George McGovern, Miami Beach 1972

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 12, 2008 at midnight

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Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky

Sen. George McGovern in his office in Mitchell, S.D.

Photo by Ray Stubblebine © AP/1972

Portraits of assassinated brothers Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy provide a backdrop as Sen. George McGovern accepts the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. The address — “probably the best speech I ever gave in my life” — came after most viewers had quit watching for the night.

MITCHELL, S.D. — The lanky widower makes a slow, straight glide through the library named in his family's honor, slowing his pace for a sidekick more than a decade his senior, at least in dog years.

George McGovern greets the crew that is waiting in his office. He takes a seat by the window that looks out at his modest house across the street. He fixes his tie and suit jacket. But he can't start an interview until he finds out if his constant canine companion is OK.

"Where's Ursa?" he asks anxiously.

She's already asleep on the other side of the desk.

"OK. She'll be OK then."

Harry S. Truman was right. If you want a friend in politics, you have to buy a dog.

It's a lesson McGovern, now 86, learned in that dreary year, 1972, when fights among friends at the Democratic National Convention started a domino of disasters and set the stage for one of the most lopsided presidential election defeats in U.S. history.

"That convention failed to do what a great national convention should do, which is to show the party and show the nominee for president in the best possible light, without a lot of distractions, without a lot of floor battles on television at the convention, without a lot of bitterness," he says. "It should be a time of jubilation and celebration . . ."

But that's not the way it turned out in 1972.

Instead of giving the Democratic ticket the usual double-digit boost in the polls, "We did something that theretofore was regarded as impossible," McGovern recalls. "We went down in public approval after that convention. Very sad."

At times this spring, it looked as if Democrats were marching toward 1972 all over again.

Both then and now, a fierce anti-war sentiment buoyed the party's hopes of sweeping the Republican Party out of the White House.

Sixteen candidates ran in 1972, and an anti-war, anti-establishment insurgent, South Dakota's Sen. McGovern, used a surprise win in the Iowa caucuses to begin compiling the delegates needed to clinch the nomination. It was the same path taken anew by Sen. Barack Obama.

Of the candidates in '72, "Every one of them thought this was the big test: winning the nomination," McGovern says. "If you can get by these other 15 people, you know, (President Richard) Nixon will be a piece of cake."

But late in the game, after McGovern won a closer-than-expected victory in California's then-winner-take-all primary, rivals Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, Henry Jackson and George Wallace disputed the allocation of delegates, saying they should be given out proportionally.

They took the fight to the party's credentials committee and then to the floor of the convention in Miami Beach - just as backers of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton threatened to do this year by challenging how Michigan and Florida delegates would be seated after being punished for moving up their primaries.

Party fight ran on television

In 1972, the lingering dispute meant that McGovern couldn't be sure he was the party's nominee until after a costly and confusing parliamentary fight waged on national television at the start of the convention.

The California delegate fight was compounded by additional disputes over the South Carolina and Illinois delegations.

"Most people in the television audience were puzzled with what we were doing challenging these delegations," McGovern says.

In the end, McGovern's forces won.

"We prevailed, but it was at an enormous cost," McGovern says. "I should have had about a one-month breather between California's primary - the last one - and the convention to carefully pick a running mate, to maybe vet three or four possibilities to see whether there were any problems with any of them. We never had time to do that."

Instead, the newly confirmed nominee and his staff, exhausted from around-the-clock maneuvering, had just hours to come up with a running mate on July 13, 1972.

In his book, Right from the Start, Gary Hart - who was McGovern's campaign manager before he became a U.S. senator from Colorado - describes that as "the longest day in a long campaign."

As the campaign staff gathered that morning, "Names surfaced like popcorn kernels," Hart recalls.

"For half an hour, the mood was light, relaxed to the point of frivolity," Hart writes. "Victory was being savored for the first time in the light of day. It was like a group of fraternity boys who had spent most of the night successfully stealing the rival school's mascot."

But by 3:45 p.m., after big names such as Sen. Ted Kennedy took themselves out of the running or others were rejected on various grounds, the campaign's deliberations devolved into chaos. There were just minutes until a 4 p.m. deadline for filing official nominating petitions, and they still hadn't settled on a name.

"I could scarcely believe what was happening," Hart writes. "I recall reading accounts of deliberations like this - particularly the confusion surrounding John Kennedy's selection of Lyndon Johnson - and thinking to myself: 'If I ever get into a situation like that, I am going to make sure the deliberations are careful, thoughtful, calm.' "

But, no.

