Senator George McGovern and the Grassroots Campaign that Changed it All | Vanity Fair
The tributes to George McGovern, who died at the age of 90 this October, were generous and profuse. He was described as “the conscience of the Democratic Party,” “a man who never betrayed his soul”—a “hero of war,” as the statement of the Obama White House put it, who became “a champion for peace.”For those too young to remember, the highlights of his life were run through: birth and early years in small-town South D 35 missions piloting a B-24 bomber over Nazi E a
multiple elections to the House and S authorship of programs that fed millions
the Distinguished Flying Cross, the World Food Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.Mention was made, too, of his relationship with the Kennedys—Jack (who brought him to the White House as director of Food for Peace), Bobby (who called him “the most decent man in the Senate”), and Ted (whom McGovern courted as his running mate)—and Pope John XXIII’s greeting in the Vatican: “When you meet your Maker and He asks, ‘Did you feed the hungry?’ you can say, ‘I did.’”Warren Beatty, his longtime good friend, told of calling him on his 88th birthday and hearing: “Warren, I jumped out of a plane this morning.” “How do you respond to that?” Beatty asked. “I have trouble jumping out of bed.” Others reminisced about this son of a Methodist preacher and onetime seminarian joking, “We Methodists can’t get rid of sin, but we sure can take the fun out of it”—then adding with a twinkle, “I’ve got a sin side. All kinds of licentiousness.”Mostly, though, those who knew George McGovern talked of how he’d tried to end a war. He’d been the first senator to denounce U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, the first and only American politician to base a run for the presidency on a pledge to immediately end the killing. This is the story of that campaign, its triumphs, horrors, and disastrous end, told by the men and women who lived it. The titles that follow their names are those held when events described were taking place.Gary Hart, campaign manager: McGovern was giving the commencement address at Dartmouth and asked me to come with him to “help identify some supporters for the New Hampshire primary.” On the flight up, he said, “We need to get organized in Washington. Do you think you can come back full-time?” I said, “I’ve got two little kids and I’m trying to set up a law practice without a great deal of success. Let me help you out for a few weeks.” He agrees, and I come back to Washington a couple of weeks later, assuming he’s got a full-time professional operation set up. There wasn’t anybody.A key adviser arrived a month later in the person of Rick Stearns, a Gene McCarthy–campaign veteran and Rhodes scholar who’d drafted the McGovern Reform Commission’s final report.Rick Stearns, research director: In 1968, Hubert Humphrey had entered one primary, South Dakota, finished third, yet became the Democratic nominee. I was curious how that could happen, so I’d written my thesis at Oxford on the way the internal politics of conventions worked in the U.S. Somehow McGovern read the paper—he was probably one of the few people other than my mother who did—and in May 1970, just after the invasion of Cambodia, he wrote to me and said, “Would you come to work for me?”I was on his Senate staff for a few weeks, he kind of got to know me, and I did what I was asked to do, which was lay out how the nominating process for delegates actually worked and then build a strategy for him. I said, “If you follow this route, which is contesting primaries, but also—without drawing a lot of attention to yourself—contesting every non-primary state, I think you can put together a majority.”The next major player on board was Frank Mankiewicz, whose lineage included growing up in Beverly Hills, son of Citizen Kane co-writer H being the director of the Peace Corps’ Latin A and serving as press secretary in Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign.Frank Mankiewicz, political director: McGovern called me up in February 1971. He was running at 1 or 2 percent in the polls, and I was anchoring the news on Channel 9 in Washington. He said, “I’d like you to join my campaign.” I said, “That’s going to be very difficult.” “I sure hope you can,” he said, “because I already told the press you were going to do it.” I said, “Well, in that case . . . ”As the head count increased, Hart and Stearns sharpened strategy, with voluble input from polling wunderkind Pat Caddell—at the time a senior at Harvard—who’d been tracking political opinion since age 17.Pat Caddell: My first meeting with Gary was in the old Miami airport. We’re in the corridor waiting for different flights, and I’m telling him my theory about alienated voters, and how the people who’d voted for Wallace in the South in 1968 were the same people who voted for Bobby Kennedy in the North. I said that the war was a one-dimensional issue. There was a lot of sentiment against it, but also a lot of support for it, especially among blue-collar voters. My argument was that McGovern was a prairie populist and that, if he used populist issues, he could appeal to that alienated vote. Of course, at 21, I knew a lot, right? Anyway, Gary said, “You know, we need someone to do ‘sampling,’” which is what he called polling then. “Do you think you’d be interested in doing it for us?” I said, trying to be as nonplussed as possible, “Yeah, I think I would be.”The question was how a campaign barely able to pay its just-hired pollster a pittance could turn theory into practice. An encounter with a direct-mail wizard turned crusading civil-rights attorney from Montgomery, Alabama, brought the answer.Morris Dees, founder-president, Southern Poverty Law Center: I was in Indianapolis, working on a lawsuit, and the state Democratic chairman asked if I’d go to a breakfast meeting with him. A fella named McGovern, whom I’d never heard of, was coming to speak. I went, and, boy, was he dull. I’m introduced afterward, and McGovern showed me this little one-page letter he was going to send out, announcing he was running for president. I said, “How ’bout asking for money in this thing?” He said, “Well, I don’t know about that.” Long story short, I convinced him to let me put some requests for money in, and with a New York ad man named Tom Collins, I came up with the kind of letter I knew would sell anything. It was seven pages, probably the longest letter in direct-mail history.McGovern gave it to a couple of high-powered political friends, who cut what I’d done down to a page, basically saying, “My name is McGovern and I am against the war. Send money.” McGovern thought I was going to mail that for him. But I took my letter and sent it out to 250,000 people. McGovern’s secretary calls a couple days later and says, “The senator wants to see you because some bad press came back.” I wanted to wait till the returns came in, so I said, “I’m tied up in a lawsuit.”Ten days later, the letter’s raised more than $300,000, and I walk into McGovern’s Senate office. He had a stack of mail piled on his desk. He picked up a letter from a woman whose son had been killed in Vietnam. Back then, the government gave you $10,000 for a dead soldier. She’d sent the check and endorsed it to McGovern. He read what she’d