CHAPTER
FOUR
Nixon’s Lonely Landslide: The Dishonored Campaign of 1972
Richard Nixon’s last election was the one he couldn’t lose. The men who might have been the president’s most threatening Democratic challengers in 1972 toppled one by one. By that spring, Nixon was in comfortable command of the campaign. So it was incredible that he and his henchmen would try to steal what they were winning anyhow. They did, and made themselves into losers after Nixon’s overwhelming reelection.
To travel with Nixon in that campaign was to watch a sort of political minuet. It was controlled, contrived, and, we would discover too late, as corrupt as the intrigues of a medieval court. On the road with Senator George McGovern, the doomed Democratic nominee, you got the hectic, often improvised air of a disco dance.
I never met so many people who later wound up in prison as when I covered the Nixon campaign. Among the convicts were the arrogant White House bosses, self-righteous political lieutenants, and a handful of sadly ruined young men who had simply done what presidential aides were expected to do—what the president wanted. The young lawyer who signed Nixon’s fraudulent income tax return without checking its accuracy, a 1968 campaign volunteer who had been rewarded with a job in the Treasury, was indicted, jailed, lost his law license, and wound up working as a hotel detective.
Another young lawyer, John Sears, masterfully engineered Nixon’s campaign for the 1968 nomination in the presidential primaries but was squeezed out of the top echelon by senior rivals who resented his influence and blunt advice to the president-elect. It was his good fortune, he told me after Watergate, because he wasn’t certain he could have resisted the kind of presidential instructions that proved the undoing of his former colleagues.
That was the cauldron of dirty tricks and Watergate, the more mystifying because it was more than stupid—it was pointless. They were going to win and didn’t need to cheat. I’d covered Nixon long enough to know that he was always watching his back, checking over his shoulder, wary that somebody was gaining on him. He practiced the politics of suspicion. His palace guard was just that, an array of unquestioning loyalists. Over drinks after a campaign day, we’d joke with political aides about their candidates’ foibles. We called McGovern “McGoo,” and some of his people joined the sardonic shorthand. Nixon’s campaigners called him “The Boss,” or “R.N.,” and you had the impression they might stand and salute at the mention.
After covering Nixon’s campaign of 1968 and his transition to power, I was assigned to the White House at the start of his presidency. I spent about five months there, the only time in my career I covered the White House full-time. I never wanted to; it was a narrow, confining kind of job. Reporters work in the isolation of the pressroom, get briefings there, and work the telephone in often frustrating efforts to get something more than the doled-out information. The assignment is to cover a man surrounded by armed guards, inaccessible except when he wants to be seen, silent except when, and on what topics, he chooses to speak. I always preferred the Capitol, especially the Senate, and got back there as quickly as I could, late in the spring of 1969. Reporting on Congress, you can talk to the people you cover, call a senator off the floor for an interview or catch him in the hallway or the elevator. White House news coverage was programmed; Senate reporting was not.
Still, White House coverage had its advantages. Travel was one. Until I covered Nixon, I’d never been farther abroad than Montreal. I was assigned to the presidential grand tour of Europe early in 1969: Brussels, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and London. Traveling with a president you don’t get much time to see the landmarks because the schedule is too tight and the work too intense. But there is compensation in the things you do see—the glittering dining hall at Versailles, the reception room at Buckingham Palace. There was an hour long after midnight for a quick cab trip to Notre Dame. It had rained and the cathedral was mirrored in the wet, deserted streets. The great square was empty except for us. It was a scene I never forgot. Jack Germond was with me. For a few moments, we cynics stood in speechless awe. Germond broke the silence. “Jesus Christ,” he marveled, irreverently but appropriately. I said I thought that was supposed to be the point.
By late spring, the advantage of my Nixon campaign contacts was about up—the people I knew had become White House aides and officials, and 1968 was history. So I happily returned to the Senate, became chief of the AP staff of five reporters covering that side of the Capitol, and got back to congressional and political reporting, on the 1970 off-year elections and then on the skirmishing for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.
Before the campaign year, public opinion polls showed Senator Edmund S. Muskie preferred over Nixon, enough to make the president nervous because, he said privately, the Maine senator had “a fair chance of beating me.” So the Committee for the Re-election of the President, aptly acronymed CREEP, set out to see to it that there would be no fair chance.
I knew the buttoned-down, slickly combed cadre at CREEP. I didn’t know what they were up to until the Watergate scandal burst into public view the year after the campaign, the misconduct magnified by the Nixon cover-up attempt. The Washington Post began reporting White House and campaign ties to the burglary and dirty tricks before the election, but the disclosures by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein didn’t became a significant issue despite McGovern’s effort to put Watergate on the political agenda before Americans voted.
We campaign reporters wrote what McGovern said about it all: that Nixon was the most corrupt president in American history, the sponsor of burglars and political buggings. We then reported the White House denials, a balancing act that was and is the habit of American political journalism. The balance struck an average between valid accusations and dishonest denials, but charge and response is the flawed ritual of political reporting, even though the average between a lie and the truth is still a lie.
Nixon’s CREEP campaign command post had the atmosphere of a bank. McGovern headquarters had the clamor of a supermarket. McGovern campaigned aggressively, Nixon hardly at all. The president logged just over three weeks of campaign travel all year, and those were short workdays of a stop or two, usually to invited audiences, with few open rallies. It was an invitation-only campaign. Often, Nixon spoke to leaders of his own vote-hunting organizations, purposely preaching to the committed. “Against McGovern it was clear that the less I did the better I would do,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs.
But I always sensed a political paranoia about his operation. Nixon claimed he had set up CREEP because he wanted to keep politics out of the White House. That sounded statesmanlike, but Nixon was the ultimate pol, a man obsessed with political maneuvering. He ordered a White House aide to hire a private investigator to look into Chappaquiddick in 1971, just in case Ted Kennedy surfaced as a candidate. The private eye came up with nothing new but rumors about the accident that killed his passenger, a young woman campaign volunteer, and Kennedy wasn’t running anyhow.
