The Hero of a Year Ago
Dyk, Ted Van
The hero of a year ago by Ted Van Dyk It won’t be long now until Theodore White and the other campaign chroniclers give us their versions of what happened to George McGovern in 1972. Teddy...
...Where was the poll taken,’’ asked Salinger, who’d just returned from an Ohio speaking date, “in our Ohio campaign headquarters...
...Our private polls told us that few, in fact, knew those views...
...And how, in reality, had Muskie done...
...ernmental Relations Commission and and, with everything else going wrong, Humphrey, formerly a mayor himself, the petty fights within the campaign had been the Johnson Administra- organization...
...In early have no idea whether McGovern was April, riding in his car in Philadelphia, simply pipe-dreaming about KenMcGovern had asked me what I nedy’s availability, or whether he had thought about a possible running good reason to think it was real...
...Then came the Humphrey-McGovern showdown in California...
...But on that January Sunday, at least, he had kept it alive...
...McGovern proved, in both primary and non-primary states, that individual citizens can still make a great deal of difference in the electoral process...
...The result was phenomenal...
...There is hardly any need for further mutual recrimination...
...We finished, finally, 2 1 points behind Nixon in Ohio...
...And, called Hubert,” McGovern said with a if he’s on the ticket, I’m certain I can sly grin, “and he told me he’d have to beat Nixon...
...He had, after all, begun his political career as a full-time Party organizer in South Dakota...
...I have no doubt that if a more traditional Democrat had been nominated and then defeated, the cries would have gone Lip blaming the loss on our abandonment of “new politics” for the old...
...If you turned on the sound, you heard the citizens complaining about their problems...
...On the morning of the first TV debate between them in Los Angeles, McGovern sent Humphrey flowers (it was his “I’m absolutely sure that, if I’m nomibirthday) and then phoned him...
...Ted Kennedy, it turned out, ord...
...Then he moved A few hours later I saw one of the on to talk about the platform and McGovern children in tears (the Post-convention campaign organizaHumphreys and McGoverns had been tion...
...We also fared miserably in Illinois, losing heavily to Muskie in the delegate contest...
...Probably some of both...
...Exhausted by a generation of overblown speeches and promises, those people didn’t necessarily expect him to have the answers...
...Sometimes he adds Ed Muskie (for not withdrawing from the Democratic race as early as Hart thinks he should have...
...His background, even his Senate committee assignments, had simply not given him much exposure to the subtle problems of economics, race, and urban affairs...
...challenged, a McGovern victory in Then, in mid-June, when McGov- November still seemed possible...
...Our sole objective in Florida was to head off John Lindsay, which we did, running (at a meager six per cent) less than a percentage point behind him...
...In conversation in the spring of 1971, he said he tended to agree...
...It’s a damned shame all this has happened to George, because I don’t know how long it will be until we have a President who feels like that...
...Humphrey, after Florida the odds-on front-runner, unaccountably spent more time in California, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and other states than he did in Wisconsin...
...Their main purpose was to dispel the impression that he was a “one-issue” candidate...
...It offered a number of policy alternatives, including the oft-proposed idea of “an annual federal payment to every citizen...
...Having worked for Hubert Humphrey in both the 1964 and 1968 campaigns, and served as his assistant in the period between, I had hoped he would not be a candidate in 1972...
...nee, I went to New Orleans to repre- Within a few days it all came apart...
...I knew it was over for sure the first week in October, when the letters and phone calls to headquarters abruptly dropped off...
...Grandmaison’s young canvassers covered every household-talking with the families, writing personal follow-up notes, then calling back again...
...In Colorado Nixon defeated McGovern by 28 percentage points, but Floyd Haskell unseated Republican Senator Gordon Allott...
...One booklet, “McGovern on the Issues,” was widely distributed...
...And you can be damned sure he wouldn’t try to prove his manhood by prolonging a war that shouldn’t have been started in the first place...
...There were position papers for the few who cared about such things...
...A favorite villain has been Gordon Weil, McGovern’s executive assistant and traveling companion, who has been blamed for suggesting the illfated $ I ,000-for-everyone scheme and for inadequately checking out Tom Eagleton in Miami Beach...
...I nated, 1’11 get Teddy...
...But the campaign’s strength with the voters lay in its sense, if you will, of anti-politics...
...From Wisconsin until the California primary, the press treated McGovern to an uncritical free ride and the financial and organizational advantages that flowed from it-the likes of which presidential politics had never seen, except, perhaps, in Eisenhower’s 1952 honeymoon period...
