THE way Americans choose Vice-Presidents has always been absurd—but never quite so absurd as in the Democratic exercise of 1972.
For seventeen of the past twenty-seven years, America had been governed by Presidents who made their entry to that office from the Vice-Presidency; Harry Truman came that way and history chose him to loose the atom bomb; Lyndon Johnson came that way and plunged the nation into the most disastrous war of its history. In the Vice-Presidency lies all the potential power of the Presidency itself—yet the choice is the most perfunctory and generally the most thoughtless in the entire American political system.
The traditional script in both parties reads the same: the Presidential candidate is nominated on Wednesday of convention week. His speech is usually unfinished at that point, and with the mantle of history being pleated for him, he insists on fussing with the speech once more, giving it that final gloss which will shimmer through time. The choosing of a Vice-President at this point is not only a bother to him—it is a curse. Matters never look quite the same to the principal candidate the night of his victory as they did when he arrived at the scene in full combat ardor. His defeated party rivals must now become tomorrow’s allies; their supporters must be appeased; the half-promises, half-commitments he has given to friends on the way hang over him; the names he or his staff has floated to test public reaction have frozen into print. Concern about who could best govern the nation fades to the far corner of the tired mind. The immediate problem seems always to be who can best help carry the nation for the ticket in November; politics weighs more heavily than history.
All Presidential nominees for twenty years have handled the problem as their personalities shaped them.
Eisenhower, the conqueror of Europe, went to sleep in Chicago after defeating Robert Taft in 1952; with the calm of the veteran commander, he had told his staff to assemble the party leadership and get him a name for Vice-President. The leadership argued all night, then in exhaustion settled on the name of Richard M. Nixon—because he was young while Eisenhower was old, because he was conservative and Eisenhower liberal, because he was from California and Eisenhower from New York; and because, said Paul G. Hoffman, who was there, “we were all so very tired by that time.” Eisenhower rarely questioned staff decisions and did not question this one. Richard Nixon, with a characteristic that later became familiar, made it quite clear that the contract was binding on both men; when the leadership two months later tried to dump him, and Tom Dewey telephoned asking him to withdraw from the ticket, Nixon replied that he had to get that word from Eisenhower himself—and that it was time for the chief to spit or get off the pot.
Stevenson, in 1956, left the decision to the convention, the only open choice of Vice-President in modern history—and thereby took Estes Kefauver to defeat with him, while preserving John F. Kennedy to run in 1960.
At his own convention in 1960 Kennedy was all master. He had been nominated late on Wednesday, enjoyed himself that night at a small party in his hideaway apartment, gone to bed for five hours of sleep, leaving his staff with the impression his choice would be either Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri or Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. He astounded the staff when, after deciding all alone, he told them the next morning his choice was Lyndon Johnson. His brother Robert opposed the choice; staff railed at him; friends tried to shake him; labor and Northern leaders were indignant. But Kennedy was stubborn—he needed Johnson for the election, and history would have to take care of itself. Besides—he did not plan to die.
Johnson, in 1964, enjoyed himself in the style of Caligula, toying with the convention, and teasing the television audience, before using his Presidential prerogative to choose Hubert Humphrey. And Nixon, in 1968, followed Eisenhower in style, leaving the choice to the conflicting groups of the party’s leadership; then, when they deadlocked, and his own man, Robert Finch, refused the offer of Vice-Presidency, he selected Spiro T. Agnew over John Volpe as his runningmate. Agnew was the better political instrument for the tight border strategy Nixon planned to run.
In 1972, in the Democratic Party, the decision was to be neither solitary nor by a consensus of leadership. It was to be, in the style of McGovern’s army, a participatory decision. Some twenty-plus people gathered on Thursday morning, July 13th, between 8:30 and 9:00 in a downstairs conference room at the Doral Hotel—all tired from overwork and celebration, some with only two or three hours’ sleep, a good number hung-over, others with only a quick dip in the ocean at dawn to clear their sleep-starved minds.
Frank Mankiewicz was to chair the meeting, and earlier in the week, on Tuesday, Mankiewicz had discussed with McGovern the calling together of a small group—himself, Hart, Stearns, Salinger, Van Dyk, Wexler—to sift the choices. On Wednesday night after the nomination, McGovern had instructed other staff members to round up a full panel. “I showed up,” said Mankiewicz, “and, Christ, there were about twenty-four people there. What was I going to do? The door would open and someone would say, ‘George told me to show up here.’ I was surprised someone from Gay Liberation didn’t show up.” The key women of the McGovern command were present—Shirley MacLaine, Anne Wexler, Jean Westwood; so, too, were the key blacks (Clay, Fauntroy, Martin); so, too, were the veterans (Caddell, Pokorny, Grandmaison, Segal, Himmelman); so, too, were the public-relations minds (Dutton, Dougherty, Jones, Salinger); so, too, was the general staff (Mankiewicz, Hart, Stearns, Weil); and others.
Time was already short, for McGovern required that they give him a choice of names by noon, to allow him time to check, clear, ponder or even seek an alternate—all of which had to be accomplished, under the new rules, by four in the afternoon. There were some forty to forty-five names in play at this point and, to simplify matters, it was agreed that no name would be discussed unless someone present was willing to make a hard pitch for the name. Mankiewicz was imaginative in his approach—his suggestions ranged from Father Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame to Walter Cronkite of CBS. Gary Hart, next in eminence, favored Kevin White, Mayor of Boston. Rick Stearns wanted Larry O’Brien. And all were very shortly dealing not in realities but, again, in symbols of reality. Of the masters of the new amateur professionalism, only three—Pierre Salinger, Frank Mankiewicz and Ted Van Dyk—had any large personal acquaintance with the men who govern America, out of whom choice is generally made. Van Dyk’s own disillusion set in at the morning session: “It was frivolous,” he recalls.
Of the six or seven names that emerged from the session for McGovern’s consideration, the name of Kevin White, Mayor of Boston, led the list. There followed: Sargent Shriver (Pierre Salinger’s choice); Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut (who had already turned down an offer of the slot from McGovern); Governor Patrick J. Lucey and Senator Gay lord Nelson of Wisconsin; and Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri. In the gathering of twenty-two people, no more than three had ever met either Kevin White or Tom Eagleton, and of those three, none had any real knowledge or experience or observation of their records.
Thus followed several hours of some confusion. All the names suggested to McGovern had to be forwarded for customary ritual clearance from various tribal chiefs. In the past such clearances had taken place with labor leaders, regional leaders or government leaders. Now the critical constituent groups were women and blacks, and Messrs. Hart, Mankiewicz, Salinger joined the candidate as he met in his suite with black leaders (Congressmen Clay and Fauntroy, Mayor Gibson, Yancey Martin) and women leaders (Delores Huerta, Elizabeth Carpenter, as well as Jean Westwood) to go over the final list of the morning’s staff meeting. Salinger again made the case for Sargent Shriver: Shriver was a brother-in-law of the Kennedys and carried the glamour of the family; a man with a good war record; former Ambassador to France; first director of the Peace Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity. The blacks approved Shriver strongly; McGovern tried to reach Shriver at his Washington office, discovered Shriver was in Moscow; so Shriver’s name was dropped. Ms. Carpenter suggested her fellow Texan, Sissy Farenthold, but that had no support.
