So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (30 page)

So I called together, and sat down on Thursday morning with, Gary Hart, Ted Van Dyk, Fred Dutton, and a few other staff and supporters, all weary from a months-long and tumultuous first-ballot victory campaign and even, perhaps, a few hungover from a celebration the night before, to discuss veep possibilities. We knew Senator McGovern would undoubtedly want to ask Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin to join him on the ticket, and so we spent some time coming up with what we thought were good reasons to pick someone else (Nelson was also from a north-central state, also Protestant, more or less a copy of McGovern domestically, equally anti-Vietnam, so no strong addition to the ticket), and we even had a good laugh over the suggestion of Mayor Moon Landrieu of New Orleans (so the media could talk about “Moon over Miami”).

But to serious business: I suggested we ask Walter Cronkite, the revered news anchor at CBS, often cited as the “most trusted man in America.” I was, to my surprise, hooted down. “He’ll turn us down publicly.” “There’s no chance he would accept.” “We won’t be taken seriously.” I tried hard, explaining that in 1968 Cronkite had asked me, on his return from Vietnam, if he could speak “as soon as possible” to Robert Kennedy and then, in a meeting just with RFK and me, he had told Senator Kennedy, “You must run for president against LBJ; it’s the only way to stop this awful war.” I even recalled RFK had then, half seriously, told Cronkite he’d run for president if he (Cronkite) would run for the Senate against Senator Jacob Javits.

I had no support for my “wild” idea of Cronkite, so we moved on to more “orthodox” candidates.

Years later, I told Cronkite of this proposal, and he answered me, in all seriousness, “I wish you’d asked me; I would have accepted in a minute.” I later heard from Senator McGovern he had also told Cronkite of the proposal and received the same answer. I think a McGovern-Cronkite ticket might very well have been elected, particularly with the deepening scandals surrounding Nixon.

I reluctantly abandoned the Cronkite suggestion. We went on through “the usual suspects,” Senators Nelson and Abraham Ribicoff, the UAW’s president, Leonard Woodcock—all rejected for one reason or another—and Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri, whom I and, after some discussion, all the others agreed would be the best possible candidate to join McGovern. Eagleton was a good young senator with an unbeaten history in Missouri, a strong campaigner as attorney general and senator, a Roman Catholic from a Southern border state with a strong pro-labor record—in short, a good candidate—and so I recommended him to McGovern. He agreed and asked me to “check Eagleton out.”

Not only was there very little time left, but we had no sources to seek out Eagleton’s record beyond the public ones and anything he might want to talk about. So I called him, remembering some of the difficulties some other proposed veeps had encountered—any illegitimate children, any high school or college scrapes or high jinks that might look bad, any trouble with women, problems with organized labor (increasingly infiltrated in St. Louis by Teamsters and the Mob), difficulties with alcohol or drugs—to which his replies were all “no.” Finally, I asked him if there was anything in his record or his personal history that might give George McGovern difficulty or trouble, and he replied strongly in the negative. I then turned the phone call over to Senator McGovern, who went ahead, after asking the same question and getting the same answer, and asked him to join the ticket. Eagleton enthusiastically accepted. The campaign had begun, and Senator McGovern’s doom had been sealed.

A slight shadow: Walking to a victory party that night, I was approached by Doug Bennet, Senator Eagleton’s chief aide, with whom I discussed when and where he should campaign and nailed down both senators’ appearance that Sunday on
Meet the Press
. We were cordial, and later became good friends, but Bennet did mention, almost apologetically, that Eagleton had been hospitalized after one of his statewide campaigns. I assured him that would almost certainly represent a very slight problem and Eagleton should say, if the matter came up, “I’m a tough campaigner; I campaigned myself right into a hospital once after election, from exhaustion.” Bennet thought this a fine answer, and the matter was dropped.