written out loud and tears were flowing down his cheeks. “Morris,” he said, “that was a good letter you wrote.”Dees was to write many more good letters, and the more than $4 million they raised in small donations underwrote a grass roots insurgency. New Hampshire’s field commander was Nashua town alderman Joe Grandmaison, a roly-poly encyclopedia of Granite State lore.Joe Grandmaison: In June of ’71, I advanced Muskie and McGovern virtually back-to-back. Muskie was giving the commencement at U.N.H.; a week later McGovern was giving the commencement at Dartmouth. I picked each of them up at the airport and drove them to where they were headed. Muskie was very stoic. More in line with most political people—meaning that there’s an “off” switch and an “on” switch. McGovern, there’s no switch. It’s just him. He wanted to know everything about me, about New Hampshire politics, about the economic situation and how people in this town or that lived their lives. On the way back to the airport, he asked if I’d go to work for him. I said yes on the spot.McGovern’s personality also appealed to strangers, many encountered on airplanes en route to stops on the college-lecture circuit. Returning from one such expedition, McGovern presented Stearns with the business card of one of the friends made at 30,000 feet.Rick Stearns: “Here’s a fella I met who I think is really into my views on the war,” he said. “I think he’d help support the campaign with a pretty sizable check. Would you be willing to go to see him?”So I fly out to meet this guy in Omaha. He picks me up at the airport, takes me to his house. We talk, and the next morning he makes breakfast for me and then writes out a $50,000 check for the campaign, which was a lot of money in those days.I say, “Look, this ca it may not. If it doesn’t, I’m thinking of going to law school. I have only managed to save about $3,000. You’re in business—what would you do with the money if you were me?”He said, “I don’t mean to be immodest, but why don’t you buy a share of stock in my company?”I’m sitting there thinking, “Take financial advice from a guy who’s a strong McGovern supporter? I don’t think so.” Well, if I had, my $3,000 would be worth $9 million today. Because the company was Berkshire Hathaway, and the guy who was so nice making breakfast for me that morning was Warren Buffett.Gary Hart: Senator Ed Muskie was the supposedly “inevitable” nominee, and he came from the state next door to New Hampshire. So I said to Rick, who knew more about the delegate-selection process than anybody in America, “Is there any contest before New Hampshire where we could surprise people?” He said, “Well, there are caucuses in Iowa, but nobody pays attention to them.”So we started surreptitiously organizing in Iowa.Carl Wagner, Iowa director: I was working for the Senate Hunger Committee, and one day McGovern came to me and said, “Do you know Iowa?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “How’d you like to run it?” I said, “Sure.”So we fly out to Davenport, where McGovern has an event. We get off the plane, McGovern says, “Good luck,” and that’s it. I didn’t have a budget, a car, or a place to stay.One thing Wagner did have was the savvy of the trip’s advance man, Doug Coulter, whom he’d talked into remaining behind during the flight. A recent Harvard Business School graduate, Coulter had learned to live off the land in Vietnam.Doug Coulter, organizing/advance: I was Special Forces, doing long-range, five-man reconnaissance patrols. We were the original, scraggly Project Delta. Toward the end of my tour I realized, “Jesus Christ, we’d have to be here 50 years!” So when I finished business school in the spring of ’71, I walked into McGovern headquarters and volunteered. In Recon, you learn to be on your own, how to improvise and get out of bad situations. It is your own initiative that is key. Same with organizing. We didn’t take donations, took stamps for mailings, lived out of petty cash, and slept on people’s floors.They specialized in the unexpected, like pitching McGovern’s case to the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Mother in Dubuque, Iowa, where 82 nuns were recruited. The tactics paid off on caucus day, when McGovern—who’d once been counted 70 points behind Muskie—finished a strong second.Carl Wagner: I’ll never forget the ABC News story the next morning: “The Muskie bandwagon slid off an icy road in Iowa last night.” It was the start of McGovern being taken seriously.The next test was New Hampshire.Pat Caddell: We did some early New Hampshire polling, and we weren’t doing very well at all. I argue at a meeting that we have to make McGovern into something other than the strictly anti-war candidate, and that our opening was with blue-collar voters in places like Manchester and Nashua. Someone actually stood up and said that it would be “immoral” to try to win those voters, because they supported the war. Thank God McGovern was there, because he agreed with me.The effort was helped along by Muskie’s seemingly bursting into tears while denouncing notoriously right-wing Manchester Union-Leader publisher William Loeb as a “gutless coward” for reprinting a gossip item suggesting Muskie’s wife, Jane, liked cocktails and dirty jokes. An even larger assist was Warren Beatty, whose political associations went back to John Kennedy, who’d wanted him to star in the movie version of PT-109. That hadn’t worked out, but he’d become close to Bobby, who’d employed virtually the entire top echelon of the McGovern campaign. After Bobby’s assassination, he had gotten bored with Hollywood and found renewal tramping through Iowa with McGovern. By New Hampshire, he’d signed on full-time. So had his sister Shirley MacLaine.Warren Beatty: What first introduced me to George was Bobby’s calling him “the most decent man in the Senate.” How could I not be attracted to George McGovern? A person who never talked about going on 35 bombing missions and wanted to get out of Vietnam.Shirley MacLaine: It was a political-value-priority promise I made to myself. I paid for all my hotel rooms, airfare, everything. I must have been $250,000 in and refused to let anybody pay for anything. I gave up several big movies. I mean, my career went in the toilet. When your agent wants to quit you, that’s pretty serious.Beatty—whom McGovern called “the third or fourth most important person in the campaign”—did everything: raise funds, mount concerts, give speeches, advise the candidate and senior staff, recruit the likes of Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel, Carole King, Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, and Mike Nichols to the cause. “I don’t dabble,” Beatty said. “Dabbling is sort of a waste of time.”Warren Beatty: Ronald Reagan, a charming guy who meant well, was a friend of mine. He said to me once when he was in the White House, “I don’t know how anybody could be president these days without being an actor.” The constant obsession with image, with wise cracks, with line deliveries, with body language, with all of this stuff that is so emphasized when it is so difficult for a person who is running for office to simply tell the truth about things. Reagan was right—it’s got a lot to do with show business.Doug Coulter: In Manchester, you campaign by having the candidate attend teas in the