The Gallup poll showed it 59-36 for the president. One of the people who didn’t believe it was one of the nation’s most respected political columnists, Scotty Reston of the New York Times, the Sunday before Election Day. Nixon would win, “but the thought that the American people are going to give Mr. Nixon and his policies and anonymous hucksters and twisters in the White House a landslide popular victory… is a little hard to imagine.” To believe that Gallup was right, “you must also believe that the American people regret corruption but have accepted it as an unavoidable part of American life and really don’t care about all those millions of dollars given to the Republican party by a few rich men and women, all the secret funds, and the bugging and burglary of the Democratic party and the fake letters and political sabotage and the guerilla warfare used in this campaign… that it’s all right for the President to seek four more years in the White House without defining his program for the next four years, without debating the opposition candidate, or answering questions from the press… that the American people don’t mind or haven’t noticed that Presidential power is now unbalancing the whole American system.”
And, for all demonstrable purposes, the American people — or at least that portion of the Silent Majority Real Americans who bought newspapers and voted in every election — didn’t mind. Which was a great relief to Mr. Reston’s employers, because comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted is so much easier than doing it the other way around. If national elections are just another variety of Survivor or American Idol, then the courtiers of the press get to demonstrate their most finely-honed talents to a much wider audience!
As a coda, it is not possible for me to despise Hubert H. Humphrey any more than I already did, but damned if Perlstein doesn’t convince me that George McGovern wasn’t a good man out of his depth in a particularly filthy race, but a pious fraud willing to make himself a puppet for whichever cabal offered him the best chance at a higher office than his natural talents allowed. Kind of the Democratic George H.W. Bush, with (per best Dem practice) less money and more guts. I don’t think this was Perlstein’s intention, but did it seem to anyone else like McGovern couldn’t have done more to ensure Nixon’s re-election if he had been a GOP plant?
Villago Delenda Est
McGovern went into this as a prairie populist, and the problem with prairie populists is that they’re earnest and interested in doing good things for many people, which makes them vulnerable to the sort of cynical power plays of sociopaths like Dick Nixon, with his army of sociopath underlings, named Rumsfeld, Cheney, Stone, Ailes, Colson, Liddy, and others.
It’s difficult to grasp just how major a fuckup the Eagleton thing was. It was a barometer of basic competence that McGovern managed to shatter into a bazillion pieces.
Not too dissimilar from McCain’s selection of Bible Spice as his running mate. No vetting apparent.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
Choosing Eagleton as VP candidate was a mistake. Being behind him “1000%” and then firing him was a bigger mistake. Really. Would you trust someone who did that?
AAA Bonds
McGovern was good enough for Hunter S. Thompson, so he’s good enough for me.
Also, I’d hope there’s some examination in this club as to whether treatment for depression should disqualify someone as a candidate for national office, keeping in mind that historians are now quite certain that John F. Kennedy was one of the first men in the United States to receive medication for the disorder.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linda Featheringill:
Which is why Nixon’s paranoia about McGovern and the Dems was even more ridiculous. After all, they wanted to run against him, because they knew he’d be vulnerable to their dirty tricks. Little did they realize how much McGovern would help them in that regard through his own actions.
Nixon, is pointed out in the book, was REALLY worried about an attack from the right, specifically, George Wallace. I don’t think he imagined that McGovern would shoot himself in the foot (repeatedly, stopping to reload) with the Eagleton thing. It was a gift that made the entire Watergate scandal look even more unnecessary in retrospect.
licensed to kill time
my laptop died on friday the thiirteenth and typing on kindle sucks bonky dolls but will read along took me 15 min to write this sorry kthnxbai
mcd410x
McGovern’s people were so involved in the floor fight for the nomination that they were unprepared for what happened next — didn’t have a VP in mind, etc.
But the list of recent Democrats who have run crappy campaigns is not a short one: Gore, Kerry spring immediately to mind.
Edt: Maybe unprepared campaigns would be a better adjective than crappy.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
Of the things we all learned from the Nixon years are:
1. Amateurs aren’t qualified to campaign for office, even if they would make very competent officeholders. The Big Boys just play too rough.
and,
2. ‘Tis best to look like your campaign is run by amateurs, a bunch of earnest choirboys. This was one of Nixon’s mistakes. The nickname “Tricky Dick”, no matter where it started, spread across the country. And then when the accusations hit the fan [so to speak], people assumed they might be accurate.
James E. Powell
Pretty much describes almost every person who runs for office.
