Transcript of M.E. Sprengelmeyer's interview with George McGovern

The Rocky

Published August 12, 2008 at midnight

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Interview with George McGovern, 85, by M.E. Sprengelmeyer of the Rocky Mountain News on May 12, 2008, at his office in Mitchell, S.D. (In July he turned 86.)

(Before the interview begins, McGovern is showing the Rocky crew around his office and is asked about a photograph showing him a long, long time ago with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.)

MCGOVERN: She was supposed to be the main speaker. I thought, "Gee, this is going to be great, sitting next to this historic figure for an hour and a half." So she ate her dinner in a surprising hurry. She looked at the program and I saw her kind of, "Wow, all these speakers." She put her head down like this and went sound asleep, even snoring. And I didn't get a word in because she was sound asleep, and I wasn't about to wake her.

"And she sat there (sigh). And so help me God, not more than two minutes before it was time for her speak, she . . . like that, took her napkin with a little ice water on it, wiped her eyes and the guy was introducing her. She got up there without a note and spoke for 45 minutes.

MCGOVERN: I'm 85. In July it will be 86. I'm getting old.

Q: I actually saw you in Iowa City. You were at the Johnson County Democrats' event.

MCGOVERN: That was the night I endorsed Hillary.

Q: I was there, I remember where you guys walked in and everything.

MCGOVERN: You probably noticed we didn't sweep Iowa after I endorsed her. She did well, but not quite well enough.

Q: If she would have beaten John Edwards that night that might have helped a little bit. But she came right back the next week.

MCGOVERN: Yeah, she did, won New Hampshire. Did Edwards come in second?

Q: He did, but just by the hair of his chin. And he doesn't have much hair on his chin.

MCGOVERN: No, he doesn't. He has a lot on his head though . . .

Q: What we're doing is, for each of the past ten conventions, we're trying to learn whatever lessons from those conventions can help going forward. And it seems really timely that we would be with you today because of all the things that happened last week. It almost seemed like you were telling those candidates to learn those lessons.

MCGOVERN: Exactly. Where's Ursa? (The dog)

PHOTOGRAPHER CHRIS SCHNEIDER: She's right here.

MCGOVERN: OK. She'll be OK then.

VIDEOGRAPHER JUDY DEHAAS: Senator, can you just say your name for me.

MCGOVERN: George McGovern of South Dakota. Where the wind never quits blowing. The damn wind. It's the worst feature of South Dakota, that wind. What's that song in Oklahoma, "Where the wind comes sweeping . . ." Is it whipping or sweeping?

DEHAAS: Sweeping down the plains.

MCGOVERN: Sweeping. That's what it does here. (To Schneider:) I wonder, since you're outside the barrier if you could get me a glass of water? There's a glass in there sitting on the sink there.

SCHNEIDER: It would be my pleasure. A glass on the sink and just some water out of the tap here?

MCGOVERN: Yeah, that's fine. Can't afford bottled water.

Q: It's not very South Dakotan to use bottled water.

MCGOVERN: That's right. They'll say you're elitist.

Q: Oh, no. Don't use that word.

MCGOVERN: Oh yeah. I listened to that word several times and thought, you know, I haven't looked that up for a long time. So I looked it up in Webster's Dictionary. Who are the elite? You know what the definition is? The best people in society. Verbatim. Webster's. The best people in society are the elite. I've got a flight pass on Northwestern Airlines. It says "Platinum Elite." You get that after you fly a million miles or something like that. And it authorizes you to sit up in first class even if you have an economy ticket. I think it's wonderful to fly in first class. So what's wrong with a first class president?

I told that to Barack Obama. He says, "If they call me that one more time I'm going to use that line."

Q: So we're trying to learn the lessons of all the conventions past and I thought I'd ask you first of all about what happened last week (when McGovern switched his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.) It seemed in that case that you might have been trying to tell the candidates that they should learn those lessons from the contentious contest of '72. Can you tell me if that was one of the messages you were trying to tell them?

MCGOVERN: You know, there's nothing wrong with a long campaign, and this one I'm convinced has energized literally millions of people who are now in the process of selecting the next president of the United States. That's the most important decision either of the major parties makes, which is to determine who their nominee is going to be for the most powerful office on this planet.

So yes, one of the reasons I spoke out, suggesting that maybe the time had come for us to begin uniting behind a single candidate. Maybe this long campaign has gone long enough.