Pat Buchanan even recommended that the Nixon operation try to disrupt the campaign of Pete McCloskey, a liberal California congressman running as a protest candidate in the Republican primaries. McCloskey was a negligible annoyance, but the Nixon people didn’t want to be annoyed. Nothing came of the Buchanan memo.
The dirty tricks operation against the Democrats was paid for with CREEP money but it was coordinated out of the White House by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s young, carefully combed appointments secretary. We used to joke that Chapin’s hair was all one piece because there never was a strand out of place.
Days before the Watergate burglary of Democratic Party headquarters on June 17, 1972, Nixon dashed off a memo: “McGovern is more clever and less principled than Goldwater and will say anything in order to win.” Two days after the break-in, Nixon learned that somebody on the CREEP payroll was involved. “My confidence in CRP was undermined more by the stupidity of the DNC bugging attempt than by its illegality,” Nixon wrote later. That mind-set was the undoing of his presidency. Instead of denouncing the stupidity of it all and cleaning house in his campaign, Nixon reacted by having his own offices checked constantly to make sure that he wasn’t being bugged as the Democrats had been, and by trying to cover it up behind a CIA cloak, the lie that finally forced him to resign.
Trying to erase the stain, Nixon wrote, lectured, and, in 1986, addressed an Associated Press publishers convention in San Francisco, where I wrote questions to be put to him, one of which was what he learned from Watergate. “Just destroy all the tapes,” he said. No thought of any apology or the lesson his disaster might send to future generations of politicians. Burn the tapes, he thought. That way the cover-up might have worked. He had asked me in advance for suggestions on what he should talk about and I answered the obvious, that foreign policy and politics were his specialties. He autographed his next book in appreciation for my “wise counsel,” and told the publishers that day how much I had helped him prepare for his address. I told Nixon afterward that I wasn’t convinced being described as his speechwriter was a good career move for an AP man. By then he could laugh about it.
I think Nixon would have won reelection in 1972 even had he confessed that his campaign’s fingerprints were on the Watergate break-in. He might have come in short of the 61 percent and the forty-nine states he carried, but he would have won with votes to burn. Had he admitted the role of his campaign, Congress probably would not have sent investigators in pursuit of the facts all the way to the smoking gun tape—the attempt to use the CIA for cover-up purposes—that forced his resignation.
In the primaries, McGovern had been marginalized by rivals in his own party who argued that he was far left of the Democratic mainstream, a sort of liberal counterpart to the Goldwater of 1964. That crippled McGovern even before the fiasco in which he chose, then dropped, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton as his running mate. McGovern had embraced Eagleton “one thousand percent” after the disclosure that he had been hospitalized for depression, a mental illness more damning to a politician then than now, but prodded him from the ticket when the reaction was too adverse to accept.
McGovern knew how to cut his losses, although he did so too late in that case. He wasn’t quite the naive straight arrow he sometimes seemed. He was a veteran of deadly combat in World War II, a decorated bomber pilot. McGovern was the peace candidate but he knew how to fight.
Purity doesn’t pay in politics. I saw McGovern cut a campaign corner here and there, reneging on promised commitments, dumping staff aides when it served a political purpose, sometimes misrepresenting what he had said or done. Nothing scandalous, but not in keeping with the image his campaign tried to project of the trustworthy heartland Democrat up against the trickiest of presidents. Besides, McGovern always seemed to get caught, as when he asked Pierre Salinger, the former Kennedy press secretary and briefly senator from California, to meet with North Vietnamese peace negotiators in Paris to see whether they would release any American prisoners. They would not. When word of the errand leaked out, McGovern first denied any involvement, saying he hadn’t given the slightest instruction to Salinger. He had, and within hours he had to admit it. While McGovern couldn’t get away with anything, Nixon got away with Watergate during the campaign. “The White House had no involvement whatsoever in this particular Watergate incident,” he said to every report that it had. The serial denials got him through 1972, past the election, and into the scarred second term he had to quit. That was the ultimate humiliation for Nixon, who coveted the presidency so long and then sacrificed it to his own strange, insecure, incredible misconduct. He was the most fascinating figure I encountered as a reporter, a political genius with a conscience of clay, a fearful man but at times a belligerent one, a public figure who could orate but couldn’t chat.
The Washington Post began reporting Watergate links to the Nixon campaign two days after the burglary on June 17, with more damning disclosures in the fall, at the height of the campaign season. Even before that, the Associated Press reported that one of the names involved, E. Howard Hunt, had ties to the White House. McGovern sharpened his corruption accusations but the issue had no bite. He kept demanding that somebody call Nixon to account, but nobody did until later.
The White House again denied involvement, and the elusive president weathered the issue with the denials. That summer, at his first campaign news conference, Nixon told us that overzealous people sometimes do things that are wrong in a campaign and added an unforgettable line that seemed a throwaway at the time. “What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”
His standard line was that he was too busy being president to be diverted by mere politics. Campaigning presidents usually say that since there is no political platform to match the White House. Nixon’s breakthrough journey to China, ending nearly a quarter century freeze on U.S. contacts, began just before the year’s voting opened in the New Hampshire primary. He called it “the week that changed the world.” No mere candidate could compete with that.
I was shivering with McGovern in New Hampshire the day Nixon arrived in Beijing to begin dismantling America’s great wall against the communist government there. McGovern was campaigning to sparse crowds and trying to get gloved passersby to pause and shake hands on icy street corners. “Who is that?” one woman asked me.
Muskie, still the Democratic front-runner by far, was in Chicago paying court to Mayor Richard J. Daley, the last of the old-line political bosses. Muskie figured he could spare the time away from New Hampshire, next door to his Maine home. We hadn’t yet learned that New England loyalties were not going to be the vote magnet Muskie thought they would be.
Nixon was riding a wave: He had the troubled economy stabilized, he had the world stage for his China and Moscow summits, and he seemed to have the Vietnam War under control, although it ravaged on and Americans still were dying in combat. More than 400,000 U.S. troops had been withdrawn during his first term, and Nixon said he had cut American casualties by 98 percent. He had campaign money to squander, and did.