No one at that point had been assigned by anyone to do any kind of background check on any of the names mentioned. They were choosing a Vice-President—had they been choosing a field commander of the troops, they would have spent more time checking records. It was some time in the early-morning session that Gordon Weil had become disturbed; he had heard from Stearns that Eagleton’s name was swathed in rumors of drinking problems; and he, Weil, knew nothing either of Eagleton or of Kevin White. Stearns, too tired to stay up any longer, had gone to sleep after the morning session. Weil had gone to his room and on his own initiative for an hour and a half, by telephone, had tried quickly to check out the backgrounds of both men. By the time Weil joined the clearance session in McGovern’s suite, the prime name had become that of Kevin White. Weil reported that he had found no problems on White, a clean bill of health from all his hasty check sources. Did anyone care to hear about Eagleton? asked Weil. No one apparently cared to hear about Eagleton—his name had been put aside. Weil persisted anyway—he had found out that Eagleton was not an alcoholic; he had indeed been hospitalized, but the hospital had diagnosed Eagleton’s problem as a technical medical problem of alcohol ingestion, not a drinking problem. But no one wanted to hear more about Eagleton.
By two in the afternoon, it was all but done. Mayor White had agreed. Stearns, who had gone to bed, was awakened and told to circulate immediately the necessary legal petitions required by the new reform rules. And George McGovern put through a final clearance call to Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts. Kennedy’s response startled McGovern. Kennedy was cool to Kevin White, he wanted time to “think it over.” For McGovern, who had sought Kennedy for Vice-President for so long, it must have been as if, yes, there might be a Santa Claus. In all the secret trial polling Caddell had done for McGovern on putative Vice-Presidents, no name had helped his standing against Nixon except one: Kennedy. McGovern, standing alone against the President, in his trial heats was running 52/38 behind; but a McGovern-Kennedy ticket in the trial heats narrowed the gap against Nixon to 47/43! Did Kennedy’s cryptic response mean that now he was reconsidering joining McGovern on the ticket? It was worth a wait to find out. In the meanwhile, news of Kevin White’s choice was bringing opposition as it spread—chiefly from the Massachusetts delegation of McGovern arch-zealots, whose guru, Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, now reached the candidate with his most strenuous and, as usual, eloquent opposition to the choice; if White were chosen, the McGovern delegation from Massachusetts would feel itself repudiated.
Out, then, Kevin White—definitely.
At 2:30 the long-awaited return telephone call from Teddy Kennedy comes in. Kennedy thinks that Congressman Wilbur Mills, of Arkansas, would be a better choice than Kevin White. As for himself—for the uncountable last time, the Kennedy makes clear that he is not running for Vice-President this year with anyone. McGovern is now irritated with Kennedy and upset; time is closing on the four-o’clock deadline, and his mind turns to his old friend Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, also on the approved list; and he tries to reach Nelson in Washington. Shortly after three, Nelson calls back—Nelson will under no circumstances accept the honor; he has promised his wife he will not go this route; but if McGovern was going the legislative way, so Nelson remembered saying, there was no more attractive and talented fellow around than Tom Eagleton of Missouri.1
Eagleton.
Eagleton is sixth on the list from the morning staff meeting. McGovern has met Eagleton personally only twice—once for forty-five minutes in the Senate steam-bath room, and once at a large dinner party in 1969 at Henry Kimelman’s home. But symbolically Eagleton promises everything—Catholic; young; bright; witty; good connections with labor; big-city background; firm on law-and-order. The morning staff meeting had heard stories of an Eagleton drinking problem—but Weil has checked them out and knows the alcoholism story to be untrue. It is at this point 3:30, and in the living room of McGovern’s suite are Gary Hart, Frank Mankiewicz, Fred Dutton, staff member Liz Stevens, others, none enthusiastic, all of them as exhausted as their leader, mildly acquiescent at the Eagleton name. At this point enters Charles Guggenheim, a genuine artist of political cinema, a McGovern favorite and media director of the campaign. Guggenheim is from Missouri and McGovern asks him about Eagleton’s drinking problem; Guggenheim says there is no drinking problem and adds that he thinks Eagleton is a fine fellow. Whether at this point decision had been made, whether it came five minutes earlier or later, none of the tired memories can recall. But with some in the room still asking for more time to think it over, McGovern has placed a call to Eagleton’s room; the phone rings; and it is Eagleton on the line.
Tom Eagleton had been in his suite at the Ivanhoe Hotel, two miles north of the Doral, all day. The Ivanhoe was the shelter of the Missouri delegation and its attendant press, and the Missouri press was now energized, as the Massachusetts, Texas, California, Illinois press had been in years before, by the thought that they held in their jurisdiction a possible national candidate whose career might flip their observations and writing to national attention. Tom Eagleton had thus found it prudent to stay in his suite rather than wait for word of his fate publicly down by the swimming pool where his old friends among newspapermen could badger him for reaction and for story.
There had been no Eagleton campaign at this convention—no posters, buttons, lobbying; Eagleton had even left behind in Washington his press aide, Mike Kelley. But Eagleton had known for several days that his name was in play—the press had said so, friends had told him so and logic insisted that he was a natural balance for a McGovern ticket.
There was, of course, the matter of his health—but that had been tucked away in some posterior pocket of memory. Mental disturbance is the second most common ailment, after the common cold, in American life; by some estimates, 25 percent of all Americans have, at one time or another, suffered gusts of mental depression, instability or incapability—moments when the ability to absorb strain is overwhelmed by too much of it—and most people recover. Yet mental illness still carries a stigma, like venereal disease—particularly among older Americans. And thus, many who have suffered mental illness, once they recover, do not talk about it, if possible conceal it and, gradually, forget about it. This is especially true of corporate executives and politicians.
Tom Eagleton had, in the past, concealed three serious rounds of mental illness; had, indeed, through his staff, deceived the press of Missouri when he ran for office there. He had been hospitalized three times: once in 1960, after running for Attorney General of Missouri and winning; once during the Christmas holidays of 1964; once more in 1966, out of total nervous exhaustion. He had on two occasions been given electro-shock treatment at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis and the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, but the press had been told he was hospitalized for stomach trouble. The need for concealment was, however, by 1972 long past. Eagleton had learned the limits of the strain he could absorb, had learned, as he said later, “to pace himself,” and had tucked away the memory of mental illness as completely as the memory of a broken leg. He had performed with distinction in all the offices he had won, and in the Senate, where he had arrived in 1969, he was recognized as a winner. He knew he was capable of action, was healed, full of zest for life.