...Teddy White, the public’s favorite on this sort of thing, will undoubtedly report in his book the conclusions he told me he’d reached last fall: first, that the national mood was more in tune with Nixon than McGovern...
...Finally, in midFebruary, he overruled the advisers and plunged handshaking into the shoe factories of Manchester...
...the people were’t ready for him...
...The Middle Americans who gave McGovern their votes in places like New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Southern California certainly were not doing so because they shared his affection for long-haired students or his mildly progressive views on amnesty, abortion, or marijuana...
...Why not conduct the “unannounced” campaign usual at such an early stage...
...But in Wisconsin, he had become the “Candidate in Full Voice and Stride...
...Then came Wisconsin, where everything worked...
...One by one they dropped out, leaving only Lindsay and Chisholm to compete with McGovern and the “serious” candidates in the primaries...
...Despite the cool reception, paigning, still off balance from the McGovern was enthusiastically confi- convention credentials challenge and dent as he left the conference that the Eagleton episode, McGovern day-most of all, he told me, because lurched from one crisis of credibility to another...
...he had won the Illinois delegate contest, 59 to 4. Wisconsin was, in fact, the first primary in four where Muskie had not made a better showing than McGovern...
...After the convention, I served as full-time director of issues and research for the McGovern-Shriver general campaign...
...And so on, at all levels of the ballot...
...Humphrey’s unchar- assumed McGovern had good reason acteristic assault took McGovern by to know that it was so...
...The hero of a year ago by Ted Van Dyk It won’t be long now until Theodore White and the other campaign chroniclers give us their versions of what happened to George McGovern in 1972...
...one of a half-dozen people submitted One of the most serious deficien- to him for consideration earlier in the cies was, of course, the choice of a day...
...I turned to Lee White who was running Sargent Shriver’s vice presidential campaign, and asked: “Lee, did George McGovern or any of us have anything to do with all of this...
...Would they see us through New Hampshire...
...But it was also a relatively accurate portrayal of McGovern’s candidacy...
...his prediction in a press conferhad served for years on the Intergov- ence of a probable Vietcong victory...
...Di c k Do ugh er ty , McGovern’s normally-sensible campaign press secretary, has also faulted the press, at least the working press...
...We were getting our free ride in the media largely because McGovern was good copy-the nice-guy underdog coming out of nowhere-and the familiar Humphrey and Muskie were dull...
...The appeal was calculated and manipulative...
...Senator William Fulbright, discussing McGovern’s misfortunes with a half-dozen fellow Democrats one evening late in the campaign, said he wanted a McGovern presidency “because George is such an ordinary man...
...I, for one, had no question of McGovern’s instincts or his ability to ultimately master what he didn’t already know...
...If he wanted to run, certainly he ought to be the first liberal candidate to declare-thereby preempting money and support that might go to other liberals...
...Each voter, in a sense, was being offered an empty canvas on which he could create the McGovern portrait of his choice...
...Between 1968 and 1972, all elements of the Party have had their chance-and all have lost...
...McGovern struck a receptive chord with his pledge to lower property taxes, and Republican crossover votes went to him in large numbers...
...These explanations remind me of what happened at a campaign staff meeting a few days before the November election...
...and second, that McGovern should have made “the crisis of the American city” the central issue of his campaign...
...The receipts from that letter and subsequent mailings to the same list kept the McGovern campaign alive throughout all of 197 1. It’s forgotten now, but back in mid- and late-1 97 1 , Harold Hughes, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, William Proxmire, John Lindsay, and Shirley Chisholm (not to mention Edmund Muskie or Hubert Humphrey) were running ahead, close behind, or even with George McGovern in the national political polls...
...Looking back, it’s hard to say w h e t her M c Govern’s surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire was due to his personal campaigning in regular-Democratic, blue-collar areas and to the thorough canvass, or to Muskie’s tears...
...If George McGovern could have faced Richard Nixon sometime between the Wisconsin and California primaries, he might well have won...
...From Inattention to Adulation “Some people have told me that I ought to declare my candidacy right now,” McGovern said to me late in 1970, during one brief meeting at his office...
...Hart, leaning back in his swivel chair, grandly pronounced for the umpteenth time the HumphreyEaglet o n - B r e m er - Mus ki e B 1 a me Theory: “You know, if George McGovern loses this election, there are several people to blame, etc., etc...