Watergate became the landmark of the 1972 campaign, but it was a time of indelible changes, among them:
But a Muskie manager did in New Hampshire in 1972, and the gaming was the beginning of the front-runner’s undoing. Muskie lost to expectations when he won the primary, and McGovern won there by losing. From that election day on, candidates have tried to lower their own expectations and raise those for their rivals, the better to claim victory whatever the outcome.
Ed Muskie beat McGovern by nine percentage points—and never recovered from the victory. The Maine senator had made his name and reputation as the vice presidential nominee of 1968, the New England voice of reason in a strident season. The wisecrack of that campaign was that Hubert Humphrey’s best chance of defeating Nixon would be to promise that upon inauguration, he would resign and let Vice President Muskie take over.
Muskie was the Democrats’ spokesman on television on election eve 1970, getting the last word after a harsh Nixon speech and adding to his reputation as a calming voice in a political storm, saying that the president peddled fear while he spoke for “the politics of trust.”
That helped install him as the towering leader among Democrats who wanted the nomination to challenge Nixon; a dozen more or less serious candidates would enter the contest. Once Kennedy stood aside, Muskie was more than a front-runner. He looked like a sure thing. Mark Shields, a skilled, sought-after campaign strategist before he became a political commentator, had offers from all significant Democratic candidates that year and asked my off-the-record advice as a friend. I told him to be practical and sign on with Muskie. He never let me forget it.
When Muskie started campaigning for the 1972 nomination, the calm, craggy, trust-inspiring candidate turned out to be cranky, impatient, and directionless. He asked the voters for their trust but never really said what they should trust him to do.
He started with the traditional moves, calling on party leaders, lining up support, touring world capitals. When he visited Israel, one of the reporters who went with him was Dick Stewart of the Boston Globe, an man of irrepressible wit who later became Muskie’s press secretary. At lunch by the Sea of Galilee, Stewart told the waiter he wanted bottled water because he didn’t want to be drinking water people had been walking on. It wasn’t Muskie’s kind of humor; his middle initial was S for Sixtus, after a pope, and his jokes tended to be New England-accented set pieces, not quips. He’d shake his head at Stewart’s wisecracks, but he always got a laugh out of them, until the campaign collapsed into no laughing matter.
I knew Muskie socially and as a Senate reporter, and played golf with him in Miami the day of the Florida presidential primary, in which he would run a faltering fourth and effectively fall from contention. There’s not much to do on an election day except wait until the polls close, and a Miami golf course is an ideal place for waiting. So our foursome went out, with Muskie my partner in a two-dollar bet against the other guys. On the ninth hole, our opponents both got into trouble. Muskie’s was the high handicap so he had a one-stroke advantage. He slashed his second shot into the rough and called me over to ask for advice. His ball was in a tangled downhill lie, just visible in the gnarl of grass. He wanted to know what club to hit, and I said he should take a wedge and just get the ball back into the fairway. “Like hell,” he said. “I can hit this onto the green.” Arnold Palmer couldn’t have hit it there. Muskie took a mighty swing and managed only to top the ball deeper into the rough. Now he was getting angry. He looked down the fairway toward the green, a good 180 yards away, and spotted a Miami television crew setting up there. “Damn them,” he snarled. “You can’t even play golf without having TV people screw up your shot.” That was candidate Muskie: stubborn, cantankerous, often angry, and convinced that what went wrong was somebody else’s fault. In other settings he was a talented, usually gracious, gentle man. He was just a lousy candidate for president.
McGovern, improbably, turned out to be good at it. He’d run briefly at the 1968 convention. He declared his 1972 candidacy a full year in advance, methodically organizing in chosen primary states and brushing aside the questions we asked him about his inability to break past single digits in the Democratic preference polls. He knew what he was about. Ten days before he announced he was running for president, McGovern resigned as chairman of the party reform commission that had written the rules of competition for the 1972 Democratic nomination, rules he said guaranteed the “least boss-ridden and most democratic” campaign ever conducted. After presiding over the writing of guidelines to open the process to the grass roots, McGovern would now run on them.
His campaign was led by the same people who had worked on the reform rules. Gary Hart—breezy, deceptively casual, handsome, and driven at thirty-four—was one of them, managing the McGovern campaign and beginning the political course that would take him to the Senate from Colorado and eventually into a presidential bid of his own.
It didn’t take a genius to see that the new system put a premium on organizing support from the bottom up. That was obvious, but Muskie’s people seemed oblivious. They set up a pricey campaign bureaucracy at a showy Washington headquarters near the White House and looked to party leaders for support. Muskie campaigners scrimping in state outposts called it the Taj Mahal. The rent and the staff cost more in a month than the McGovern campaign spent on its entire national operation. Muskie gained endorsements like no candidate before him, lining up senators, governors, and House leaders for what we called the endorsement-a-day show. But party leaders had lost control, and their endorsements were all but irrelevant. When we asked Muskie about the endorsement strategy, he always claimed to be organizing his grassroots base at the same time. He’d illustrate with the story of the two Polish builders trying to put up a house by building the roof before digging the foundation. Given his ancestry, Muskie could tell Polish jokes with impunity. But Muskie and his people kept building a roof-down campaign.
He was the Democrat every potential rival, including Nixon, was watching. He didn’t take to the rigors of the road, but he worked at the campaign buildup in thirty-two states before the election year began. Locals kept asking him whether he was running for president, which he obviously was. It finally got to him. “What the hell do they think I’m doing here?” he snapped at us over a drink one night in a San Mateo, California. As though he’d suffer being in such a place except as a presidential candidate.
Muskie had a habit of complaining about the rigors of running for president. In Los Angeles, he told a women’s luncheon that he wanted to work for positive policies, a conviction without which “I would not be wandering around the country putting up with the inconveniences of time changes and physical difficulties, including the runs.” He was nothing if not candid.
At times, the candor was admirable. After he’d met with black leaders in Watts, word leaked out that he had told them he would not consider a black running mate because the country wasn’t ready for it; such a ticket would lose and the result would set back the cause of equal rights. That was true, but impolitic. Muskie said he “chose what I thought was the honest answer,” not the safe one. McGovern and the rest of his rivals all reacted by saying that race or sex would not rule anyone off their tickets, the standard line in such situations even though it wasn’t so and they knew it.
