Almost President (35 page)

But a botched opportunity to deliver his most considered pitch to the largest possible audience was only the second worst outcome of July 13. Within a day, rumors about Eagleton's history of mental illness were circulating widely. Eagleton insisted to McGovern aides that he had only been hospitalized once for exhaustion, but it was soon confirmed that he had been hospitalized three times for what appeared to be severe depression and that part of his treatment involved electro-shock therapy.

It seemed to most observers, then, that McGovern would have no choice but to dump Eagleton from the ticket, not only out of concern for his mental stability should he be elevated to the presidency, but also because he had misled McGovern and withheld the truth. Yet, McGovern continued to back his choice publicly, at one point issuing a statement that he was “a thousand percent behind Tom Eagleton,” even as he privately sent out feelers to reporters to determine what the reaction would be if he dropped Eagleton. Six days after issuing his “a thousand percent” statement, McGovern asked Eagleton to withdraw from the ticket.

This complete reversal badly damaged McGovern's credibility and remade Eagleton into a sympathetic figure. Eagleton was angry both at the damage done to his reputation and at how McGovern had publicly backed him while privately expressing doubts to others. In a face-to-face meeting, McGovern denied to Eagleton that he was the source of any of the stories that suggested McGovern was considering dropping him from the ticket. “Don't shit me, George,” Eagleton responded.

In no mood to do McGovern any favors, Eagleton said he would resign only on the condition that he write McGovern's statement announcing the decision. He told McGovern that if there were any mention of his alleged mental illness, he would refuse to resign and would fight for his place on the ticket all the way to November. McGovern, then, was forced to say only what Eagleton allowed him to say, which was that Eagleton was an able public servant who was in fine physical and mental health. McGovern explained that he was removing Eagleton from the ticket only because the furor over his past medical treatment “continues to divert attention from the great national issues that need to be discussed.” Such a disingenuous statement made McGovern appear indecisive and untrustworthy.

McGovern's reluctance to drop Eagleton from the ticket was, he said later, deeply personal. McGovern had a daughter, Terry, who had battled depression and became an abuser of drugs and alcohol. Terry would later freeze to death in 1994 at age forty-five after passing out outside a Madison, Wisconsin, bar on a cold winter night, and McGovern would chronicle his daughter's tragic life in a book titled
Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism.
McGovern later said that he felt that if he had jettisoned Eagleton, he would be sending a message to Terry that mental illness made a person a pariah.

McGovern had not only lost the character issue to Nixon, but the whole mess with Eagleton was considered the political story of the year, drawing media attention away from Nixon's Watergate scandal.

Whatever small chance (and it was almost certainly infinitesimal) McGovern had had for victory in the general election was lost with the Eagleton fiasco. The search for Eagleton's replacement was a farce played out in public view. Once again, a steady stream of prominent Democrats refused to board a rapidly sinking ship. Finally, Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver accepted. Shriver had run the Peace Corps under JFK and the “War on Poverty” under LBJ. Had he been a first choice, Shriver, who proved to be an effective campaigner, would have pleased party regulars and attached some of the Kennedy glamour to a charisma-challenged candidate now branded a “hapless loser.” Instead, Shriver was a bandage applied to a patient who had already bled to death.

When looking at 1972 in retrospect, McGovern aides have conceded that a McGovern victory would have been highly unlikely even if they had run a near perfect campaign. But had it not been for the Eagleton debacle, those same aides believe that McGovern would have carried ten or twelve states, instead of one, and he would have won 45 percent of the vote, instead of 37.5 percent.

Perhaps, but while Watergate would eventually color the view of what Nixon accomplished in 1972, his landslide win was not all about political dirty tricks and subversion of the Constitution. Nixon ran a masterful, disciplined campaign, and the first six months of 1972 were the high point of his presidency. In that time period he made his remarkable visit to the People's Republic of China, he bombed Hanoi in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, and did so without scuttling a summit with the Soviets in Moscow where he signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). At the beginning of the year, Nixon's job approval rating had been just below 50 percent, but by mid-year it had soared to 61 percent.

McGovern's belief that he could unify the party around a shared antipathy toward Nixon was a gross miscalculation. He couldn't. And it was not just jealousy by the party regulars; McGovern's moralistic tone, delivered as a jeremiad to a nation that prefers sunny optimists, was as offensive to Cold War Democrats as it was to conservative Republicans.

Returning to the Senate after his defeat, McGovern overheard Georgia senator Herman Talmadge explain to other senators, “You know, what was wrong with George in that campaign was that he gave the impression that he was mad at the country. . . . This is a great country. It makes mistakes, but by God if you get up there and preach day and night against America, you're not going to be elected.”

Washington Post
reporter William Greider had written during the campaign that “McGovern's moral message is repugnant to a great many American voters who not only disagree with it, but are outraged that a major party presidential candidate should even be saying such things.”
Newsweek
added that McGovern, “the preacher's boy from Mitchell, S.D.,” had “turned more furiously evangelical than any major-party candidate since William Jennings Bryan . . . [and had] returned more and more to the old moral absolutism—and to the harshest rhetoric of any campaign in memory.”

But where Bryan had railed against Wall Street and the Eastern establishment, McGovern's anger at the war in Vietnam, and his consuming desire to end it at almost any cost, was received by many voters as an indictment of the American people for their complicity in the conflict. He certainly said things no presidential candidate had said before or since.

McGovern had begun his campaign in January 1971 with the high-minded idea that “thoughtful Americans understand that the highest patriotism is not to blindly accept official policy but to love one's country deeply enough to call her to a higher standard.” McGovern was then intent on ensuring Americans knew how far below that standard American behavior in Vietnam had fallen and how they were complicit in that failure. In one campaign speech, he said:

For what we now present to the world is the spectacle of a rich and powerful nation standing off at a safe distance and raining down a terrible technology of death on helpless people below—the most incredible and murderous bombardment in all the history of mankind. . . . We have steel fleshettes that penetrate the skin and cannot be removed. We have napalm—jellied gasoline that sticks to the skin as it burns. We have white phosphorus that cannot be extinguished until it burns itself out.

