Almost President (34 page)

Despite the fact that he had not entered a single primary, the Democratic presidential nomination went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, which outraged both reformers who wanted a more open nomination process and also those opposed to the war, for at this point Humphrey was still supporting Johnson's war policies. Only in late September did Humphrey break with LBJ in calling for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and the resurrection of peace talks in Paris. His new position allowed Humphrey to close the gap, but in the end he lost to Nixon by less than six-tenths of a percentage point in a three-way race that included George Wallace. Despite the narrowness of Humphrey's defeat, the Democrats seemed in complete disarray.

To help heal the wounds and bridge divisions within the party, Humphrey had agreed to let the Chicago convention's delegates vote on and approve a proposal to create a Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection that would soon be known as the “McGovern Commission.” Humphrey had chosen McGovern to head the task force because he had credibility with the insurgents but was also a loyal Democrat who, unlike other insurgent leaders like McCarthy, had enthusiastically campaigned for Humphrey during the general election. McGovern was also acceptable to all party factions because no one thought he would be a serious presidential contender in 1972.

Party regulars had no concept of how thoroughly the commission would change the Democratic Party. Organized labor declined to participate at all, thinking it a waste of time. Much of labor felt contempt for the insurgents, who were seeking to reduce labor's traditional influence within the party, and they were convinced the college kids and highly educated professionals behind the mass movements felt contempt for them as well.

With the party regulars sitting on the sidelines, McGovern and the insurgents dominated the commission, determined to open up the delegate selection process. In the commission's final report, members listed expanding the level of popular participation as “more than a first principle. We believe that popular control of the Democratic Party is necessary for its survival.” In a period of intense social turmoil, over the war, over race, over gender, over morality, the commission warned that if the Democratic Party did not provide an avenue for people committed to change to find expression within the political system, the danger was not that they would become Republicans but that “they will turn to third and fourth party politics or the anti-politics of the street.”

State parties were encouraged to hold primaries rather than caucuses, but if the caucus was the method of selecting national convention delegates, then the meetings had to be adequately advertised so that any interested party member could attend. No longer could party chairs just decide who the delegates to the national convention would be, and no longer could a fee be charged as a requirement for a party member to be a convention delegate. Proxy voting was disallowed, and the unit rule, which bound delegates to back the candidate supported by the majority of their delegation, was ended—though an exception was made for states that selected delegates through a primary. This would prove to be an especially important exception in the state of California.

The most controversial recommendation of the commission was to establish numerical targets for the inclusion of women and minorities in convention delegations. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in addition to only 13 percent of the delegates being women, only 6 percent had been African Americans, and just 2 percent were under the age of thirty. Party regulars on the commission argued that party rules should simply ensure that no representative of any group could be specifically excluded from participating, but McGovern and the insurgents did not want a passive plan of no exclusion, they wanted an aggressive program of inclusion.

Under McGovern's chairmanship, the commission recommended that each future convention delegation include women, minorities, and young voters “in reasonable relationship to their presence in the state as a whole.” After McGovern had left the commission to run for president, and a new chair took over, feminists pushed through additional language that committed the party to specific numerical targets for each previously underrepresented group—essentially quotas that have been ridiculed by critics ever since, but which over time increased the allegiance of women and minorities to the Democratic Party.

The immediate impact of the commission's work was clear at the 1972 convention. Eighty percent of the delegates were attending their first convention, and women now made up nearly 40 percent of all delegates. But the greatest initial impact of the commission's work was that it allowed McGovern to win the nomination, a feat that, given the antagonism of the regulars to his candidacy, would likely have eluded him had the old rules remained in effect.

Early polling showed McGovern receiving less than 3 percent of the Democratic vote, and the famous odds-maker Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder put McGovern's chances of winning the party's nomination at 200-1.
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But under the new rules, having high profile endorsements, the support of powerful special interest groups, or even a lot of money mattered far less than being able to organize supporters and get them to turn out for caucuses and primary elections. Because attendance for caucuses and primary elections was generally low, a cadre of dedicated supporters could easily determine the outcome. The organizing phrase was “grassroots”—which, not coincidentally, became the title of McGovern's autobiography. The other Democratic candidates for president in 1972 did not seem to realize the rules had changed. McGovern, co-author of the new rules, did, and he surrounded himself with aides who knew everything there was to know about the new delegate selection process.

McGovern's chances were also boosted because the man who might have dominated the nomination process in 1972, Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, had disqualified himself to run because of his bizarre behavior following a 1969 traffic accident that had killed a young woman on Chappaquiddick Island. The remaining favorite for the nomination was Maine senator Edmund Muskie, who had been Humphrey's running mate in 1968. Some have attributed Muskie's later fall from frontrunner status to a series of sophomoric “dirty tricks” played on the Muskie campaign by Nixon operatives, but in truth Muskie proved, as McGovern had predicted he would be, “a bland and unexciting campaigner” who was out-hustled by McGovern and his grassroots army.

McGovern made a stronger than expected showing in the opening Iowa caucuses, and it was soon clear that Muskie was simply not attuned to the electorate's new mood, which demanded more openness from candidates. When McGovern made all his public and personal finances public, Muskie declined to follow suit; when McGovern challenged Muskie to debate, Muskie refused. Muskie also misplayed the expectations game. A campaign staffer had guaranteed that Muskie would get 50 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, but he received 46 percent, so even though he won, the media spun it as a loss.

With Muskie no longer seeming the inevitable nominee, Humphrey got into the race, joining a host of other candidates that also included Wallace, who was still running a racially divisive campaign but who won the Florida primary and finished a strong second in Wisconsin. After McGovern defeated Muskie in the Massachusetts primary, and after Wallace was shot and paralyzed on the eve of the Maryland primary, the race for the nomination came down to McGovern and Humphrey.