No charge bothered Eagleton more in the next four weeks than the charge that he had deceived George McGovern. When George McGovern had called, shortly before four o’clock, Eagleton’s room was full of staff, friends and friendly newsmen. McGovern’s call was short and well reported, McGovern opening the conversation with his offer and Eagleton snapping back, “George, before you change your mind, I accept.” Then, at the Dorai end, in McGovern’s suite Mankiewicz took the phone and asked whether Eagleton had any skeletons in his closet. Eagleton replied that he had none and, after more detailed questioning, later hotly disputed, turned the phone over to his administrative assistant, Douglas Bennet, who could brief Mankiewicz on the necessary biographical background for a press release. News was now spreading rapidly; strangers and more newsmen were bursting into Eagleton’s room; Bennet remembers shushing the growing noise when a TV crew with beacon lights flaring burst in while he spoke to Mankiewicz. Eagleton remembers fleeing, seeking privacy from the TV camera, to his bedroom, where his wife was telephoning her parents with the good news—only to be followed into the bedroom by a St. Louis Globe-Democrat reporter and cameraman. In the instant mini-bedlam, privacy had evaporated, and with it any possibility of thoughtful reflection. Bizarre as had been the sequence of choice at the Doral, it would have been even more bizarre for an Eagleton or anyone else to have lifted the phone in such a crowded and public room and said in the pandemonium, “Listen … you should know … Tom’s been hospitalized three times for nervous breakdown.” In any event, as Eagleton kept telling visitors months later, “My health just wasn’t on my mind, it wasn’t on my mind, it was like a broken leg that healed.” At no point during this or the next ten days was Eagleton dissembling to or concealing from George McGovern. At the charge of deception, the Eagleton staff still becomes bitter.
Yet the bitterness of the McGovern staff was understandable, too—they were grappling with a new kind of outer reality. And their information, and hence the problem, was coming to them in bits and pieces, jagged, disturbing, denying them the decision-making ability they had enjoyed but yesterday when they lived in, and controlled, their own tight little world.
* * *
Their tight little world was breaking up. The people whose personalities and ideals had been the protective shield of George McGovern’s candidacy were undergoing the stress of power and the competition of those who collect around power. For days, press reports out of the convention had been speculating on staff shirts, the reorganization of the McGovern army for the electoral push. Nerves had been jangled; communications, trust and confidences within the old group were upset. Gordon Weil, who for over a year had traveled with the candidate as the custodian of his body and his day’s time, was said to be on the way out. So, too, was Kirby Jones, who had served around the clock as press secretary in the hard times.
Thus, on the Thursday night of the acceptance speech and acclamation of the McGovern-Eagleton ticket, euphoria had been tinged with apprehension as the victors jostled for places on the podium. Then, the victorious ones had all gone back to McGovern’s suite at the Doral for a short private celebration before mounting the staircase to the grander public victory celebration in the Doral’s Starlight Room. Among the apprehensive and the moody was Gordon Weil, who, on the way upstairs, stopped Douglas Bennet and asked what was really true about the mixed rumors he had been hearing about Eagleton. Bennet replied that Eagleton had been so mentally exhausted after his 1960 campaign that he had put himself in a hospital to get help. At other times, until the day before, Weil might have gone directly to the candidate with the information; now he went to Mankiewicz and Hart to tell them immediately what he had just learned, in the room thronged with celebrants and contributors. Bennet joined them to discuss the problem. Mankiewicz, sleepless, but still creative, felt they could ride it out—if the question came up in the next few days, particularly on television, Eagleton could say simply that he had campaigned himself right into the hospital in 1960. But McGovern was not informed.
Yet the news was upsetting. It became more upsetting the next day. By this time Weil’s separation from the candidate had become official; and without access to the candidate or a chance to say farewell, Weil had flown off from Miami alone. McGovern, unaware of the new development on Eagleton, had flown off shortly after three. By six o’clock Mankiewicz, preparing for a few days’ vacation, was packing his bags at the now hollow Doral when Bennet called. This time Bennet offered the information that Eagleton had been hospitalized not once, but twice. In complete exhaustion, not wanting to break off his vacation—a mistake Mankiewicz readily admitted later—Mankiewicz asked Bennet to set up a telephone call the following day between Mankiewicz and Hart in the Virgin Islands and Eagleton in Washington. The call came at midnight, and while Mankiewicz talked, Gary Hart listened in. It was an unsatisfactory conversation; the memory of the Watergate bugging was fresh; Republicans were bugging and wire-tapping Democratic lines. Mankiewicz asked, “Supposing Chuck Colson has the records before him and he’s going in to tell the President, what would he see?” Eagleton, in Man-kiewicz’s recollection, replied that he would see something like a report on nervous exhaustion and melancholia. But such a conversation could not be continued on an open line, and they agreed to meet privately for breakfast on Thursday morning in Washington, when Mankiewicz and Hart would be back.
Meanwhile, McGovern was not to be disturbed. The candidate needed rest and refreshment of spirit. He was scheduled to depart from Washington on Monday morning for his native South Dakota, where he would spend his fiftieth birthday and rusticate in the Black Hills, near Sylvan Lake, to think through the ideas, the re-staffing, the perspectives of his campaign against Richard Nixon.
McGovern, in South Dakota, was thus still not aware of the crisis when on Thursday morning Mankiewicz and Hart, back in Washington, met Eagleton for their scheduled breakfast. By then matters were dramatically more serious. The switchboard at McGovern headquarters had been taking anonymous calls for both Mankiewicz and Hart, messages that Eagleton had a record of mental illness, including electro-shock treatment and possibly worse. The Thursday breakfast brought out the full story. When asked, Eagleton told all: there had been, actually, three episodes of hospitalization; he had indeed been twice subjected to electro-shock therapy; he still took occasional tranquillizers. The questioning was rough. Eagleton offered to resign, or do anything else they wanted him to do. Mankiewicz said no.
The decision was the candidate’s. McGovern was interrupting his South Dakota vacation to fly to Washington for a Senate vote that afternoon, and Mankiewicz and Hart would join the candidate for the flight back to South Dakota the next day, Friday. It was on the plane going back to South Dakota that McGovern learned from Hart and Mankiewicz the full Eagleton story as they had pieced it together. McGovern said nothing; but Eleanor, a tough-minded woman, was appalled. Saturday in South Dakota was devoted to staff conferences as McGovern mulled the matter over. Mankiewicz and Hart were both, by now, hardening in their opinions. Hart considered McGovern attorney for the nation; the candidate had a responsibility for choosing the best man to succeed him as President; unless the medical records of Eagleton’s illness convinced him that Eagleton was sound, McGovern should let Eagleton go. So Hart expressed himself.
Mankiewicz had become even more convinced that Eagleton should go. There was, for one thing, a new development: Both the Knight newspapers and Time Magazine, Mankiewicz had learned, were on the trail of Eagleton’s past frailty; the story would not be the candidate’s to pack age and manipulate as he wished; it was about to break. On Sunday evening, after Hart had returned to Washington, Mankiewicz went to McGovern’s cabin alone and insisted, flatly, that Eagleton must go. It was necessary, Mankiewicz said, both politically and patriotically. McGovern again made no comment. He listened. Said only that he was thinking about the problem; and preferred to wait until the next night, Monday, when Eagleton was scheduled to arrive at the lodge for direct conversation.
It was after midnight when Eagleton arrived—and, telephoning his arrival to McGovern, was invited by the candidate to bring his wife along to breakfast the next morning with both McGoverns.
With the two women present, breakfast was friendly and connubial. Eagleton had not brought with him the medical records which the McGovern staff had anticipated, but he was forthright and outgoing. Forty-five minutes were spent in the usual pleasantry of social dialogue when two couples meet for the first time; the next forty-five minutes were spent on the Eagleton problem. Foremost on McGovern’s mind was the accuracy of the working memorandum the Knight newspapers had prepared to prod Mankiewicz into further revelation. The memorandum, despite several serious inaccuracies, was a reflection of genuinely diligent and responsible reporting. Eagleton again repeated the story of his troubles from Day One. McGovern was satisfied. The two candidates met next in restricted staff without wives; all decided that since the story was about to leak anyway, they might as well break it that afternoon at a press conference at the lodge.
