ONE might imagine, reporting the Committee in Washington, that it was all like this, all bloodless, all managerial, all computerized, all planned. Except for those rare moments when one could follow the President in the flesh, see him raw, hear his voice ring free of the speeches written for him or hand-tooled in his own notes on the yellow legal pads.
And then, hearing him, one grasped what George McGovern was running against—a man, and a set of ideas, more formidable than his computers or his unrecognized espionage apparatus.
For example, October 28th, ten days before election, in Ohio.
No one had known, when the Ohio trip was planned, that the duel of war and diplomacy would be leading to a blurred pre-climax of the Vietnam war; that the negotiations in Paris, which had apparently been going so well for the previous three weeks, would be announced first out of Hanoi; and that Henry Kissinger, carried away by a momentary euphoria, would give the nation from the White House, on Thursday, October 26th, those most beautiful of all words, “Peace is at hand.” Or that the next day so great a relief would sweep the entire country that when Richard Nixon landed at Hopkins Airport, near Cleveland, it would be a day for the book of memory.
I had followed Richard Nixon through four campaigns, and seen him ill on the road in 1960; indignant in 1962; fatalistic in 1968. He was now, on this day, both totally exhausted and totally happy, and at ease with himself in public as I had never seen him before, the simplest of his emotions, personal and political, bubbling to the surface.
The day began with almost military precision, the President’s plane touching down at 12:08, two minutes from plot time. The airport scene was exactly as the Committee’s pre-planning would have had it. He was to move this day, in a very old-fashioned motorcade, across northern Ohio, from the suburbs of Cleveland to the steel town of Warren, his target again the ethnic vote. One could make out the wording on the sign held by the “DEUTSCHE MUSIKSCHULE SACHSENHEIM,” or the “YOUTH FOR NIXON” signs in English. But then there were the signs in strange languages, lofted by “LITHUANIANS FOR NIXON” or “UKRAINIANS FOR NIXON.” And signs in Greek. Signs in Serbian. Signs the local TV cameras had to pick up, if they were to cover Nixon’s arrival at all.
Then, quickly, the Nixon motorcade moved out of the airport, through the industrial belt that surrounds Cleveland, past the Ford plant, with its tall plumes of white steam slanting through the air, past the machine shops, and on to Parma, Ohio, the Middletown of the “peripheral urban ethnics” who work in the heavy industry of the area. Nixon’s advance men had laid it on. But there could be no doubt that the crowds which lined the road, whether stirred by peace or by Nixon’s presence, were authentically jubilant. And hard, “MC GOVERN TALKS BULLSHIT,” read one of the signs in the first five minutes; and for the next hour, people almost five deep crowded either side of the procession as the motorcade passed. Nixon has always, from his first campaign, been able to call up the little peppermint-striped flags that children wave, and the flags were out. They were waving at him, each group in its custom—some giving him the Roman salute, hand-high for Caesar; others had turned their young ladies out in Balkan or Slavic peasant costume with gypsy-colored billowing skirts and white puffed sleeves. And the Boy Scouts, cub scouts, senior scouts, American Legionnaires. The signs in the ethnic belt were standard (“ITALIANS FOR NIXON,” “WE LOVE YOU MR. PRESIDENT,” “NIXON AND YOUTH,” “PUT PRAYER BACK IN OUR SCHOOLS,” “WE NEED NIXON”).
We passed quickly, in less than an hour, through the ethnic belt, and then the clean lawns, the neat houses, the autumn gardens of the ethnics gave way to countryside where the names on the mailboxes changed from the unpronounceable to straight Smith, Jones, Miller, and the faces became the faces of Grant Wood canvases.
Here in the farming country, where the crowds were less thick, one could observe Nixon himself—standing in tan topcoat, leaning out of the open hatch of his limousine, letting the air blow over him. He rested on his elbow as he stood in the open hatch, as if the air and the cool of Halloween season could blow vigor into him; his face, sun-tanned by days in Key Biscayne and San Clemente, was nonetheless so lined with weariness, so heavy from the neck as it swayed and nodded, that one could only imagine how much the week’s negotiations with Hanoi and the wind-down of war had punished him. He had, he was sure at that moment, ended a war. Now, leaning out of the car, he was looking at his people, as few Presidents have been able to do, at what he and they believed to be the moment of peace.
The signs and the bands and the colors of the uniforms were making it a grand day for him: “NIXON GAVE PEACE A CHANCE TO WALK,” “TRICKY DICK TOOK THE TRICK,” “MY DADDY WILL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS,” “NIXON IS MY HERO,” “RIGHT ON MR. PRESIDENT,” “DO YOURSELF A FAVOR, VOTE NIXON,” “TRY HIM, YOU’LL LIKE HIM,” “WELCOME CHIEF, WE’RE WITH YOU,” “HELLO MR. PRESIDENT, HANG IN THERE SIR,” “NIXON, THE MAN FOR NO MORE NAM,” “A KISS FOR KISSINGER,” “HAPPINESS IS PEACE,” “SEE DICK. SEE DICK RUN. SEE DICK WIN,” “NIXON IS OUR PRESIDENT,” “THANK YOU FOR BRINGING JOHNNY BACK HOME,” “PEACE TIME IS NIXON TIME,” “TRICK OR TREAT, NIXON CAN’T BE BEAT.” And on and on—as the high-school bands and the veterans’ clubs stood at attention; the pretty girls with their tall shakos prancing, pompoms bobbing about their ankles; the blown-cheek boys tonguing the air furiously into their trumpets and trombones; the paunchy veterans lined up. And also the McGovern pockets, wherever they showed, with a gallantry inviting lynching by Nixon’s adoring crowds, chasing after him in university towns, headbands around their heads, chanting “On, McGovern,” flaunting their signs, too—“TRICKY DICK, STOP CHISELING ON THE WAR AGAIN, SIGN UP BY THE 31ST,” “TRIBU AND HEROIN EQUALS NIXON.” But the McGovern signs were rare. Nixon had carried Ohio by 90,000 votes against Hubert Humphrey in 1968, but lost these working-class towns by over 150,000 votes. He would carry Ohio this time by 882,000 votes and he could sense it, feel it.