wards. There are 14 wards, so your timing had to be very precise. We had it down to the second. We’d send Warren in first for 20 minutes to warm them up, then McGovern in for 20 minutes.Jules Witcover, Los Angeles Times: The focus in that primary was Muskie, who was supposed to be the sure thing. And then the local head of his campaign said that if he didn’t get at least 50 percent of the vote, she would shoot herself. Muskie finishes with 48. So everybody, including myself, hawked on that and cast Muskie as the loser.Worse for Muskie was around the corner in Wisconsin, where McGovern forces were being directed by Gene Pokorny, a 23-year-old farm boy from Nebraska.Gene Pokorny: The first decision I made was not to put the campaign headquarters in Madison—where every picture of McGovern would have some long-haired kid waving the Vietcong flag behind him—but Milwaukee, which made us seem more mainstream and centrist.Steve Robbins, director of scheduling and advance: I came to Wisconsin to go over with Gene the congressional districts I’ve got McGovern scheduled to appear in. He starts getting on me about the Fourth C.D., which is the south side of Milwaukee and loaded with blue-collar ethnics. I said, “We’re not going to spend any time there. We’re going to get whomped.” He raised his voice and said, “We are going to do at least two events on the south side of Milwaukee or you’re going to be out of here.” Next day, I have lunch with an old friend, who’s working for Muskie. “How’s it going in the Fourth?”’ I ask. “You’re going to win,” he says. I went back to the office and said, “Gene, we should do three events.”Ted Van Dyk, senior campaign adviser: We took the line that Wisconsin was going to be determinant. And not only did the media buy it, Muskie did, too.Carl Wagner: My reward for doing such a good job in Iowa was being sent to run Polish Milwaukee. I had one name, Hilly Beschonik. I asked him, “Do you have a Christmas-card list?” He said, “Sure.” I said, “Write a letter to everyone on your list and invite them to a church basement a week from now. I’ll take care of the basement.” A week later, he comes with 25, 26 people. We did that neighborhood by neighborhood. You didn’t have to make the case for McGovern. The war made it.The proof was Election Day, when McGovern won with 30 percent of the vote—triple Muskie’s total.From there on, Muskie was dead man walking. The formal end came shortly after same-day thrashings by McGovern in Massachusetts and Hubert Humphrey in Pennsylvania.Harold Himmelman, Ohio-primary director: We’re meeting with McGovern in a hotel room, when a call comes in for him. It’s the announcement that Ed Muskie is “suspending” his campaign. He shares the news as if reporting that rain’s predicted for tomorrow. Very little reaction. No celebration. No jubilation. The rest of us are ready to jump up and down and start screaming. But he was very calm.The nomination wasn’t McGovern’s just yet, however. He still had Hubert Humphrey to contend with, as well as former Alabama governor George Wallace, who led in total primary votes by trading segregationist cant for populist upset. Then, on the eve of adding Michigan and Maryland to his win column, Wallace was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down, when a deranged ex-janitor named Arthur Bremer shot him during a campaign appearance in suburban Maryland. White House tapes record Nixon ordering aides to plant McGovern-campaign literature in Bremer’s Milwaukee apartment, so as to link his likely Democratic opponent to the near assassination. The scheme failed when the F.B.I. showed up first, and ever so quietly, McGovern continued to rack up delegates.Barbara McKenzie, senior campaign organizer: Who even thinks of hunting for Democrats in states like Alabama or Utah or Wyoming? Well, you do the arithmetic, and you figure it out pretty quickly. So while the other candidates are focused on the big states and big cities, we’re getting a handful of delegates in Utah, seven in Montana, and three in Wyoming, where Leonard Nimoy went out to the caucus and helped set up chairs. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece. Very quietly, we got more than 300 delegates that way.Scott Lilly, Central States director: Missouri caucus day we’re in this big auditorium out east of Kansas City. The regulars realized that there were a lot more McGovern supporters than they were going to be able to get, so they started a brawl. The cops come, and the caucus gets put off a week. So we get Ray Schoenke, an offensive lineman for the Redskins and a big McGovern supporter, to recruit some of his huge teammates. Second caucus, we have football players sitting on the ends of every row, with old people and women sitting in between. Some of the women were carrying mace. We win the caucus with no trouble.The big prize was the 271 delegates at stake in California, where Hubert Humphrey was lambasting McGovern for everything from threatening to bankrupt the country to risking Israel’s existence. The attacks didn’t register in Caddell’s polls, which put McGovern more than 20 points ahead less than three weeks till Election Day. Then, unexpectedly, Humphrey challenged McGovern to televised debates.Gary Hart: I was in the studio when Humphrey went after him. He said, “George, you are just weak on defense.” McGovern’s face literally dropped. Here are guys who’ve served together, been on every liberal cause together. Humphrey was his next-door neighbor, for Christ sake. And you watch McGovern seeing a totally different guy across the table from him. This is Mr. Liberal telling him he is “too far left.” He’s looking at a guy who would do anything to get to the presidency, and it shocked him.Especially damaging was Humphrey’s assault on “Demogrants,” a McGovern proposal to reform welfare via a guaranteed-annual-income program the press dubbed “a thousand dollars a year for everybody.” Humphrey claimed it would cost taxpayers $72 billion. McGovern admitted he didn’t know how much the program cost.Ted Van Dyk: First Humphrey debate, McGovern was just flummoxed about the cost of his $1,000 plan. Second debate, he’s asked about the cost of the plan again, and this time very confidently gives a number. I asked his executive assistant Gordon Weil where that came from. He said, “The Brookings guy we had working on it couldn’t come up with a figure in time, and McGovern knew he had to do something. So he just pulled it out of thin air.”George McGovern: Humphrey stunned me. It was like if you found a letter from an old friend who’d written something terrible about you. You’d say, “How could he do that? How could this happen?” There’s much to admire about Hubert Humphrey. I still do. But our friendship was never the same.McGovern won California, but by 5 points, not the predicted 20. When the Democratic National Convention convened in Miami on July 10, there was blood in the water. The first order of business was spilling more, much of it by overwhelmingly first-time delegates who owed their presence at the convention to McGovern Commission gender and racial reforms. More than 80 percent of them had never been convention delegates before. It made for a combustible mix.Ted Van Dyk: Every constituency wanted their plank in the platform and couldn’t have cared less if McGovern wanted them or not. At