Muskie was he was going to campaign slowly and methodically. Part of his method was to collect those big name endorsements. “If you’re going out on a limb, take a lot of people with you,” he told us. He did that, and the limb snapped.
At first, McGovern traveled with no entourage and scant notice. His was one face in a crowd of Democrats looking toward the 1972 nomination. He was the antiwar candidate, promising immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam. But by 1972, the Democratic ballot was full of antiwar candidates—Muskie and Hubert Humphrey were for withdrawal, too.
Muskie had been running for months by the time he declared his candidacy early in January 1972, on a paid national television hookup. McGovern had pronounced himself a candidate with no such fanfare a full year before. At the time, his was the earliest formal declaration of candidacy since Andrew Jackson.
Muskie said he would campaign everywhere and might enter all the Democratic primaries, certainly the first eight. That meant spreading his efforts thin, but he told me he already was a national candidate so he had no alternative.
McGovern did. He picked his spots, beginning with New Hampshire, where the public opinion polls put Muskie so far ahead that McGovern could run against the odds instead of against the front-runner. Muskie was, after all, the next thing to a favorite son. One of his state campaign managers said that any showing short of an outright majority over the other four candidates in the primary there would be grounds for suicide. “If my neighbors don’t think well of me, how do I go to the rest of the country?” Muskie asked.
The early polls showed Muskie the favorite of two-thirds of New Hampshire Democrats, with McGovern in single digits. Muskie could only come down and McGovern could only go up. As the voting neared, that is exactly what happened. Muskie complained that we were putting him up against a phantom candidate—those expectations. He was going to win. The question was of the margin. And we political reporters would judge that.
One night in the hotel bar we wrote a “Rock of Ages” parody about the role of the political press—especially the lead reporters for the Washington Post and the New York Times—in judging how much of a margin would be enough for Muskie:
David Broder, write for me.
Tell me what is victory.
Johnny Apple we’ll recruit,
And the rest will follow suit,
David Broder, write for me.
Tell me what is victory.
McGovern had more than expectations going for him. He was the liberal against Muskie the centrist, and the left usually is the push in a Democratic primary, where constituencies are more liberal than in the electorate at large. He had the young activists at work for him. He adroitly used the issue of campaign finance disclosure, as popular a cause in New Hampshire then as it was for John McCain in 2000. He made public his finances and donors, which was not required at the time, and demanded that Muskie do the same thing. Muskie said no, that he had complied with the law and need not go beyond. He told me later that he might have done it but for contributions he’d gotten from Republicans who didn’t like Nixon but didn’t want it known that they were donating to the other side. The issue dented his image as the man to trust. For McGovern, campaigning on a shoestring, telling all was easy because there wasn’t much to tell.
Muskie took another image dent, this one self-inflicted, when he staged a challenge to the Manchester Union Leader and rightist publisher William Loeb, ten days before the primary, and choked on his own anger and emotion. It was snowing that Saturday as he stood on a flatbed truck outside the newspaper and called Loeb a “gutless coward.” The story that ignited his public wrath was about Jane Muskie and her unladylike language when talking with a group of women reporters, one of whom put it into print. I don’t know whether Muskie cried that day or not. Dick Stewart, by then Muskie’s spokesman, was standing close to him and always said the moisture was melting snow running down his face. But tears or snow, he certainly was choked up, and not, as he later conceded, the solid, steady figure he’d tried to present. Anything but. He was emotional, and he was angry.
Curiously, the story that supposedly enraged him wasn’t a Union Leader story at all, but a reprint of a reprint, picked up from a news magazine which had, in turn, picked it up from Women’s Wear Daily. So it was old stuff by the time Muskie denounced it, although that fact didn’t make the stories about his meltdown.
He had another grievance that day, a letter the Union Leader published saying that Muskie had laughed when he heard people of French-Canadian descent derisively described as “Canucks.” Muskie denied it and the letter turned out to be a Nixon campaign dirty trick. I found that one curious, given that “Canucks” was not so insulting a term as to prevent its becoming the name of the Vancouver team in the National Hockey League.
McGovern had tried to goad Muskie into a campaign debate in New Hampshire but the front-runner ducked until his poll numbers started to slip. Then he agreed to a forum with all five primary candidates just before the election. Muskie the debater did not look like the dominant figure he was supposed to be. Not that McGovern distinguished himself, either. The only memorable debater was a man named Ned Coll, a social worker from Hartford, Connecticut, a fringe candidate who wasn’t even old enough to be president. Coll came with a prop to dramatize the plight of the poor. Every time it came his turn to speak he would dangle a rubber rat by the tail. “This is what it’s all about,” he would say.
Muskie carried New Hampshire with 46 percent to McGovern’s 37, then angrily tried to fend off our questions about why he hadn’t done as well as expected. He snapped that we were the ones who set the expectations and then wrote about them. The mood around Muskie only got testier. There was the night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when reporters gave Muskie a fifty-eighth birthday cake and Jane Muskie pushed a piece of it into the face of the Newsweek correspondent. McGovern won that primary and the stock question to Muskie became when he’d concede and quit. He stopped campaigning on April 27 but said he was still a candidate. As his campaign had foundered, Muskie was asked whether he was in trouble; the answer was obvious but journalistic convention required the question. He replied with a New England joke about the guy whose car wheels were spinning in the mud. Somebody asked the man whether he was stuck and he replied that you could say that, “if I was going anywhere.” That April, I was summoned to New York to address the AP Board of Directors about the campaign, a command performance I dreaded. To make it worse, the forum was a cocktail reception, no place for a talk on politics. But the boss insisted, so at the appointed time, he banged a spoon on a glass and announced that I was about to speak. Adding to my discomfort, the wife of the chairman of the board stopped me as I went to the lectern and said, “Keep it brief, please. We’ve been having fun.” I did, avoided forecasting the Democratic nominee, and said thank you. The boss decreed that I would answer questions. There was only one, repeated: Who would the Democrats run against Nixon? “I don’t know,” I answered. Muskie was sinking but McGovern still seemed the unlikeliest of choices. The board chairman commanded that I pick a name. “I don’t know,” I said. “Muskie might come back.” He quit campaigning within the week, and I was still being needled about it thirty years later.