Damned at Random
I’m amazed that Nixon didn’t pick up more Congressional seats when he had such a huge win. If he had a Senate majority, would there have even been Watergate hearings? I sort of doubt it. I used to have more respect for the Repubs – I thought they were less overtly political back then, but now I think they were just less- umm- exposed
Rick Perlstein
Anne, you’ll love my op-ed coming out in the New York Times for the centenarry of his birth praising Hubert as an unsung hero then!
bryanD
At the ’72 convention, McGovern had denied floor privileges to 225 Democratic congressmen; held his acceptance speech up until 3 AM; and topped it off by a failed attempt at a coup (via microphone!) inside the DNC against chairman Larry O’Brien.
Immediately after all this, McGovern backstabs his own running mate Thomas Eagleton, is confronted with it, and lies about it to Eagleton’s face, to which Eagleton famously retorted, “Don’t shit me, George”***. At which, according to Eagleton, McGovern “smirked”.
***reported verbatim in many newspapers nationwide. In short, what in the hell was Scotty Reston smoking in 1972? McGovern was dead candidate walking after Humphrey ripped him in California. The Democratic convention week buried him.
As for Nixon: Chicago mob-sponsored e-ticket, like Reagan. (Chicago Outfit managed California and Florida politics, 1945-1970s)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I finished the book about three weeks ago, and didn’t get a chance (again) to review it, but that wasn’t my take on McGovern at all. I went into the book and came away with pretty much what VDE said @ 1.
The conflicts with labor did remind me that McGovern was still trying to get even almost 40 years later, when he did those ads about card-check a couple years back.
One thing that didn’t come up in the book: Wasn’t Eagleton the one who initially gave Novak the line about “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion”? Seems to me that came out a couple of years ago, maybe after the original publication of Nixonland.
stuckinred
Miami 72
Bobby Mueller and Ron Kovic in chairs.
Rick Perlstein
“McGovern was good enough for Hunter S. Thompson, so he’s good enough for me.”
AAA, besides being stoned all the time (I would say self-medicated against unacknowledged mental illness, which had an element of cowardice to it), Hunter’s judgment was terrible. He was not a good man. The whole book played out a riff making up a “joke” (which he never acknowledged at the time) that Humphrey was addicted to a drug called Ibogaine.
A very valuable chronicler, and a great writer. But no one to follow in political judgments.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT – cause the thread below is dead, but I have such great memories of the Eurovision Song Contest, Bucks Fizz, Brotherhood of Man, Cliff Richards, damn the whole post took me back to some of the most awesome moments of my TV viewing life, with a grainy black and white TV and a sense of pride. I am NOT going to apologize for it, ever.
Rick Perlstein
“t was a gift that made the entire Watergate scandal look even more unnecessary in retrospect.”
It only looks unnecessary in retrospect. If you recall the high tide of the dirty tricks were that spring, when Muskie was the nominee-apparent, and that Muskie and Nixon were polling neck and neck, and when keeping Wallace in the Democratic Party was absolutely crucial to a Nixon victory, it looked very necessary at the time.
stuckinred
@Rick Perlstein: Bad Craziness!
Villago Delenda Est
@mcd410x:
Well, that’s a reason, I guess. Totally absorbed in the current battle, no planning for the one you know will come afterwards if you succeed.
However, McCain had no such excuse for Palin. That was just pure fuckup. He had months to figure this out, knowing the nomination was his. McCain was apparently dead set on Lieberman, was told that Lieberman was totally unacceptable to the 27% crowd, and had to come up on the fly with an alternative, and didn’t bother to check her out before offering her the position.
Rick Perlstein
@Damned, he didn’t even campaign for Congressional candidates! He simply had so much contempt for his own party (any club that would have him for a member, and all that) to do so.
Asshole
I’m too young to have any personal knowledge of this, so forgive me if it’s a stupid question. But apart from the Vietnam War stuff, what did Humphrey do to merit such contempt from modern-day liberals? Nothing I’m aware of seems to warrant it, but it was all long before my time.
Also, I read Nixonland about a year ago, so not reading it with the book club; but I didn’t get this impression of McGovern at all. He struck me (he’s always struck me) as one of the most thoroughly decent men in the history of American politics.
This has already been referenced, but a hardened political cynic like Hunter S. Thompson said this about him and that election in September 1972:
“If the current polls are reliable… Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states… This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes… understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose… Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
Rick Perlstein
That fact also shows that a competent Democratic candidate, and one more alert to the public than the ideologically arrogant McGovern, could have won, or at least kept it close.