And I would add this: If the candidates can keep it on a high plane, talking about their vision for America, talking about the steps they would take if they become president of the United States, and talking about why the Bush policies have failed over the last eight years, and why continuing those policies under John McCain - this senseless war in Iraq that's almost bankrupting us, to say nothing of the real cost: these wonderful young men and women that we've lost in this unjustifiable war that McCain not only wants to continue, he wants even more American troops over there. He's for the tax giveaways for people who do not need a tax reduction. So you put a costly war in place at the same time you're lowering your revenues, what happens? The debt goes through the ceiling. Those are things that need to be brought out by Sen. Clinton and by Sen. Obama, very sharply, and they need to be laid at the door of John McCain, who has supported them. So that's what I'd like to see. If they stay on that level, I won't worry about how long they continue to compete.

Q: In 1972, do you remember what you imagined the convention would be like before it happened? I mean, did you imagine that it would be different than it turned out? How did you imagine it would be?

MCGOVERN: Absolutely, 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. It should be a time of jubilation and celebration over what we're doing, which is confirming the nomination of our candidate.

Let me tell you just one thing, very simple, that we should have learned from '72. Do you know when I gave my acceptance speech? Two-thirty in the morning. I finished at 3:15. Probably the best speech I ever gave in my life, and it should have been the best I ever gave in my life. 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, and those exhausted delegates in the convention hall. But a crowd of 90 million viewers at 9 o'clock - when I talk about a crowd, I'm talking about the nationwide television audience, 90 million - probably dwindled down to about 3 million by the time I . . . Let's not let that happen. Let's keep our eye on prime time and no matter what's going on on the convention floor, adjourn until after the candidate has come out there and made his acceptance speech.

So that's lesson number one. If that ever happens again, I'm going to disown who's-ever in charge of the convention schedule.

Q: How did it get to that point? I know about the South Carolina challenge that preceded the California challenge, then the maneuvering on the vote, and then the vice-presidential selection process. But what do you think was to blame for all those factors that led up to it being pushed past 2 in the morning?

MCGOVERN: I think the delegates had become kind of slap-happy after all these battles over who should be seated, and what delegates were valid and what weren't. None of that stuff should have been carried out on the floor of the election in prime time. When we got to the nomination of the vice president, it had always been a tradition that the nominee picks his or her running mate. In this case we had people getting up on the floor and nominating Mickey Mouse, nominating various other delegates around the convention hall. Somebody would see a person they knew sitting over here and get up. 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. I had nothing to do with that, incidentally. If I had had anything to do with that, I would have shut it down. In retrospect, I probably should have picked up the phone and called the presiding officer and said, "Get this thing wound up. If we've got to go over until tomorrow, we'll do it. But let's get us our prime time coverage tonight for my acceptance speech." But I wasn't used to being ahead. I had been trying to catch up for a year and a half, so I didn't immediately assume the authority that I actually had.

Q: So when you see (the third-place finisher in the '72 running-mate balloting) Mike Gravel on the stage this year in 2008 running for president, does that evoke a flashback to that '72 convention and what you just talked about?

MCGOVERN: Well, I don't want to rule out Mike Gravel as a candidate. He handled himself very well in the primaries. But he was one of the persons nominated for the vice presidency. I think there must have been 25 of them, and that's silly. And we never should have permitted that. I take some of the blame for it, but basically the presiding officer of the convention should have sensed what was going on and cut it off.

Q: Did the earlier fight over the California delegates - the apportionment of those - combined with the South Carolina delegate challenge, did that, all the time and effort you had to put into that, take away from time or affect the way you made your selection of vice-presidential pick?

MCGOVERN: It did take away time that we needed for other things. Most people in the television audience were puzzled with what we were doing challenging these delegations, particularly on California. Every candidate knew that California was operating on the winner-take-all rule, every one of them knew that. And we all geared our campaigns with that much attention to California because it clearly was a winner-take-all primary. We thought of those rules meticulously, and yet, after I won California clean and square, some of the other candidates mounted an effort both before and during the convention to take that delegation away from me and reallocate it - a completely unfair and unjustified move which we finally defeated in a roll call at the convention. But it was too bad we had to use the last month before the convention trying to save what we had already won.

I was on the phone night and day calling delegates all over the country saying, "Do not change the rules after the California election was over." As I say, we prevailed but it was at an enormous cost. 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. We were tied up with just trying to save the California delegation that we had won. We should have had that month to plan the agenda of the convention so I wouldn't have ended up giving my acceptance speech at 2:30 or 3 in the morning.

I hope we don't have anything like that in 2008. This is a Democratic year. We'd have to work at losing this election. But that's what we did in '72, and that's what we did in '68 when Senator Humphrey was the nominee. In both cases, the Democrats delivered those elections to Richard Nixon.