Muskie retreated to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and invited me to interview him on the condition that I did not announce his whereabouts. He didn’t want any more TV cameras around. He told me he’d stay in as a candidate because the party might need a compromise nominee and he would be available. He was, but there would be no compromise, no alternative to McGovern by the time the convention voted. Even then, McGovern seemed an improbable nominee. To the old guard Democrats, the new crowd looked like a collection of hippies. “We got beat by the cast of Hair,” Representative Tip O’Neill lamented after McGovern was nominated that summer.
There were familiar faces available—Humphrey’s, for example. He was trying one last time, picking his spots, beginning with the Florida primary. But there wasn’t much joy left in his politics. I traveled with him in Florida, and we arrived at the Miami airport late one night, the terminal all but deserted except for the cleaning crews. The drivers who were supposed to have met the candidate were late. As the nominee four years before, he had campaigned with all the trappings and privileges, along with all the political burdens, of the vice presidency. Not now; his entourage was stranded. Humphrey wearily surveyed the empty airport. “Shit,” he summed up, to no one in particular but for all of us to hear.
That Democratic primary in Florida was dominated by one issue, mandatory busing of schoolchildren for racial integration. George Wallace rode busing to 42 percent of the vote; Humphrey limped in with 19 percent despite an uncharacteristic attempt to cater to the antibusing mood by saying that he’d approve the practice only to improve education, not for desegregation. Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington was a candidate, too, and he tried to ride the issue by advocating a constitutional amendment against mandatory busing. Jackson knew that was close to the edge on a racial issue. As an antidote, he singled out a black TV reporter covering his campaign, draping an arm around the guy’s shoulder and repeatedly calling him “my little buddy,” since he was not only black but short. The reporter didn’t like it and we commiserated, but short of slugging the candidate he couldn’t see a way out. Jackson flunked the sensitivity test and the primary, too, running third. He stuck around but never was a real contender.
Humphrey battled McGovern for the rest of the primary season, until the finale in California which, he told us, would be the ball game. By that time, McGovern was the leading Democrat but a wounded candidate. Humphrey had campaigned against him as a man out of tune with most of the party, a fringe candidate with unreliable ideas. It puzzled McGovern, since they had been Midwestern friends and colleagues in the Senate. He told us that Humphrey seemed to him to be uneasy with the tactic, which he found a somewhat comforting thought about a man who once had been a mentor. McGovern said that in a birthday telephone conversation, Humphrey told him he didn’t like being mean. Perhaps not, but he didn’t ease the pressure. He ridiculed McGovern’s idea about giving everybody in the country $1,000, to be taxed back from the rich and to help the poor, setting up a target for Republicans. The proposal came with no numbers and not even an estimate of the price, although McGovern dreamed one up: zero. He said the tax-back plan would cover the cost, which defied both political and mathematical reason. McGovern eventually dropped the proposal, but the Republicans didn’t. Humphrey said McGovern was proposing spending cuts that would undermine national defense; the Republicans grabbed that line, too.
In California, Humphrey counted on organized labor support while McGovern mobilized a McCarthy-style army of volunteers and activists, thousands of them canvassing the state door-to-door. Humphrey and McGovern met twice in one-on-one television debates. I came away with a slogan not of my making, but one that stuck for the rest of my career. It came out of Tim Crouse’s description of the debate pressroom in his campaign book The Boys on the Bus. There were about thirty of us watching the debate on television. As a wire service reporter, I had to write a running story as the two candidates argued. My copy would be in first; everybody else’s editor would see it before their own reporters had delivered their versions of what happened. So in situations like that one, colleagues used to ask me what I’d chosen as the lead. They did that day in Los Angeles, and Crouse took note, covering the coverage. I’d written a lead saying that both Humphrey and McGovern had said they would not accept George Wallace as a vice presidential nominee, but that Democrats needed to consider his views. Wallace, who had been shot and partially paralyzed in Laurel, Maryland, on May 15 had won three Democratic primaries and was second in delegate strength.
“Walter, what’s our lead?” asked Marty Nolan of the Boston Globe, half serious, half needling. I told him mine; he wrote his own. But ever after, people said to me, “What’s the lead, Walter?” It got to be a campaign junkie’s cliché among people who didn’t even know me. At the end of the 2000 campaign, the National Association of Manufacturers’ PR people sent out what was labeled a Campaign Survival Kit: a canvas shopping bag containing small packs of headache pills, snacks, toothpaste, and the like, along with a list of the spokesmen and officials they hoped reporters would call for comments on election night. On the other side of the bag was a drawing of a press plane and a question: “What’s the lead, Walter?” A bonus on my fifteen minutes of fame.
Nolan was a talented, insightful political reporter, as good as they came. After Crouse’s account, Boston Magazine ran a column questioning why the Globe would send out a fancy reporter when the guy could do no more than copy the lead of some wire service drone. Nolan sent me a copy of the magazine with a hint that I might want to set them straight. So I wrote a letter to the editor saying Marty Nolan never copied my leads because he wasn’t smart enough to use them.
Tim Crouse captured the fraternity house atmosphere of the press buses and workrooms of those campaign times. The Boys on the Bus eventually made reading lists at journalism schools, although a student who reads it now will find a different world out there. The boys have been joined, sometimes outnumbered, by the girls on the bus. Laptop computers have supplanted the blue-cased Olivetti typewriters all of us toted in the ’60s and ’70s. With a laptop, reporters can keep working between stops, save the copy in memory, and file at the next stop—sooner, with a cell phone to plug into the computer and deliver it en route. I remember being the first reporter to board a campaign jet years ago, settling into my seat when a newly assigned stewardess asked me if I could suggest what she should do to prepare for the press crowd. I told her to get started on about two hundred Bloody Marys. Nowadays, she’d have to start popping Perrier.
We used to work hard, compete hard, and unwind hard. We had our own tribal rules, named for the inventors. The Weaver rule, for example, under which the last man into the taxicab sits in front and pays the whole fare. Warren Weaver of the New York Times devised that one, and it led to some athletic cab entries. The Germond rule was Jack’s contribution: No matter what you eat for dinner, everybody at the table pays an equal share of the tab. Jules Witcover and I added a corollary one night after getting saddled with a bill inflated by the multiple martinis a colleague drank like water. Our two-word rule: “Drink defensively.”