Things moved swiftly after that. First, Bennet called me the next day to say there had been two such hospitalizations, and I began to worry. Then the columnist Jack Anderson “reported” that Eagleton had a well-known—with many traffic incidents—problem with alcohol and more than one DUI incident. Eagleton denied this, and the article was later disproved and forgotten. Gary Hart and I then agreed we should take up the hospitalization with Eagleton himself. When I spoke to Senator Eagleton, he told me there had been
three
such incidents, each resulting in hospital stays. When I asked him the diagnosis, he told me it was “melancholy.” I told him, gently, this was an obsolete term and that it was now called “depression.” He agreed that “depression” was probably accurate but said he’d been treated and there’d been no recurrence. I then expressed my concerns to Senator McGovern, who seemed concerned but not as seriously as I.

The next day, I was visited by Clark Hoyt and Bob Boyd, reporters from the powerful Knight Ridder organization of newspapers. They told me they had a story—confirmed and which they believed and were ready to print if they could get a comment from McGovern—that Eagleton had indeed been hospitalized three times and treated for serious
mental
illness, that part of the treatment was at least two instances of electroshock treatments. Now I was on full alert; “electric shock” treatments were live wires, so to speak, with the U.S. public, and I thought if the story was true, McGovern should then and there ask Eagleton to get off the ticket. He had, after all, not only probably demonstrated an inability to make the quick rational decisions necessary to being president but—perhaps more important from our standpoint—lied to me and to Senator McGovern.

Senator McGovern was unconvinced. He told me, for the first time, one of his daughters was at that time undergoing psychiatric treatment for extreme depression, and if he were publicly to renounce Eagleton for the obvious reasons—not mentally equipped to be president—he would in effect be telling his daughter he thought her unworthy. It was, for him, a terrible dilemma and one he wrestled with through the long days until he came to share my view. In talking with the Knight Ridder reporters and doing some discreet checking with the hospital in St. Louis, I was able to verify the treatments, and I then consulted with—my count may be off by one or two—some seventeen psychiatrists. Each of them had the same opinion: Senator Eagleton could adequately perform any job to which he’d be assigned,
except
president of the United States.

Eventually, after some tough questioning on “the Eagleton matter” by the traveling press in South Dakota, Senator McGovern came to the view Eagleton had to go, but not until a climactic moment out in the Black Hills, where McGovern and his wife were vacationing. For a final showdown, he had summoned Eagleton to a meeting with him in the (appropriately named) town of Custer, at which I and a few other McGovern-ites would be present. There, Eagleton admitted the electroshock treatments but added he had been given a strong medicine—Thorazine—and that had eliminated, or at least strongly abated, the depression.

The key moment in this struggle, which lasted eighteen days, came, I believe, when I asked Eagleton if he was still taking Thorazine. “Yes,” he replied, “but don’t worry, the prescription is in my wife’s name.” I caught McGovern’s eye at that moment; it seemed clear his mind had finally been made up: Eagleton had to go, not so much for the treatment as for his continuing deceit.

Then started a terrible week, in which one candidate after another turned McGovern down for a place on the ticket—including Ted Kennedy, on whom I think McGovern had relied all along. That, in addition to his indecision and his back-and-forths during the week or so it took to reach the inevitable conclusion, sank the campaign. I’m convinced that had Walter Cronkite or anyone other than Eagleton been the candidate initially, Nixon would probably have won anyway, not by a landslide, but by a reasonable margin, and George McGovern would have been the inevitable, and victorious, Democratic presidential nominee in 1976.

One footnote: In the course of writing a book about the 1972 campaign and the impeachment of Richard Nixon that followed, I had some long interviews with Leon Jaworski, who had become the special prosecutor in the Watergate matter. Jaworski told me, among other disclosures, that the White House had been the source of the information about Eagleton, from his hospital records, and that the official medical diagnosis had been “paranoid schizophrenia, with suicidal tendencies.” I’m sure if that had been included in the material the Nixon people leaked to the reporters, Senator McGovern would have made up his mind a lot sooner. If we had known of that diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia with suicidal tendencies,” I’m sure George McGovern would have responded instantly with a call for withdrawal from the ticket, instead of going through the days of hesitation he did.

