This Day in Electoral History (Eagleton Withdraws as McGovern VP Choice)

July 31, 1972—George McGovern would have faced an uphill battle for the Presidency in the fall in any case, but the full dimensions of his landslide loss to Richard Nixon began to become apparent when Senator Thomas Eagleton (pictured), dogged by revelations of past bouts with mental illness, stepped aside as his running mate.

Vice-Presidential selections over the past several decades have been—well, not reassuring. Dick Cheney just made headlines by stating the obvious: that Sarah Palin, though an “attractive” candidate, only had two years of experience in office, making her not the best choice for John McCain’s running mate. Of course, the ex-Veep did not comment on his ploy of eliminating all possible aspirants to become George W. Bush’s Vice-President, until the nominee, unimaginatively but inevitably, asked if he’d take the job. (See my prior post on Cheney’s clever “Hello, Dolly” strategy.)

Dan Quayle—as Alexander Pope wrote, “Why break a butterfly upon the wheel?” As for Joe Biden, he looks positively Presidential by comparison with these Republicans—and remember, this is a guy who a) has burnished his considerable reputation for running off  at the mouth in his term a heartbeat away from the Presidency, b) displayed, in his youth, great ingenuity in avoiding the draft that might take him to Vietnam, and c) saw his own early Presidential ambitions prematurely snuffed out after the revelation that he'd cribbed an entire campaign speech from British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock.

A Ken Rudin blog post for National Post Radio makes the point dramatically: Since 1964, only seven Vice-Presidential selections can be regarded as pluses; 12 rate as minuses. Now, a couple of the choices here are debatable (Cheney, inexplicably, rates a plus), but all in all it balances out. It’s not at all pretty, but it all simply reinforces a point made by Theodore H. White nearly four decades ago in The Making of the President 1972: “In the Vice Presidency lies all the potential power of the Presidency itself—yet the choice is the most perfunctory and generally the most thoughtless in the entire American political system.”

But none of these compared to the Eagleton affair. His selection was performed in haste, reconsidered under duress, terminated with extreme prejudice—all while setting back the cause of McGovern.

It had been bad enough that somehow the U.S. Senator from Missouri ended up on the ticket in the first place, calling into question McGovern’s managerial ability. But when the Democratic nominee reneged on his initial stance that he was behind Eagleton “one thousand percent,” despite the revelation that the running mate had undergone electroshock therapy three times, another impression was fostered. "The seemingly backhanded and spineless manner in which McGovern compelled Eagleton to withdraw probably hindered McGovern's shot at the presidency more than keeping Eagleton would have hurt it," writes Joshua Glasser in a new account of the imbroglio, The Eighteen-Day Running Mate.

The circumstances behind Eagleton’s selection were as fraught as any ever existing for the Vice Presidency. Start with this simple fact: before he agreed to join the ticket, hardly anyone, it seemed, wanted the job. Ted Kennedy, McGovern’s first choice, turned it down a couple of times, including only one hour before the selection was to be made. So did Walter Mondale, Gaylord Nelson, and three other politicians. McGovern and his staff were down to the wire.

What led them to such a pass? This convention combined the worst features of the Old and New Politics. The Democrats had redefined the delegate-selection rules (by a committee chaired by none other than the future nominee himself), but the party confabs hadn’t yet morphed into the intensely scripted, trouble-free snorefests we know now. Party elders had not yet taken up the task of warning pesky also-runs from mounting challenges in an event televised to nationwide audiences.

McGovern, in short, was so busy heading off a first-ballot attempt to deny him the nomination that the last thing on his mind was picking a Vice-President. 

(In fact, on the final night of the convention, delegates still were involved in enough floor fights that his acceptance speech, on the theme “Come home, America,” was delivered at such an insane hour—almost before dawn, Eastern Time—that the only people who got to watch it in prime time were those on Guam.)

The name that came up repeatedly for McGovern’s advisers at first was Kevin White, but the Boston mayor's candidacy came undone when Kennedy indicated only reluctant support. Meanwhile, Eagleton’s name had been suggested by a couple of the candidates who turned McGovern down, making him a logical second choice. 

The subsequent disaster might have occurred for the simplest of reasons: Nobody, not even the nominee, really knew Eagleton or much about his history.

In the days of the “old politics,” Eagleton’s name would have been floated among the party poobahs—regional leaders, labor bosses, longtime government officials—and they would have offered all they knew about him—some insights, surely, not helpful, but others based on insiders’ knowledge of the man. 

This was not the case in the room of 22 McGovern staffers. Only three of these people actually knew Eagleton—and the new interest groups that powered “the new politics” (feminists, African-Americans, college students) had even less experience with him. The same, amazingly, was true of McGovern himself. Despite the fact that they were similar in background (liberal anti-war politics, Midwestern roots, lifelong Democrats who had served in the Senate together for four years), the two had probably conversed at most a half hour together.

What was known about Eagleton made him seem a perfectly plausible candidate, someone with appeal to groups that McGovern needed to hold onto: Catholics, unions, voters in Midwestern swing states such as Missouri. Those qualifications—and the lack of instinctive knowledge to suggest otherwise—meant that, as the clock ticked toward making a Vice-Presidential selection, the one McGovern aide who had heard only vague rumors about Eagleton drinking heavily and experiencing mental illness, when unable to substantiate the allegations quickly, dismissed them as being without merit. 