Anne Laurie
@AAA Bonds:
I suspect that ship has sailed, if only because trying to ratfvck treatment for depression would give the Media Village a chance to play the “Oooo! Just like Eagleton! See, we can historigraphical too!” role. It’s like smoking dope — there’s so many people from the earliest Boomers and onward that’ve been there, agitating about it only heats the fringiest of each party’s fringiest supporters & they’re in the 27% base that’s gonna vote the party ticket regardless.
No, my increased disenchantment with McGovern lies in reading the cold details of his willingess to navigate right to try & steal HHH’s old-bull machine-Dem supporters, and then further right to try & co-opt Wallace’s “salt of the earth” delegates. Neither of which had any chance of being successful, but his GHWBian willingness to drop his pants and invite a public gang-rape by his most committed enemies was unpleasant to pick through. I’d known since watching that disaster of a Dem convention (on tv, I was just out of high school) that George didn’t actually care about women, people of color, gays, or the anti-war contigents, but I’d assumed he must have some Democratic principles beyond “I wanna be the Prezdint”, and the guy described in Nixonland didn’t.
Hunter Gathers
@Rick Perlstein: It wasn’t Humphrey. It was Big Ed Muskie. And HST hated Muskie more than Humphrey.
Rick Perlstein
@Jim, Foolish LIteralist, remembers correctly. Eagleton no prize.
Rick Perlstein
Asshole, you’ll see that your intuition is correct when my op-ed is published. Humphrey’s sin was mostly being “establishment” in an anti-establishment time. He wasn’t “cool.”
Anne Laurie
@James E. Powell:
If I believed that, I’d be even more discouraged about current American politics than I already am. Although there are days when it seems like an accurate description of everyone who wins office, these days.
stuckinred
@Rick Perlstein: And those pesky vets were on the mall.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rick Perlstein:
Also, Nixon was all about the “Presidential” stuff (going to China, détente, “Peace in our time”), leaving all that boring domestic policy…and the dealings with Congress…to his subordinates.
Anne Laurie
@Rick Perlstein: You are welcome to surprise me, but the odds are not in your favor.
Looking forward to your Reagan book, but the Spousal Unit is gonna have to hide all the sharp implements before I start reading it.
Asshole
@Rick Perlstein:
Who is? I’m using him as a judge of character, not politics. To someone of my generation, Nixon looks like a moderate centrist Keynesian. He seems like someone more liberal than most of the Democratic nominees I’ll probably find myself “forced” to vote for in my lifetime. But HST’s take on him was as a character when he wrote his epitaph.
Murc
I too also wonder why so many modern-day liberals despite Hubert Humphrey. I quite like the man, from what I’ve read about him.
Also, AHole’s aim is off. The Democratic loser he is thinking of who was one of the most thoroughly decent men in American politics isn’t McGovern, it’s Stephenson.
Hunter Gathers
@Rick Perlstein: It wouldn’t have mattered who the Dems ran in ’72, save the re-animated corpses of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, they were going to get the shit kicked out of them. Nixon had successfully integrated the bigots who voted for Wallace into his base. Name me one Dem candidate who could have peeled off a significant chunk of Wallace voters. One. And remember, both Humphrey and Muskie were on the same ticket in ’68, so those two are obviously out of the question.
stuckinred
@Murc: Just look in the damn wikipedia, it ain’t that hard:
Villago Delenda Est
Oops. Should have been “peace with honor”, not Chamberlain’s catchphrase. :P
Davis X. Machina
Congress was still rife with Dixecrats, and incumbents just don’t turn over that fast. Nixon couldn’t have done any better with real Republicans than with some of the Democratic incumbents. The Democratic majorities were bizarre combinations of Mondale and Sparkman and Stennis, the GOP had Karl Mundt and Chuck Percy and Ed Brooke
Asshole
@Rick Perlstein:
I’ll be interested to read it. I enjoyed your books very much, BTW. “Before the Storm” should be as widely-read as “Nixonland.” My takeaway from it was that F. Clifton White was personally responsible for building much of the wingnut dominance in the state-level Republican party infrastructure that made the massive national lurch rightward chronicled in “Nixonland” even possible for the hitherto-centrist GOP. What’s even more amazing to me is that the man receives almost no press attention for this achievement, and I myself never would’ve heard about him if I hadn’t read your book.