...The difference was that they didn’t have the mailing list and the money it brought in...
...One paper, dealing with income redistribution and tax reform, was drafted cntirely by Weil...
...But New Hampshire was still enough to keep the campaign alive...
...At the end of the meeting, McGovern, standing at the head of the room, made a direct appeal for funds...
...The rest we know...
...He slapped his fist into be nice to me after all that kindness...
...Shaky on the Issues Muskie’s decline was generally viewed as the result of his vague stands on the issues: who could say what Muskie thought about the war, or how he would change the welfare system...
...He wouldn’t stand for pricefixing or these outrages against people who work for wages and pay their taxes...
...In Florida, for instance, voters surveyed rated McGovern “more conservative” than any of the candidates except Wallace and Jackson...
...The McGovern disaster, after all, did not bury many of the non-incum bent liberal Democrats who shared the ticket with him...
...I supposed he was asking consideration of alternatives from his others the same question...
...One possibility, it said, might involve a $1 ,000-per-person payment...
...McGovern, by contrast, was in these early days building a reputation as the issue-oriented candidate...
...In Iowa it was Nixon by 17 points, yet Dick Clark turned out incumbent Senator Jack Miller by 11 points...
...and Arthur Bremer (for shooting George Wallace, who might otherwise have run as a thirdparty candidate and taken votes from Nixon...
...Gary Hart, the nominal campaign manager, has offered other reasons for the debacle...
...tion’s principal champion of urban Worn thin from months of caminterests...
...And we were getting our hearty organizational and financial support from 1968 McCarthy and Kennedy supporters rallying to the flag of the unfinished peace cause...
...But there is a danger that Deniocratic officeholders and candidates will misread 1972 as a public rejection not of the person of George McGovern, temporarily overwhelmed by circumstance and events, but of the very premise that men and political parties should actively attempt to redress social injustice...
...What the Democratic Party clearly needed was a candidate who could bridge the gap between the 1968 peace activists and regular Democrats...
...it looked quite authoritative but consisted largely of McGovern quotations and lists of bills the Senator had co-sponsored...
...What Did It All Mean...
...And so, when McGovern’s policy stands turned out to be only slightly better researched or thought out than those of, say, Sam Yorty, the shock was greater than it would have been for other candidates...
...I felt that McGovern, whose peace credentials were good but who also had been the first to join Humphrey after his nomination on the Chicago platform, could best do that...
...The fact is we were there because we had no choice...
...Instead, they began propagating the idea that, as it usually was expressed, “McGovern proposed an unprecedented number of detailed and specific programs to meet the nation’s needs...
...There were many sighs of relief that, when Muskie’s campaign collapsed in New Hampshire, George Wallace, Scoop Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, and John Lindsay were not on the ballot to share in the windfall...
...The Fall From Grace First, Scoop Jackson, moving through Nebraska a week before the primary there, raised and distorted the “acid, amnesty, and abortion” issues...
...the tragicomic search for a new deliver a speech on urban affairs...
...On Sunday, January 9, we convened a last-ditch meeting of major financial contributors at McGovern’s home in Washington...
...The campaign alumni, in their books, will unsurprisingly cast themselves as both protagonists and heroes, unconnected with any of the major errors behind the disaster...
...I know it...
...These papers were directed primarily toward the 1968 Kennedy and McCarthy supporters, whom we expected to be the base of any McGovern organizational and financial effort...
...The policy papers themselves, with the exception of an “Alternate Defense Budget,’’ prepared under the direction of McGovern’s legislative assistant, John Holum, were largely rehashes of long-standing Democratic doctrine, quickly put together by Holum and Gordon Weil...
...I, for one, vice-presidential candidate...
...Pierre Salinger, the Muskie and Humphrey, speaking ear- diplomat-negotiator and the confusion lier in the day, had received far of explanations about his role...
...Too many *ex-journalists were involved in the .McGovern campaign, he says, and everyone knows that journalists (presumably excepting Joe Kraft) are not qualified to make serious judgments or run a presidential campaign...
...The Senator personally wrote a long letter of declaration and sent it to the hundreds of thousands of people on the mailing list left over from fund appeals for the McGovernHatfield Amendment to end the war...
...and the press was soft on Nixon...
...Most of them personally favored McGovern, he said in an article in Newsweek...
...Prospects in Illinois also looked bad...
...Mcwarmer receptions from the mayors...
...1,000 per conference McGovern flew down to cent...