one point, when all these groups were making demands and calling them rights, Dick Leone, who was on our platform-committee staff, says to me, “What about the nobility? Their rights have been eroding for years. Isn’t there something we can do for them?”The most militant were the women’s groups, led by Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. At an earlier fractious session in Chicago, Shirley MacLaine, McGovern’s point person on feminist concerns, told Steinem, “If you people had your way, you’d have George support everyone’s right to fuck goats.”Temperatures hadn’t lowered since.Shirley MacLaine: One of the big fights was over abortion. Bella and Gloria and many of the women were on one side, and George really wouldn’t face it. I had to make a decision: Am I more for electing McGovern by not supporting a position that will polarize him with a lot of people? Or should I vote my own feelings? I basically went for McGovern.Ted Van Dyk: They wanted a number of language insertions in the platform. I accepted some planks they wanted, moderated others, and got rid of the few that would have been offensive to the vast majority of voters. But they were very restive, and McGovern called me back from committee proceedings. He was in a house we’d rented for him, and they’d descended on him. He said, “Ted, I have got the women’s groups here with me. I hope you will include as much as you can of what they want.” He gave me some phrase they were particularly pushing, and I said, “George, the average voter might think that authorized prostitution.” And he said, “Well, Ted, give them as much as you can without giving away the store.” A classic.In the midst of the hubbub, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter—who’d promised McGovern he’d do nothing to hurt his campaign—appointed himself spokesman for the “Anybody but McGovern” movement, an aggregation of Southern governors, Humphrey and Scoop Jackson delegates. “A.B.M.” did not keep McGovern from winning the nomination, which became his at 11:09 p.m., June 12, 1972, but the memory of Carter’s betrayal endured. In the 1976 presidential election McGovern voted for Gerald Ford.The last major piece of business was selecting a vice-presidential running mate. In McGovern’s mind, there was one choice: the last surviving Kennedy brother.The Teddy quest was partly the product of McGovern’s star-struck regard for all things Kennedy. But mostly, it was cold-eyed calculation. Two national polls had found a McGovern ticket without Teddy trailing Nixon by more than a dozen points. With Teddy, the margin shrank to insignificance. Neither finding had moved Kennedy, who repeatedly swore off any interest in being on the 1972 Democratic ticket. To McGovern, however, his disavowals always contained a tiny, tantalizing hedge.George McGovern: I thought that being a Kennedy and having the image of greatness like his brothers would eventually bring Teddy out. I was always after him to play that role. I was closest to Bobby. He was really the one who had my heart. But I had genuine affection and admiration for Ted.Ted Van Dyk: McGovern and I flew back from the National Mayors Conference in New Orleans together a few weeks before the convention, and I asked about the vice-presidency. He said, “Well, I know when it comes down to it, Teddy will do it. I don’t need to look at alternatives.” I said, “Don’t you think we ought to get up a list, just to be on the safe side?” “No,” he said, “Teddy is going to do it.” Of course, Teddy had told us he wasn’t going to do it. McGovern just didn’t believe him.It wasn’t until after McGovern phoned Kennedy an hour after he had been nominated that the truth finally sank in.Gordon Weil: I was in the room when he made the call. It wasn’t “Teddy be my running mate, and Teddy says, ‘No, sorry.’” It was a much he really tried to convince Teddy to do it. When he hung up after Kennedy turned him down, I expected him to say, “Well, it is going to be so and so.” Instead he turns to me and says, “Gordon, we better get everybody together for a meeting tomorrow to come up with another name.” I was astounded.Ted Van Dyk: Gary convenes a meeting the morning after we knew Teddy was not going to do it. We’ve got to have a nominee that night, McGovern wants us to give him a name by 11, and it’s already 9 a.m.Rick Stearns: At some point, someone proposed Tom Eagleton, the senator from Missouri, and I said to Gordon that I had been told by a reporter in St. Louis that there was something in Eagleton’s background, alcoholism or mental illness or both—I couldn’t remember quite which—that we should know.Gordon Weil: We get up from the meeting, and it looks like [Boston mayor] Kevin White or Eagleton is going to be the vice-presidential nominee. We knew very little about either one of them, so I say, “I’ve got an hour or two. I’ll make some calls.” I do, and get a lot of good stuff about White, and not all that much about Eagleton, except that he was thought early in his career to have a real drinking problem. But they’d found out that it was some sort of metabolic thing, and that so long as he watched his alcoholic intake, he was O.K. Nothing about mental illness. But when I get back from making calls, no one’s interested in what I’ve found out about Eagleton. All the focus is on White. I deliver my positive report, McGovern gets hold of him on the Cape, and White says he can be in Miami that evening.McGovern passed the news on to Teddy, who said that if White were chosen, he’d “find it difficult to campaign for the ticket with as much enthusiasm.” However, he added, he’ll reconsider his position on accepting the vice-presidential nomination and call back in half an hour. In McGovern’s suite, there was jubilation. It turned to consternation when John Kenneth Galbraith—renowned Harvard economist and close Teddy chum—called to announce (falsely, he later admitted) that the Massachusetts delegation had voted to walk out if White were the vice-nominee. The gloom deepened when Teddy called to say he was sticking with his not-interested decision. Instead, he recommended several alternatives, most glowingly, Tom Eagleton.Pat Caddell: So we have no White, we have no Kennedy. We don’t even have Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, McGovern’s closest friend in the Senate, who turns him down, too. Now we’re desperate. That’s how we wound up with Eagleton. Almost by default.Ted Van Dyk: McGovern’s got the phone to his ear, waiting for Eagleton to come on the line. He turns to me and asks, “Do you know anybody that would be good?” Before I could answer, Eagleton says hello and McGovern offers him the job.“I’m flabbergasted, George,” Eagleton said. “Before you change your mind, I hastily accept.”Frank Mankiewicz: McGovern says, “Tom, I’m going to turn you over to Frank Mankiewicz. He has a few questions for you.”Jeff Smith, legislative assistant: I was in the room when Frank said, “Tom, is there anything, anything, anything that could possibly come up that would throw the game?”