I had never seen him more weary, never felt such deep weight of aging in a contemporary. This day, in elation, his hair graying, he was old. He had been negotiating on war and peace all that week. Now, this afternoon, he was released from his own compulsory orderliness, to ramble in his own words, leaning out of his car with a hand-held mike, as the stump speaker, in which role he had begun his career.
He did it first that day in North Royalton, Ohio, about twenty-five miles out of Cleveland. The crowd had clotted at a crossroads, and he halted his cavalcade to walk about, shake hands, then come back, then put forth a thought:
“… as we drove through Parma, Ohio, I saw that the flags were at half-mast…. I asked one of our Secret Service, a man who has … risked his life many times, why the flags were at half-mast. He told me that … just two days ago a policeman, in the line of duty, trying to apprehend a criminal—who proved to be a criminal, certainly, by his actions in killing the policeman—was murdered…. The town … was paying its respects to that man of the law…. Let me tell you, you can’t pay these men what it is really worth. You can’t pay a man enough to risk his life to help you keep your life. One thing you can do is this: Respect him, honor him. I have seen on occasion over these years some times some scroungy-looking people that are spitting on policemen and calling them pigs and the rest. It makes my blood boil.”
On went the President, talking to his people and his voters from his heart. He stopped just before entering Mantua Corners, Ohio, for someone he recognized holding a sign—and it was Al Doyle, a Navy veteran who had served with Nixon on Guadalcanal. Of course, it was old Al Doyle, and the President lingered for a minute. Here’s a pen, he said, it’s a White House pen. Hey, said the President, remember when old so-and-so (I missed the name) cracked up that new tractor on Guadalcanal? Someday at the White House we ought to have a reunion of our Navy service crowd, got to get together. And thus, on.
In Mantua Corners, on a grass knoll stood a white frame house with a huge sign reading “MR. PRESIDENT MAY I PLEASE SHAKE YOUR HAND, WE LOST OUR SON IN VIETNAM.” The President stopped his cavalcade. Mr. Frank Lorence, a tall, lean man with a sharp nose, standing with his wife, was waiting there, surrounded by children and grandchildren. They had lost their son, Sp-4 John Lorence, somewhere near Truang Banh. “I don’t want to feel like he went for nothing,” said Mrs. Lorence after the President had promised her that he wished he “could bring him back. We’re going to do everything we can to see that it doesn’t happen to … other boys. That’s what we’re going to do.”
The President went on: “They give up their lives, but they do it to serve their country, and the few hundred that deserted this country, the draft-dodgers, are never going to get amnesty when boys like yours died. Never. They are going to have to pay a penalty for what they did. That’s the way I feel.”1
And on and on, the President sniffing the sycamores as he leaned out, the fall turn of the earth, his eye watching the somber change of Ohio seasons, these people loving him, not only because he had brought peace but because he spoke their language. He paused more frequently as he relaxed, stepping from his car, revealing himself to his people as Caliph Harun al-Rashid might have done had he coursed Route 82 in Ohio the week of Halloween. He was behind schedule, which is an odious offense in the Nixon organization, when, as he entered Warren, Ohio, he passed a field on which some pre-adolescents had set a table and sign which said, “STOP AND GET A FREE PUMPKIN MR. PRESIDENT.” SO he stopped the caravan again, the press buses in the rear, a quarter of a mile beyond, wondering what kind of Presidential campaign this was anyway. How much were these pumpkins? the President asked, before the crowd could run up and cluster around him. The children, overwhelmed, said the pumpkins were free. Oh, no, said the President—he was against that, they had to be paid for their pumpkins, how much would three cost? A dollar? And he peeled off a dollar and paid it out. Carrying his three pumpkins, the President strolled back to his limousine and was accosted by a young man who introduced himself as a Vietnam vet. How was it going to come out? the veteran asked. The President, being President, replied, “I think we’ve had significant progress. I think it’s going to come out all right. But you’ll have to read about it in the papers.”
Thus, finally, as evening approached, into Warren, near Youngs-town, Ohio, fourth-ranking steel center of the country, and a quick, political speech plugging the local Congressman, and noting the money that Warren, Ohio, would soon get from the Federal government, from his scheme of revenue-sharing. And into the plane for one more stop at Saginaw, Michigan.
Michigan was a busing state, where the issue cut deep. Nixon emerged from Air Force One at the end of the day, too tired to move farther than the platform of the plane staircase which had been rolled up to him. In the light of television, he looked as young and tough as he ever had. One hand tucked into his coat, he urged these voters to vote for his Republican friend Senator Robert P. Griffin: “The Senate needs Bob Griffin standing against any kind of program that would bus children away from their homes across town…. The best education is the education you get in the school that is closest to your home.”
Then, into the plane and back to Washington. On the scoreboard of national politics, he had scored his points that day on ethnics, on busing, on “work-fare,” on peace, on amnesty, on law-and-order. The mark on the inner scoreboard of the President was probably just as important: The people he had seen today liked him, understood him, were with him. And thousands of them undoubtedly loved him, which was most important of all.
So the campaign came to its end.
The great storyteller Sholom Aleichem might have told it best. Sholom Aleichem has a story about the rich man’s funeral and the poor man’s funeral. At the rich man’s funeral the sun shines, the flowers nod in the grass, the horses prance, the carriage rolls noiselessly. At the poor man’s funeral the horses droop, the wheels squeak—and it rains.
Shifting back and forth between candidacies, it was usually my misfortune, after the primaries were over, to follow George McGovern on cloudy days when it rained—or threatened to rain.
