All Things in Moderation

George McGovern, RIP

10 Responses

1. 

   jnc4p, on October 22, 2012 at 8:40 am said:

   Thanks for that piece Mark. I was on Rolling Stone today and came across Hunter S. Thompson’s original piece from 1973 about the campaign. Stories like this incidentally are why I love Rolling Stone’s reporting.

   “HST: The Eagleton Affair was the first serious crack in McGovern’s image as the anti-politician. He dumped Eagleton for reasons that still aren’t… that he still refuses to talk about. Eagleton’s mental state was much worse than was ever explained publicly. How much worse, it’s hard to say right now, but that’s something I’ll have to work on…

   In any case there was no hope of keeping Eagleton on the ticket.

   The Eagleton thing is worth looking at for a second in terms of the difference between perception and reality. McGovern was perceived as a cold-hearted, political pragmatist who dumped this poor, neurotic, good guy from Missouri because he thought people wouldn’t vote for him because they were afraid that shock treatments in the past might have some kind of lingering effect on his mind. Whereas, in fact, despite denials of the McGovern staff in the last days of the campaign – when I was one of the five or six reporters who were pushing very aggressively to find out more about Eagleton and the real nature of his mental state – I spent about ten days in late September, early October, in St. Louis trying to dig up Eagleton’s medical record out of the Barnes Hospital, or actually the Rennard Hospital in the Washington University Medical Center. Despite this, Mankiewicz denied knowing anything about it, because he’d promised to protect the person who told him about it in the first place…

   I knew he was lying because I had all the facts from other people in the campaign whose names I couldn’t use. I couldn’t quote them, because I had promised I wouldn’t say where I got the information. About three weeks after the election, though, Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post wrote a long series on the Eagleton Affair, and here’s the way he explains how Mankiewicz reacted to the initial shock of this information about Eagleton… He’s talking about the fact that two reporters from the Knight newspapers got hold of the information about the same time as Gary and Frank did. The same person who called them, called John Knight in Detroit, and two reporters from the Detroit Free Press – or the Washington bureau of Knight newspapers – flew out to Sioux Falls with a long memo on the Eagleton situation. They hadn’t broken the story yet, but they were about to. They were trying to be… first they were trying to be fair with McGovern and, second, they were trying to use what they had to get more – which is a normal journalistic kind of procedure.

   Ed: A normal what kind of procedure?

   HST: Journalistic. If you have half a story and you don’t know the rest, you use what you have to pry the rest out of someone.

   Ed: Leverage.

   HST: Here’s what Mankiewicz told Haynes Johnson after the election was over, when it no longer mattered: “As Mankiewicz says, they had come up with a very incoherent and largely unpublishable memo full of rumors and unsubstantiated material – but a memo that was clearly on the right track.” The memo contained such things as drinking reports and reports that Eagleton had been hospitalized and given electro-shock treatments for psychiatric problems. “But the real crusher,” Mankiewicz said, “was a passage in the memo that had quotations around it as if it had been taken from a hospital record. It said that Tom Eagleton had been treated with electro-shock therapy at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for, and this was the part that was quoted, ‘severe manic-depressive psychosis with suicidal tendencies.’ And that scared me.”

   That was Mankiewicz talking, and here’s the explanation he gave for why he lied to all the reporters, including me, who had asked him about this… Because I knew… I had that exact quote from several people on the McGovern staff, who wanted to release it. They thought that if people knew the truth about the Eagleton situation – that there was no way he could possibly be kept on the ticket – that the “perception” of McGovern’s behavior with Eagleton might be drastically altered. Eagleton would no longer be the wronged good guy, but what he actually was – an opportunistic liar.

   Ed: An opportunistic liar.

   HST: With a history of very serious mental disorders and no reason for anyone to believe they wouldn’t recur. Here’s what Mankiewicz… here’s the reason Mankiewicz gives for not explaining this to the press at the time. This is Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post again: “Mankiewicz says ‘he stalled furiously’ with the newspaper representatives, appealed to their patriotism and promised them tangible news breaks. Both McGovern and Eagleton would have complete physicals later at Walter Reed Hospital, and challenge the other candidates to do the same and release the medical results. When that happened, he went on, he would try to arrange either an exclusive interview with Eagleton or give them a news cycle break on the Eagleton medical story.”

   http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/timewarp-campaign-72-19730705?page=2

   Was it your impression at the time that the Eagleton affair was the end of McGovern’s chance to win?

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   • 

     markinaustin, on October 22, 2012 at 10:32 am said:

     JNC, Eagleton left the ticket about ten days before the meeting I described.