“Nope. Nope.”Rick Stearns: Frank Mankiewicz brought Eagleton up to McGovern’s suite around five o’clock. He was sweating profusely and seemed to be almost bouncing off the ceiling. Well, I might be excited, too, if you told me I was going to be a nominee of a major party. But this just seemed beyond normal to me. I k it wasn’t my pay grade.McGovern and Eagleton talked about logistics and schedules for roughly half an hour—their longest conversation since a 45-minute chitchat in the Senate steam room in 1969. Then McGovern went back to work on his acceptance speech.Bob Shrum, speechwriter: The speech was done, but McGovern suddenly decided to tack on a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote at the end. I said, “Senator, you don’t want to do this. The speech has a rhythm, and it is moving along.” But he really wanted to keep that quote. I thought to myself, “Maybe Warren can help.” So I go to his hotel room, and Julie Christie answers the door in a kind of diaphanous bathrobe. She says Warren is on a call, invites me in, the two of us sit down, and the most beautiful woman in the world asks if I’d explain the American political system to her. I have no idea what I said. I was just staring at her. Finally, Warren comes in. I explain the problem, and Warren says, “Let’s go see George.”When we get to his suite, Warren says, “I am here to tell you that I agree with Bob about this.” McG he is not happy that I have recruited somebody. Warren says, “Look, George, this is like you have just thrown one of the great fucks of your whole life, and at the last second, you pull out and say, ‘I am going to let Waldo finish this.’” McGovern laughs, and that’s it for Mr. Emerson.Politically, having the speech received well was crucial. The “bounce” for Al Gore after giving his acceptance was put at 14 points. McGovern, however, was to have anything but an easy time of it, thanks to his rambunctious delegates, who nominated seven vice-presidential candidates in addition to Eagleton and cast votes for 39 more, including Jerry Rubin, Mao Zedong, and Archie Bunker. By the time McGovern made it to the podium, it was nearly three a.m., and what had been a prime-time audience of 16 million was now less than two.George McGovern: I know there were frantic calls to the trailer and the podium, saying, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” But it was just out of control. Some people thought I could simply command that it stop. But I was told that there were legal procedures, and I was reluctant to ask what they were, because anytime you ask a lawyer about anything, the answer’s no. There were others who thought we should just put the whole thing off to a good prime-time moment the next day. But the headlines would have been if you can’t control your own delegates, how are you going to control the country? Frankly, I was greatly irritated that people who were supposedly our friends were responsible for the chaos. But there was no way to win for losing. My feeling was, we’r let’s push ahead and get this thing done.Marcia Johnston, assistant to Gary Hart: I was standing on the floor of the convention at three a.m., looking around and seeing guys in dashikis and flower children and thinking, “This is democracy.” Then I go back to the Doral, and my sister, who’s been watching everything on television, calls and says, “Marcia, you can’t imagine how chaotic it looks. It’s scaring everybody.”It was well past 4:00 by the time Gordon Weil got back to the lobby of the Doral, where he bumped into Knight-Ridder political writer Loye Miller.Gordon Weil: Miller asked what I’d heard about Eagleton. I said I heard he’d had a problem with drinking, but it was more metabolic than anything else. Miller said, “There’s more to it than that,” and told me that Eagleton also had had some mental problems. He didn’t share many details, but they were enough to get me worried. I thanked him and got on the elevator to go up to my room. Who’s the only other person on board but Doug Bennet, Eagleton’s chief of staff. I said, “Is there something about your boss’s mental health you guys haven’t told us?” He says—no pause, straight out—that Eagleton had been hospitalized on several occasions to be treated for depression. We go to my room, and he tells me everything—electroshock treatments included. Talk about seeing it all go down the tubes right in front of your eyes.When we finished, I went up to the top of the hotel, where there’s a party going on, and everyone is dancing and having a good old time. I found Frank and Gary and pulled them into a quiet corner. “Stricken” is how I’d characterize their reaction. There was a little bit of wishful thinking, “Let’s get to the bottom of this to find out if it’s true” stuff, but I said, “Look, if Bennet tells me it’s true, I believe him.”Mankiewicz and Hart decided to hold off telling McGovern and departed for a Virgin Islands holiday on the estate of multi-millionaire businessman Henry Kimelman, the campaign’s chief of major-donor fund-raising.Eagleton was on the move, as well—to Washington to prep for an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation.Ted Van Dyk: I went to Eagleton’s house the Friday after the convention to brief him. He said, “I haven’t talked with George since the convention. I need to have a good talk with him.” So I called McGovern and told him that Eagleton wanted to meet. He said, “Well, I am busy today. Tell him I’ll call tomorrow and we’ll get together.”Sunday I watch Eagleton from home. He does well, but I notice he sweats a lot. Frank calls me afterward, and says, “How did he do?” I wondered what all the excitement was about. I said, “He did fine.” Then I get another call. It’s Eagleton, who says, “I never heard from McGovern.” So I call George, who says he still doesn’t have time and asks me to travel with Eagleton to Hawaii, where Eagleton’s speaking to a union group. “Watch over him,” he says.While Van Dyk was puzzling over the Eagleton fuss, an anonymous but obviously well-informed source who claimed to be a McGovern supporter was beginning to make calls. His first was to the Knight Ridder–owned Detroit Free Press, where he told an editorial intern that Eagleton had been hospitalized several times for “acute manic-depressive condition with suicidal tendencies” and had been treated at least twice with electroshock. Asked for specifics, the informant had called back—this time with the name of the St. Louis hospital where Eagleton had first been treated and the identity of the anesthesiologist who’d been present during the initial electroshock sessions. Later that weekend the source passed much of the same information to a volunteer switchboard operator at McGovern headquarters. She recorded the details in a memo for Hart, who dismissed it as nonsense.He changed his mind after returning to Washington with Mankiewicz for an extended breakfast session with Eagleton in the Senate dining room, a week to the day after his selection as McGovern’s running mate. Until then, they’d only talked to Eagleton by phone, and he’d been unwaveringly ascribing his “not very serious” problems to “melancholy” and “pushing myself too hard.” Face-to-face, Eagleton at last owned up to virtually everything claimed by the anonymous source.Frank Mankiewicz: Eagleton said the reason he got better after the electroshock treatments was that they gave him pills. He called them “stripies.” They were whatever the most popular anti-depressant was after Valium but before Prozac. I said, “Tom, do you still take it?” Here we are, six years after his last hospitalization. And he said, “Yes, but don’t worry, because it’s