The cloud that hung over George McGovern was, however, more real than rain. The mind of the country had set; and the will of his staff had crumbled. Whatever mysterious thing it is that sets national opinion, that evoked a community judgment from November’s 210,000,000 Americans, that mysterious thing froze against George McGovern, whether in the national polls, or in the Committee to Re-Elect’s polls, or in his own polls.
By the beginning of October, Caddell had identified for the McGovern staff, and for his candidate, who now glanced at the polls ever more infrequently, what the condition of their campaign was. CaddelPs polls were realistic. McGovern, in the analyses Caddell was doing, was now seen as more concerned about people than ever. But the problem in the public mind was, simply, his competence. Americans take their vote for the Presidency very seriously—a sense of obligation weighs on that vote. They are concerned, of course, by issues. But beyond that there is another concern—can the man do the job? And in August and September, Caddell, sampling as optimistically as he could, was reporting to his headquarters roughly what Teeter was reporting to the Republicans: Since July there had been a 35-percent shift of McGovern voters away from their candidate—either to the undecided column or to Nixon. Does George McGovern understand how things work? asked Caddell in an agree/disagree question of orthodox polling. Forty-nine percent of those polled by Caddell agreed that McGovern didn’t understand; 39 percent thought he did. Caddell tried paneling questions on personality characteristics. In July the favorable qualities people had perceived in McGovern had led the unfavorable by three to one. By the beginning of October the perceptions had shifted to three to one against McGovern, headed by “indecisive,” “impractical,” “the Eagleton experience.” A specific sample in New Jersey, a key state for McGovern, had come out with such results on personality characteristics as: Strong—Nixon 64, McGovern 16. Honest—Nixon 32, McGovern 30 (!). Foolish—Nixon 11, McGovern 44. Sneaky—Nixon 32, McGovern 13. Practical—Nixon 56, McGovern 16. There was movement, always movement, for, according to Caddell, no one really loved Nixon, nor did any voter believe that the government could do anything about what bothered him most. (When do you think the war will be over? asked Caddell, and 30 percent replied, “Don’t know”; 40 percent, “A year or longer”; 12 percent, “In the next six months”—and 12 percent, “Never.”) George McGovern, in the voters’ eyes, by his own polls, was less competent to get things done than Richard Nixon. “This thing keeps me up all night,” said Caddell. “I lie awake at night trying to figure out a way that he can break this competence issue, how do we break that one basic question? And I don’t know. In the primaries we had the war issue going for us, and the alienation issue. Now our problem is at the top. We’ve always been light in the idea sector, we got left without any strategy of ideas, we play one thing, then we play another thing, and it all contributes to his image, to this lack of consistency and competency.”
At the beginning of October it had been decided that McGovern would combine his one great positive issue (America’s disgust with the war) with his one greatest weakness (“competence”) and make a nationwide broadcast on the Vietnam war. Only this time he would be specific. There would be a timetable of specific actions to bring the war to an end and the boys home—a workable, practical proposal. The speech told as much as any other episode about George McGovern’s political valor and political weakness.
The best Democratic brains worked over the Vietnam speech. Former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke advised on its first draft. McGovern was dissatisfied, and Ted Van Dyk and the issues theme team worked it over. Then McGovern handed it over to his personal staff writers; then he worked it over himself for three or four more hours to final edited form. Finally, on October 10th, his nationwide commercial on CBS showed the floodlit Capitol, panned in to George McGovern behind his desk and he was off with a superlative performance. The indignation was McGovern’s, the eloquence was McGovern’s, the high yearning morality was McGovern’s. It was a seven-point solid construction, one more in the countless succession of solutions put before the American people in the long war; but the essence of McGovern was in the last of his practical proposals. He had inserted this last proposal over the advice of most of his staff—to wit, that all those who had fled the war, all those who had sought refuge from the draft overseas, be pardoned, forgiven once the war was over and the prisoners had been brought home. McGovern’s conscience insisted that amnesty, one of the chief moral controversies of the year, be thrust forth now, at this moment. But there were voters whose consciences had dictated that they be ready to answer the call to die, if necessary, for their country. They could not, in their conscience, forgive men of other conscience who had refused either to kill or to die for their country.
There was deep conscience going on both sides, two tenacious views of patriotism and moral responsibility. Neither McGovern nor Nixon could recognize conscience on the other side. Two and a half million American veterans had answered the call to arms in Vietnam; only 14,000 had answered a contrary call of conscience which insisted they must escape the service. The numbers and emotions ran for Nixon.
McGovern’s leaders had looked forward to the speech of October 10th as a turning point, the 1972 equivalent of Hubert Humphrey’s Salt Lake City speech of September 30th in 1968, which had reversed the tide of opinion. In one way the McGovern speech was a stunning success—perhaps the most successful in terms of dollar response of any in modern times, drawing in the next four days $800,000 from the committed peace-lovers who had always been McGovern’s base. But the effect of the speech on the over-all electorate was that of a pin dropping.
McGovern had now in the last month of the campaign come home to the Vietnam issue; he and Eleanor had decided he would speak to that. Two days after the peace broadcast he was on the University of Minnesota campus, stunning the students with a tape-recording of horror, the voice of a Vietnam veteran recalling the remains of human bodies “fused together” by napalm bombings, “like pieces of metal that had been soldered. Sometimes you couldn’t tell whether they were people or animals.” One day later he was again before a cheering audience of 25,000 in the San Francisco Cow Palace, lifting his listeners to frenzy as he called on “them” to “give us back our country.”
McGovern was no longer happy in Washington. As he said later to James M. Naughton of The New York Times, “I had to stay out of Washington to keep my morale up and every time I’d go back to Washington and start reading those polls and talking to people back there, God, I felt [this thing was hopeless]. Then I’d get out among the people, you know, and you’d see a different thing. You’d see that there were really masses of people who wanted a fundamental change.” On the road, the faithful, the moralists, the young still cheered; the McGovern army could still turn out volunteers to make crowds. But McGovern was wise to stay out of Washington. At his Washington headquarters, by the second half of October, when the upturn had failed to come, a condition had set in which I had never known before; it was not the condition of bleak despair, or the black-humor surliness of the Goldwater headquarters in 1964; it was a condition that passed disloyalty. Men and women I had known for over a year as disciples now despised their own candidate. They were not disaffected with the cause, but contemptuous of the man; betrayed not by his beliefs, which they still shared, but by the absence of that hard quality of leadership which they sought. He had failed them not in honor or devotion—but in craftsmanship.