...I was surprised Maryland, for several years) after to hear that Kennedy was availablewatching Humphrey’s all-out attack everything flowing from his friends on the $1,000 plan and the Alternate had indicated to the contrary-but I Defense Budget...
...Rather, they saw and heard him as an honest man who, whatever his views on the issues, could be trusted...
...George McGovern was different because he appeared not to be identified with the old programs, promises, and failures, and because he really seemed to respond to the individual’s concerns...
...With only an hour left until a viewed McGovern’s campaign...
...you...
...With its talent for hyperbole, the press transformed this performance into a New Messiah version of McGovern that bore little relation to the facts...
...He was probably right to do so...
...Suddenly, the obscure man whose chances could not be taken seriously, became the fresh Prairie Populist, moving from news magazine covers into the hearts of the people in his quest for a more decent and moral politics...
...But the gaps were there...
...Yet the campaign was, I am convinced, of some lasting value...
...Nor would the way the public, led by the press, others...
...I expect that in 1976 the nominating procedure will be much more open because of McGovern’s campaign...
...pressed their preference...
...After several moments of nervous shifting and throat-clearing by all present, Max Palevsky of Los Angeles pledged $150,000, almost half the amount finally raised that day...
...One had to sympathize with the complaints of Ed Muskie, whom the press all but counted out after Wisconsin...
...But McGovern kept insisting that these two groups couldn’t produce enough votes for a victory...
...But, I said, he could still do that many months hence...
...Florida was expensive, inhospitable, and had too many candidates...
...In personal appearances and in television commercials produced by Charles Guggenheim, George McGovern listened as much as he talked...
...The exchange marked a change in would not serve after all...
...thus they should have adopted the subjectivity of the “new journalism” and exTed Van Dyk was Director of Issues and Research for the McGovern-Shriver campaign...
...The general assignment reporterswho during the early stages are the only reporters covering a presidential campaign-paid little attention to what was in the policy papers...
...In Illinois Nixon won by 19 points, but Dan Walker nonetheless defeated Republican Governor Richard Ogilvie...
...Several of us, and then McGovern himself, painted bright pictures of the victories ahead-if only we could finance the next two months...
...But even if the Senator didn’t know all the answers, he did sincerely want to listen to the homely problems of ordinary people (like those he’d grown up with...
...By late August, a majority of Americans polled reported that they considered Nixon, trickster of yore, the far more trustworthy of the two candidates...
...I think I probably had as good a vantage point as anyone for observing the campaign...
...Thus, from June, 1971, until July, 1972, I served George McGovern on a volunteer basis-offering counsel, raising money, overseeing his campaigns in several primary states, and, then, at the July convention, managing his efforts at the platform sessions...
...In mate...
...attaining that state-of-being a candidate so seldom reaches, in which he is confidently and fully in tune with the electorate...
...They were, in order: Hubert Humphrey (for attacking McGovern’s $1 ,000-per-citizen plan in California...
...I don’t mean ordinary in any negative sense, but the presidency was designed for ordinary men-not for a succession of so many larger-than-life men on horseback...
...his Palm for emphasis...
...And with the tidal wave of publicity came a tidal wave of money...
...encouraging, in any case, to know that Even at the convention, where he was thinking seriously about it, Middle America saw its Richard Daley although his own candidacy, at that ousted and its deepest moral beliefs point, was still a long shot...
...Everyone with the exception of Gary Hart (who, after traveling through the primary states, suggested all-out efforts in both Florida and Illinois) agreed that we should begin in New Hampshire...
...He’d finished 10 percentage points ahead of McGovern in New Hampshire, and 3 points ahead of McGovern in Florida...
...The mailinglist money was no longer enough...
...But then the honeymoon began to end...
...In fact, the policy papers were thin, and McGovern’s first-hand expertise was largely limited to Vietnam and the hunger issue...
...In the press reports, his slow rise was linked to shifting public attitudes-on the war, on moral standards, on the tax and welfare systems...
...The caring was something in itself...
...sent him at the National Conference In rapid succession there were the of Mayors...
...I told him I thought it was a bad idea...
...We’ve long since had George McGovern’s own explanations: he was too moral...
...If George McGovern were President he wouldn’t stand for a CIA or FBI pushing people around the way they do now, or the Pentagon building and buying what it pleased...
...Govern’s comparison of Nixon to But that was to be expected-Muskie Hitler...
