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.
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:
·
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.