     Nixon was a sure winner in ’72 and no one wanted to be on the McG ticket with him. I had supported Muskie and thought McG would not get a conservative D to run with him b/c of his VN stance. Truth be told, I did not plan to vote in ’72. But I knew all the TX D insiders and I had friends right up to Bentsen and Briscoe. I was a Bentsen D. Also, I had previously worked for Sam Houston Clinton and David Richards [Ann’s husband] in their labor practice; socialized with Ann and David. Did ACLU cases, including opposing the USA’s busing plan for Austin, which I won. My other law partner,, T.A. Herrington, was the Travis County R Chairman, so our law office was always in the thick of stuff. Herrington was a residual TX R who joined that party b/c it had been pro equal rights for blacks when the Ds were still riddled with segs, and we were pro war Ds, so there was not that much for us to argue about and we actually never fought about anything because we did not do labor law in that practice.

     As I wrote, no one wanted to be on the ticket with McG. McG tried for Teddy first. No deal. Tried for Gaylord Nelson. No deal. Eagleton was a desperation choice and an asshole. When he was dumped, Shriver joined the ticket. Shriver was a plus, but the campaign was a loser. Had it been professionally run, had it listened to local Ds like Sam Houston Clinton and not been completely a Hollywood deal, it would have carried maybe ten states. Eagleton was not the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was a broken backed camel to begin with. I thought he was a disaster before the shock treatment story so it was good news as far as I was concerned. I would have felt relieved in the same way if McCain had dropped Palin on some pretext and picked Ridge. After the meeting in our office, which I think was on August 12, 1972, I knew it would be a landslide, biggest ever.

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2. 

   jnc4p, on October 22, 2012 at 8:52 am said:

   Also, with regard to the military intervention in Cambodia, I believe that Nixon did that unilaterally. The only reference I could find to Goldwater and McGovern cosponsoring something was the Twenty-sixth Amendment giving 18 year olds the right to vote.

   While Googling, I came across this Goldwater quote which still seems quite apt in describing the current administration and the War on Terror:

   “If Republican spokesmen in the last Presidential campaign had proposed the use of non-lethal gas in Vietnam, . . . they would have been depicted as dangerous, hip-shooting, irresponsible warmongers. . .

   Any proposal for dealing firmly with the Communists is regarded by some commentators as warmongering if it comes from Republicans, but something entirely different if it is carried out by the Democrats.”

   —Barry Goldwater in the New York Herald-Tribune April 3, 1965

   from MiA:

   “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch a population slaughtered, or do we marshal military force and put an end to it?” — Senator George McGovern, August 21, 1978

   The “it” McGovern wanted to put to an end was the killing of millions of Cambodians in the late 1970s by the communist Pol Pot dictatorship. In this, BG joined with him.

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3. 

   jnc4p, on October 22, 2012 at 10:17 am said:

   McGovern arguing to intervene militarily in South East Asia in 1978 strikes me as a good candidate for the biggest flip flop in all of recorded history.

   What did he think was going to happen if America withdrew from the region and left it to the communists?

   Worth a read on the subject. Apparently this was somewhat tied to the Vietnam-Cambodia war as well:

   http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/learning_from_george_mcgovern.html

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   • 

     markinaustin, on October 22, 2012 at 10:40 am said:

     JNC, if you read the definitive VN books – all by Bernard Fall – you come away with the notion that Ho was a nationalist, first. He hated China and wanted trade with the west. He wanted to modernize VN. He traded with Michelin even during the French war. We could have made a separate peace with him instead of installing puppets in the south. General Gavin thought as late as 1966 that we could cut a deal with Ho that would give us a port in ‘Nam and control of the South China Sea, but no one listened.

     Cambodia was a different story. Pol Pot was not a nationalist leader like Ho. He was a monster. We did not abandon Indochina to commies, hindsight says we went after the wrong ones.

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4. 

   jnc4p, on October 22, 2012 at 11:15 am said:

   As always Mark, you have the best stories. Hopefully I’ll make it out to Austin City Limits Music Festival next year (they are expanding to two weekends) and buy you a drink.

   If you have a few minutes and want to go down memory lane, I’d recommend reading the Hunter S. Thompson story from Rolling Stone all the way through. I really wish he was writing about this campaign.

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   • 

     markinaustin, on October 22, 2012 at 11:17 am said:

     I’ll do it. Both Hunter Thompson and the drink.

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5. 

   bsimon1970, on October 22, 2012 at 3:38 pm said:

   Stories you’ll read nowhere else. Thanks for sharing.

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6. 

   Fairlington Blade, on October 22, 2012 at 6:16 pm said:

   Thanks for all the details, Mark.

   Radio silence from the folks in Arlington.

   BB

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   • 

     markinaustin, on October 22, 2012 at 6:27 pm said:

     Were you expecting to hear by now, BB?

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