A political reporter could carve out of the McGovern schedule in the last three weeks whatever story or pattern he wanted. His plan, to appease some, included one college-campus appearance a day, a “visual” for the cameras. To appease others, the plan called for hitting big cities in big states, to show the ethnic flag. With all goodwill, obedient to schedule, decisions and compromises in Washington, McGovern went through his travels. But the only image worth carving out of the last weeks of the campaign was the image of the man himself, as it broke through the frames and time blocks set for him: He was the preacher, calling for repentance.
Dressed in white robe and bearing rod or staff, he might have been a minor prophet; dressed in starched black, he might have been a circuit-riding Wesleyan. Alighting in Texas, he could recall his Sunday-school days when the children in Avon, South Dakota, chanted, “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight.” In Wheaton, Illinois, he told the Evangelical School of Wheaton College that the Scripture clearly assigns to mankind “the ministry and the mission of change.” Not only would he change the course in Vietnam, but he would “also change those things in our national heritage which turned us astray, away from the truth that the people of Vietnam are, like us, the children of God…. So, Christians have a responsibility to speak the questions of the spirit which ultimately determine the state of the material world.” That day McGovern had chosen as his text a passage from the Book of Micah: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
Yet McGovern, though he quoted Micah, was a proud man (“a humble, self-effacing egomaniac” is the way one of his disillusioned saw him). And so, two weeks after his quoting of Micah came one of those moments which so endeared him to correspondents, who now winced at his humiliation. He had come into Battle Creek, Michigan, that evening five days before the election, shaking hands at the fence as candidates do, and encountered a stout young man wearing Nixon buttons, who heckled him with coarseness. McGovern beckoned to the young man, saying, “I’ve got a secret for you.” Then, quite audibly to all around him, the farm boy from South Dakota said what he had to say. “Kiss my ass,” said the Presidential candidate. He really no longer cared about rounding up votes—he was speaking from his heart.
By the last week of the campaign, his text had become what it was in the very beginning: Repentance. And: Beware. His voice was cracking, his throat was sore as he traveled from Chicago to Waco and Corpus Christi, Texas; to Little Rock, Arkansas; to Granite City and Moline, Illinois; to St. Louis, Missouri. But the war and its killings lay heavy on him, and his spirit was burdened.
He took to the air, on a nationwide telecast Friday night, to warn the American people about Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam. By the text of McGovern, the American government was deceiving the American people with this talk of peace, this “cruel political deception” that Nixon and Kissinger were perpetrating. President Nixon was only “pretending”; he had actually “closed the door to peace once again.” The entire exercise of Kissinger diplomacy in October, prematurely exposed, was a fraudulent bit of election trickery. Hammering his message home, he told a news conference in Chicago that he was making his charges “as a patriot and not as a candidate. He has no plan for ending this war,” McGovern said of Nixon. “… He’s not going to let that corrupt Thieu regime in Saigon collapse…. He’s going to stay there. He’s going to keep our troops there. He’s going to keep the bombers flying. He’s going to confine our prisoners to their cells in Hanoi for whatever time it takes for him to keep his friend General Thieu in office.” It was, in short, as George McGovern presented it in its final weeks, a contest between an alliance of monsters, Nixon and Thieu, versus a saint named McGovern.
He made a final television appearance—again on Vietnam—on Sunday night after having been scheduled into a dismal tour of the ethnic boroughs of inner New York by downcast local regulars. He took off Monday, after a walk on New York’s Fifth Avenue in the morning, and his schedulers moved him that day (while Richard Nixon rested in San Clemente, doing nothing but plan the reorganization of government) to Philadelphia, to Wichita, Kansas, and late at night to a mismanaged rally at Long Beach, California—from which he flew back through the night to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which was home.
All others in the McGovern camp had given up hope weeks before. As he himself recalled it, he thought there might be an upset until the Monday before the election. And then it was clear even to him that it would not work. Thus, Tuesday, Election Day, was tranquil for the candidate. He left Sioux Falls rather late in the morning to vote for the straight Democratic ticket in the education building of the Congregational Church in Mitchell, South Dakota, his home town. After voting, the candidate went to the Campus Center building of Dakota Wesleyan, where he had once taught, and gave a lecture on civics to high-school students from all over the state. A reporter in the hall reflected that it was very difficult to think of this happening in any other country. All America was voting that day on its Presidency and here was one of the two candidates eating cookies and drinking coffee with old faculty friends, then talking to high-school students—but you had to grasp the fact that George McGovern had always, really, been the Senator from South Dakota, and a teacher. He was doing his own thing as he spoke to the students, instructing them; he fitted more appropriately into this hall than any other on the long campaign trail.
The drive back from Mitchell to Sioux Falls takes about an hour and a half; and before McGovern had left, Frank Mankiewicz had telephoned him from Washington. Mankiewicz had already received two foreboding calls that morning. One reported that, by the early turnout of voters, it seemed that Detroit would be voting 100,000 less than expected that day—which was bad for McGovern. And, even worse, the second call had come from Suffolk County in New York, which was voting exceptionally heavy that day—which was good for Mr. Nixon. But Mankiewicz was flying out from Washington that evening anyway to join his chief in Sioux Falls for the vespers of the campaign.
So it was over.
And yet not.
It was impossible to dismiss George McGovern as one of the trace-less losers of American Presidential politics, like the Coxes or Landons who passed into the record books leaving no more than sterile voting totals behind to mark their defeats.