Q: As you looked at this year's election, did you see a parallel between the California dispute of '72 and what's still an unresolved issue as of this spring of Florida and Michigan - as a danger sign that it could slip into that sort of thing in 2008?

MCGOVERN: It could, but since the . . . I hope people will remember what happened in '72 and not go down that road again. We can resolve this Florida/Michigan situation. They clearly violated the rules of the Democratic Party when they moved the dates of their primaries way up near the head of the list - a strict violation of party rules. So that's different than the situation in '72, where the state was perfectly willing to play by the rules and did play by the rules. And then, it was the rule that the losing candidates tried to overturn. In this case, (Florida) and Michigan were not playing according to the rules. We'll have to work out some kind of a compromise here. Maybe the best thing would be to give each of the candidates, Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama, half of the delegates from those two states. That's one possibility. But I think our rules committee will work that out ahead of time on May 31.

Q: On the question of vice-presidential pick then, if you had been able to go through that time, with that month to choose, might you have ended up with Thomas Eagleton anyway if you had gotten the (medical) records that (then-campaign aide and future U.S. Sen.) Gary Hart was trying to get. Do you think in hindsight that you still might have ended up with him but just have been better prepared for the controversy? Or do you think that you might have ended up with another nominee?

MCGOVERN: In view of the fact that we knew it was going to be a very tough battle with Nixon and he would use every technique possible to win re-election, we might have been cautious about going ahead with Sen. Eagleton if we had known that he had had a 15-year history of depression, mental illness that would almost make him incapacitated during those periods. It's not that he should be punished for that, but we at least should have had that information before we made a final judgment. And that was what caused all the confusion about what to do with it.

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. I don't claim to have been an expert on clinical depression. 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." It's a terrible affliction that can really put you down. And so we would have, I think, before we made a final decision on Sen. Eagleton, if we had known about this 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.

Q: How did it come about? How much time did you have between the time you knew you were the nominee and the time you actually made the call to Sen. Eagleton? How much time was there between that?

MCGOVERN: Well, we finally won the California challenge, and then I became the nominee of the party. And the next day we had to name a running mate. In fact, we had to do it the day I gave my acceptance speech. It was that afternoon and we were running out of time. It was a matter of minutes. We just had to get that in. Now there again, we might have tried to make an effort to get the convention extended, but that would not have been an automatic request. There's a lot of things that go into a national convention, including the networks and other people. But we didn't have much time after the Eagleton problem developed, or even before this . . . I had asked seven different people to be my running mate. They didn't think anybody had a chance against Nixon. It turned out to be right, I guess. But I hadn't expected seven people to turn me down as a running mate.

Q: Even after all of that, even after that speech ended at 2:30 in the morning, you knew it was the best speech you'd ever made . . .

MCGOVERN: Yeah.

Q: At the time were you cognizant that . . . What were you thinking at the time? This is it, I'm going to beat the president here? What was your mood after you gave the speech?

MCGOVERN: I still thought we could make it, but I thought that that speech would have given me a 10- or 12-point lift in the polls. Instead of that, we did something that heretofore was regarded as impossible. We went down in public approval after that convention. Very sad. If you go down at your own national convention, then something's wrong with that convention or with the candidate. I thought it was the convention that was off.

Q: If there was one moment, one moment at that convention where you think the race might have been lost, can you name what that moment would have been? A phone call? A conversation? A speech?

MCGOVERN: I didn't see anything at the convention immediately that I thought was a fatal stroke. The overall impression I knew was not very favorable, but I thought, since we had been honest about all these things and given everybody their chance to talk. Everybody that wanted to get nominated for vice president was nominated. I began to count them by the dozens. I knew that wasn't doing us any good, but I still thought we could defeat Nixon in the fall.

Q: If you had your choice between the old-style conventions of '60, '68 or even before, which some regarded as too closed off, smoke-filled-room style, or the style of '72, which one do you think is better for democracy and also for the Democratic Party?