And so, without a background check, Tom Eagleton was introduced to the Democratic delegates, and America, as McGovern’s running mate.

A 29-year-old St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Clark Hoyt, and his bureau chief, Robert Boyd, preparing a profile of the Vice-Presidential nominee, began to notice odd gaps in his history when going through morgue files at the paper—things along the lines of “Senator Eagleton has been at the Mayo Clinic for a physical exam, or Senator Eagleton has been exhausted and taking a rest, something like that,” Hoyt recalled in an interview 35 years later. When a source tipped the reporter off about Eagleton’s background—even providing the name of a physician who treated him—those inexplicable gaps began to make sense.

By this time, the McGovern campaign had also been tipped off by the source (who was fearful about what would happen once the Republicans knew about it). Eagleton, however, did not immediately fill the campaign in right away on the full details of the story—i.e., that he had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion three times and been treated with electroshock therapy on more than one occasion.

A 1997 article by former New York Times columnist Frank Rich, decrying the stigma against openly seeking psychiatric help as the “last taboo” among politicians, cites the Eagleton affair as an example of the American electorate’s blinkered approach to the subject. As so often happens, however, Rich oversimplifies a complex subject. (When he left the newspaper of record a couple of years ago, the Times’ gain became New York Magazine’s loss.) Here are some reasons why the Eagleton imbroglio was not just an example of stigmatizing the mentally ill, but deserved to be a very big deal:

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a   *Eagleton was not fully forthcoming with the man who would be his boss. Eagleton may have been technically correct that he never lied to McGovern or his staff, but he did not divulge the full dimensions of his treatment until the press essentially had the outlines of the story. (When asked what the Nixon campaign would find if they looked into it, he said they would only discover his exhaustion and melancholy--not mentioning his electroshock therapy.) This would not have boded well for their subsequent working relationship, had it continued. In fact, when McGovern campaign aide Frank Mankiewicz asked if he had any “skeletons in the closet,” Eagleton said he hadn’t, admitting later he had taken “a calculated risk” in not revealing all early on.  That left the McGovern campaign in a constant scrambling mode, never sure how much of what was being reported was true and how much exaggeration.

·         *Eagleton, by not being immediately candid about his past, gave the Nixon campaign what could have been a tremendous opportunity to destroy the Democrats. In a campaign already marked by dirty tricks (an aspect of Watergate I discussed in a prior post), Nixon’s operatives wouldn’t have needed much, if any, skullduggery to ferret out the truth of this situation. 

·        * Eagleton was sanguine to the point of self-deception about the nature of his illness. After the campaign, according to Theodore H. White, the senator explained to visitors that “My health just wasn’t on my mind, it wasn’t on my mind, it was like a broken leg that healed.” But, as Paul Tsongas would be about his cancer (then in remission) in 1992, he downplayed the real chance of a recurrence. He had not only been hospitalized, but hospitalized three times—once even after the conclusion of a stressful campaign. His susceptibility to another breakdown could not be explained away. Moreover, electroshock therapy, as practiced when Eagleton first received the treatment in 1961, was much more overprescribed and less regulated than it is today. The results could be devastating. (Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which occurred the same year as Eagleton’s first treatment, was precipitated by electroshock therapy that deprived him of short-term memory.)

·         *Eagleton did not make available the records of his medical treatment. It might be argued that privacy issues weighed against their release, but such is also the case with records related to the finances and physical health of candidates, and Americans have begun to look askance at candidates who are reluctant to yield such information (as Mitt Romney is learning now in his refusal to reveal more than a year or two worth of his tax records). In 1972, Eagleton was asking Americans to examine him without knowing fully how he would react under stress. In an age of nuclear peril, this was an electoral non-starter.

·         *Eagleton ignored the fact that Americans expect officials with access to national security be mentally sound. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of John Tower came a cropper because of allegations related to heavy drinking. That tendency, though it didn’t concern the Texas senator’s colleagues too much while he was in the upper legislative chamber, worried a number of them very much when he was thrust into a higher position.That heightened standard continues to govern nominations and elections to high posts in this republic.

The pressure mounted on McGovern to sack Eagleton: dozens of newspapers called for him to be dropped from the ticket, and his campaign finance personnel resigned over Eagleton’s initial retention on the ticket. Mankiewicz and Gary Hart (then McGovern's campaign manager, later a candidate in his own right) both urged that Eagleton be dropped. The senator’s replacement, Kennedy brother-in-law (and stand-in) Sargent Shriver, could not help save the sinking McGovern campaign.

Nowadays, it is fashionable to regard Americans’ attitude toward mental illness 40 years ago as benighted. Perhaps it was, but likewise, treatment of the disease had not advanced very well, either.

Americans will need to evaluate the mental health of their leaders with the same sophistication that they evaluate physical health. Clinical paranoia and delusions, for instance, are less disabling than ordinary neurosis. Moreover, what might not be disqualifying in a lower office might hold very grave consequences at the highest levels of government.

In the years since the Eagleton affair, though some politicians (notably, former Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles) have reacted to disclosures of clinical depression quickly and candidly, others (currently, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.) have, as Eagleton did, responded in a piecemeal fashion. They deserve compassion and understanding as they seek help, but the American electorate deserves from these prominent victims of mental illness candor and realism—both qualities in noticeably short supply among politicians.