Germond and Witcover, whose double byline would grace political columns for a generation in the Washington Star and the Baltimore Sun, were my close friends, but I tested them to the limit one night in Milwaukee. It was getting late, I was hungry, and I could see the flashing neon of a steak house outside the hotel press room. “Fazio’s,” it blinked. No need to take a cab somewhere, I said, why don’t we just go over there and get a steak. They agreed and some other reporters joined us. We got a table that stuck out into the aisle so far that Witcover, seated at the end, had to stand up when other diners wanted to pass us. The steaks were okay, but just. Neither food nor ambience worked for Germond, the gourmet of the crowd. Before we left, Jack and Jules required me to sign a note. It said “I promise I will never again choose the restaurant.” Witcover carried it in his wallet until the paper disintegrated from age. I never again chose the restaurant.
Germond was dedicated to fine dining, but his profession came first. He went to lunch with George Wallace one day in Montgomery. Wallace had a habit of dousing every meal in catsup, but he didn’t like it called to attention because it added to the impression that he was a Deep South redneck with dubious manners. (He was, but never mind.) Germond knew all that, so before Wallace could pick up the catsup bottle, he did, and poured it all over his own lunch. Wallace beamed, had his catsup, and always answered Jack’s telephone calls.
McGovern won California, 44 percent to Humphrey’s 39 percent. That won him all 271 delegates from the biggest state, which was ironic because his reform commission had wanted to do away with winner-take-all primaries in favor of a rule that would award delegates in proportion to shares of the popular vote. The reformers couldn’t get it approved, and now it served the purpose of the chief reformer. Then the reformers and the old guard suddenly switched roles.
The establishment—labor, Humphrey, conservative southern Democrats, and what was left of the Muskie and Jackson campaigns—still were trying to stop McGovern by denying him the entire California delegation, letting him have only 120 nominating votes to reflect his 44 percent of the popular vote. They argued that would fit the spirit of reform. To which McGovern retorted that the game was over, and changing the rules after the fact was no reform but a hijack attempt. The convention credentials committee voted to split the California delegates, the McGovern side went to federal court, the Supreme Court opted out and sent the issue back to the national convention, and the California challenge became the whole show.
Finally, McGovern won back his California sweep, clinching his nomination in a boisterous, all-night session that set the pattern for convention week.
The convention was a clamor of interest groups shouting for attention. Gay rights came out of the political closet. Traditionalists complained that the convention was all about acid, amnesty, and abortion. At the convention hall in Miami Beach, old-line Democratic leaders were among strangers. Daley was ousted in the name of reform, although McGovern was pragmatic enough to go to Chicago after he was nominated and claim that he’d tried to keep the mayor in the convention, which wasn’t so. But Daley still knew how to deliver Democratic voters in Illinois.
The Democratic platform demanded complete, immediate U.S. withdrawal from Indochina, with postwar amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. The Democrats embraced school busing, advocated freedom “of life styles and private habits” for homosexuals.
It was a televised turnoff for middle America, at least for those who still were watching the show from Miami Beach. Much of what the Democrats decided was settled so late at night that the audience had tuned out. McGovern didn’t deliver his acceptance speech until 2:48 A.M., and by the time he got to his “Come Home America” closing, it was 3:25 in the morning, and most everyone was at home asleep.
That closing would be part of his everyday campaign speech, and it touched on a war record he seldom mentioned. Barely into his twenties, McGovern wrote a heroic record in World War II, logging thirty-five combat missions, 230 hours at the controls of his B-24 bomber, named Dakota Queen for his wife, Eleanor. McGovern named his chartered campaign jet Dakota Queen II. He ran for president under fire from within his own party and from the Republicans as a man weak on defense, unmindful of the need for a military strength, a naive peacenik type on Vietnam. But this was a man who knew more about war than his critics did. At one point he had to defend his war record against false accusations by the rightist John Birch Society that he had shirked combat. In fact, he had piloted his full share of bombing missions and had seen more than his share of perilous skies over Nazi targets.
There was an air of Midwestern reserve about McGovern. He seldom talked about himself. He wasn’t a shouting, demonstrative campaigner, even when his accusations were unrestrained. He said, for example, that Nixon’s Vietnam bombing was “the most barbaric action that any country has committed since Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jews,” but in a voice as nasally bland as the assertion was inflammatory.
His “come home” theme recalled his military service. “I was a bomber pilot in World War II,” he told a Labor Day rally. “I still remember the day when we were hit so hard over Germany that we were all ready to bail out. So I gave this order to the crew: ‘Resume your stations. We’re going to bring this plane home.’ I say to you and to people everywhere who share our cause: ‘Resume your stations. We’re going to bring America home.’ ”
It became the set closing to his set speech.
Nixon’s Republican convention in the same Miami Beach hall was as tightly controlled as the Democrats were unruly and unmanageable. No postmidnight sessions for them, only prime TV time. It was so closely supervised that even the opening prayer had to be submitted to party officials for approval in advance. It was the first convention run on a script and timed to the minute. A Republican contact slipped me a copy of the schedule the day before the opening gavel sounded. It told in minute detail what would happen at every moment or every session all week. “Begin spontaneous demonstration,” it would say, giving the time for the delegates to cheer and parade. When time was up, it decreed, “End spontaneous demonstration.” It told the presiding officers how to announce the outcome of votes on convention business—the ayes had it, long before the votes were taken. The script ruled every session, almost exactly on time, although the fourteen-minute floor demonstration after the roll call vote that nominated Nixon did run two minutes over the allotted time slot. Nothing was improvised. The Nixon people wanted a television show and they produced one.