Eagleton was always a bit too clever with his deceit about his history. He agreed, when the story first broke, that he had indeed been through electroshock therapy. When some reporters wondered why he didn’t tell Senator McGovern or me about that when we asked about his past, he always replied that I had asked him only “if he had any skeletons in his closet.” He said that to him “skeletons” meant “horrible” and “dangerous” things, like arrests or ugly events. NBC’s indefatigable TV anchorman John Chancellor called me immediately about that Eagleton story. He said “skeletons in the closet” didn’t sound like me or my manner of speech—had I used those words? I was pleased he followed my speaking style so carefully and reassured him I had never used that phrase, not ever, and that what I had asked Eagleton—not once, but twice—and almost word for word, was, “Is there anything in your background which might give us a problem, or trouble?” Eagleton had assured me that there was nothing, and he gave the same answer to Senator McGovern when he used almost the same phrasing. Nobody ever talked about “skeletons.”

*   *   *

This all made me wonder about double standards in our history. The accepted wisdom is that George McGovern was a weak candidate and an ineffective politician, as evidenced, among other things, by his handling of the vice presidential nomination. This, however, may be a self-reinforcing judgment: McGovern lost, therefore he was ineffective.

Think back on other vice presidential nominations, for example, of actions by the man usually regarded as the greatest politician in U.S. history. At the 1864 national convention that renominated Lincoln, the president pushed through Andrew Johnson as his vice presidential choice at the last minute without bothering to tell Hannibal Hamlin, then serving as vice president. Hamlin learned about Lincoln’s intent after the actual floor vote was complete. But Lincoln won the subsequent election and, as a winner, enjoys the courtesy of having history forget such actions. Or take Franklin D. Roosevelt seeking reelection in 1944. Most historians agree that FDR in 1944 knew his health was bad and that in selecting the Democratic nominee for vice president he was quite likely choosing the next commander in chief (World War II was still under way; the D-day landings had recently occurred). FDR let Henry Wallace, his current vice president, assume he was being renominated, and then he mishandled, perhaps deliberately, communications and instructions to party leaders. The convention delegates almost chose Wallace despite FDR’s opposition, and then Harry Truman was added to the ticket, not because he was FDR’s first choice, but because party leaders shifted wording in an FDR message to the convention, making Truman seem to be the president’s preference. But FDR was a winner, so only professional historians, and people otherwise enamored with the minutiae of history, know about his maneuvering in selecting a vice president.

While the Eagleton matter was unfolding, I had a call from Justice William O. Douglas, a leader of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. “Call me Bill,” he suggested, and then invited me to his home to “discuss this problem you have with Eagleton.” In his study, Bill Douglas then told me about “a similar problem we had in 1944 with Henry Wallace.”

That a sitting Supreme Court justice would have made such a political telephone call in the midst of a presidential campaign shocked me. Justice Douglas continued to talk, explaining that Franklin Roosevelt, contemplating a run for a fourth term as president, wanted to get Vice President Wallace off the ticket and replace him with either Douglas himself or Senator Harry Truman. The problem, of course, was that Wallace had no intention of leaving quietly and threatened to split the party if FDR forced him to withdraw. “The thing you have to do,” Douglas explained, “is find ‘something’ about the man you want to replace and then promise not to reveal it if he’ll quietly leave the ticket.” He then told me that during Wallace’s term as vice president the inner FDR circle had learned about a relationship between Wallace and a New York mystic, who called himself a “guru,” named Nicholas Roerich. A mysterious fellow, and quite obviously a fraud, he had apparently intellectually enthralled Wallace, who took this man’s prophecies as gospel, and there were letters back and forth to prove it. Douglas added, “Robert Hannegan, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made the deal with Wallace, threatening to tell reporters about the Roerich connection, and Wallace peacefully withdrew.”

And here’s a nice footnote: Hannegan, Douglas told me, wanted his tombstone to read, “Robert Hannegan, but for Whom, Henry Wallace Would Have Been President of the United States.” Hannegan’s heirs did not honor this suggestion.

Hannegan’s role, to be sure, was the key one in 1944. FDR gave him a letter to be read to the key party leaders, saying that if he were a delegate, he would vote for Wallace. But, the letter said, “either Bill Douglas or Harry Truman” would be acceptable as vice presidents. When Hannegan read FDR’s letter to the leaders, he
reversed
the names, and so they gave priority to Truman, and he became the vice president—and later the president.