Rick Perlstein
Gang, I have to take off, but I just wanted to take this opportunity to share with you how deeply I appreciate the deep intellectual and emotional engagement you all made with my book. It was a pleasure to behold.
RP
stuckinred
@Rick Perlstein: Thank you.
Anne Laurie
@Rick Perlstein:
Given what HST wrote about himself & his family ‘unacknowledged’ is hardly the right word. He did self-medicate, and pretty much called it that right from his Hell’s Angels days at least, but the legal / reliable pharmacological support for HST’s brand of craziness — starting, I believe, with ADD — is still being worked out. I think that Hunter S. Thompson was a good man, broken by the torture of bad men, and calling that cowardice is cheap and thoughtless.
Damned at Random
I enjoyed the mention of Ron Ziegler as the arrogant press secretary. His disrespect for the press was mutual, IIRC. His uninformative dancing around Watergate questions was referred to as “ziegling.” I always wished that term had come into common usage as I remember seeing something similar with respect to the Valerie Plame outing investigation
Damned at Random
@Rick Perlstein:
For what it’s worth, I’m a fan. Looking forward to the Reagan book.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Based on what you know of Nixon, what, if you were in McGovern’s shoes, wouldn’t you have done to get Nixon out of the Oval office?
ETA: Where would you draw the line on making compromises?
Linda Featheringill
@Rick Perlstein:
Just wanted to say that I enjoyed your book. It took a lot of research and a lot of work to produce, and you did all this very well.
I also appreciated your comments during our discussions.
When we go to the next book, and when you have the time, why don’t you join us?
Nicole
On a train, so reading more than commenting, but had to say the next-to-last chapter had one of the greatest titles for anything ever.
Asshole
@Damned at Random:
My father talked about an incident in which Ron Ziegler let Nixon kick him in the ass on national television, while he angrily yelled at him and told him to go deal with the media. He felt that Ron Ziegler’s refusal to punch Nixon in the face at that point- Secret Service agents be damned- told you everything you needed to know about the spineless personality of Ziegler.
Anne Laurie
@Asshole:
Well, yeah, except that today there are more than 300 million of “us”, and part of what’s making us uncomfortable is the fear we won’t have enough money to kill all the perceived threats, amirite?
Villago Delenda Est
@Rick Perlstein:
I suppose from Nixon’s point of view, it was all necessary, because of Nixon’s inherent paranoia about everything…always someone seeking to damage him, to wound him, to humiliate him. Always trying to be five moves ahead in the game…with the North Vietnamese, with the Chicoms, with the Soviets…and most importantly, with the Franklins. Franklins around the corner, all the time, lurking, scheming to kick Nixon while he’s down.
Charles
I think Anne Laurie has no clue how hard it is to run for president.
And that’s even if you don’t have to contend with a ruthless guy using the national security apparatus as his dirty tricksters as an opponent, Wall Street funding him, or the unreconstructed Southern racist establishment to contend with.
Ms. Laurie, George McGovern had many faults. But he was no fool. He single-handedly built the South Dakota Democratic Party from the ground up. He was a genuine war hero and decent man.
It was America that was the fool. And, alas, apparently Rick Perlstein, who is too young to have appreciated just how difficult the situation was.
Asshole
@Anne Laurie:
We’ll always have the nukes, though, and once we get our SDI boondoggle up and running we can nuke the crap out of the rest of the world with total impunity. (Radioactive fallout is just another lie-beral myth like evolution and global warming, right)
Maude
@Anne Laurie:
HST is dead and can’t reply to the bad man statement.
A fair number of writers don’t like other writers. I hear this a lot when some writers are interviewed about their books. They stiffen and get almost hissy when another writer is mentioned.
Asshole
@Villago Delenda Est:
He seems like such a sad, sad little man. He doesn’t strike me as someone soullessly, mindlessly evil like Reagan or Bush. Nixon comes across (from reading about him, watching videos, etc., at any rate) as a bit of a Dostoevskian “Underground Man” type. The mouse that roared, the kicked dog that went mad. Nixon needed a hug more than anything else. I think McGovern should’ve said as much on national television. It couldn’t have hurt, anyway.
Charles
Some more faux history that requires urgent correction: Humphrey was disliked by the left not only because of his support for the Vietnam War, but because he was believed to have taken advantage of the vacuum created by the assassination of Robert Kennedy and because he was believed to have approved of Mayor Daley’s beating of people in the streets of Chicago. He certainly did not speak out against the police riot. He was also felt to have been to some degree a collaborator with McCarthyism, though by 1968, that was pretty much forgotten. The failure of the Kennedy supporters and the anti-Vietnam left to give Humphrey full-throated support in 1968 meant that in 1972, the regulars would sabotage anyone outside the establishment who ran.
