplined campaign, and the first six months of 1972 were the high point of his presidency. In that time period he made his remarkable visit to the People’s Republic of China, he bombed Hanoi in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, and did so without scuttling a summit with the Soviets in Moscow where he signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). At the beginning of the year, Nixon’s job approval rating had been just below 50 percent, but by mid-year it had soared to 61 percent.
McGovern’s belief that he could unify the party around a shared antipathy toward Nixon was a gross miscalculation. He couldn’t. And it was not just jealousy by the party regulars; McGovern’s moralistic tone, delivered as a jeremiad to a nation that prefers sunny optimists, was as offensive to Cold War Democrats as it was to conservative Republicans.
Returning to the Senate after his defeat, McGovern overheard Georgia senator Herman Talmadge explain to other senators, “You know, what was wrong with George in that campaign was that he gave the impression that he was mad at the country. . . . This is a great country. It makes mistakes, but by God if you get up there and preach day and night against America, you’re not going to be elected.”
Washington Post reporter William Greider had written during the campaign that “McGovern’s moral message is repugnant to a great many American voters who not only disagree with it, but are outraged that a major party presidential candidate should even be saying such things.” Newsweek added that McGovern, “the preacher’s boy from Mitchell, S.D.,” had “turned more furiously evangelical than any major-party candidate since William Jennings Bryan . . . [and had] returned more and more to the old moral absolutism—and to the harshest rhetoric of any campaign in memory.”
But where Bryan had railed against Wall Street and the Eastern establishment, McGovern’s anger at the war in Vietnam, and his consuming desire to end it at almost any cost, was received by many voters as an indictment of the American people for their complicity in the conflict. He certainly said things no presidential can
didate had said before or since.
McGovern had begun his campaign in January 1971 with the high-minded idea that “thoughtful Americans understand that the highest patriotism is not to blindly accept official policy but to love one’s country deeply enough to call her to a higher standard.” McGovern was then intent on ensuring Americans knew how far below that standard American behavior in Vietnam had fallen and how they were complicit in that failure. In one campaign speech, he said:
For what we now present to the world is the spectacle of a rich and powerful nation standing off at a safe distance and raining down a terrible technology of death on helpless people below—the most incredible and murderous bombardment in all the history of mankind. . . . We have steel fleshettes that penetrate the skin and cannot be removed. We have napalm—jellied gasoline that sticks to the skin as it burns. We have white phosphorus that cannot be extinguished until it burns itself out.
McGovern’s opponent may have been Nixon, but he was campaigning as fiercely against the apathy of the American people, and was desperately trying to get the American public to confess and atone for their own culpability as passive witnesses and active participants. In one particularly exasperated moment, McGovern said:
I do not honestly know whether the war weighs as deeply on the minds of the American people as it does on mine. I do not honestly know whether the blunt words I have said tonight will help me or hurt me in this election. I do not really care. For almost a decade, my heart has ached over the fighting and the dying in Vietnam. I cannot remember a day when I did not think of this tragedy.
What he learned, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote, was that “we are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway.”
Dissent is an honored American tradition, but it is seldom popular in the moment and opens up the dissenter to charges from opponents that he or she is unpatriotic. McGovern would later admit that his harsh moral tone had been a mistake. Moral critiques, as Jimmy Carter learned and put to use in his own campaign, are only effective when directed at the Washington establishment. What voters want to hear, McGovern aide Greg Craig said ruefully after the campaign, is that America is a great country filled with good people.