Ed: All right. But you’ll have to speak into the microphone.
HST: Yes… He named his campaign plane the Dakota Queen II, and at first that was enough—just one 727 which he chartered from United Airlines at outrageously inflated rates. They burned him as much as they could. He was doing things like flying back and forth from Washington to New York when he could have stayed in one place and they were running up…
Dr. Thompson at work. ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
Ed: Speak up, please.
HST: They were running up massive bills which were not necessary. I learned this from the United Airlines representative on the plane. But nevertheless, when the campaign began mushrooming around Labor Day, more and more press people came aboard the Dakota Queen, and it was necessary to have two McGovern campaign planes. One of which was divided into three compartments: where McGovern’s family, himself and his sort of… personal staff sat in front. Like a first-class compartment. The middle of the plane was full of the very serious… working press, the New York Times, the wire service people, the Washington Post…
Ed: The New York Times, the wires?… What else?
HST: The people who had to file every day…
Ed: They had some sort of priority?
HST: Right. They were very serious people.
Ed: And they sat in the middle section of the plane?
HST: Yes. In the rear was a bar and a sort of mini press room where there were about five typewriters, a few phones—you could call from the plane to headquarters in Washington—you could call anywhere from the plane. But the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen was very… ah… very… reserved is the word.
Ed: The atmosphere was reserved? On the day before the election?
HST: Only on the Dakota Queen… the atmosphere on the Zoo Plane became crazier and crazier as the atmosphere on the Dakota Queen became more reserved and more somber. The kinkier members of the press tended to drift onto the Zoo Plane. The atmosphere was more comfortable. There were tremendous amounts of cocaine, for instance.
Ed: There was cocaine on the Zoo Plane?
HST: Yes… dope.
Ed: Marijuana?
HST: Oh, hell yes… lots of marijuana, hash, MDA….
Ed: Was this from the press primarily?
HST: Well, what happened was that the press took over the Zoo Plane—totally.
Ed: There were no McGovern staffers on the Zoo Plane?
HST: A few tried to get on it, but the press people had nailed down their own seats and refused to leave them. Once you got a seat on the Zoo Plane you clung to it. And so people would trade off for different legs of the trip. I recall once when I wanted to talk to McGovern, I traded with John Holum who had a girlfriend on the Zoo Plane. And when I tried to get my seat back, I think it was in Wichita, it was necessary to hint that I might have to use physical force to get Holum out of my seat and back on the Dakota Queen.
Ed: Were the… provisions provided on the Zoo Plane brought by the press themselves or were they a part of the hospitality of the McGovern staff?
HST: Well, you have to remember that the press was… every member of the press who traveled on either one of the planes, any campaign plane, was billed at the first-class rate plus one-third.
Ed: Why? What was the one-third for?
HST: Well, presumably for the damages…
Ed: Damages?
HST: It was a chartered plane, and on charters the stewardesses are more or less at the mercy of the passengers.
Ed: At the mercy?
HST: At one point on the Zoo plane on the way to Sacramento—the pilot, whose name was Paul Prince1… and he was called Perfect Paul, the Virgin Pilot….
Ed: Perfect Paul, the Virgin Pilot?
HST: Right. He was locked out of the cockpit…. And several of the crazier members of the press, who were up front—the cocaine section was up right behind the cockpit—got hold of him… and tore all of his clothes off… down to his underwear.
Ed: The press people tore off the pilot’s clothes??
HST: Well, they sort of helped a woman from, I think it was… not Women’s Wear Daily, but something like that. She was completely drunk and stoned. But, the TV technicians were the worst villains on the plane…. They held him while the wild woman tore his clothes off.
Ed: Who was flying the plane at this time?
HST: Well… the co-pilot, I guess…
Ed: The co-pilot was flying the plane?
HST: There was a crew aboard—three crew members.
Ed: This was a 727?