prescribed in my wife Barbara’s name.”All this was finally reported to McGovern on July 21—eight days after he’d tapped Eagleton. His enlightenment came during a closed-cabin briefing from Hart and Mankiewicz during a flight from Washington to a rustic retreat in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore. The senior staff was to spend a week and a half planning the fall campaign but mostly kicking back. So, anyway, had been the plan.Pat Caddell: On the plane out to the Black Hills, the heavies are running around like crazy. You know something is going on, but you don’t know what. No one is saying boo. We have our first-day meeting, and I do my little presentation. I’m back in my room, when I get a summons to Frank’s cabin. Fred Dutton, a Kennedy guy who’d joined the campaign as a Big Thinker, Dick Dougherty, and Frank. I sit down, and they said, “We need to tell you about something very important. You cannot tell a soul. It is absolutely confidential.” I’m going, “O.K, O.K.” They said, “What do you think the reaction would be if the country found out that Tom Eagleton had electroshock treatment?” I said, “What’s electroshock treatment?” Frank got up and acted it out. My whole life changed at that moment. Dick said I looked like death. I said, “Frank, I don’t think that would go over very well at all.”’Two days went by without the press axe falling. Then, late Saturday evening, Clark Hoyt, a reporter from the Miami Herald, and Bob Boyd, Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau chief, showed up unannounced in South Dakota. With them they brought a two-page memorandum summarizing their investigation of Eagleton’s psychiatric history.Kirby Jones, Deputy Press Secretary: I was walking through the press gallery when Bob Boyd came up and said, “Kirby, we are running a story. Eagleton had this, that, and the other. Do you have a comment?” Trying to be cool, I said, “Let me see what I can find out.” I then hustled back to the trailer and said, “Guys, there’s a story about Eagleton, and it is going to blow us out of the water.”Hoyt and Boyd turned the memo over to Mankiewicz the next morning. Feigning ignorance, he offered—and they accepted—a deal: hold off publishing until after Eagleton arrived with his wife late Monday evening, and he’d arrange an exclusive interview. What Mankiewicz neglected to disclose was that, while the reporters had been running down sources, including the shock-therapy anesthesiologist, he’d been polling psychiatrists.Frank Mankiewicz: The first one I reached—a friend who sat with me on the board of the Georgetown Day School—said, “You have to be careful with this guy Eagleton. I’ve seen him on TV, and he’s got a pronounced tremor in his hand. That is a dangerous sign.”Well, shit—psychiatrists. I said, “Thanks for the information.”I kept calling, about 19 psychiatrists altogether. And every one of them said, “This guy can do any job there is to be done in America, except being president of the United States. You can’t let him do that.”That night Mankiewicz crept over to McGovern’s cabin to tell him what he thought. “Let’s get rid of this guy,” he said.George McGovern: My father was a clergyman and he had to deal with people with all kinds of emotional and mental irregularities. So I grew up with compassion for people in some kind of psychological trouble. I still have that. My heart goes out to people who are struggling with emotional difficulties. Some of them can be very painful and disconcerting. So I think that I’ve been afflicted with that weakness, if it is a weakness.The McGoverns hosted the Eagletons for breakfast the next morning, and they got on as if childhood chums. Tom told George he was sorry for not telling him about past medical events when he should have, and he’d quit the ticket the moment George asked. George told Tom he was sticking with him, and they’d ride it through. The only awkward moment was when Eleanor McGovern, who hadn’t wanted Tom as her husband’s running mate in the first place, asked, “Why didn’t you tell George about this illness?” To which Eagleton replied: “We didn’t think you’d ask me if I did.”When Eagleton suggested using a scheduled noon press conference to make a “complete, public clean breast” of his health history, McGovern—who’d promised Hart he’d make no move before digesting Eagleton’s medical records—instantly agreed.The “clean breast” promised was slow being revealed, however. Reporters fidgeted in their seats as Eagleton droned on about “nervous exhaustion” and “fatigue”; the Cardinals and the Chiefs being his fav and his similarity to the character in the Alka Seltzer commercials who says, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Finally, Eagleton admitted that McGovern had not known of various hospitalizations pre-selection. McGovern—whose weakness for hyperbole was a source of staff mirth—cut in before Eagleton could further: “I have watched him in the United States Senate for the past four years. As far as I am concerned, there is no member of the Senate who is any sounder in mind, body, and spirit than Tom Eagleton. . . . If I had known every detail that he told me this morning . . . he would still have been my choice for the vice-presidency of the United States.”Eyes were still rolling when Eagleton, describing the kind of treatment he’d received while hospitalized, blurted everyone’s headline: “Including electric shock.”Bad turned to worse the next day, when Henry Kimelman, furious with McGovern for leaving him in the dark about the would-be vice president’s mental health, reported that major donors had halted all contributions and loans and that McGovern shouldn’t count on small donors, either, since Morris Dees had gone home to Alabama. The capper came when McGovern, enraged by a (correct) A.P. report that he would have to “wait and see” before determining Eagleton’s fate, ordered a statement released that he supported his running mate “1,000 percent.” Staff morale thereupon hit bottom.Gene Pokorny: You have now spent a year of your life or more getting to this point, and everybody is exhausted and kind of looking at each other, and saying, “Jesus Christ, we are supposed to make omelets out of this?” It was then that I sort of said to myself, “This is not going to work out.”Eagleton was not present for the hand-wringing. He’d stopped in L.A. en route to Hawaii to attend a fund-raising dinner and appear on The Merv Griffin Show. He also squeezed in a press conference, where he revoked his pledge of speedily making his me ticked through some of his pre-hospitalizations symptomology (“irascibility,” “loss of weight,” “edginess,” “depression of the spirit”); volunteered he was still popping an occasional “little blue” tranquilizer whose name he claimed he couldn’ and would fend off relapses as vice president by getting “an adequate amount of relaxation.” With that he flew off to Honolulu, where he awoke to word that syndicated columnist Jack Anderson had reported that he’d been arrested half a dozen times for D.U.I. by the Missouri Highway Patrol. The good news was that the patrol could find no trace of the records Anderson claimed would prove his charge and hang-in-there calls were pouring in, including one from Teddy.McGovern, however, was sliding toward the Mankiewicz position, after conferring by phone with Dr. Karl Menninger, of the Menninger Clinic, and a depression specialist at the University of Virginia. Both urged that, as a matter of national interest, he remove Eagleton from possible succession to the presidency.Bob Shrum: McGovern had called me and said, “Don’t tell anybody, but write a statement explaining why I am keeping Eagleton and bring it over to the house.”He barely glanced at it when I gave it to him. He’d just had a conversation with Karl Menninger and another doctor. When he heard from them, it was: “Can’t do it, boom, that’s it.”The formal end came the evening of Sunday, July 31, during a 90-minute meeting in the Marble Room of the U.S. Capitol. At the recommendation of a psychiatrist, who worried about Eagleton’s stress level without a neutral party being present, McGovern had asked Gaylord Nelson to be on hand. The proceedings commenced with McGovern stepping into an anteroom for phone conversations with two of Eagleton’s doctors. Both echoed Menninger’s recommendation. “What did they tell you?’ Eagleton asked when he emerged. “They gave you a clean bill of health,” McGovern lied. Eagleton then handed over a press statement that McGovern was to deliver verbatim. If he didn’t, or if his staff ever indicated in any fashion that health was involved in his “withdrawal,” Eagleton warned, he’d fight him “right through to November 7th.”A few minutes after nine p.m., they walked out to a forest of TV cameras and microphones. McGovern stuck to the script.Teddy, predictably, was first choice as Eagleton’s replacement. Just as predictably, he took a few days to think it over before saying no again. A humiliating week followed looking for someone who’d say yes. Beatty spent several hours trying to convince his friend, the “very lovable” Hubert Humphrey, who seemed amenable, but wound up saying no, too, as did several others. Finally, a call was placed to Sarge Shriver, who said he would—though only after keeping McGovern on hold until he finished a tennis game.Gordon Weil: Shriver could afford to take one for the team, because he had no likelihood of being elected to anything. He was a good speaker, Catholic, enthusiastic. Not least, he was willing.By then, the damage had been done. But there was no time to mourn the 18-point plummet in the polls or the battering McGovern was taking from the no-longer-sympathetic press. Too many other problems needed to be fixed, hurt feelings of party regulars at the top of the list.Ted Van Dyk: Larry O’Brien, who came on board specifically to bring the party regulars in, had this therapy session at the Washington Sheraton Park for all the Democratic congressional leaders. I was the only McGovern representative invited, as most of those present knew me from earlier incarnations and didn’t harbor the kind of resentments they felt toward Gary and Frank. Not that they were happy. They felt they’d been shafted, and good liberal Tip O’Neill was furious. “McGovern was not supp Muskie was supposed to be nominated. We were all Muskie delegates, and most of us didn’t even make it to the convention.”Gary Hart: People don’t like to be made fools of. They resent it when you do. It had nothing it had to do with power. They’d placed their bet, and we’d screwed it up for them.In the midst of all this, McGovern agreed to serve as principal speaker at the annual Truman Day Awards Dinner in St. Louis, where the honoree was none other than Tom Eagleton.George McGovern: We had a private dinner beforehand, Tom, Barbara, Eleanor, and me, and I asked Tom if he would do a television commercial for us, which would have been really helpful in a fall campaign. But Eagleton refused. “You know, George,” Barbara said, “Tom is the most popular politician in the country right now.” Eleanor never forgot that, or how Barbara had agreed with Tom not to reveal his mental-health history if I selected him as my running mate. Eleanor didn’t understand how a wife could do that. I tried my best to understand Tom, at least in the beginning, but by the end, I couldn’t. I’ve never been given to rage—some people even say it was a weakness of mine. But if I ever felt rage, it was then. I—we—wanted to end the war so badly, and if I’d been elected, I would have. But here was this one person who had lied to me.Out on the trail, McGovern was pounding away on Vietnam and on what had come to be known as Watergate, after an office complex where, in June, four operatives of the Committee to Re-elect the President under the direction of ex-CIA agent James McCord, were arrested while trying to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.Shirley MacLaine: He was appalled by Watergate. He was truly outraged. He told me that if Nixon got elected, he was going to leave the country. He said it very, very seriously.Bob Shrum: He was advised by the greybeards in the campaign to talk less about the war and Watergate, but he wasn’t going to take that advice. He wanted to win the election. But he also wanted to stand up for what he believed in, so he wasn’t going to walk away from the war or Watergate.The only concession McGovern was willing to make to normal notions of electability was to briefly mention his war record:“I was a bomber pilot in World War II. I still remember the day 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.’”George McGovern: Over a period of almost a decade, ending that war in Southeast Asia was my principal concern, my principal aim. I thought that it threatened to destroy the public image of the United States in world affairs. I thought our conscience was on the line, our heritage.Then it would be back to Vietnam and Watergate.Bob Shrum: McGovern was holding up The Washington Post at rallies, and saying, “Here is the newest story.” The country just didn’t want to believe it.The polls confirmed it. One found that only three percent of the electorate considered W another, that 48 percent of Americans had never even heard of Watergate.Then, less than two weeks before Election Day, Henry Kissinger announced that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam.Ted Van Dyk: McGovern wanted to immediately denounce it, but Gary and I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s find out what people think. We’ve got to be careful.” So we took a quick 24-hour survey. It was like 80 percent believed that it was the truth, that peace really was at hand.”Bob Shrum: McGovern thought that Nixon, as soon as he had a free hand again, would go right back to bombing the North, which is exactly what he did. Six weeks after Election Day, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi begins.Rob Gunnison, advance staff: The week before the election, we had big crowds. From Detroit to Philadelphia to New York. You begin to think, “Polls? What do they know?” You live in a bubble when you’re out on the road. It just never dawned on me that he could lose.Pat Caddell: McGovern would say, “Well, is there any hope?” You can’t say there’s no hope, because he’s got to campaign every day. I would say, “We have to get a break, we have to push.” He knew what the numbers were. I didn’t try to hide them. Frank had ideas that I should go out and tell people that we had polls that we are winning. Even that young, I was not dumb enough to do that.Marcia Johnston: In the waning days of the campaign, money started pouring in. There were nights when people