The press conference began, after McGovern’s opening remarks, with Eagleton telling his full story: “… on three occasions in my life I have voluntarily gone into hospitals as a result of nervous exhaustion and fatigue.” It closed with George McGovern fielding questions from the press: “Tom Eagleton is fully qualified in mind, body and spirit to be the Vice-President of the United States and, if necessary, to take over the Presidency on a moment’s notice.” And if he had the choice to make all over again? “I wouldn’t have hesitated one minute if I had known everything that Senator Eagleton said here today,” McGovern replied.
With that, so far as George McGovern and Tom Eagleton were concerned, the issue had been opened, cleared and closed. Eagleton was off to California and Hawaii for a campaign swing; and McGovern could turn his attention to the unresolved problem of his campaign staff—confident that his prompt and open disposition of the Eagleton problem would earn him Brownie points for candor and decisiveness with the press and the public at large. Within forty-eight hours he would know better.
It was inevitable from the first unfolding of the news that Eagleton would be dropped from the ticket for the simplest of reasons: However competent, able or honest the Senator from Missouri, he had been hospitalized for mental strain—and American folklore had not yet learned to separate the degrees and different natures of mental illness. Presidents of the United States from Jackson and Lincoln through Wilson have been swept by stress and strain—some, like Wilson, collapsing completely, some, like Lincoln, moving through days of bleak despair to triumph. Yet in the folklore of older America, mental illness was a peril that bore the stigma of the deranged mind. And in a nuclear age, other considerations pressed: A pilot of SAC or the captain of a nuclear submarine would be invalidated by such a health record as Tom Eagleton’s. Should Tom Eagleton then be propelled to a position where someday he might have command over them?
For a full day George McGovern held firm. On Wednesday night he gave his campaign its most memorable statement, that he was “1,000 percent for Tom Eagleton and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket.” The 1,000-percent phrase would haunt McGovern through Election Day, just as much as the event which produced it. It was possibly the most damaging single faux pas ever made by a Presidential candidate. That fatal phrase had hardly left McGovern’s lips, however, when the events which would force him to repudiate it began. First the New York Post, the most rigidly liberal paper in that most liberal of major U.S. cities, pronounced sentence on Eagleton, calling for his resignation. Simultaneously, Queens County (New York) Democratic leader Matthew Troy, one of the very few party regulars who had backed McGovern even before the primaries, made known his views: “I have nine kids,” said Troy, “I don’t want to see them destroyed because some unstable person might become President.” Then, Thursday, came the floating of an absolutely spurious story by Columnist Jack Anderson, who claimed to have proof that Eagleton had an arrest record of half a dozen charges of drunken and reckless driving. Simultaneously both the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun were calling for Eagleton’s resignation. Then came The New York Times, and The New York Times carried with it master influence over most of those liberals who contribute money to good causes like McGovern’s. And by now McGovern, isolated from the centers of public opinion in Washington and New York, secluded at a summer lodge in mid-continent, was beginning to sense the pressure in the hundreds of letters and telegrams pouring in, the hundreds of calls jamming the hotel switchboard.
Some time on Thursday, decision firmed in George McGovern’s mind. But then came again the familiar McGovern phenomenon—the man of goodwill unable to master the clean cruelty of necessary decision. Eagleton was now in campaign flight—to Los Angeles, to Hawaii, to San Francisco—cheered by enthusiastic crowds and bayed by the press, unable to shake the story or the questioning, harassed and embittered by renewed stories of his drinking; and mystified by reports of what was going on back at the ranch in South Dakota. Following Eagleton’s course was like watching a chicken flopping around the barnyard, pursued by a little boy with a hatchet trying to chop its head off, the chicken bleeding and squawking as it went, the little boy upset by his inability to strike a clean blow.
Back at the ranch, McGovern’s participatory staff was now in one of its full flights of confusion; but no one reading the stories out of South Dakota could be in any doubt that the staff’s internal debate was moving sharply against Tom Eagleton. McGovern had tried to quench his aides’ semi-public debate on Wednesday by scolding them to silence and issuing his 1,000-percent statement. By Thursday, however, he, too, was turning. On Friday morning he had penciled a new paragraph into a speech he was giving that day to South Dakota Democrats at Aberdeen—a vague statement that the skies were cloudy and while he made up his mind he asked for their prayers. This was a “signal,” said McGovern to his staff. Then, lest the signal be misunderstood, the candidate wanted to make the signal clearer—and his press officer, Dick Dougherty, arranged that McGovern would dine in the common room of the lodge with the news correspondents, speaking first to Jules Witcover, then of the Los Angeles Times, a correspondent whose reliability is unquestioned and whose story would certainly reach Eagleton the next day in California, then to others as he table-hopped, making clear to all that he was reconsidering the Eagleton matter.
The signal was not at all clear to Tom Eagleton. That day, Friday, Eagleton had come back from Hawaii to the mainland after rousing crowds and rallies, and shortly before lunch he telephoned George McGovern from San Francisco. McGovern described to Eagleton the pressure on him, said he had “thirty editorials here in my hand which are against you.” His people were worried. But he wanted to reassure Tom once more of his own stand: “Remember, Tom, I’m 1,000 percent for you.” Eagleton went to bed in San Francisco that night at 10:00 P.M. while in South Dakota McGovern was just about to inform the press of his reconsideration of the nomination. “Why in hell,” wrote Eagleton later, “did he have to table-hop? Why in the hell didn’t he pick up the phone, call me collect if need be, and say ‘Tom, it’s over. There are too many imponderables in your candidacy. Your presence on the ticket jeopardizes my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.’”
The signals were clearer on the East Coast. Money-raising at McGovern headquarters had been suspended as Henry Kimelman waited for the name of a new runningmate. The poster and button makers under contract to the campaign had decided to stop the run of McGovern-Eagleton posters and buttons until the situation was clarified. Democratic leaders across the nation now had the word Eagleton was to be dumped. The press accepted it. Tom Eagleton alone did not get the message until Sunday, when it came to him publicly over the airwaves.
Eagleton had barnstormed back to Washington on Saturday from San Francisco, through his home state of Missouri, where he received a frenzied welcome, to the capital for his appearance on Sunday, July 30th, on the CBS telecast Face the Nation. At 1:00 P.M. he confronted a panel of inquisitors, and though faced on the panel with the unexpected participation of Jack Anderson, who had spread the drunk-driving stories about him, he performed admirably. But driving home, after taping another show for CBS, he learned that on the rival NBC telecast, Meet the Press, Jean Westwood and Basil Paterson, the new chairpersons of the Democratic National Committee, had dumped him publicly. Mrs. West-wood had phrased it as what “a noble thing” it would be if Eagleton quit the ticket. It was quite clear from the report—as indeed it was so in fact—that Mrs. Westwood had spoken to McGovern and had received his approval of the remark. Eagleton had got the signal finally, and the signal in the words of his press secretary, Mike Kelley, was “Goodbye, Tom.”