The Democrats’ rowdy, run-on performance was a factor in McGovern’s most damaging decision of the campaign, his tortured choice of a running mate. He was weary, his advisers were exhausted, and because these were the liberal reformers, there would be no select, inner circle council to decide on a vice presidential nominee. Instead, McGovern had more than twenty advisers and campaign allies assemble in a conference room at the Doral Hotel to talk about prospects. It was a reflection of the interests that had dominated the convention, with scant room for the advice of traditional Democratic powers including organized labor, which wasn’t going to endorse the McGovern ticket anyway. Names bounced on and off the table, and the hastily assembled vice presidential screeners took votes on scraps of paper like some odd jury. The list they finally sent McGovern was headed by Boston Mayor Kevin White, but that had to be cleared with the senator from Massachusetts and Ted Kennedy blocked it. The fallback: Senator Eagleton of Missouri.
There is something to be said for smoke-filled rooms. At least they imposed order on political decision-making. In the end, only one vote for vice president counts in setting the ticket, the one cast by the presidential nominee. The way nominees pick their partners was changed forever because of what happened to McGovern and his fractured ticket.
Nobody bothered to do a background check on Eagleton before he was chosen; there wasn’t the time or the inclination. A McGovern lieutenant asked Eagleton whether he had any skeletons rattling in his closet and the senator said no. That was it. But Eagleton had been hospitalized three times for psychiatric treatment, and twice had undergone electroshock therapy for depression, most recently in 1966. Cover stories had kept that quiet as he ran in Missouri, but this was a different league.
After Eagleton, nominees would be more careful, meticulous, about checking the records of their vice presidential prospects. There would be preselection questionnaires, interviews, and vetting by aides commissioned to conduct vice presidential talent hunts well before the conventions.
The Eagleton nominating session was a circus. It was entertaining for a while, then it got tiresome. I had to wait out the convention silliness before writing my story about the serious business that got pushed well past midnight by the vice presidential follies. The Democrats wasted prime time by putting up an assortment of seven other vice presidential candidates, with pointless speeches for each, followed by a roll call in which thirty-nine names got votes. One was cast for Archie Bunker, one for Mao Tse-tung.
When the Democrats broke camp in Miami Beach, the story of Eagleton’s mental health treatments was breaking out. Reporters Bob Boyd and Clark Hoyt of Knight Newspapers won the Pulitzer Prize for disclosing it, although Eagleton, knowing that the story was about to break, announced it himself before they got into print.
By then, McGovern was taking a break at a Black Hills resort in Custer, South Dakota, and making a bad situation worse. Eagleton joined him and McGovern said the senator would stay on the ticket, adding the “thousand percent” endorsement he soon had to swallow. The reaction in the party and on editorial pages was adverse to hostile, and it was obvious Eagleton had to go. McGovern tried hints, then long-distance prodding, and finally met with Eagleton in Washington and got him to withdraw.
Now the problem was getting a candidate to replace him on a ticket that obviously was going nowhere. McGovern hadn’t had much of a chance before, and he had none after the Eagleton episode. So he went shopping for a new vice president and kept getting turndowns. The joke around the Capitol was that there was a signup sheet in the Senate Democratic cloakroom for anyone willing to run with McGovern. He finally got Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy brother-in-law who had run the Peace Corps and the war on poverty and who said he didn’t mind being seventh choice. Actually, we figured he was No. 6. At least the vacancy was filled, and McGovern could get on with his futile campaign. Shriver made no waves.
The Democrats were the only show we political reporters had. Nixon was just watching their soap opera and staying close to the White House. For every Watergate disclosure, there was a vehement White House denial. Nixon had the high hand. McGovern could denounce the war; Nixon could announce just before Labor Day that he was going to end the draft within the year.
McGovern used to come back to the press section of his campaign plane and complain to us that while we kept cross-examining him on every proposal he made, we never held Nixon accountable. That was so; we couldn’t get at Nixon. Since only one candidate was campaigning, he got all the coverage, good and bad. McGovern traveled with an entourage that sometimes took three airplanes, his, the press plane, and what we called “The Zoo Plane,” home to overflow reporters, TV technicians, and assorted others. It was a noisy, unkempt charter, but the bar was always open and there were spare seats.
McGovern’s frustration only grew as the Watergate disclosures appeared in the Washington Post. Based on the Post reports, he said that Nixon was abusing power in a fashion that threatened a constitutional crisis, prophetic but widely ignored despite our stories about it. Nobody seemed to care.
“The men who collected millions in secret money, who passed out special favors, who ordered political sabotage, who invaded our offices in the dead of night, all of these men work for Mr. Nixon,” McGovern said. They did, of course, but the accusations were not registering. Nixon wouldn’t reply to McGovern. “I have been charged with being the most deceitful president in history,” he said. “I am not going to dignify such comments.”
The Post reports on Watergate and campaign sabotage pointed ever higher in the Nixon operation, then directly into the White House, and McGovern kept trying to make an issue of it. But it never took hold. Nixon and his spokesmen simply kept denying involvement—and arguing that their denials were more credible than the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein because the news accounts were based on unidentified sources. The Nixon camp succeeded in making damning disclosures into a matter of political argument.
McGovern complained to us that people were treating it all like politics as usual when it was not, it was abuse of presidential power. But that did McGovern little good in the campaign. The White House stonewall stood, well beyond election day.
Nixon postured above it all. He had the presidential stage. Like all presidents he was guaranteed a crowd when he wanted one, he could make news with whatever he did, and he could travel under the guise of official business. He used those advantages and a limited campaign itinerary to sell his “four more years.” He set up a grandly named operation in which other Republican figures represented him in campaigning. They were called The Surrogates. Officially there were thirty-five of them traveling for the Nixon ticket, including Cabinet members, senators, governors, and White House officials. Stand-ins for the candidate always had been part of presidential campaigns, but until Nixon, they had no fancy title. Now they were The Surrogates. Nixon was big on pomp.
McGovern was like a frustrated prizefighter who gets a title bout only to see the champion send sparring partners to face him. McGovern told me it was galling to see his hard day’s campaigning boiled into ninety seconds on network television, followed by “equal time for those lackeys of Nixon’s.” He said he was running against a vacuum. “I’d like him to get out here and mix it up.”