Good grief. I can’t believe how much has been forgotten.
Anne Laurie
@Charles:
‘Anne Laurie’ is my first name.
I’m sure McGovern was no fool, a war hero, and decent in his daily life. But he still shivved Shirley Chisholm and the other Democratic feminists — or, at least, permitted his handlers to cheat them — and for that, I will probably never be able to forgive him. Since I interpret Perlstein’s reporting in Nixonland as an indication that betraying his ‘women’s lib’ supporters was just one more seriously mistaken betrayal in the search for right-wing delegates that he wasn’t going to get under any circumstances, the excuse that ‘running for president is haaaaard’ does not change my opinion.
Of course, were McGovern running as the Democratic candidate in 2012, I’d still hold my nose and vote for him, because that’s the new all-purpose slogan: DEMS 2012 — WHERE ELSE YOU GONNA GO?
Damned at Random
@Villago Delenda Est: I always imagined Nixon in retirement wondering what he could have done differently and coming up blank. I believe that defensiveness and paranoia was a mental block he could never overcome.
I guess in some way we are all damaged goods, but most of us don’t have to play it out publicly.
Charles
One more thing that needs correction:
No question that McGovern made a mistake nominating Eagleton. But here are a couple of facts that people are probably not aware of. First, Eagleton flat out lied to McGovern when McGovern asked him if he had any skeletons in his closet.
Second, the FBI slow didn’t exactly expedite the investigation of Eagleton’s background. I suspect they slow-walked it, knowing of Eagleton’s mental illness. Knowing the foibles of politicians was one of Hoover’s specialties and, while Hoover was out by the time of the convention, it’s inconceivable that Eagleton’s mental illness was unknown to the Bureau.
Finally, as to why the nomination happened so late at night… it’s because there was genuine democracy at the convention, and people who had been denied the right to speak for generations because of the color of their skins were finally allowed to speak to America. Real democracy is messy. It’s also what makes people free.
It’s a shame this generation prefers scripted conventions like we’ve seen recently to freedom.
mcd410x
@Maude: Disappointing that Perlstein blew the Ibogaine-Muskie thing.
Of course, I’m a huge fan of HST’s writing. I’m sure he was a pain in the ass! But his chronicling of Carter’s Law Day speech at UGA shows at least a bit of political judgment, doesn’t it?
Charles
Anne Laurie says, “But he still shivved Shirley Chisholm and the other Democratic feminists—or, at least, permitted his handlers to cheat them—and for that, I will probably never be able to forgive him.”
Good grief. This is one of the worst reasons I can think of for holding a grudge. Politics is about winning. Hubert Humphrey “shivved” George McGovern by refusing to abide by California’s winner-take-all rules. No one held it against Humphrey. Gary Hart called Humphrey’s release of delegates to Chisholm “desperation politics”. I think it was an attempt to use racial frictions in a last desperate attempt to stop McGovern.
Added: I don’t think any feminists of that era would agree that McGovern sold them short. I believe that he was strongly supported by all the leaders of that period.
Anne Laurie
@Charles:
Not in my blue-collar, Dems-(largely)-voting-for-Nixon neighborhood. At the time, a sizeable number of real-life Archie Bunkers said that HHH was a mole the Republicans saddled LJB with after making it clear that nobody was safe from a ‘lone gunman’ if he Made Trouble for the Wrong People. Nixon may have been Head Paranoid in Charge in 1972, but the condition was rampant throughout the American public.
Damned at Random
@Charles: I don’t think this generation “prefers” scripted conventions- the powers that be just realized the damage that letting the process play out on TV could do to them. Remember the pressure they put on Hillary Clinton in 2008 to be a good girl and NOT introduce any messy drama into the convention? A floor fight would have been ratings gold – we love our reality shows- but the consequences are unpredictable. I expect we’ll never see another meaningful party convention
Villago Delenda Est
@Charles:
Sorry, but the fuckup was not Eagleton lying to McGovern.
The fuckup was how McGovern reacted to finding out about it. The entire “support 1000%” crap.
It’s never the event. It’s the reaction to the event. McGovern really screwed up the followup to the thing. Eagleton may have lied, but McGovern screwed up the aftermath. That’s fully his problem, not Eagleton’s.