It was now time for the McGovern leadership to formalize its decision. During the four hectic days since Tuesday, the McGovern staff had come to the conclusion that, no matter what Tom Eagleton’s personal merits, if he stayed, for the rest of the campaign Americans would be discussing mental health, not the issues McGovern wanted to talk about. The senior group met at George McGovern’s home—the Senator and his wife, Gary Hart and Henry Kimelman early enough to watch the broadcasts, joined later by Frank Mankiewicz and Jean Westwood as soon as the broadcasts were over. With no dissent they agreed Eagleton must go and the announcement would be made formally the next night, Monday.
But first, before the public Monday meeting, there was a last courtesy to go through—McGovern would meet secretly that evening, Sunday, with Eagleton at the home of Henry Kimelman. Escorted by Secret Service, slipping away from the scrutiny of press and broadcasters, both arrived, Eagleton first, McGovern a bit later, and, having sent their respective staffs upstairs, began their only face-to-face private conversation shortly after ten in the evening.
Eagleton dictated his notes of the conversation when he returned home and then, some time later, transcribed them:
Only now as I write this do I perceive the bloody irony of a situation wherein the two nominees of a major political party are alone together for the first time since their 45 minute respite in the Senate steam bath in the spring of 1969.
How does any conversation start under these circumstances? Cautiously to be sure.
George complimented me on my “Face The Nation” performance. I complimented him on Jean Westwood’s hatchet job—and I used just those words—on “Meet The Press….”
To this McGovern rejoined, “Tom, believe me I had no idea what she was going to say. Only this afternoon when she and Basil Paterson came by my house did I first learn of what she said.”
“Don’t shit me, George,” I said. This was the first time in our recent political linkage that either of us had said to the other anything that was less than kind. George smirked. Not a smile of faint amusement. Not a frown of slight irritation. A smirk, that’s what it was.
“All right, Tom, let’s talk some facts. You tell me your facts, I’ll tell you mine.”
They talked on, Eagleton telling McGovern of the huge crowds his campaign trip had drawn during the week, the warm and human response, the support he had received from personalities like Mayor Alioto of San Francisco, the Governor of Hawaii, telephone calls of support from Senator Kennedy and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. McGovern listed the newspapers, the Senators, the Congressmen, the state chairmen and others who had called demanding Eagleton’s withdrawal.
“T know Mondale is a good friend of yours and a close friend of mine,’” said McGovern. “‘He called me every day in South Dakota since the beginning of this health business. He has begged me to get you off the ticket. He feels that you will defeat the national ticket in Minnesota and that you will defeat him for re-election to the Senate.’”
Then McGovern added, “‘Tom, I know you’ve gone through hell this week, but so have I.’
“The conversation seemed to be rambling,” read Eagleton’s notes, “then I said, ‘George, I am now no longer Tom Who. I am Tom Eagleton, suddenly a very well-known political figure. George, you may not win with me, but you can’t win without me.’ This time it was not a smirk. This time it was a look of incredulous disbelief. There was a pause. It seemed like eternity, but it couldn’t be more than fifteen seconds. ‘Tom, tell me what you feel in your heart,’ he asked.”
Eagleton made one last plea for his candidacy, feeling that this time he might have swayed McGovern. McGovern answered, “‘Tom, you’re one hell of a guy. Let’s go home and sleep on it.’” And then, each of them summoning his staff, they went their respective ways home.
Eagleton and McGovern met the next evening in the Marble Room of the Senate, with Senator Gaylord Nelson, a friend of both, present. Two pro forma telephone calls were put through by McGovern to Eagleton’s doctors, McGovern taking the calls alone in a corner. The bill of health was clean, said McGovern. The two then went on to discuss once more the pros and cons of Eagleton staying on the ticket. Finally, to avoid embarrassing Nelson by forcing him to cast the decisive vote, Eagleton said to McGovern, “‘George, if my presence on the ticket causes you any embarrassment, or hindrance, or an impediment, I’ll step aside.’” McGovern said, “‘Yes.’” Nelson nodded. And the McGovern-Eagleton ticket was over.
Much more, however, had been lost to the Democratic ticket than Tom Eagleton. Lost was McGovern’s reputation as a 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 reporting of the first two weeks of August was to raze to the ground George McGovern’s reputation for candor and trust; more than that, it was to make him look like a fool. The first weeks of August are always the low passage of the summer news doldrums, when television’s evening news shows scratch to fill their time and editors wrestle with making the front page attractive. And in this news vacuum stood McGovern—he was prey, and the press was on the hunt.
He “is beginning to remind us of those school teachers who couldn’t keep the class,” wrote columnist Tom Braden, onetime writing partner of Frank Mankiewicz, and more than indulgent to McGovern earlier in the campaign. “You can find them, even in college. Nice people, too. One looks back with sympathy and a sense of shame. But at the time—was it that they were too nice?—their classes were a shambles. The erasers flew when they turned their backs….” A reporter, no matter how personally fond of McGovern, could do nothing else but report the events of the following weeks as either hilarious, pathetic or simply tragic. After all, the man was running for President, an office in which the quality of decision is all-important.
McGovern’s search for a new runningmate had begun on Monday, even before the formal dismissal of Tom Eagleton that evening. He had flown to Louisiana that morning for the funeral of Senator Allen Eilender; flying back, he sat beside Senator Edward Kennedy and again, in a courtship that had become embarrassing to Kennedy, he pressed his suit, to be rebuffed again. Again the following day he pursued Kennedy; and still on Wednesday morning tried to enlist the Massachusetts Senator with an early-morning telephone call to Senator Abraham Ribicoff for intercession. When Ribicoff reported back that Kennedy was adamant in his refusal, McGovern pressed his case on Ribicoff; Ribicoff, who had already turned down McGovern at Miami, was equally firm—he was sixty-two years old; he was to remarry in a few days; he would have none of it. McGovern and Eleanor had dined the previous evening at the Jockey Club with Lawrence and Elva O’Brien. He had told the former party chairman that he was high on the list, that there was strong support for him all across the country; O’Brien, suspicious of all McGovern overtures after his Miami experience, admitted only to a mild interest in this one, and McGovern said he would get back to him. But now, with two refusals in three days, McGovern turned on Wednesday evening to his old patron Hubert Humphrey in a semi-public courtship on the Senate floor, later in a more private plea in the office of the Secretary of the Senate. McGovern pursued Humphrey again the next morning at breakfast, and by noon all three refusals were public, Humphrey’s being the most colorful public statement: “Imagine Hubert Humphrey on that ticket…. [The press would say] poor old Hubert, he just had to get on. He just couldn’t remain off. He smelled the sawdust again and there he’s in the ring. Well, bull…. I don’t need to be in the ring. I’m just not going to leave myself open to any more humiliating, debilitating exposure.”