There would be a permanent residue of the McGovern campaign. Never again would the Pentagon’s budget be accepted by the American people and their Congress as sacred. Never again would a President’s right to make war abroad without consent of Congress go unquestioned. And someday, shortly, certainly, his attack on the ramshackle and jerry-built tax structure of America, with all its inequities, would result in law.
More than that. Like Stevenson and Goldwater, McGovern had introduced a new generation of young people to politics. Most would pass on, discouraged, to other things, the campaign of 1972 fading to a memory of their lives at springtime. But others, a handful, would remain to live and act within their party, wiser perhaps than before; and, like the Stevenson and Goldwater men, they would change their party, in structure and nature, from what it had been before.
It was what these young people had learned from the McGovern campaign that would, finally, give ultimate meaning to the McGovern phenomenon of 1972. The McGovern phenomenon had been something more than a movement, something more than a party coup. It had been a rhythm, a sound in the hearts of millions of Americans, a rhythm that came to crest that night in Miami when George McGovern looked down from the rostrum and the hall was singing, black and white chanting together.
And then, after that, the magic left. The music which moved the McGovern phenomenon was the oldest music in American life—the music of the religious ones, of the American crusaders, the abolitionists, the good-cause people, the cold-war people, a music that inspires some and frightens others. On the long march of the American people to the uplands, most have usually been willing to go along so long as they feel that they or their children will not be discarded, or crushed, or sacrificed in the journey; they will follow so long as they feel those at the head of the march have a competence, a skill, a practical understanding of affairs which touch their lives. At Miami the music began to frighten people.
From Miami on, the rhythm was broken. The hard work remained to be done, work for which magic was no substitute; the McGoverns had been frivolous in choosing a Vice-President, showing a contempt for the process which they proclaimed sacred. “It was like a doorbell ringing during love-making,” said a young McGovern volunteer of the Eagleton affair and its impact. They then showed themselves incompetent in organizing a campaign, auguring badly for their ability to organize a government. They remained pure at heart—but the system rejected their purity as unsafe. The rhythm beat on, of course, in the inner ear of the faithful; but fewer and fewer Americans cared to join that dance.
Mr. Nixon and Mr. McGovern conducted their campaigns for two different audiences, never joining issues in one central place, but setting up their tents, offering different music, on different terrains of American culture, inviting America to divide. When the Americans did, the majority went to Richard Nixon because they felt most at home there, most safe. Though McGovern himself would never again run for President, the rhythm and music of spirit that had moved him would persist in politics, as it had persisted through American culture from its beginning. And so, too, would Mr. Nixon’s.
Thus, finally:
On November 7th, 1972, Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States, was re-elected for a second term—only four of the thirteen Presidents of the United States in this century had won two such votes of confidence from the American people.
Of the 77,681,461 Americans who voted—the largest number in history—he carried 47,167,319, as against 29,168,509, to defeat his Democratic rival, George Stanley McGovern, by 17,998,810, the largest numerical margin in American history.2 The Nixon landslide was overwhelming. In percentage terms, he won 60.7 percent of the entire national vote, and stands second in history by only a tiny margin to Lyndon Johnson’s record-breaking 61.1-percent landslide of 1964. At the same time, the American people were electing a Congress of remarkable stability, untouched by the landslide: Of the 378 incumbent Congressmen running for re-election, only 13 were defeated. Over-all, the Republicans gained 12 seats in the House, to send back a Congress in which they were still a minority—192 Republicans against 243 Democrats. In the Senate, remarkably, the Republicans suffered a net loss of two seats, to become a diminished minority of 43 against 57 Democrats.
But the national contest of man against man, idea against idea, campaign against campaign, was enough to give the historian pause: Here, with 18,000,000 votes, was the largest numerical margin of decision ever recorded. Here, with a victory in 49 states, Nixon had carried the largest number of states ever carried by any President. Here were the most electoral votes ever recorded for any Republican (5213), only two short of Franklin Roosevelt’s 523 in 1936. (McGovern won 17 electoral votes.) Whatever later would be made of this mandate, however much its mechanics would cast shadow on it, it was a major statement by the American people. And they had stated their preference for Richard Nixon.
The simple numbers spurned quick analysis—they were numbers that might have turned the head of a more secure personality than Richard Nixon. Unlike most landslides, Nixon’s had been truly national; there had been no Harding, Eisenhower or Johnson landslide in the South. Only the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 compared with Nixon’s in the deadly uniformity of the returns in every region. The President’s percentages ranged from the merely huge (in the high fifties or the low sixties) for the East, Middle West and Far West to absolutely enormous (over 70 percent) in some Southern states.
The landslide scrambled historic patterns. New York, which in Nixon’s previous two races had voted decisively against him, gave him a larger ratio of victory than did Iowa—which had twice before voted for him by decisive margins. Connecticut, which had twice rejected him, embraced him this time with a greater percentage than did his thrice-faithful native California.
In this scrambling of patterns, one could detect the hardening of shapes that had begun to jell over previous years.
The Nixon victory in the South was something with which history had been pregnant for almost a generation. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been the last Democratic President to carry all eleven states of a once-traditional “Solid South.” In 1948, Harry Truman had lost four of those states to Strom Thurmond. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower had also ripped off four—Virginia, Florida, Texas, Tennessee. John F. Kennedy, in 1960, Catholic though he was, carried seven of the states of the old Confederacy. Johnson, in 1964, could hold only six. Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, could hold only one, Texas. But Richard Nixon, in 1972, carried the entire “Solid South” for the Republican Party. In doing so, he blew apart voting numbers that had prevailed only four years before. Mississippi, his poorest state in 1968 (with 13.5 percent of the vote), was his best state in 1972—with 78 percent. Georgia, Nixon’s second-best state in 1972, had been 47th four years before. Of the eight states which gave the President 70 percent of their vote or better in 1972, all but Nebraska and Oklahoma were in Dixie. And Nebraska, Nixon’s best state in both his previous elections, trailed five Southern states in 1972.
