It’s odd to read the words of this volume—many of them admiring, if not approving, of Richard Nixon—knowing what happened next. Theodore White’s author’s note is dated June 8, 1973, a few weeks before White House Counsel John Dean’s damning testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. In another month we would watch Dean insist that it might be proven that the cover-up of crimes continued, and that it came from the president himself. In July 1973, Alexander Butterfield quietly told the committee that President Nixon had taped his conversations in the Oval Office. And the unraveling of the Nixon presidency became inevitable.
So it is odd, then, to read about the creation of the second term of that presidency, the tumultuous times that defined the 1972 campaign. And it is fascinating. For me, as I suspect for anyone “of a certain age,” these pages evoke an amused nostalgia for when we were young and ready to take on the world. I remember the eighteen thousand screaming fans ushered to their seats by the likes of Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Julie Christie at the Fabulous Forum in Los Angeles when James Taylor, Carole King, Quincy Jones, and Barbra Streisand sang out their souls for George McGovern. But even then, as the crowds around us roared, those of us with any political sense knew that Richard Nixon was right on Election Day when he told Theodore White: “The election was decided the day McGovern was nominated.” Once the Democrats made that choice, the president judged as he flew across the country to watch the returns at the White House, “the question after that was only how much. McGovern did to his party what Goldwater did.”
But Nixon wasn’t able to do for his party what Franklin Roosevelt did for his; he wasn’t able to create the “new majority” he sought. Even as the president piled up one of the biggest landslides in history, White tells us “the President was bothered; the results nagged” because he couldn’t bring the Congress, or ultimately the people, with him. While Nixon trounced his rival by the astounding margin of 61 percent to 38 percent, Republicans actually lost seats in the Senate and gained only twelve in the House of Representatives, leaving both houses well in the hands of a Democratic majority. The voters had sent a strong message to Washington—they were rejecting George McGovern more than they were electing Richard Nixon and the policies he stood for.
By Election Day the bare outlines of the Watergate scandal were known. The botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee in June had already been traced to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, gleefully dubbed CREEP by Nixon-haters. By October, more than threequarters of the voters told pollsters that they had heard of the scandal, though most dismissed it as “just politics.” Still, White muses, Watergate might have led to an unprecedented pattern of voter turnout: in several states more people cast their ballots for governor or senator than for president. And most of those ballots went to Democrats, but that didn’t just happen by chance. Democratic Party leaders looked ahead at what they knew would be a debacle in November and took action. My father, Hale Boggs, was the majority leader of the House at that time. He and Hubert H. Humphrey, the former vice president and defeated 1968 Democratic nominee, mounted a frantic fall road trip in support of congressional candidates. In fact, the last time I ever saw my father was at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles, where he and Humphrey outdid each other in their purple pleas for the party. Shortly after that, while campaigning for Nick Begich, an endangered Democratic house member in Alaska, the plane carrying my father and Begich disappeared, never to be found. (In the 2008 election, with Republican Governor Sarah Palin on the national ticket, Begich’s son Mark was elected as Alaska’s first Democratic senator in eighteen years.)
The race for Congress was the one arena in the crazy campaign of 1972 where party leaders and organized labor could play a role. The AFL-CIO refused to endorse McGovern, ostensibly over his anti-Vietnam war stance. But White gives us one instance after another where labor and elected officials were excluded from the march that ended with the nomination of McGovern. And that offensive provides the heft of White’s story; it’s all here—starting with the commission formed by the Democratic convention of 1968 and chaired by McGovern that changed the rules for delegates, working through the primaries and caucuses and state conventions; and ending at the raucous Democratic convention in Miami, where the candidate cooled his heels until almost three o’clock in the morning waiting to make his acceptance speech while a parade of delegates insisted on having their say about minute details. I still laugh remembering my mother’s wisecrack as we witnessed that convention from the prime real estate of my father’s box. Scanning the scene, she fixed her gaze on one particular delegate and stammered, “Why would anyone wear shorts that short?” My husband, Steve, who was part of the team covering the convention for the New York Times, remembers his fiercely antiwar, pro-McGovern father looking at the chaos on television and concluding, “There’s nobody there who looks like me.”
A lot of America felt that way, despite the fact that 60 percent agreed with the basic thrust of the convention and the raison d’être of the McGovern candidacy—that the Vietnam war was a massive mistake. (Though White can’t resist telling us that McGovern decided to run for president in 1962 long before the war was ever an issue. The reason? He had read The Making of the President 1960, and he thought he’d go for it.) But even as Nixon continued to wage war, mining the North Vietnamese ports and bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, he talked peace. And he walked it as well—dazzling White with his opening to China and his trip to Moscow, the first ever for an American president.