That day, Thursday, McGovern tried to reach Governor Reubin Askew of Florida, in Tallahassee, proffering the Vice-Presidency just before Askew left for vacation, and getting Askew’s refusal from North Carolina in the afternoon. With Askew out, it was now four tries at bat and no connection. Matters were compounded further when McGovern informally met a group of reporters and acknowledged he had been turned down by Kennedy, Ribicoff and Humphrey, but insisted he had still a long list of people under consideration … names like Ralph Nader, Republican Jacob K. Javits, Public Citizen John W. Gardner. Moreover, he said, he was also considering blacks, Chicanos and women—a courtesy bow to his constituent groups, but preposterous as a serious statement to reporters invited to believe it. Finally, added George McGovern, he did not mean to be rushed in his choice this time—and yet the Democratic National Committee had been summoned to convene on Tuesday to rubber-stamp McGovern’s new choice, and that deadline was only five days away.
By Thursday evening McGovern was working on his fifth choice: Edmund Muskie, to whose Washington home the candidate drove that night to make the offer personally. Muskie, whose cautious deliberation had amused the press and the McGovern staff through the spring months, was still cautiously deliberate—he would need, he told McGovern, a day to think it over. He would fly to his summer home in Kennebunk Beach, Maine, to talk it over with his wife and children, then give his reply on Saturday.
By now McGovern had learned from experience, and was seeking standbys. On Friday he spoke to Larry O’Brien again and, stipulating that Muskie was up in Maine considering the offer, said that Larry had high marks from everyone around the country; it would be “heartwarming” to Larry, said McGovern, to hear what people said about him, and if Ed Muskie turned down the offer, he might be back to O’Brien once more.
McGovern was also telephoning Sargent Shriver that day. Shriver had never yet been approached by anyone directly and regarded himself, ruefully, as always a political bridesmaid, never a bride. He had been “mentioned” as Vice-Presidential runningmate in 1964, 1968, now again in 1972, but never asked. This time McGovern was asking: If Muskie turned it down, would Shriver be willing to consider it? Shriver would. Shriver had already been checking his prospects. He had called Lyndon Johnson, who had urged him to accept if the offer came. He had called Dick Daley in Chicago for advice; Daley felt the main issue had to be jobs, that McGovern had to make clear he wanted to keep the country strong, that McGovern had to soft-pedal the abortion issue; Daley pledged all-out support in the November election (“I’ve never been neutral yet,” Shriver remembers Daley saying, “I’m a Democrat”). Shriver checked finally with his brother-in-law, Senator Ted Kennedy, who had flown from Washington for a summer weekend at the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port. At dinner on Friday, Kennedy was quite sure the choice would come to Sarge the next day—Ed Muskie, said Kennedy, is talking to his wife in Maine, and the longer he waits, the less likely he is to say yes. Shriver asked whether he would be crossing Teddy’s path if he accepted, would he be getting in his way. Kennedy said not at all—feel free to accept if you want.
The next morning Ed Muskie telephoned George McGovern to say he could not accept “for family reasons.” McGovern’s call to Shriver reached the Kennedy family compound while Shriver was playing tennis. You know, said McGovern when Shriver came to the phone, that Muskie’s turned it down—would Sarge now be willing to consider the offer? Shriver allowed that he was honored, flattered, wanted to discuss it with his family and Teddy. But the answer was yes. McGovern, up against deadline again, but more deliberate this time, mentioned the impossibility of going through another Eagleton affair, and was there anything in Shriver’s background he should know? Shriver thought briefly and replied that he had been cleared for health by the Navy, cleared by the FBI for service in the Kennedy administration, cleared again under Johnson, cleared again under Nixon—the only thing he could think of was a picture in the scatology-and-scandal weekly The National Enquirer, which had shown him dancing at a Paris night club with a beauti ful young lady in hot pants; but the lady was an old friend of the family. McGovern laughed, and that was the end of it.
The new Democratic National Committee met at two P.M. on Tuesday, August 8th, in Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel to consider the choice of a Vice-Presidential nominee to replace Tom Eagleton. The hall, hung with bunting, enlivened by taped music, entertained a melancholy group. The marching songs of Miami had long faded, and the evangelical euphoria of McGovern’s acceptance speech, that pilgrim’s call to pilgrim’s progress, had passed from memory. Security was light, the atmosphere easy, and the committee members and press mingled in the lobby with the other conventions proceeding at the Sheraton Park at the same time—of the American Massage and Therapy Association as well as the Interallied Confederation of Reserve Officers. After all the calls to unity, a humorous and charming appearance by Tom Eagleton, a stemwinder in the old tradition from Hubert Humphrey, a brief appearance by Larry O’Brien, appearances by Muskie and Kennedy, Sargent Shriver was formally nominated for Vice-President. After that Shriver spoke gaily and with gallantry about what lay ahead, and George McGovern, suddenly looking like the old pictures of William Jennings Bryan, closed the evening by calling on all good people “to reclaim this nation so freedom can truly ring again.”
This time, proceedings had gone off in prime time, so that the nation could pay attention if it would. But the nation had become bored with pilgrim’s progress, and the ratings were down to 10,240,000 homes.
Another index provoked even greater reflection. The editors of Time Magazine had, with apparently correct appreciation of the political importance of the new team offered by the Democratic Party, covered the newsstands of the nation that day with an issue that joined pictures of Sargent Shriver and George McGovern on the cover of their magazine. The newsstand sale of the magazine bombed; passersby ignored the story of McGovern/Shriver. The editor of Newsweek, Osborn Elliott, had, however, entertained an oblique intuition. Despite the public excitement over the Eagleton/Shriver/McGovern affair, he had decided to offer the nation an off-beat enticement: a cover story on Chinese acupuncture. For those who chose their news magazines on the run that August week, the winner was acupuncture over McGovern/Shriver by a landslide, and Newsweek sold the fourth highest quantity of magazines at the newsstand in all its forty-year history. The nation had tuned the Democrats out.
Reporting the Democratic campaign for the Presidency later, after mid-August, was to be assigned to reporting a revolving, continental wake.
In the weeks before the Republican convention, with the image of George McGovern shattered, there was little more to do than examine one’s conscience and observations, and puzzle out why so fundamentally decent a man as George McGovern had cut so grotesque a profile on the perception of so many of his countrymen.
Goodwill was at the heart of it, of course. Each speech, each phrase, each program of George McGovern came from a heart of charity. If political goodwill terrified the citizens of the big cities, who had had their bellyful of goodwill in the 1960’s, this political goodwill was nonetheless understandable and honorable. It was the personal goodwill that was so baffling—the gentleness and the kindliness which resulted in such aberrations of character.
The thought had first come to me shortly after a trip to Florida at the beginning of the year—a journey with McGovern in January of 1972. He was then polling only 3 percent support among Democrats in the Gallup Poll and his candidacy was apparently hopeless. No large press corps then attended his comings and goings; none of the major news organs had yet assigned a permanent reporter to dog him full-time; and on this particular day his half-empty plane contained only a few Florida reporters plus Stewart Alsop of Newsweek and Tom Braden, the Washington Post columnist, men of large dimension in national journalism. The busing issue was, obviously, about to become the key issue in the Florida primary, so I approached George McGovern and began to talk about it. He was disturbed—did we have the right, he asked, to bus children across county lines, in and out of neighborhoods, at a time of such racial tension? Busing probably increased racial tension. What would I think if he came out against cross-county busing? I said it might turn the race upside down; and then McGovern summoned his black aide, Yancey Martin, and they discussed the matter once more. It was a long flight down the Florida coast that day as we prop-stopped from Jacksonville to Miami, and in the course of the flight both Alsop and Braden had individual conversations with the candidate. That night, cautiously comparing notes as reporters do, lifting the down cards one by one to make sure the other fellow has the same story, it was quite apparent that all three of us had heard identical ruminations from the candidate—and that this internal debate in McGovern’s mind on busing was a major story. Alsop and Braden proceeded to print the story—as a rumination, not a decision, of a major personality.