Another shape, just as significant though fuzzier in profile, had been emerging over the years in American voting—the shape of voting in the big industrial centers of the Northeast. Here, in 1972, Nixon scored another major breakthrough—but that breakthrough, like his final occupation of the “Solid South,” could be understood only by what had happened to the Wallace vote.
As one approaches analysis of the Wallace vote, one must confront again the most brutal reality of domestic American politics—which is that white people fear black people all across the country. In the spring, McGovern theorists had argued that the huge Wallace vote in the primaries was an expression of “alienation,” of general lack of trust in the process of American government, and that, under their skins, Wallace and McGovern voters shared similar emotions. In the fall, as McGovern’s campaign was collapsing, months after Wallace had been gunned out, they argued that Nixon was inheriting the Wallace vote, a racist vote.
The election results proved the theory both true and untrue. In the South, the Wallace vote moved en masse to Richard Nixon. A CBS analysis of some 17,000 American voters on election day,4 pinioning them for questioning as they left the polls, showed that the 1968 Wallace voters in the South had gone for Richard Nixon by three to one. In a remarkable number of Southern states, the 1972 Nixon vote was within a point or two of the combined Nixon-Wallace vote four years earlier: Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas.
But in the rest of the country—North, East and Midwest—the same CBS survey showed that the Wallace voters of 1968 split between Nixon and McGovern by almost equal numbers, six to five for Nixon over McGovern. What carried the North, East, West and the industrial centers for Nixon was Nixon’s new strategy—his courtship of the blue-collar, working-class, ethnic voters on issues clearly voiced to appeal to them.
One of the crucial elements of the Nixon strategy had been his discernment of the emotions of the mass of American Catholics, most of whom had come of late-nineteenth-century immigration, who had fought their way up to the status, the comfort, the neighborhoods in which they now dwelt—and wanted to preserve their neighborhoods and way of life against the tide of change. In Eastern industrial states, Catholics had achieved a rough voting parity with Protestants in the electorate; and now, by the CBS analysis, in the election of 1972 the once heavily Democratic Catholics had gone Republican for the first time in any American Presidential election. Nixon spoke to them. Rhode Island, the most heavily Catholic state in the Union, had gone against Nixon by two to one in 1968; in 1972 Rhode Island voted for him. Even Providence County, which had gone for Hubert Humphrey by 70 percent in 1968, gave Nixon a majority in 1972. All through the East, the same way: Hudson County, New Jersey; Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania; Albany and Erie counties (Buffalo), New York; Hartford County, Connecticut—all heavily Catholic, and all, utterly out of previous political character, voted for the Republican Protestant from Yorba Linda, California.
New York State was perhaps, outside the South, the chief triumph of the Nixon strategy. Twice—in 1960 and 1968—it had humiliated Richard Nixon as Presidential candidate by cruel margins. This year, the Empire State gave Nixon his largest numerical majority in the nation. The campaign on Nixon’s behalf was managed by the elaborate political technocracy of Nelson Rockefeller. But the stars of the campaign team were Liberal Jewish Senator Jacob Javits and Conservative Irish-Catholic Senator James Buckley. Both did valiantly for the President, but Buckley was the better spokesman of the Nixon strategy. In the CBS News analysis, Catholic voters in New York supported the President by the unheard-of margin of two to one! By so doing, they almost enabled the President to carry Brooklyn—as inconceivable a thought to American politicians as it would be, in Britain, for a Tory to carry Nye Bevan’s old Welsh mining district of Ebbw Vale. Nixon lost New York City by only 82,000 votes, compared to the 700,000 by which he lost it in 1968! And he carried the whole state by almost a million and a quarter votes—1,241,694—as against his larger native California, fourth largest in plurality, in which he led by 1,126,249.
If campaign planning is something more serious than the simple mechanics and manipulation of media and vote registration, its historic rationale has to lie in the governing concepts of the men who seek to lead the nation, how they see the nation. The final votes measure these thoughts and concepts. The home strategy of George McGovern had been one of universal brotherhood; the home strategy of Richard Nixon had been one of self-respecting, interacting yet independent communities. At Key Biscayne, he had decided he would make such communities—previously ignored by Republicans as “ethnics”—his primary target. They had voted Democratic previously because they had had no place else to go. He would take them away.
The votes record the success of this strategy. In the CBS polling, as in every other public poll, the defection of Democrats from their loyalties is one of the high ridges of the election results. Of people who identified themselves as Democrats, 37 percent voted for Richard Nixon. This compared with only 8 percent of Republicans who supported McGovern. The Democratic defection in 1972 is without precedent—in neither of his huge victories did Eisenhower win over more than 23 percent of Americans who claimed to be Democrats; and in Johnson’s huge landslide, only 20 percent of the Republicans defected. The response of Democrats in 1972 was, thus, unique.
For a detailed breakdown of how Nixon’s strategies worked—what the final markers were in the Polish wards of the big cities; the Italian wards of Cleveland, Boston, Chicago; the Irish wards of St. Paul; the Jewish districts of Los Angeles—one is best referred to the final analysis of the voting results by the Research Division of the Republican Party, always one of the best analyses in statistics, detail and general meaning, and usually ignored by the leaders of the Republican Party.5 The ethnic, blue-collar strategy of Richard Nixon, according to this analysis of results, ran thus: Among Italian-Americans, Nixon ran his margin up to 51 percent of their total, from 22 percent in 1968; among Polish-Americans, he increased his totals in various big cities by 12 to 30 percent of the vote; among Spanish-American voters, he ran his total up from an average 18 percent in 1968 to 31 percent in 1972.
The massive CBS Election Day survey threw up other readings that provoke reflection—on blue-collar workers, union members, Catholics.