According to Hart, one of the people Ted Kennedy suggested was Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri. When his name surfaced earlier in the day, the staff spent about 30 minutes looking into rumors that he might have "problems of drinking and mental illness in the family, perhaps a parent in a mental institution," Hart writes. But they could find nothing that backed up the rumors.

With time running out, McGovern declared, "I think I'll go with Tom."

"The call was placed," Hart writes. "And the time bomb destined to destroy the infant McGovern presidential candidacy started ticking."

Still, the day was far from over.

McGovern's running mate pick still had to be confirmed, and by that point, McGovern figures, the delegates had become "kind of slap-happy" from the earlier fights.

Dozens of names were put into nomination. Among them was then-Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, the vocal Vietnam War critic famous at the time for putting the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record.

At one point, Gravel took to the stage and seized the lectern, demanding time to speak to second his own nomination. According to the account in the late Norman Mailer's book St. George and the Godfather, convention co-chair Yvonne Braithwaite Burke attempted to stop him. But Gravel protested, exhorting the crowd: "Is this an open convention?"

Gravel was allowed to speak, and the episode helped turn the usually routine confirmation of a running mate into a process that ate up prime time on the national television networks and forced McGovern to make his triumphant acceptance speech at 2:30 a.m.

"In this case, we had people getting up on the floor and nominating Mickey Mouse, nominating various other delegates around the convention hall," McGovern says. "In the name of freedom of speech, we let that run on through the midnight hour, on into the early morning before it was finally brought to a halt."

Finally, McGovern got to the stage.

"I finished at 3:15 (a.m.). Probably the best speech I ever gave in my life. And it should have been the best I ever gave in my life," McGovern says. "But how many people saw it at 2:30 or 3 in the morning? I think my wife did. Maybe my mother if she didn't get too sleepy . . . But a crowd of 90 million viewers at 9 o'clock . . . probably dwindled down to about 3 million."

Even so, after all the convention floor battles, after the chaotic running mate pick, after the delayed acceptance speech, McGovern and his supporters still thought they were on track to win the White House.

But the Eagleton "time bomb" was about to explode.

Only after the close of the convention, at an after-party celebrating McGovern's acceptance speech, would the campaign learn that Eagleton had been hospitalized for "fatigue and exhaustion" - as his clinical depression was first explained.

In coming days, the press was filled with stories about how Eagleton had undergone "shock treatment." At first McGovern said he supported his running mate "1,000 percent." But soon the explosive stories prompted the McGovern campaign to replace Eagleton with Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law.

New campaign buttons were printed. But at that point, the Democratic ticket was doomed, most analysts say.

Decision was made in rush

"Today, 2008, people have a much better understanding of mental illness and especially depression than they did 36 years ago. I didn't know much about it myself," McGovern says. "Abraham Lincoln struggled with it most of his adult life. At one time he said, 'I'm the most miserable man.' Another time he talked about being 'the saddest man on the planet.' And so . . . before we made a final decision on Sen. Eagleton, if we had known about his history of illness, we would have had time to talk to the doctors, talk to the psychiatrist, talk more to Sen. Eagleton than we did."

But they didn't. The decisions to pick and then drop Eagleton were made in a rush. And on Nov. 7, 1972, less than five months after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, President Nixon won in a crushing landslide - 520-17 in the electoral vote tally.

As McGovern talks about the lessons of 1972, a framed picture of the melancholy Lincoln looks over his shoulder.

It's an inspiration to McGovern, but also a reminder of a looming deadline for a Lincoln biography he is writing for Time-Life Books.

The original writer for that presidential biography was supposed to be President Bill Clinton. But Clinton got busier than expected, backed out, and the assignment fell to his old friend, McGovern.

McGovern and the Clintons go way back. Bill and his future first lady, now-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, helped run his Texas campaign in 1972. McGovern shared some of those fond memories late last year, when he traveled to Iowa City, Iowa, and stood with Sen. Clinton on a stage lined by straw bales and endorsed her presidential campaign in front of a barn full of Johnson County Democrats.

That made for an emotional moment in May, when McGovern placed a call to former President Clinton and said he had decided to switch his endorsement to Sen. Barack Obama.

"There was not a cross word," McGovern says. "He was sad. He was just plain sad."

McGovern told President Clinton "endorsements of candidates don't mean a damned thing." They're not important, he meant. "That's not true," Clinton replied. "Yours is."

It was a tough call to an old friend, McGovern says. But as the Clinton-Obama fight dragged on - with no end in sight at that point - the prairie state idealist was trying to pass along the painful lessons he learned before, during and after that 1972 convention.