MCGOVERN: What we have now, because the women participate now. They're rather important in an election. They've got slightly more than half the votes. You look back at '68 or '64 conventions or earlier ones: mostly white, middle-class, middle-aged males. I'm not against people like that. That's what I was at those conventions, one of the white, middle-class, middle-aged males. But I think women should have every opportunity that males do in selecting the presidential nominee and they now have that. It's just as easy for a woman to become delegate. The same is true for young people. We had delegations at the '68 convention just before these rules went into effect of the so-called "McGovern Commission" - that's a wonderful name for a commission, the McGovern Commission . . . We had at the '68 convention before those rules, there were many delegations that didn't have one single person 30 years of age and under, even though the transcendent issue of the times was the Vietnam War, where everybody was under 30. In fact, most of them, many of them hadn't even reached 20 and they were dying over in Vietnam. So now you look at this convention that's coming up in Denver . . . and you'll see a lot of young people there. You'll see that it's about even between men and women. You'll see a lot of black people there. So, yes, these conventions may be a little more turbulent now than they used to be because there's more zest, there's more energy, there's more excitement, and that's all for good. But somebody also has to keep their head and protect prime time and be watching what's coming across on the television screen.

Q: Do you think in the end that it was that convention that doomed you?

MCGOVERN: No, I think it was the divisions in the party. I think too many Democrats went off angry or sulking or frustrated and the Vietnam War was still the number one issue before the country. That split the Democratic Party in two. And we didn't get together at the convention or after that. We stayed divided in 1972.

I know what I was hearing out on the campaign trail. I was getting enormous crowds, but I also was aware of the kinds of people who weren't in those crowds and that was unfortunate.

Q: I've heard some people say, the conventions these days, in this decade, right now, they ain't what they used to be. They're public relations shows. We don't see enough of the actual work of the party, just what the P.R. machine wants you to see. So if the conventions ain't what they used to be, is that necessarily a bad thing?

MCGOVERN: I think the kind of conventions we have now are good, except that sometimes they're too managed, they're too slick, they're too controlled. You don't want to go to extremes. Because the '72 convention got out of hand from time to time is no reason for us to go all the other way. You know, if you wanted an airtight convention, you'd have to go back to Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler. They ran a pretty tight show. And we don't want that in this country either. We want people to be relaxed. We want a few whistles. We want a few groans. We want a few pauses. So let's not get too micromanaged on how this convention goes.

Q: Did you see an example after '72 of any convention that you thought would have benefited from a little bit more debate, or was too slick like you say? Were there any of the conventions that came that disappointed you on that grounds?

MCGOVERN: Yes. I don't remember any specific illustration of that. But I've seen several conventions in the last 36 years since '72, several of them, that I thought were too managed, too artificial, too dictated by television schedules. And I think that is a mistake. And I think the voters somehow kind of sense when a campaign is too slickly managed or controlled.

Q: I was curious - this is a little bit off this topic - I was curious what it was like in 1984 when you and Sen. Hart . . . You ran again in 1984.

MCGOVERN: Just very briefly.

Q: It was an intriguing matchup to have the two of you in that race, for those that knew (that Hart had led McGovern's '72 campaign).

MCGOVERN: I got in in '84 after the others had been campaigning for over a year. And I did it because there were certain issues that were not being discussed, for example the Reagan policies in Latin America, which I thought were setting the stage for a diplomatic and political disaster in Central America. No discussion at all about how big the military budget should be. At that time nobody was threatening us anywhere in the world. It's like today. There's no country in the world that has any designs on attacking the United States. And yet the military budget just kept growing every year. It has been growing ever since. The less enmity in the world, the bigger the budget gets. We've got this little band of desert warriors with box-cutters, they took over four airliners. They didn't do that with aircraft carriers or tanks or armies of 5 million men. They did it with these little plastic box-cutters. "Hey, I'm taking over this plane." And they took over four planes. But that's no excuse to increase the military budget, which had nothing to do with the problem we faced there. So that issue was not even touched on by the Democratic contenders of 1984, and I thought it should be. There were several other issues that got no discussion. The environment didn't get much. Health care didn't get much of a mention. All of those problems. The difficulties of hunger, both in this country and abroad. So I thought, well, it's a year late, but I'm going to get in and raise some of these questions. Which I did. I announced before I got into the race that I would leave if I didn't either carry or come in second place in Iowa, the first test, or Massachusetts, which is McGovern territory. I came in third in both of those states, so true to my word I got out after those two contests. It wasn't that I was against Gary Hart . . . It was an interesting matchup.

Gary Hart would have made a good candidate and a good president. I think it's just too bad he got knocked out in '88 by his brief liaison . . . That was too bad.

Q: If we could go back to '72 again, at the convention itself, can you talk about, besides the speech, what was your favorite moment that happened during that convention? Just your favorite moment . . .

MCGOVERN: The day I walked out on the stage elected the nominee of the party, before I said a word, just walked out there and stood. I didn't think they were ever going to quit applauding. People were crying. Others were laughing. Others slapping people on the back. It was just total jubilation. Most of those delegates out there, I had won quite a few. Sen. Humphrey had won quite a few. George Wallace had won . . . The other candidates I think won very little. But it was a marvelous. I guess that's the highlight for me.