Blue-collar workers gave Nixon 55 percent of their major-party vote, up from 41 percent in the Gallup survey of 1968. The families of union members, which gave 34 percent of their major-party vote to Nixon in 1968, awarded him 51 percent in 1972. Catholics, 36 percent for Nixon in the Gallup survey of 1968, were 53 percent for him in the CBS survey of 1972. The rise in Nixon’s white-collar vote, by contrast, was much less pronounced. From the 1968 Gallup survey to the 1972 CBS survey, the white-collar vote for Nixon rose only eight points—from 55 to 63 percent.
The Presidential strategy had been to develop and exploit a new majority. Its most striking effect, in the heavily blue-collar, strongly Catholic, larger states of the East which Nixon had lost in both his prior races, was to turn those states around and produce in them landslides as great as, and in some cases greater than, those in the states which he had carried in the past.
An NBC survey indicates that the Jewish vote across the nation rose from 18 percent for Nixon in 1968 to 37 percent in 1972. The CBS survey estimates that the percentage of Jews voting for Nixon came to 32 percent. These figures fall in a rough area of agreement. Nelson Rockefeller’s private polls had always given him pride that Jews, who normally voted only 15 percent Republican in the Empire State, would vote for him up to 30 percent in his gubernatorial races. Nixon, then, had pulled enough Jews over to the Republican side, nationwide, to match, or possibly surpass, Rockefeller’s record.
Of the Irish-American voting and German-American voting, so important in past history, there are as yet no realistic measures.
There were two elections going on in 1972, as Professor Walter De Vries has written—that for the Presidency and that between the parties. The election for the Presidency was over by August. There remained after that, according to De Vries, another campaign—that of the two old parties in the cities and states. That was a real contest. Here the Americans split, in bewildering fracture patterns. In the twelve states where both a Governor and a Senator were running for office, six split their votes between the Republican and Democratic victors. Eighteen states split their control of state legislatures. More Americans split their votes between the local candidates of the two parties than ever before. They were searching not in parties but in personalities for answers to problems that baffled them.
So large, diffuse and provocative are the data which the election of 1972 poured out that reporters, like this one, must wait for fine shades of meaning on the slow thought and dissection of results by scholar-psephologists, who sort out the pebbles—on the forthcoming stories of Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg; of Walter Dean Burnham; of the scholars of the Michigan Research Institute. Buried somewhere under every great historic landslide are the ripples of counter-movement, nodules of resistance to the general sweep. What they represent is not yet quite clear, now in 1973. But a few should be noted.
For example:
Everywhere across the country, the President ran ahead of his party, partly by design and partly by construction—but in the rare cases when Senate Republican candidates ran ahead of the landslide Republican President, generally it was a liberal Republican who did so—Case in New Jersey, Percy in Illinois, Hatfield in Oregon, Brooke in Massachusetts. Nixon landslides of 58 percent or better did not prevent liberal Democrats from upsetting Republican Senatorial incumbents in Delaware, Maine, Colorado, Iowa.
One is intrigued, also, by those areas where George McGovern outran the record of Hubert Humphrey, however unfortunate his record was in the rest of the country. McGovern carried Alameda County, California—seat of the University of California at Berkeley. He carried Dane County, Wisconsin, better than Humphrey had—the seat of the University of Wisconsin. He did the same in Washtenaw County of Michigan—seat of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. And Johnson County, Iowa, seat of the University of Iowa.
One is intrigued by the pattern of black voting. The blacks were the only group in the country among whom Richard Nixon’s appeal failed to fatten preference for him substantially. He had received only 13 percent of the black vote in 1968; in 1972, he could move that up only to 14 percent.
There were other illusory dynamics in the planning of the campaign of 1972 which turned out not to be realities. The youth vote, on which George McGovern’s strategists had based so much of their hope, failed to materialize. The women’s vote, that potential which McGovern’s planners had mobilized in the primaries, developed little force in the general election. The women, insofar as the polls can determine, voted for Richard Nixon over George McGovern in even larger proportions (62 to 38) than they had voted for Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy, the lanceman of Camelot, in 1960 (51 to 49).
One of the more stubborn realities that showed in the results of the “other” election, where people decided who should govern, or speak for them, in their own states, was the continuing power of the AFL/CIO.
The AFL/CIO powerhouse deserves more space than it gets in this book; its influence and muscle spread over the middle ground of working men and women who lie between the thuggery of the teamsters’ leaders (pro-Nixon) and the idealism of the auto workers’ leadership (pro-McGovern). The working men and women of the AFL/CIO are independent of their leaders at the national level of issues and candidates, where, like most Americans, they make up their minds by what television and press tell them. But when it comes to local voting to choose who speaks for them in Congress, they will go with the union leadership. Messrs. Meany, Kirkland and Barkan, who control this system of loyalties, opted out of the Presidential contest. But at the Congressional and Senatorial level, they delivered maximum impact. In Maine, they decided Margaret Chase Smith could be eliminated—not out of any malice but because labor needed every Senatorial vote it could get. Their contribution of $10,000 to William D. Hathaway, Democrat, was probably the largest single contribution to his campaign; yet more important was the mobilization of the building-trades, textile workers’ and service workers’ unions to support him. AFL/CIO’s COPE moved in Delaware to support young Joseph Biden against J. Caleb Boggs, an apparently hopeless race which Biden finally won. Labor financed and helped the Iowa campaign of Dick Clark, who ran a spectacular race on his own, against the surprising loser, Republican Senator Jack Miller. In Rhode Island, the AFL/CIO machinery was certainly the largest factor in turning that state’s electorate against its former Governor, John Chafee, Republican, to support incumbent Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell in what had appeared, in early fall, an almost sure win for Chafee. The AFL/CIO managed to pump $103,000 into various committees of Pell’s campaign, as well as manpower. In the Senate, where Richard Nixon now faces his Constitutional challenge, the AFL/CIO probably provided the critical handful of votes that may swing decision. So, too, in the races for the House. AFL/CIO political effort concentrated on eighty-two marginal House districts. Most incumbents, as we have seen, were reelected; only thirteen lost; but all five of the Republican losers were replaced by liberal Democrats whom the AFL/CIO had backed to the hilt; and in the new Congressional districts—approximately a dozen, chiefly in the middle-class suburbs, carved out by the reapportionment required by the Census—AFL/CIO-endorsed candidates won four.