"You know, there's nothing wrong with a long campaign, and this one I'm convinced has energized literally millions of people," he says.

But, his experience made him think, "Maybe this long campaign has gone on long enough."

Even now, McGovern thinks lingering party divisions over the Vietnam War were the root of his defeat.

"That split the Democratic Party in two, and we didn't get together at the convention or after that," he says.

What the party needs now, McGovern says, is a convention in Denver that patches up divisions and unites old friends to face Republican Sen. John McCain.

The 1972 nominee plans to be there. And in the meantime, he can be found in the library across the street from his house with a running mate he knows he can count on.

"Come on Ursa, let's go," he shouts to his dog, heading for the door. "She's getting old. To get the human equivalent of 14, you have to multiply it by seven. So she's 98. She's healthy. She's blind in one eye and the other one's beginning to fail. She bumps into furniture once in a while, but so do I."

sprengelmeyerm@shns.com

• August 12, 2008

  7:01 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Yankee writes:

  It is nice to be reminded that there was a time when the Democrats fielded candidates who put devotion to America ahead of their own, personal interests.

• August 12, 2008

  8:13 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  Truth writes:

  I suppose McGovern's lousy extreme left-wing policies had nothing to do with his numbers dropping after the convention.

  If George McGovern is endorsing Barack Hussein Obama, that's all the more reason to vote against Barack Hussein Obama.

• August 12, 2008

  8:40 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  DemsAreDumb writes:

  George was the beginning of the end for the Democratic party. The party became hijacked by the far left loons from him on. The likes of JFK and Truman are long gone and today, they would be republicans- JFK for sure. Obama/Edwards/Gore are all cut from the same cloth as McGovern and need to be defeated if America is to remain strong.

• August 12, 2008

  9:02 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  DenverDan writes:

  truth

  I love it when you say his full name. Do you know the old mans middle name?

  Obama 08

• August 12, 2008

  9:05 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  bobjohnson writes:

  So "Nixon was a piece of cake". When was Nixon ever a piece of cake?

  Nixon was the most twisted, self pitying president of the century, but also the meanest and one of the smartest.

  The people who supported McGovern protested the war, burnt draft cards, smoked dope, got on TV a lot, and made up 40 per cent of the electorate.

  The other 60 per cent couldn't stand the sight of them.

• August 12, 2008

  9:07 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  DenverDan writes:

  He is 10 years younger than McCain.

• August 12, 2008

  9:15 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  HolierThanThou writes:

  An irony in the present campaign was the ad portraying Barack Obama as a celebrity and comparing him to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. John McCain is no stranger to late night entertainment having appeared on numerous talk shows and Saturday Night Live. There's nothing wrong with that. But there's something seriously wrong if you decry your own behavior only when you see other people doing likewise.

  And of course, almost everyone missed the deeper irony of including Britney Spears in the comparison. She once proclaimed herself a Bush supporter. Now that she's gotten publicly trashed and lost custody of her kids, the people she once supported make her out to be garbage.

  Oddly, Richard M. Nixon ultimately did what McGovern promised to do. He withdrew our military forces from the quagmire in Viet Nam. Nixon was a crook but compared to the despot in the White House now, he was a saint. Nixon practiced diplomacy and he even founded the Environmental Protection Agency. Ordering the burglary at the Watergate Hotel was quite possibly the most wanton criminal act of the decade. McGovern was doomed once he backed away from Eagleton. Nixon could have invaded China and still won.

  The trouble with John McCain is that he's basically a simple decent man. Why is that bad? John McCain tends to trust very bad people. He trusted Charles Keating and became one of the Keating Five who were responsible for shady loans, bribery, deregulation, bank fraud, and massive failure in the old savings and loan banks. Neil Bush, the brother of the president, actually admitted to taking a $100,000 interest free loan that never had to be paid back from his business partner who borrowed millions from Silverado Saving and Loan in Colorado. Neil Bush also illegally loaned himself money from Silverado. The failure of that bank cost US taxpayers $1.3 billion. The whole S&L mess cost over $124 billion to taxpayers.

  John McCain was part of that mess. Personally, I don't believe that if he had any idea of the financial catastrophe his actions helped to bring, that he would have had any part of it. But this history goes to show that John McCain is not a good judge of character. He's naive.

  The running mate they pick for John McCain is likely to be one of the worst conservatives available who hasn't been caught yet. That man will be president because John McCain will die in office. If natural causes don't take him from this Earth, he will be assassinated by the very people who've taken him down before.

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