Q: It seems like every convention I've ever seen, Democrat or Republican, they're kind of designed to get you to the end to be thinking, "Wow, I'm looking at the next president." Did everyone in that hall, even after 2 in the morning, kind of, did you think the crowd and the people around you thought, "Wow, we nailed it."

MCGOVERN: Yeah, oh yes. No doubt about it. They felt we were on the way to the White House. And I must say, to the best of my knowledge, of all the candidates who ran . . . Do you know there were 16? You've got two now. They had 16. And every one of them thought the big test, winning the nomination - if you can get by these other 15 people, you know, Nixon will be a piece of cake. That's what I thought. That's what Hubert Humphrey thought. Ed Muskie. Mayor Lindsay. Gov. Sanford. We all thought that, that the big test would be getting the nomination.

Q: I have one last question. I'd like to make you in charge right now, of Denver. And let's presume that it's going to be just one nominee and not two (candidates) at this point. Whoever the nominee is, how would you design that to make it the most successful for democracy and also for the Democratic Party?

MCGOVERN: I would immediately set up a planning committee with a strong person chairing it to lay out what the convention agenda should be. Who should be allowed to speak? Who should have access to the platform? What do we do about television and maximizing coverage there? How do we deal in the most effective way with the writing press, photographers? Put a strong person in charge of press releases. I would agree that we are going to put the candidate on in what our research shows is the maximum audience nationwide from Vermont to San Diego - what will get us the biggest audience. I would try to resolve the thorniest questions before the convention. That's why I'm glad Howard Dean called this meeting on May 31 to decide what we're going to do with Michigan and Florida. That's about it.

I think we're in a good place being in Denver because we Democrats have tended to neglect the mountain states in recent years. We've neglected the upper Great Plains states. We may even have neglected the West Coast . . . Texas - either West or South in somebody's lexicon. That's an important state. And Denver is right in the heart of all this, so I think it's a good place. The Rockies are even beginning to win a few baseball games. (Smile.)

Q: I have to follow up on one thing you said about Denver: Resolve all these things beforehand. If they don't resolve everything beforehand and you do end up with two candidates and their people fighting over, whether it's Florida or Michigan or some larger issue, is that a death sentence for the party in the fall?

MCGOVERN: It could be. It could be. I think it's such an obvious Democratic year that we'll probably win in spite of ourselves, but I think that would jeopardize the race.

Q: Senator, I appreciate all your time. It has been a total pleasure.

MCGOVERN: Yeah, I enjoyed it, too.

* * *

(NOTE: As the interview ended and McGovern was getting ready for his portrait to be taken, the reporter, age 40, got something off his chest.)

SPRENGELMEYER: I told my friends I was going to apologize to you because when I was 5 years old, my grandmother and my grampa were having a disagreement. My sister said, "Grampa, I'm with you, I'm for George McGovern." And my grandmother turned to me and said, "Michael, who are you for?" And I said, "I'm with you gramma, Nixon." So as a 5-year-old, I apologize.

MCGOVERN: Well, you can't alienate grandma.

I grew up with two wonderful parents who were lifelong Republicans. If they were alive today, they'd throw Bush out of office. Bush and Cheney and their whole crowd. For example, my dad believed in a balanced budget. This crowd is running that debt through the sky. Nine trillion dollars, can you believe that? We used to say, "Don't worry about the debt. We owe it to ourselves." Now we owe it to China, Japan and Germany - all these people we knocked out in World War II are now keeping us afloat.

* * *

POST SCRIPT

(Not transcribed: McGovern talks about the book he is writing for Time-Life Books about Abraham Lincoln, whose portrait hangs over his desk. Turns out, the original writer was supposed to be former President Bill Clinton, who canceled, clearing the way for McGovern to write that edition. While he was on the subject, McGovern was asked about the previous week's phone call, and how Clinton took McGovern's news that he was switching his endorsement to Obama.)

MCGOVERN: There was not a cross word. He was sad. He was just plain sad. He said, well that's all I can say. I said, "You know Mr. President, these . . . endorsement of candidates don't mean a damn thing." He says, "That's not true. Yours is." Look at Ted Kennedy. He endorses Barack . . . He is the most influential Senator. He endorsed Barack Obama and Hillary beat him in Massachusetts.

* * *

(After the interview, McGovern tries to get his trusty dog, Ursa, to follow him.)

MCGOVERN: Come on, Ursa. Let's go . . . 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.

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