Theodore White had covered China for Time during and after World War II, and was a legitimate expert on that vast nation. Traveling with Nixon’s press corps back to the country in 1972, White saw the China trip as the momentous occasion that it was, nothing less than “closing an epoch” of postwar foreign policy. The promise that Nixon offered in foreign policy, and his attempts at a pragmatic approach to domestic policy, understandably attracted not only the author but also the American people. That’s why Watergate created such a “breach of faith”—a phrase that would become the title of White’s next book, published in 1975.
But the full extent of Watergate was not yet known as the campaign of 1972 marched on toward Election Day. As Nixon’s team ran ads highlighting the president’s foreign visits, interspersed with staged rallies—and certainly no messy press conferences or interviews—the McGovern operation imploded in plain sight. In chronicling first the embarrassment over Thomas Eagleton’s selection as running mate, and then the frantic search for a substitute after unceremoniously dumping Eagleton from the ticket, White provides some juicy stories I had long since forgotten. And putting together the predictable frustration of the losing candidate with the press with Nixon’s longstanding hostility to the news media—allows the author an opportunity to do a riff (chapter 10) on the power of the press at the time. Reading his thoughts makes an old-fashioned reporter like me yearn for “the good old days,” when newspapers were profitable and network news was watched by fifty million adults nightly (about half that number tune in today).
Many of the contemporaneous reviews of the book singled out White’s section on the press, but with very different takes on his opinion. The book was applauded in the conservative journal Commentary by Harvard’s James Q. Wilson, who called it “a brilliant analysis by a knowledgeable but detached insider.” In the liberal New York Review of Books, however, Garry Wills scoffed: “White’s indiscriminate celebration of the ruler shows up best in his long chapter on the press. There he tries to defend Nixon’s nonexistent public sensitivity to the press, despite the fact that 93 percent of the papers endorsing a candidate last year came out for Nixon.” To liberals, of course, any defense of Nixon at all was an offense.
Reading through the reviews, I feel as though I am witnessing a much more erudite and informed preview of the Fox News/MSNBC shouting matches of today. The changes in the media (a word White dismissed as an invention of advertisers) would certainly surprise the author. What else? The demise of the Soviet Union? Certainly. The rise of a capitalistic Communist China? Probably. The idea that energy issues still defeat us would surely depress him, given that Nixon named energy as his top agenda item for his second term. White was particularly obsessed with the problems facing America’s cities in 1972, viewing them as something of a code for issues of race. He would be pleased, I suspect, to see some revival of our urban areas, and I think he would be flabbergasted to find an African American (a term that would have been unfamiliar to him) in the White House.
But that’s because the country has changed greatly. In 1972, George McGovern thought he could mobilize women, the young—the 1972 election marked the first year that eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds could vote—blacks, and the poor to go to the polls. He was wrong. As the Census Bureau dutifully reported the following year, “Females, Negroes, persons of Spanish ethnic origin, the youngest (18–34), [and] those in families of income less than $5000 … were less likely to register and vote.” The electorate McGovern faced was almost 90 percent white, with “persons who are male … the middle age group (35–64), [and] those in families with incomes greater than $10,000,” showing “higher levels of registration and voting.”1 By 2008, whites had dropped to 74 percent of voters, with blacks, Hispanics, and Asians adding up to more than a quarter of the electorate and women more than half, according to ABC News exit polls.
The election of 1972 was quickly overshadowed by the disgrace and resignation of President Nixon, which left a lasting mark on American politics. The “new majority” that Nixon sought to bring to the Republican Party—ethnic whites, Catholics, patriotic pro-defense workers—showed up in 1980, giving Ronald Reagan a Republican Senate for the first time in decades and a working majority in the House. And the Democrats spent the next several elections dealing with “McGovernization”—the image of a party “where nobody looks like me.” Senator McGovern himself—one of the few key players in this book who is still alive and active today—understandably, rejects the term; however, it’s now standard shorthand for both political parties when they veer toward the unelectable extremes.
Finally, as Teddy White predicted, George McGovern “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.” Of that new generation, Bill Clinton would become the 42nd president of the United States, and his wife, Hillary Clinton, now the secretary of state, would run her own presidential campaign against a candidate she and her husband believed was McGovernizing the party. But in 2008—at last—American politics had moved beyond 1972.
—COKIE ROBERTS
October 2010
1 www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/p20/1972/p20-253pdf