HST: Yes, a 727. I think they call them “Whisper Jets.” The one with the D. B. Cooper door, you know, the one that drops down out of the tail… And the pilot was stripped down to his underwear. Finally he got back into the cockpit, had to land in Sacramento in his underwear with this stoned woman still after him….
Ed: One of the stewardesses?
HST: No, no. It was a woman from…
Ed: One of the reporters.
HST: I’d rather not name her.
Ed: Well, let’s not mention any names. Certainly not.
HST: That sort of thing happened regularly on the Zoo Plane. All the sound freaks, for instance, were on the Zoo Plane. There were speakers up and down the aisle… every ten feet there would be a different… tape going. There were the Rolling Stones in front, the Grateful Dead in back…
Ed: I’d like to interrupt you now to ask what was the prevailing mood of the McGovern staff at this point… flying back to Sioux Falls… a day before the election, November 6?
HST: We left Long Beach at about 8:30 on Monday night, November 6, and flew directly to Sioux Falls. Long Beach was the last campaign appearance McGovern made except for a… sort of… homecoming in Sioux Falls at 1:30 at night. And… you asked about the mood… the mood of the McGovern staff on the Dakota Queen was very, very quiet. They had known for a long time what was going to happen. McGovern admitted knowing for at least a week.
Perfect Paul, The Virgin Pilot (left) and crewmember.
Ed: McGovern admitted knowing for a week before the election?
HST: Yeah. I talked to him earlier that day on the way from Wichita to Long Beach and I could tell… he loosened up so much that it was clear something happened to him in his head…. He was finally relaxed for the first time. This was shortly after he told a heckler in I think it was… Grand Rapids, “Kiss my ass.” He did it with very… considerable élan…. He moved up right next to this guy and he said: “I have a secret for you—kiss my ass.” Most of the press people missed it. He put his arm around him and whispered, sort of quietly in his ear. McGovern didn’t know anyone had heard him. Only two people heard him—one was a Secret Service man, another was Saul Kohler, of the Newhouse papers. McGovern thought he was saying it in total privacy. But it got out. But by that time he didn’t care… He was laughing about it, and when I asked him about it on the Dakota Queen, he sort of smiled and said… “Well, he was one of these repulsive people, it was… one of the types you just want to get your hands on….” He was so loose it was kind of startling. He got very relaxed once he realized what was going to happen. Later he said that he’d known for at least a week, and Gary Hart later said he had known for a month.
Ed: Gary Hart later admitted he had known McGovern would lose for a month before the election?
HST: He told me when I stopped in Denver on the way to the Super Bowl that he’d sensed it as early as September, but when I asked him when he knew, he thought for a minute and then said, “Well, I guess… it was around October 1….” According to Pat Caddell’s polls they had known—when I say “they,” I mean the McGovern top command—had known what kind of damage the Eagleton thing had done and how terminal it was ever since September. Pat said they spent a month just wringing their hands and tearing their hair trying to figure out how to overcome the Eagleton disaster.
Ed: By “the Eagleton disaster,” do you mean the question of McGovern’s competence in handling the affair?
HST:
His whole image of being a… first a maverick, anti-politician and then suddenly becoming an expedient, pragmatic hack… who talked like any politician in anybody’s… kind of a… Well, he began talking like a used car salesman, sort of out of both sides of his mouth, in the eyes of the public, and he was no longer… either a maverick or an anti-politician… he was… he was no better than Hubert Humphrey and that’s not a personal judgment, that’s how he was perceived… and that’s an interesting word. “Perceive” is the word that became in the ’72 campaign what “charisma” was for the 1960, ’64 and even the ’68 campaigns. “Perceive” is the new key word.
Ed: What does “perceive” mean?
HST: When you say perceive you imply the difference between what the candidate is and the way the public or the voters see him.
ED: What causes the difference between the perception and the reality?