finished their day jobs—including Gary and Ted and Frank—then went upstairs to the seventh and eighth floor and opened the mail. There were sacks and sacks of it, everybody who cared about ending the war or who believed Nixon was a crook was cramming checks and cash into envelopes. They were sending us Social Security money. We were the only campaign in modern history that ended up with a surplus.Ted Van Dyk: I went out to that Japanese-style house of McGovern’s early the Sunday morning before the election to take him to do ABC’s This Week. He and Eleanor had flown back from the coast overnight. Eleanor was still in bed, and George got up in his pajamas when he heard me come to the door. He greeted me, and pulled out of his pajama vest pocket a Polaroid of a popcorn stand at a theater in Burbank. They took a poll there every four years as to the presidential election, and it had never been wrong. This year, it had him as the winner. “Isn’t that something,” I said. Phone rings, McGovern asks me to pick it up, and it’s Sarge Shriver, who is always Mr. Cheerful. “Is George there?” he says. “Three days to go, and I just want to wish him well on his TV appearance.” McGovern is making “no-no-no” motions in the background. “Well, he is in the shower right now,” I tell Sarge, “but I will pass on your good wishes.” On the way downtown, I’m going over his briefing materials with him, but McGovern’s strangely silent. We’re about halfway to the ABC studio there on Connecticut Avenue, when out of the blue he says, “It was that fucking Eagleton and that fucking thousand dollars.” That’s all he said. He knew.George McGovern: I went through the fall campaign thinking that no matter what I did, it was probably going to be a losing proposition. I tried everything I could think of to turn it around, but in the end I was forced to recognize that I was up against insuperable odds and that it would be almost impossible to transform that race into a victory effort on my part. There was just too much working against us.Bob Shrum: Frank and Gary called me and said, “We’re afraid that McGovern believes he is going to win. We think someone needs to tell him that it is going to be bad. So you should go tell him.”I said, “Thanks a lot, guys.”So late Sunday night, I go to this garish hotel suite where he’s staying, and say, “I’ve got to talk to you for a minute.” He said, “Sure.” I said, “Frank and Gary and I and some other folks are worried that you don’t realize what is going to happen Tuesday. Because you are going to lose, and it is going to be pretty big.”He looked at me and said, “Let’s have a drink.” He makes a vodka martini for me and one for himself, and we sit down. “Bob,” he said, “I know this. But for the next 48 hours, I just have to pretend.”Gordon Weil: I would get McGovern up every morning. He’d always order room service, and I’d always nibble off his breakfast. The morning before Election Day, he was getting organized, and we were going through the schedule—the usual kind of thing you did every day. Except that this was the last day of the last trip of the campaign. We both knew that it was something we had to do, and that it was not going to produce a positive result. But he was composed. Through the very end of the campaign, right until the time he came back to Washington, he was more concerned about the staff than he was about himself.The rest of the day was a killer: Rallies in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Wichita, Kansas, and Long Beach, California, enormous, emotional crowds at every stop. By the time McGovern’s chartered 727, Dakota Queen II (after the B-24 he’d christened for Eleanor), made its final touchdown three hours late in Sioux Falls, it was past one a.m., and the temperature was near zero. None of which had deterred 5,000 of his friends from waiting in the frigid darkness to welcome him home. They cheered when he appeared at the top of the ramp, cheered more as he walked down the stairs holding Eleanor’s hand, and kept cheering, louder and louder, the closer he came.Election Day, November 7, 1972, dawned crisp and cold in South Dakota. McGovern rose early, slipped into the back seat of his assigned S.U.V. in the Secret Service motorcade, and stared out at the passing prairie for the 90 odd miles that separated the state capital from Mitchell, where he’d grown up and still had a home. They’d cleared out the center of town for him, and he walked down the middle of Main Street to his polling place.Across the country, the thousands who’d worked to make him president and end a war went about their chores a final time.Max Holland, Los Angeles volunteer: I was knocking on doors in the Hollywood Hills from very early in the morning on. We’d canvassed the neighborhoods, so we knew where all the McGovern supporters lived, and which of them needed a lift to the polls. Those were the houses I was going to. Everything was fine, until I came to a place a few minutes after 4:00, L.A. time. An older woman answered the door, and I explained that I was with the McGovern campaign. I could hear the news on the living-room TV in the background. “Oh,” she said, “you don’t know. It’s over.”Joel Swerdlow, industrial states coordinator: I was at headquarters in East Orange, New Jersey. P so many of them thought McGovern was going to win. I had a bottle of whisky in the bottom-right drawer of my desk and a shot glass in front of me. I said, “No one can talk to me until they’ve had a shot.” I was 26 years old, a baby.Bob Shrum: Pete Hamill is in Sioux Falls with Shirley, and they invite me to have dinner with them at this local Mexican joint. I check with McGovern, who says, “You’ve got plenty of time. We have two to three more hours before we are going to know anything.” So I go to the restaurant, and we were just starting into the guacamole, when one of the advance people comes up and says, “Bob, the senator would like to see you.”I go back to the hotel, and McGovern is standing there in his pants, shirtless, in the bathroom shaving. Walter Cronkite is on TV saying, “Connecticut for Nixon, Maryland for Nixon,” and Jeff Smith is sobbing. McGovern looks up and says, “Jeff, tomorrow we will wake up, and we will begin to live the rest of our lives and we will do some good. Everything will be O.K.” Jeff looked at him through his tears and said, “That’s easy for you to say!” McGovern and I just started laughing.The members of McGovern’s Secret Service detail took some of the sting out of the final result—49 states lost, only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia won—with a surprise for him the next morning. Overnight, they’d had one of the presidential limousines flown in, and it was idling curbside, when he came down for the motorcade that would take him to the airport and the flight back to Washington.There was joking and reminiscing as the campaign survivors handshakes, hugs, and fibs to get together again someday when they arrived.Marcia Johnston: There’s a line in Patton when George C. Scott says to his troops, “When you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you, ‘What did you do in the great World War II?’ You won’t have to say, ‘Well, I shoveled shit in Louisiana.’” That was the way we felt. At least when our kids asked us what we did during Vietnam, we wouldn’t have to say nothing.Powered by Zergnet