McGovern's opponent may have been Nixon, but he was campaigning as fiercely against the apathy of the American people, and was desperately trying to get the American public to confess and atone for their own culpability as passive witnesses and active participants. In one particularly exasperated moment, McGovern said:

I do not honestly know whether the war weighs as deeply on the minds of the American people as it does on mine. I do not honestly know whether the blunt words I have said tonight will help me or hurt me in this election. I do not really care. For almost a decade, my heart has ached over the fighting and the dying in Vietnam. I cannot remember a day when I did not think of this tragedy.

What he learned, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote, was that “we are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway.”

Dissent is an honored American tradition, but it is seldom popular in the moment and opens up the dissenter to charges from opponents that he or she is unpatriotic. McGovern would later admit that his harsh moral tone had been a mistake. Moral critiques, as Jimmy Carter learned and put to use in his own campaign, are only effective when directed at the Washington establishment. What voters want to hear, McGovern aide Greg Craig said ruefully after the campaign, is that America is a great country filled with good people.

McGovern's complete dedication to extricating America from Vietnam also made voters wary that he could end the war in a way that protected American pride, honor, and interests. Polling showed most Americans believed Nixon was satisfactorily winding down the war and, in a paradox that deeply troubled McGovern, polls showed that, by a better than two-to-one margin, Americans believed Nixon would do a better job of withdrawing the United States from Vietnam than the anti-war candidate. While more than twenty thousand of the roughly fifty thousand U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam occurred during Nixon's first term, Nixon did finally withdraw most U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1973, a year that saw fewer than two hundred U.S. combat deaths.

Nixon was so disliked in so many quarters that he received scant praise for his overwhelming victory. Rather than credit Nixon for running a brilliant campaign, which would have triumphed without the dirty tricks, the narrative that came out of 1972 was that McGovern had run a lousy campaign and that he proved that liberalism was no longer ascendant in American politics.

Yet over time much of McGovern's domestic program, such as expanded rights for women and gays, became mainstream, and some scholars argue McGovern was well within the tradition of the Democratic Party's Jacksonian and New Deal past in “its commitment to economic security for the average American.” Nor have subsequent Democratic presidents and presidential candidates abandoned all liberal reform impulses. Carter proposed tax reforms that were very similar to McGovern's own wealth redistribution programs. Mondale ran as a very conventional liberal—he even pledged to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit. Clinton tried to reform national health care, and Obama did just that. Even McGovern's proposal of amnesty for “draft dodgers,” considered extreme in 1972, was not a particularly divisive issue when President Ford granted conditional amnesty in 1974 and President Carter granted unconditional amnesty in 1977.

Yet, despite all this, the McGovern campaign is not remembered among Democrats as a prophetic venture in the same way that Republicans venerate the equally hapless Goldwater campaign. McGovern and Goldwater were both insurgents attacking the established order. Goldwater inspired a movement that took control of the Republican Party; four decades later, it is still considered “toxic” for a Democrat to be known as the “next McGovern.” Why has McGovern's campaign been interpreted as the last gasp of a dying liberal movement that had once dominated American politics, while Goldwater's sounded like the first breath of a newborn?

The notoriety of McGovern's campaign is due to his anti-war stance and his legacy as “the ultimate peace candidate” in a society that still esteems martial virtues.
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This is where subsequent Democratic candidates have tried to draw a distinction between themselves and McGovern—not over any alleged radical domestic agenda. They have wanted it understood that they are not “soft” on defense issues.

In 1984, Mondale and McGovern's former campaign manager, Gary Hart, each called for modest increases in the U.S. defense budget. In 1988, Michael Dukakis explicitly insisted that he was “not another McGovern” when it came to foreign affairs.

Clinton had joined in protests against the Vietnam War and was the Texas coordinator for the McGovern campaign, yet he dissembled during his own presidential campaigns on whether he did or did not try to avoid the draft. “I think he winced every time it was mentioned that he was a McGovern worker in '72,” said a McGovern campaign colleague who also knew Clinton as president. In a bizarre twist, John Kerry had made his national reputation as a Vietnam veteran who ended up opposing the Vietnam War, yet in his 2004 campaign Kerry played down his brave and prescient role as dissenter and instead played up his war record, only to see that record distorted and used against him.

The message is clear: Candidates cannot hope to be elected president if they talk about war as McGovern talked about war. Indeed, they must seem to be eager for the role of commander-in-chief.

McGovern had hoped that Obama, with his opposition to the Iraq War, had perhaps demonstrated that an anti-war candidate could win the presidency. But Obama was no peace candidate. He said he only opposed “a dumb war” and labeled himself “a hawk when it comes to defeating terrorism.” He pledged during the campaign to actually increase the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and shocked his liberal supporters when he did just that as president.

McGovern, of course, as noted, was not a pacifist either, but he opposed the Cold War liberalism that had taken over the Democratic Party after World War II and that emphasized a strong national defense while muting the party's reform instinct. McGovern, for example, had supported Henry Wallace over Harry Truman in 1948 and never regretted it. “My mission,” McGovern had said, “was to try to show the American people that we didn't have any mission to police the world.”

Many Americans agree. Three-fifths of Americans, even in 1972, agreed with McGovern that sending troops into Vietnam in the first place had been a mistake. But McGovern's language was so harsh and uncompromising that it disturbed the fundamental belief of most Americans that the United States only engages in “good” wars that are fought by humane means for the best of intentions.