Ten days later I was in Washington again and opened the Washington Post to read in its letters column a letter signed by George McGovern: “The report that I am considering opposing the school busing orders of federal courts, or the recent decision consolidating school districts in Richmond, Virginia, is totally without foundation. (Tom Braden column, January 25.) All my political life I have fought for the principle and the practice of integrated schools…. I will not change that position regardless of the political cost….”
What Stewart Alsop and Tom Braden had printed had been accurate; but if McGovern chose to deny the story, then, in the murky morality of off-the-record confidences, he had the Fifth Freedom of the politician to deny what he had said.
The incident might have slipped from memory except for the fact that the same day I was visiting with Al Barkan, labor’s chief political attack-bomber, a straight shooter but rough-tongued man. McGovern’s name came up early in conversation, and Barkan fulminated instantly: “The man is a deliberate liar.” Barkan then passed on to other things, and would not elaborate.
Now, in midsummer of the year, with McGovern’s public credibility shattered by the Eagleton affair, with the AFL/CIO refusing to endorse a Democratic candidate for the first time in twenty years, it seemed important to find out why he so disturbed labor’s leadership. After all—McGovern had been labor’s man in his early days; the AFL/CIO had put up the dollars necessary to pay for the recount by which McGovern first won election to the Senate (by 597 votes) in 1962; and the Senator’s voting record was excellent on labor’s own annual score card.
As pieced together from conversations with Barkan and Lane Kirk-land, two quite different figures in the ruling hierarchy of the AFL/CIO, the story of the feud was at once complicated in its origin but simple in result. It was complicated by the intricate mechanics of parliamentary procedure in the Congress of the United States; the story went back to 1966, and concerned the twenty-year-old effort of the labor leaders to repeal provision 14B of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. That Act had left it to the state legislatures to permit or forbid unions to demand a union-shop proviso in their contracts. The AFL/CIO had wished, for years, to outlaw this restraint of state legislation and leave the union-shop proviso to free bargaining. By 1966 the AFL/CIO could take its count of both House and Senate and feel victory close. The House had already passed labor’s repealer of 14B; and in the Senate, AFL/CIO leaders counted 56 sure votes for their side—if only the votes could get to vote. Yet whether the Senate could get to vote or not depended on Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who was conducting a filibuster to prevent a vote. The filibuster could be choked off only by two thirds of the then Senate, or 64. And labor’s leadership was not angry at Dirksen—they understood him. They were still angry in 1972 at George McGovern.
The reasons for their anger were as simple as the parliamentary background was complicated. They had counted on George McGovern’s vote against filibuster. Barkan, who rarely descends from his eminence for nitty-gritty lobbying, was assigned to see McGovern personally. McGovern assured him that on this cloture he would vote labor’s way. A few days later Barkan, informed by Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana that McGovern’s vote was in doubt, checked again. McGovern assured Barkan that his vote was solid for cloture. To stiffen McGovern’s promise, Barkan invited to Washington the head of South Dakota’s own AFL/CIO, Francis McDonald. Again McGovern assured his home-state AFL/CIO leader he was voting right. “And McDonald was sitting right there in the gallery, watching,” said Barkan, “when the roll-call came—and when McGovern voted against us, he went up out of his seat like you jabbed a pin in his butt.”
“That doesn’t happen in this town,” said Lane Kirkland. Labor in America is rough; but by labor’s code a deal is a deal, and a commitment is a commitment, the given word is bond. Labor supported McGovern again as Senator from South Dakota in 1968 and proposed to do so again in 1974—but for the Presidency in 1972, no, they did not trust him.
It went on like that in the doldrums of August, everyone examining McGovern’s personality afresh in the weeks of Sirius. All examination hung on the critical word “commitment.” McGovern was committed to a vision, to peace and brotherhood, and would certainly be willing to die for that vision; but his commitment to people, individually or to any group outside of the staff of his own army—this was another matter. All through the early weeks of August, stories of feud, clash and broken promises multiplied in McGovern headquarters—from minorities division to registration division, grievances puckered and personalities soured. Some charges were excusable as misunderstandings of intent; others could be explained as the normal grumbling that goes on when any necessary reorganization downgrades the old, elevates newcomers. But then, on August 17th, four days before the Republican convention opened in Miami Beach, came the Salinger affair.
The Salinger affair, too, had its roots on the Black Friday of July 14th—the day of the O’Brien affair, the unraveling of McGovern’s commitment to Salinger on the vice-chairmanship, the first hint of the Eagleton breakdown. Only the exhaustion of the candidate and his staff could have incubated so many blunders on a single day.
Chapter One of his dismay had ended for Pierre Salinger with his repudiation by the candidate, and the Democratic National Committee, in favor of Basil Paterson. “I left that room as angry as I’d ever been in my life,” said Salinger later. But, packing his bags and holding his tongue, he was off that afternoon to the shelter of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, where Ethel Kennedy had invited him for the weekend. Salinger, worn out, his legs numb from the waist down after four consecutive days on his feet at the convention, retired early—and was in bed no more than ten minutes before Ethel Kennedy knocked to say that George McGovern was on the phone from Washington, to begin Chapter Two of dismay.
McGovern was apologizing again for what had happened earlier that day in Miami, and now asked Salinger to handle an important one for him. McGovern’s staff had received word via David Dellinger, leader of the peace demonstrators in Chicago in 1968 and one of the chief contacts of North Vietnamese in the U.S.A., that the Hanoi government wanted McGovern to send a representative to talk to it. Would Salinger fly to Washington to be briefed by John Holum, who had been briefed by Dellinger, and then explore the matter? “I said OK,” recalls Salinger, “but in my mind I saw it as an effort to win me back with an important assignment.”
By Monday, Salinger was in Washington being briefed by Holum; by Tuesday, July 18th, he was in Paris, his home abroad, conferring with two members of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks.
It was a tricky matter—for an American to deal with an enemy during a war tests the legal limits of one of the oldest laws in American history, the Logan Act of 1799. For McGovern to be communicating with Hanoi via David Dellinger, one of the arch-symbols of street protest, was perilous. To intervene with the North Vietnamese at a moment when the American government was itself negotiating with them bordered on the unpatriotic. Yet, thought Salinger, if his trip to Hanoi could bring about the release of thirty or forty American prisoners of war, it might be worth it. But he cautioned the Hanoi delegates finally, “If there is any way you can make peace with the current administration, you should do so without regard to the political events in our country. Senator McGovern would prefer peace in Vietnam today to being President, if that is the choice.” And then Salinger was off on vacation, first to the Riviera, then to Sardinia, and was not to see the North Vietnamese again until August 9th, when, over tea, the North Vietnamese told him no prisoners would be released. Thereupon Salinger canceled his exploratory trip to Hanoi, and by telephone reported to Mankiewicz in Washington that the mission had failed.