...The White House strategists now say ‘that, because of his overseas triumphs in Peking and Moscow, Nixon would have beaten any Democrat in 1972, although McGovern was the candidate of their dreams...
...When you worried about drug problems in your children’s high school, you saw the worry in his face...
...You saw George McGovern nodding, agreeing, giving the camera an earnest profile-his lips not moving until the very end...
...A new wave of fighting broke out in Vietnam just one week before the primary, pushing the peace issue forward...
...Many name had to be formally placed on of the gaps and improvisations that the nominating petitions, McGovern had seemed insignificant before would suddenly turned to Tom Eagleton, now be examined more closely...
...It seems to me that Richard Nixon won in 1972 because people thought he offered competence while they thought McGovern did not...
...Then it examined other suggestions...
...Gene Pokorny, who coordinated our primary campaign in Wisconsin, had been intensely organizing the state for months...
...A1 Barkan of COPE claims McGovern lost because he was anti-labor...
...then, you heard McGovern briefly telling them that they were right...
...The race was settled when Ed Muskie hired a flatbed truck and set it up outside William Loeb’s newspaper office...
...And, believe me, we’ll settle up with them afterward...
...A Humphrey candidacy in ’72 felt, would only reopen the Democratic Party’s ’68 wounds...
...In Delaware Nixon beat McGovern by more than 20 points, but unknown Democrat Joseph Biden upset Senator J. Caleb Boggs...
...There was some question as to whether the list was McGovern’s or belonged equally to all the Amendmen t’s sponsors, but McGovern solved that simply by using it as his own...
...And the press, increasingly bored with the primaries, had a good story...
...Then came the New Hampshire primary, which the pundits would later call a masterstroke of McGovern political strategy...
...It must have been all those other guys...
...Political pollsters Richard Scamman and Ben Wattenberg have told us that, despite their warnings, McGovern strayed .too far from the ideological center...
...There was a long moment of silence as each of the potential donors watched the others for some sign of commitment...
...Tom Eagleton (for being Tom Eagleton...
...After Wisconsin, we were able to outspend each of the remaining Democratic contenders by as much as 5 to 1. Some of this reward from press and public was deserved...
...surprise, and McGovern counterat- Then came the chaos of Miami tacked on Humphrey’s Vietnam rec- Beach...
...It was mind...
...On the final day of the Eagleton disclosures...
...What do you think...
...Most of these policy stands were in the form of position papers issued early in the campaign...
...Later, Palevsky was to abandon the campaign over a policy dispute...
...Wisconsin, on April 7, offered us our best chance...
...He was, essentially, a man on a hot streak...
...When you spoke about unfair taxes, he heard you...
...If you watched the Guggenheim commercials and turned the sound off, you saw factory workers, housewives, farmers, old people-all with their lips moving...
...Both running mate...
...A ern seemed an almost-certain nomi- month later, it did not...
...I gave him two names and the any case, the idea served to block reasons why...
...McGovern had worked his heart out for 16 months, earning little but derision from politicians and commentators...
...Apparently not,” Lee said...
...And what the people wanted in 1972, in my judgment, is what they still- want and do not have: political leadership which not only will make government more responsive to the needs of the individual citizen, but will devise a more satisfactory relationship between the two...
...Few presidential candidates, including John Kennedy in 1960, have really known all the issues as they entered a campaign...
...Crying for Joy In New Hampshire itself, both Joseph Grandmaison, the state campaign manager, and Hart said the only chance for votes lay with the Boston commuters living in the southern part of the state and the remnants of the 1968 McCarthy peace activists...
...But perhaps the greatest contribution will prove to be the cathartic the campaign has provided to the Democratic Party...
...As he campaigned, McGovern always stopped to ask a few questions of each voter, looking him straight in the eye, instead of grasping his hand and looking ahead to the next man with a pro forma “How are He was not a George Wallace, who was different from the others because he angrily shouted his brand of Poujadist “truth...
...It was about then that Pat Caddell, the campaign’s young pollster, burst into my office with the news that “we’re only behind by four points in Ohio...
...A month later, 15 months before the first 1972 primary, McGovern formally declared his candidacy...
...But, to do decently there, we would have to make a good showing somewhere else...
...Joseph Kraft, in his syndicated column, has several times stressed the explanation he developed last October...
...next-door neighbors in Chevy Chase, I was encouraged...
...I also felt it would needlessly expose Humphrey to undeserved abuse...
Vol. 5 • May 1973 • No. 3