The last message of the voting record of 1972 to history was its most bleak: its shriveled size. Americans, numbed by words, headlines and TV shows, cozened, courted, cross-analyzed by canvassers, telephone banks and statisticians of both candidates, simply drew in on themselves. Only 55.7 percent of all Americans old enough to be eligible to vote bothered to cast a vote for President—the lowest percentage since the 51.3 percent who voted in the confusion of the Truman-Dewey-Thurmond-Wallace (Henry) race of 1948. The proportion of eligible Americans who vote has been dropping every four years since the election of John F. Kennedy, whose fight drew 63.8 percent to the polls. Kennedy established a Presidential commission thereafter to find out why so few Americans cared to vote. But the vote continued to drop—to 62.1 percent in 1964, to 61 percent in 1968, to the results of 1972.
Something in this turn of time had made Americans feel that their votes were unconnected with the control they should have over their own lives. “Alienation” was the fashionable word for the vague feeling. What it meant was that in the decade of the 1960’s you had lost the right to vote on where your child went to school. You had lost the right to vote on when your son should be drafted, and where he should be sent to fight. Most of the major problems that affected “you”—from taxes to smog, from busing to war—you could not reach by voting for anyone.
Of those who believed that voting could still help you control your life, the preponderant majority wanted Nixon to set their directions, not George McGovern. They approved of his course, from what they had seen, or heard, or felt in their own lives. That was the mandate for Nixon—to carry on. But fewer Americans than ever in a quarter-century wanted to make a choice.
The phrase that governed traditional contests of the past was “fair choice.” In terms of “fair choice,” the decision of 1972 was a climax in the thinking of Americans—they voted for the end of the postwar world.
But what if the choice had not been fair? What if the rules had deceived them? What if their President had betrayed the system of fair choice, fair laws, fair chance for which all of them had come here—ethnics, Catholics, Jews, Englishmen, Nordics and Mediterraneans? What if the blacks, who had been dragged here in chains and coffles, now were convinced that “Charlie’s” society was phony? Now all of them, black and white, rich and poor, North and South, minorities and majorities, would have to look back on what their choice of power really meant. Here, analysis of election numbers gave no answer.
1 A day later, back in Washington, the President told a group of his staff people what the day had meant to him. The episode at Mantua Corners had scored deeply. His remarks, abbreviated here from a transcript, express the essential Nixon and his relation to his people as well as anything I can recall: “Some of you read of the motorcade yesterday and a stop that I made, one that was unplanned, one that came about because we saw a sign on the side of the road….
“After I had gone by the sign, I stopped the car, got out and walked back. I talked to the mother, to the father, to the brother of the man who had been killed…. I shook hands with them. Anyone who has been in politics and who shakes hands a lot can tell a lot about people by how they shake hands, and also the feel of their hands. I shook hands with the man. His hands were not soft. I don’t mean that most of us who have soft hands because we don’t do manual work have anything to be ashamed of, but he obviously was a working man; he was a farmer. It was a callused hand, but strong and firm.
“But what impressed me even more was the mother. I shook hands with her. Her hands also were somewhat rough, and I looked at them and they were red. She obviously cannot have a dishwasher, and she didn’t have all those fancy things that you read about in Vogue and the rest as to how to make your hands pretty and lovely and the rest. I thought of my own mother and father. My father had hard hands too, because he worked all of his life. My mother’s hands were not pretty, but I always thought they were beautiful because I knew how much she did and how hard she worked all day, baking pies at four o’clock in the morning to send four kids to college, hoping they could, or helping other people.
“I thought as I talked to this woman and to this man that they were really what makes this country great….
“The mother said, very simply, not out of anger toward those who are in Canada or who deserted the country, but simply speaking about her son, she said, ‘We put the sign up because,’ she said, ‘we just don’t want our boy to have died for nothing.’
“… We could have ended this [war] in the beginning of our administration. But ending it by getting out of Vietnam would have left our POW’s to the mercy of the enemy. We would have had to beg or crawl in order to get them back. Ending it without some sort of an agreement would have meant that we would have gotten out, but the killing would go on, the North Vietnamese would kill the South Vietnamese and the Cambodians and the Laotians.
“… If the United States were to withdraw, if the United States were to surrender, in effect, and throw up our hands, it means that 50,000 Americans, including the son of that wonderful man and woman that I saw on that Ohio farm, they would have died for nothing. It would mean that the grandchildren that I saw—one was six; another was eight; another was ten—they may be fighting in another war. I can’t guarantee to them or to you that there will not be another war, but I do know this:
“By ending the war in Vietnam in the right way, in a way that discourages aggression, that does not reward it, gives them a better chance for the sons and the younger brothers of those who have died in Vietnam to grow up in a world of peace.”
2 All the figures used in this passage are taken from the final tabulations of the Associated Press, as is traditional in this series. A full tabulation of the vote by states and including splinter-party candidates, also made available by the kindness of the Associated Press, is to be found in Appendix A.
3 Nixon won 521 electoral votes, but the official record reads 520; one of Nixon’s electors from Virginia defected to cast a vote for John Hospers, Libertarian.
4 The CBS News Election Day Survey was conducted in 143 voting precincts throughout the country. It caught an unprecedented sample of 17,405 voters leaving the polls, the largest sample ever taken of the national electorate—large enough to produce for the first time sub-samples of groups (such as Jews and voters under twenty-five) which had never been sampled before in numbers large enough to give statistical validity to their results. The survey was designed and conducted by Warren Mitofsky, associate director of the CBS News Election Unit, and supervised by Robert Chandler, then its director and now a CBS News vice-president.
5 See 1973 Republican Almanac, State Political Profiles, 1972 Election Summary, produced by Political/Research Division, Republican National Committee, 310 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C.