It was a week later that matters came apart. For, as Salinger was flying back to New York, the United Press International reported out of Paris that Salinger had been negotiating with the North Vietnamese on McGovern’s instructions, and had urged them to settle for peace at once with Nixon. At the airport in New York, another agency reporter demanded confirmation. Salinger made no comment, drove directly to a hotel in New York and frantically tried to reach the McGovern headquarters, which he found in the same confusion as the day he had left Miami.
Reaching the traveling McGovern party in Illinois, he tried to find out from Fred Dutton, who answered the phone, what their common reaction should be to the leak. The Senator had just left the room, said Dutton. “What’s he going to say about the UPI story?” asked Salinger. “He’s just gone out to deny it,” replied Dutton; and the furious Salinger demanded that the Senator get back to him directly, personally, at once. When McGovern did call back fifteen minutes later, he was soothing. Yes, he had denied the tenor of the UPI story that he, McGovern, had sent Salinger to Paris to urge Hanoi to make peace with Nixon; but no, he had not denied that he had sent Salinger to Paris. Agreeing with McGovern that they would put out a joint statement as soon as possible, Salinger waited until an announcement had been worded, and then talked to the clamorous press from a script which he believed to be a common base of understanding. Salinger then turned on his television set in New York to find out what McGovern had actually said earlier that morning about the Salinger mission. And then came the statement: “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.” George McGovern had been caught again in apparent flirtation with the facts.
If Salinger that night was flabbergasted, the American public was only slightly less so. McGovern had been revealed to be secretly negotiating with Hanoi; first he had denied it, then confirmed it. He had been doing so in the interest of peace, of course, which was understandable—as understandable as his final removal of Eagleton two weeks before. But why the confusion? Why the initial reaction of deception? Harry Truman had said of the Presidency, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. The heat of decision evidently upset George McGovern—and if one examined the nature of all the McGovern blunders, both before and after the convention, a pattern became evident.
Goodwill was the pattern of George McGovern’s frailty. On public goodwill, on care for the sick and aged, on respect for the blacks and the youth and the women, on peace and tax equality—he was inflexible. It might—and did—worry Americans who were on the wrong side of this goodwill. But when it came to individuals, in the critical face-to-face decisions and interchange of personalities, the goodwill was a weakness. He could not dismiss, or fire, or sharply disagree, or impose his intent on people he personally liked. His kindness and gentleness would lead him to say almost anything to any individual in his pursuit of friendship, brotherhood and harmony; if, later, people were let down by reliance on his private commitments, it was to McGovern a sincere, an acute, a poignant sadness; but he must be true to his larger causes. To the public, insofar as it believed he meant his larger causes, he was divisive; and as his private commitments one by one came apart openly, the public questioned the largest thrust of his campaign—his credibility and competence.
George McGovern’s course in the American mind could be traced best by the polls; for all polls agreed, even with aberrations for bias—the rival public polls, Harris and Gallup, the private polls, Republican and Democratic polls. The McGovern problem as traced by the polls had a neat two-part sequence, if one looked back to the beginning of the year. The first problem had been recognition: Who was George McGovern? The triumphs of the McGovern army, the deeds wrought at the primaries, had cured that. By late spring he was recognized. And, thus, being recognized, the second part of public examination had begun: What did George McGovern stand for? Hubert Humphrey in California had tried to define that problem rigorously for the Democratic voters of California; the effect of that primary could also be followed in the graphs.
At his peak of popularity in the polls, fresh from cross-country victories and entering California, George McGovern in May had closed the gap between himself and Richard Nixon to only 5 points—Nixon 40 percent, McGovern 35 percent, George Wallace 17 percent, so read the Harris Poll. The California primaries had been the first occasion for examining the man himself; and, though winning the California primary, McGovern had slipped in public scrutiny. After the California primary, the Harris Poll read: Nixon 45 percent, McGovern 33 percent, Wallace 17 percent. The matter of credibility had not yet set in, and the Democratic convention, if it came off well, should give him an upswing, as traditionally it does to all victorious candidates. Instead of that, the spectacle of the new politics at Miami Beach had thrust the polls the other way. Now, losing support as he gained recognition, McGovern had come out of the Eagleton affair and the convention in a straight man-to-man poll-testing at 34 percent against Nixon’s 57 percent, with 9 percent undecided. McGovern was now 23 percentage points behind Nixon in the pollsters’ measure of public opinion—the largest gap between Democrats and Republicans since public-polling had been perfected. And yet to come were the Salinger affair and the Republican convention, which would widen the margin even further.
In the slow, languid days of summer when people flick the pages of the papers, watch their television through a cushion of beer, when, without recognizing their own unconscious urge to identification, they slowly try to identify the candidate of their choice, they were examining George McGovern—and he was slipping in their esteem more rapidly than any other candidate had ever done.
At a breakfast in the first week of August, Ted Van Dyk, who had been placed in charge of McGovern’s disaster-prone issues desk, tried to define for a round table of Washington reporters what he held to be his candidate’s fundamental appeal to the country. “Basically,” said Van Dyk, “the people are going to have to decide from whom they would rather buy a used car. The campaign will be decided on the personality and the credibility of the candidates.”
Two weeks later, on August 23rd, Ted Van Dyk was writing a confidential memorandum to George McGovern on where the campaign now stood:
We had a meeting this morning in my office of those people primarily concerned with the issues effort in the campaign…. We were unanimous in our conclusions. Namely:
(1) Our principal theme to date—namely, that McGovern is more trustworthy and credible than Nixon, both personally and across the key issues—has been defused by the unfortunate events of the past few weeks, i.e., Eagleton and aftermath, Salinger, the Hitler remark, the V.C. statement in your press backgrounder for last Sunday’s newspapers….
(2) Our primary and perhaps only chance to win will he in reclaiming those millions of traditional Democrats who are now undecided or leaning to Nixon. These Democrats, primarily in the big industrial states, are typically blue-collar, middle-minded and socially more conservative than our principal sources of support in the Democratic primaries.
(3) These voters can only be reached by returning to the traditional Democratic themes. Namely, that the Democratic Party and George McGovern are good for ordinary people….
(4) Our principal theme from here on in … should be that George McGovern and the Democratic Party have supported Medicare, Social Security, decent wages and economic growth. They deeply care about the well-being of decent hardworking people….
(5) This theme can be illustrated in a multitude of ways—visits to assembly lines, bowling alleys, supermarket checkout counters, blue-collar shopping centers, plant cafeterias….
Summary: We urge that, from this point onward, you return to the traditional Democratic themes…. The traditional Democratic voter simply must come to feel again that you are deeply concerned about his homely everyday problems, such as his taxes, his job, his food prices where Richard Nixon and the Republicans have let him down.
Even more simply expressed, the struggle over George McGovern’g campaign, raging at every level of confusion and maladministration inside his campaign staff, could have been stated as “Come Home, George McGovern. Come Home to the Democratic Party.” And Mr. Nixon and his Republicans were to preach that you can’t come home again.
1 Two outstanding studies of the Eagleton affair are to be found in a series by Haynes Johnson in the Washington Post, December 3rd-6th, 1972, and a full-length essay by Loye Miller, Jr., of the Knight newspapers, in the December 8th, 1972, edition of the Miami Herald.