McGovern, who considered Humphrey a political mentor and a friend, expected a civil, even friendly, contest. But Humphrey, now sixty-one years of age and seeing yet another opportunity to become president slip away, went on the attack. He pummeled his fellow Democrat as a dangerous leftist radical whose supporters included even more dangerous radicals.

After McGovern narrowly defeated Humphrey in the California primary and won all the state's delegates (because the unit rule had been left in place for primary states), Humphrey challenged the “winner-take-all” results. McGovern was astonished that he was now mired in an intraparty squabble when it was clear he had won enough delegates overall, even without California, to be the nominee. He needed time before the convention to pull the party together and prepare for the general election, but all his campaign's energy was now spent on beating back the Humphrey challenge.

While Humphrey and the other regulars within the party resented that the new politics meant their own influence was reduced, many also sincerely believed that McGovern was not only unelectable, but he would also be a disaster for down-ticket races. This fear turned out not to be true; while Nixon won in a landslide, Democrats actually gained two Senate seats in 1972.

Nor did McGovern believe himself unelectable. He and his advisors, who included his thirty-five-year-old campaign manager, future Colorado senator and presidential aspirant Gary Hart, had concluded that McGovern had an excellent chance to defeat Nixon based on six assumptions that proved to be mostly false. As author Bruce Miroff outlined them, they were:

One, there was a widespread feeling of political alienation among the electorate;

Two, Nixon was an unpopular president;

Three, George Wallace would eventually become a third-party candidate, as he had in 1968, and siphon votes away from Nixon in the South and Midwest;

Four, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen would spur a huge turnout among youth, most of whom were anti-war;

Five, the Democrats were the natural majority party; and

Six, Democrats were united in their animosity toward Nixon—no matter whom the nominee might be.

McGovern and his advisors could not have foreseen, of course, the assassination attempt that ended Wallace's presidential bid. But the other assumptions suggested that McGovern's team was out of touch with the prevailing sentiments in America.

In addition to misreading the youth vote, McGovern also misread the public attitude toward Nixon. Because McGovern had despised Nixon since the latter's Red-baiting days began in the late 1940s, he assumed most Americans shared that feeling. The hard part of the election, McGovern thought, would be winning the Democratic nomination. After that, “it should be comparatively easy to defeat Richard Nixon by appealing to the decency and common sense of the American people.” One of the cruel twists of McGovern's campaign was that the election ended up, as
Time
magazine noted, “turning not on Nixon's character and credibility, but on McGovern's.”

This was thanks to the way McGovern mishandled the Thomas Eagleton affair.

Prior to the Democratic National Convention, McGovern and his campaign had been consumed with Humphrey's challenge of the California primary results. They were left little opportunity to consider whom McGovern's running mate should be. Despite Chappaquiddick, McGovern still wanted Ted Kennedy as his running mate and was certain he could persuade Kennedy to accept the nomination. He couldn't. Kennedy declined, and so did Walter Mondale.

Because McGovern failed to finally put the California challenge to rest until the national convention was well under way, he found he had only a single day to decide whom his running mate would be before presenting the name to the convention. That day, July 13, would be among the worst in the history of presidential campaigns.

Weary campaign staffers gathered early that morning and developed a list of three dozen potential running mates, a sign of how little forethought had gone into the decision to date. The ridiculously lengthy roster was finally winnowed down, and McGovern first focused upon Boston mayor Kevin White. An urban Catholic, White might have appealed to the old guard of the party and been a force for party unification. Ted Kennedy, however, did not want the nomination to go to a rival Massachusetts politician.

McGovern then offered the nomination to an old friend, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, but, like Kennedy and Mondale, he, too, declined. It was then, with only an hour left before the deadline to give the convention a name, that the campaign concentrated on Thomas Eagleton, a senator from Missouri and another urban Catholic with appeal to labor who had also been a Muskie supporter. Eagleton immediately accepted the invitation to join the ticket.

Eagleton had been asked point-blank by a McGovern aide if he had any skeletons in his closet that should cause the campaign concern; Eagleton said no. His nomination went forward. What Eagleton failed to mention was that he had previously undergone treatment, including electro-shock therapy, for a mental illness. He later explained that he felt he had been cured and so felt no more need to disclose that condition than he would have mentioned he had once had a broken leg that healed.

Because Eagleton was a last-minute selection, convention delegates had not had time to rally around him and make his nomination pro forma. Punchy delegates decided to have some fun instead and nominated or cast votes for nearly eighty vice presidential nominees. Some were serious offerings, such as the feminists' nomination of Texas state legislator Frances “Sissy” Farenthold. Other votes for Archie Bunker or Mao Zedong were pure silliness.

To that point in the process, the McGovernites had done their best to ensure an orderly convention to counter their image as radical amateurs. The convention had adopted a moderate platform, and the most radical ideas and unsettling images had been kept out of the convention's television coverage.
Washington Post
columnist David Broder praised the type of delegates and convention the McGovern reforms had created: “Purposeful, decent, demonstrative, good-humored, indefatigable, and, above all, diverse.”

But this single lapse in discipline concerning the selection of a running mate had two fateful consequences.

First, the “convention horseplay” around the vice presidential choice threw off the convention schedule, and McGovern was not able to give his nomination acceptance speech until 2:45 a.m. EDT. Instead of a prime time television audience of seventy million who might have heard McGovern give one of the best speeches of his campaign, his audience was estimated at fifteen million—and, except for insomniacs, these were likely only die-hard Democrats who were going to vote for McGovern anyway.