That’s what he was judged on. And found badly wanting.
mcd410x
@Anne Laurie: The Did McGovern sell them out or was it strategy to defeat Humphrey and the Old Guard for the nomination?
Nothing was sown up — there were rumors Teddy was going to fly in and take the nomination right up to the actual vote.
Charles
@Anne Laurie says
But you miss my point. I was speaking specifically about the Kennedy family/associates and the anti-Vietnam left and not about blue collar workers. It was those folks’ absence from the election that cost Humphrey the presidency.
Anne Laurie
@Charles:
Us wimmen and our silly little grievances! It’s not like Chisholm was, you know, a “real” politician or anything…
Seriously: McGovern’s people had the chance to change American politics, by treating Chisholm and Abzug and other ‘minority coalition’ candidates as allies instead of sideshow distractions. They boggled that chance, because they wanted to bet on getting one more WIN from the old bulls in the Democratic machine. Which, as we can see with our 20/20 hindsight, meant that they turned a great many individuals away from the political process for years to come, poisoned the traditional Democratic mainstream by setting ‘minorities’ against each other, let the CREEPsters capture the blue-collar Wallace voters by default, and still lost the godsdamned election.
Damned at Random
@Asshole:
I just read the epitaph. This paragraph could be the epilogue to Nixonland:
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
Charles
@Villago Delenda Est says:
Excuse me. This is ridiculous. This is like saying that the drunk driver who kills a child isn’t responsible; the kid shouldn’t have been frozen when he saw the car bearing down on him.
McGovern considered Eagleton a friend. He knew him. They had worked together. Eagleton showed no signs of mental illness.
There were a series of errors, starting from the late choice of running mate (a consequence of the California delegation fight), and proceeding to the “1000%” slip. But people who run for office are people, dammit. You’ve seen the press tear Al Gore apart for “inventing” the Internet, haven’t you? Don’t you realize that this was an early version of that?
David Broder, who knocked Muskie out of the race by reporting that he cried, lied. Was he working for Nixon? I don’t know. But he could have been. Lucianne Goldberg was a mole inside the McGovern campaign. There were other dirty tricksters stirring mischief. Why focus on McGovern, who was neither a genius nor a saint, but he was a decent man?
Anne Laurie
@Charles:
Are you trying to say that Kennedy “royalty” could’ve swept in on eagles’ wings in 1968, and saved us poor strife-torn Democrats from ourselves? And what would that have to do with HHH and the long-standing suspicion that he was a Republican pretending to be a Democrat in order to damage the Democratic party?
Villago Delenda Est
@Charles:
McGovern was (and is) a decent man, but he screwed up how he reacted to the Eagleton revelation. Bad damage control. Something I’d expect much better of from a guy who commanded a badly damaged bomber back to base during WWII.
Eagleton lied, but McGovern’s reaction to it is what he was judged on. That is my point. It was very badly handled, and all Nixon had to do was allow his enemy to continue on shooting himself, repeatedly, in the foot.
Damned at Random
@Villago Delenda Est: McGovern thought he could bring the Eagleton issue in for a safe landing. He couldn’t. The 1000% was the same kind of pep talk as telling the crew of his bomber to stay at their stations. Eagleton should have bowed out gracefully.
Charles
@Anne Laurie says:
Anne Laurie, that’s not how anyone saw it. As I recall, McGovern got into the race because the Kennedy family wanted him to. He put together an impressive grassroots effort, which Chisholm never matched. She ran in only a dozen primaries, and was unknown by most of the American people.
It was a time of near-chaos, both in the country and in the Democratic Party. A lot of people got to speak at the Democratic convention who had never been allowed to speak– nor would ever be allowed to speak again. So many got to speak that the nomination was pushed into the wee hours of the morning. Are you arguing in favor of running it to dawn?
Maybe they should have just run the convention another day. I don’t know if that was even feasible. I do know that the disorganization of the convention did work against McGovern. If he couldn’t even unite his party, could he unite a divided nation?
I am not here to say that McGovern was a saint or a genius. I am here to say that running for president is a lot harder than you apparently believe it is.
Charles
@Anne Laurie says:
If you only knew what you are saying.
The Kennedy family was devastated in 1968. John and Bobby had both been murdered in cold blood. The family was barely able to participate in the convention, but they saw it as a matter of duty to Bobby’s memory and to country.