That was the opposite of the Nixon plan. He was a landslide ahead in the polls. The Wallace shooting in the spring had eliminated the threat of another third-party challenge like the one that plagued him in 1968, and McGovern was going nowhere. Nixon said that as president it was “necessary to stay in the White House to do the job the people elected me to do.” He ducked TV debates again and made it sound like presidential patriotism. Nixon said it would not be in the national interest for him to debate McGovern because a president “makes national policy every time he opens his mouth” and a debate wasn’t the place to do it.
McGovern kept trying. I watched on a cold late-autumn afternoon in Cleveland as a chill wind off Lake Erie whipped away hundreds of colored balloons that were supposed to have risen over a campaign rally as he forlornly renewed his debate demand. “Nixon knows the kind of questions he would be asked if he once came out on a public platform in face-to-face debate instead of hiding behind the surrogates and spies and saboteurs that seem to be running his campaign,” McGovern said. So Nixon didn’t come out.
The Vietnam issue was a pale shadow of what it had been four years before, when the war was the undoing of Johnson and then Humphrey. There was still a war on, but Americans were coming out, casualties were shrinking, and Nixon got overwhelming support in the polls that spring when he ordered the mining of North Vietnamese harbors and intensified U.S. bombing, which McGovern said risked World War III. The White House announced an outpouring of cards and telegrams supporting the Nixon orders. We dutifully reported that, and found out long after that the letters and telegrams of support had been arranged at CREEP and the Nixon people were essentially sending the messages to themselves.
At least the Democrats were colorful. Shirley MacLaine, the actress, had campaigned with McGovern off and on since spring. They walked through a ward at a veterans hospital on Long Island, shaking hands and pausing to chat, and after they had passed, one codger cackled to Jules Witcover that he’d once had an affair with the actress. When Jules told her, she laughed and said he might well have.
Earlier, her brother, actor Warren Beatty, had turned up in the McGovern entourage in Florida. One night I drove my rented car up to the valet parking stand at the Four Ambassadors Hotel in Miami, got out, and flipped the keys to a guy in denims who was standing there. When I got into the lobby, a colleague was choking with laughter. He said I’d just tossed my car keys to Warren Beatty. I doubt that he parked my car, but it was ready when I called for it the next day.
McGovern slugged on to the inevitable election burial. What could go wrong did. When he and Kennedy went out to shake hands with shoppers in a suburban Detroit mall, the amateur advance men hadn’t figured out a route, and they couldn’t move through the crowd. So they decided they’d give speeches instead, although there was no platform and no microphone. They wound up standing on a display table at the Barna-Bee Children’s Shop trying to shout over the static of a faulty bullhorn. When McGovern dipped into his meager treasury to buy time for a dozen televised call-in sessions near the end of the campaign, the callers got hostile. “Why do you find it necessary to find so many things wrong with Mr. Nixon when he doesn’t say anything against you?” a woman asked him in Seattle. He said that as the opposition candidate he had every right to challenge the president. “Instead of accusing me of mudslinging I wish you would use whatever influence you have to get Mr. Nixon to come out of the White House, to come out of hiding,” he said.
McGovern’s strategy wasn’t working but he stuck to it as his campaign sank, concentrating on nine major states where he claimed he stood a chance (he lost them all). He went regularly to Ohio, prompting us to put new lyrics to the tune from Wonderful Town.
Why, oh why, oh why, oh,
Do we keep going to Ohio?
Why must you humblus with so much Columbus,
We’d rather see Athens or Nome.
McGovern laughed at our rendition and then seriously lectured us on the importance of Ohio’s twenty-six electoral votes.
Near the end of his futile 200,000-mile campaign route, McGovern finally had enough one day in Battle Creek, Michigan. A portly young man festooned with Nixon buttons heckled him as he shook hands along the airport fence. “Nixon will beat you so bad you’ll wish you’d never left South Dakota,” the man said. McGovern stopped and leaned toward the guy’s ear. “I’ve got a secret for you,” he said in a whisper loud enough for a reporter to hear. “Kiss my ass.”
The election ran to form, a Nixon runaway. McGovern carried only Massachusetts, plus the District of Columbia. Nixon was a winner doomed by his own tainted tactics, at the head of a Republican ticket he did not help. He didn’t try. CREEP claimed all the money it could get for the presidential campaign, leaving other GOP candidates short of campaign funds. The Democrats actually gained two seats in the Senate plus a governor, and lost only a dozen House seats to the Republicans despite the presidential landslide. The morning after, Nixon issued a call for the resignations of his entire Cabinet and staff, not intending to accept many of them, but sending the strangest of victory signals to the people who had campaigned for him, surrogates and all.
I wrote that it was a lonely landslide.
When Nixon wrote his memoirs, he said that he had been reelected with a toothache, the result of a broken cap. “I am at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over me on that victorious night,” he wrote. “Perhaps it was caused by the toothache.” The ache was going to get a lot worse. Within six months he would have to force the resignations of his two senior aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, trying to cut his own losses in Watergate. In 1974, he’d have to resign himself.
William P. Rogers, then the secretary of state, told me years later that Nixon had tried to get him to tell Haldeman and Ehrlichman to resign in April 1973. Rogers said he replied that they were Nixon’s men and he’d have to do it. “Well then,” he said, “will you come up to Camp David while I tell them?” Rogers agreed. When he got to the presidential retreat he was ushered to his cabin and found instructions to join the president and the other two at another lodge. Rogers said he started out the door and then stopped himself. He said it occurred to him that Nixon was just tricky enough to leave him alone with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, effectively forcing him to carry the resignation message. He called the other cabin and found out that the president had done it when Nixon’s butler, Manolo, answered the phone. “Is the president there?” Rogers asked. “Yes, and so are Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman and they’re all crying.”
One more Watergate postscript: As the scandal and impeachment unfolded it became a badge of honor among journalists to have been included on the “enemies list” the Nixon crowd put together. It was the mark of a tough political reporter. I always thought I was a fair one. But I must confess that I wound up on another list. In a 1969 White House memo, Haldeman told Herb Klein that the president wanted “a list of all his good personal friends in the working press.”
“I don’t know exactly what he has in mind on this,” Haldeman wrote.
So Klein put together a list of forty-nine names, which surfaced years later in the Nixon archives. My name was on it. I don’t know what he had in mind, either.