HST: The best example of how perception can drastically alter a campaign is the difference between, for instance, how McGovern was perceived by the Wallace voters in the Wisconsin primary as being almost as much of a maverick and an anti-politician as George Wallace himself. He carried the south side of Milwaukee—one of the last places anybody expected him to carry.
Ed: That was primarily a blue-collar district?
HST: Not just blue-collar—hardhat, a really serious hardhat district.
Ed: Weren’t they also Polish?
HST: A lot of them, yeah. Muskie was supposed to carry the Fourth but Muskie’s campaign was falling apart by that time, and Humphrey was not the kind of person who would go over up there.
Ed: So the voters perceived… the blue-collar, Polish, Wallace-style voters perceived McGovern to be as much of a maverick as Wallace.
HST: Yes, at that point he was hitting the tax reform issue, which he picked up from Wallace in Florida.
Ed: What was the difference between the perception and the reality on the Eagleton affair?
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….
Ed: Which person?
HST: The person who called and said… several days after the convention… who left a note at the headquarters in Washington saying, “There’s something you should know about Tom Eagleton—he’s a dangerous nut.”
Ed: This was back in June, July?
HST: It was about two days after the convention ended in Miami.
Ed: An anonymous person called Mankiewicz…?
HST: And Gary Hart.
Ed: And Gary Hart?!
HST: Both of them got messages about the same time. It was the husband of a woman whose name… well, there’s no point in going into that—it would probably be libelous… but it was the husband of a woman who had been part of the anaesthesiology team, who had participated in Eagleton’s second shock treatment, so she knew about it.
Ed: So you were investigating the Eagleton story and Mankiewicz denied knowing anything about it?
HST: Repeatedly, over and over again. 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.”
Ed: What’s a news cycle break?
HST: I don’t know. That’s the kind of language Mankiewicz used all through the campaign when he got confused and started treading water.
Ed: So the difference between the perception and the reality was that the public saw McGovern dumping Eagleton for political expedience, when in reality there was no way Eagleton could stay on the ticket. He had deceived McGovern, and Mankiewicz was attempting to break this in the most favorable way but failed.
HST: Right. At that point Mankiewicz was afraid to say anything heavy to the pr
ess, and rightly so, I think. Look at what happened to Jack Anderson when he went on the air… on the Mutual Radio Network with a story of Eagleton’s drunk driving arrests. Then he couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t get the records. He was told by True Davis, who had run against Eagleton in the Democratic primary for senator in 1968 in Missouri, that the records were in a box in an office in St. Louis, and Davis promised Anderson that he would get them immediately. So Anderson had every reason to believe that he would have the actual drunk driving records or xeroxes of them in his hands by the time he broke the story. After Anderson had broken the story both on the radio and in his column… his syndicated column… he got desperate for the records because he knew he was going to be challenged. At that point True Davis was the president of a bank owned by the United Mine Workers in Washington.
Ed: Tony Boyle’s union? Hubert Humphrey’s friend?
HST: Right. Davis told Jack Anderson that unfortunately the box containing the records pertaining to Eagleton’s drunk driving arrests had disappeared from this room… some storage place in St. Louis… and contrary to what he told Anderson earlier, he couldn’t produce them. So Anderson was left with a story that almost every journalist in Washington still believes to be true.
Ed: How does this get back to what we were talking about before?
HST: I wanted to tell you why Mankiewicz was afraid to break the… or help anyone else break the story on Eagleton’s mental history. Anderson got burned so badly on that, and was so embarrassed publicly that it apppeared—for reasons that he could never explain—that he was taking just a cheap shot at Eagleton, and Eagleton came off looking better than he had before Anderson had started. So Mankiewicz and Gary Hart along with McGovern… those were the only people who knew the details about Eagleton’s mental disorders…. They decided that they couldn’t break the story. They couldn’t help anyone else investigate Eagleton any further than Eagleton himself wanted to be investigated, or it would appear that the McGovern staff was deliberately leaking false information on Eagleton in order to make him look bad, which would then in turn make McGovern look good.