McGovern was the decent man, the friend of the family, who stood with the Kennedy delegates–themselves in mourning– to try to hold things together and uphold Bobby’s ideals. It was an impossible task. But it was the gratitude of the Kennedy family and delegates that was the nucleus of the 1972 campaign. People remembered just what a decent man McGovern had been.
I have never heard a suspicion that Hubert Humphrey was a Republican. Only that he was an opportunist and a hollow man.
Charles
@Villago Delenda Est says:
Being brave in combat and smart in politics are very (very) different things. Again, what about Al Gore’s reaction to the media’s claim that he said he invented the Internet or that he had been the one to discover Love Canal (and so on)? Couldn’t Al Gore have done better?
In theory, sure. But people are people. Al Gore was one of the most skilled and savvy politicians of pur lifetime. If he could get rolled that easily, so could anyone.
Running for president is really, really hard. Over the course of your lifetime, maybe a dozen or so people out of 300 million will become president. You and I, despite that fact that we have perfect 20/20 hindsight probably aren’t one of them. Does that suggest anything to you?
Charles
We’ve talked about this enough.
I have one last comment. I hope that everyone who reads Rick Perlstein’s book also watches “One Bright Shining Moment.”
We should never engage in hagiography of politicians. They are people. But neither should we slander them. I would wager that not one person on this thread could win an election for any office higher than county clerk, self included.
Don K
@Murc:
I was a senior in high school/freshman in college during the ’72 campaign, and all I can say is you had to be there. Vietnam was the issue at the time, and any pol who was wrong on that couldn’t be forgiven, no matter how many times he had been right in his life. In retrospect I can say HHH was a good man, and probably would have been a good president, but he should have been elected in ’68.
Murc
@Charles:
Speaking as a member of the current generation (an under-thirty, for at least another couple months) I do not prefer a ‘scripted’ convention. I prefer a convention that is largely irrelevant because the rank and file Democratic voters, rather than party apparatchiks, have already chosen a candidate via a free and open primary process.
If I had my way, there would be NO superdelegates at all, and we’d run our primaries with a form of STV wherein if all fifty states finished without someone taking a delegate majority, the person with the lowest delegate count got knocked out and their delegates got re-distributed. Fuck backroom deals.
Murc
@Don K:
You know, I keep hearing ‘You had to be there’ as an explanation from people who lived through that era, and it’s never really satisfied me. I don’t get it from people who lived through, say, WWII, and I know I won’t have any problem explaining the pathologies of the Clinton and Bush years to those who come after me.
That’s not meant to be a dig, or a slight. I’m just saying.
Ben Mays
I listened to the audiobook all spring on my evening drives home (2 hours from suburbs to rural life). It was a wonderful and awful experience. I’m 52 and was precousiously political in those days. All of this was both parochial and national for me. My maternal grnmdparents were machine politicos in WVA. I remember going into homes in 1972 in the coalfields where the three pictures you always saw in miners homes (no aprocypha here, this was very common) were Jesus, JFK and John L. Lewis. I was living in suburban GOP Chicago (DuPage) in 68, and the view there was exactly has described.
At the end, Humphrey chased the Dixiecrats from the party in 48 and did LBJ’s legwork to get so much real progressive legislation done. He’s still on my hero list for that.
swellsman
About McGovern . . . yeah, I had the same thought when I first read Perstein’s book. Which is too bad, because until then my closest read of the 1972 election had been HST’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. And that certainly made McGovern look fairly good.
It’s always sad to find out that historic figures you might semi-revere are after all just people too, but this is the kind of multifaceted look at history that helps us resolve our view a little bit closer to the ever elusive Truth.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
That paragraph just doesn’t make any sense.
joel hanes
I am pushing 59 and was deeply involved in the 1972 election.
And my recollections and opinions align nearly perfectly with those of Charles, contra Perlstein.
Hubert Humphrey, who had for decades been a dependable, mostly-honest, and well-loved liberal, joined the Dark Side and forfeited the support of his liberal base by chasing after the votes of “centrists” — his unvarying support for Johnson’s continual escalation in Viet Nam had much the same feeling as the deficit hawkery of those of today’s Democrats who, for the sake of political expediency and the votes of imagined “centrists”, find themselves unable to speak out in defense of Social Security.
Asshole
I’m sorry, I’m just still not getting why I’m not supposed to think McGovern is a thoroughly decent human being. Was he an inept politician? Sure, he’s an idealist and they’re usually crappy politicians. Did he make tactical mistakes that I don’t think one would need to look at in hindsight to say that they were maybe bad ideas? Absolutely. But how was he not a decent person? Because he slighted Shirley Chisholm? Because he ran for President and tried to win (albeit with a stunningly inept campaign) instead of just throwing the election and using it as a bully pulpit to advance civil rights or gay rights or womens’ rights? I still don’t see it. This sounds to me like an inverse of the GOP position that candidate X isn’t worth nominating because, while potentially electable and pledging to criminalize abortion if elected, they’re actually trying to win over moderate voters and are refusing to pledge to impose the death penalty on women who get abortions (or what have you).
Maybe I had to be there to understand why HHH was a disgusting monster and McGovern was a craven whore, but from my 33-year-old’s vantage point they both look like the kinds of nominees I’d vote for in a heartbeat, I’d pound the pavement going door-to-door and campaigning for, I’d donate money to, I’d work to rile as many people as possible up about. Neither one of them could get nominated by the Democratic Party of today, of course, though, so it’s a rather moot point.
Omnes Omnibus
@Asshole: AL doesn’t seem to like politicians who compromise in order to try to get elected or to pass legislation. Note that she did not answer my question* above regarding what compromises she would have been willing to make were she in McGovern’s shoes. See also, her palpable disappointment in Obama. I think she wants her politicians to remain pure. It is tough, if you want your politicians to be pure, to decide between someone pure who loses and someone who compromises and wins, but both HHH and McGovern compromised and lost. It is easy for the purist to despise them.
(*) I am not suggesting that she has any obligation to answer questions posed by a random commenter.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, I want “my” politicians to remain effective — LBJ certainly made compromises, many of them less than savory. If you’re going to give something away, either do it for love or for profit; don’t throw away your convictions in search of a ‘compromise’ with a political opponent who’s going to make you move 95% in his direction and then vote against you anyway. It’s the difference between, shall we say, President Obama’s negotiations on the HCR bill and his pre-negotiation collapse on the renewal of the Bush feed-the-rich tax cuts. I was taught that Humphrey was always a political whore, someone who got his first big break enabling Joe McCarthy, and who was suspected of being an undercover Republican within the Democratic party. I was also under the impression that McGovern was a nic man who was in over his head as a presidential candidate, but the details in Perlstein’s book about him… aren’t flattering.
Phoenix Woman
@Anne Laurie:
Except that the McGovern of Perlstein’s book isn’t the McGovern those persons who were alive and politically active in 1972 remember.
As for the HCR debacle: Obama killed the public option because he wanted AHIP’s and other health-industry and insurance-industry lobbyists’ backing for Democrats in 2010. That’s why he let WellPoint’s Liz Fowler write for Max Baucus a business-coddling, public-option-trashing, most-of-America-screwing HCR plan that the Democrats knew months beforehand was going to help sink them in the midterms even with health- and insurance-industry money helping them. (And guess what? The industry reneged on its promise anyway.)
Phoenix Woman
@Anne Laurie:
I’m beginning to think that this is all part of a big push by institutional Democrats to make everyone stop trying to halt Obama’s courting traditional GOP corporate donors with his hard shoves rightward, the idea apparently being that we’re not supposed to enforce party ideology the way that the GOP enforces it in their party (that is to say, effectively).
Phoenix Woman
@Charles:
I certainly don’t recall Bella Abzug or Gloria Steinem saying that he’d sold them short. And looking for comments by them on him turns up nothing the least bit nasty, during or after the 1972 elections.
Paul in KY
I liked VP Humphrey alot. I think he would have made a fine president, certainly much, much better than Nixon.
We all have our flaws, politicians are politicians. I feel strongly that Hubert Humphrey cared more for the little man than just about all of our politicians today.
Paul in KY
@Ben Mays: Hear, hear!
Chris
@Paul in KY:
Humphrey seems to me to’ve been a spokesman for a certain kind of liberalism, which was radical during the battles of the New Deal years and became the establishment after that, once New Deal reforms had become the new normal. As Rick points out, his problem was being an establishment man in anti-establishment times: his association with LBJ and Vietnam turned many liberals off from him.
But I’d add that a lot of the support for him and his wing of the party came from the people who would become Nixon voters – white voters from the unions and urban machines, who’d been staunch Democrats because of the New Deal, but were turned off by the civil rights, socially liberal, and anti-war (as they saw it, anti-patriotic) attitudes of the new Democrats.
I’d say Humphrey’s problem was being a centrist man in the beginning of an anti-centrist age.