McGovern: I think that there was just a chance, coming out of Miami, that we could have ignited the public. There was a period there right after I got the nomination when I’m sure that the majority of the American people really weren’t sure what they were going to do about me. But the impressions that they had were rather favorable.
HST: I would have bet dead even coming out of the convention… I was optimistic.
McGovern: Yeah, I was, too. Now I think the first thing they saw was the Eagleton thing, which turned a lot of people off. No matter what I’d have done, you see, we were in trouble there. And so that was an unfortunate thing. And then there were some staff squabbles that the press spotlighted, which gave the impression of confusion and disarray and lack of direction, and I think that hurt.
HST: I know it hurt. At least among the people I talked to.
McGovern: So those two factors were related and the Eagleton thing upset the morale of the staff and people were blaming each other, and there was no chance to recover from the fatigue of the campaign for the nomination—we had to go right into that Eagleton battle, and so I think that—if there was a chance, at that point, to win the election—we probably lost it right there. And then other factors began to operate, the “peace is at hand” business, the negotiations sort of blunted and killed it; actually, I think the war issue was working for the President. And then the accommodation of—at least the beginning of the accommodation of Peking and Moscow seemed to disarm a lot of moderates and liberals who might otherwise have been looking in another direction.
HST: But that was happening even before the convention.
McGovern: Yeah, it was, but it happened far enough ahead so that the impact of it began to sink in then. And I think—I don’t think we got a break after Miami. I think that from then on in the breaks were with the President. I mean—and he orchestrated his campaign very cleverly. He stayed out of the public eye, and he had all the money he needed to hire people to work on direct mail and everybody got a letter tailored to their own interests and their own groove, and I think their negative TV spots were effective in painting a distorted picture of me.
HST: The spinning head commercial?
McGovern: Yeah, the spinning head commercial, knocking over the soldiers. The welfare thing. They concentrated on those themes. I suppose maybe I should have gone on television earlier with thoughtful Q and A sessions, the kind of speeches I was doing there the last few weeks. I think maybe that might have helped to offset some of the negatives we got on the Eagleton thing… Another problem: There was a feeling on the part of a lot of the staff that after Miami there wasn’t the central staff direction that should have been. Whose fault that is I don’t know… I found in the field a lot of confusion about who was really in charge, pushing and pulling as to where you got things cleared, who had the final authority. That could have been handled more smoothly than it was. When you add all of those things up, none of them, in my opinion, comes anywhere near as serious as the fact that the Republicans were caught in the middle of the night burglarizing our headquarters. They were killing people in Vietnam with bombing raids that were pointless from any military point of view. They were making secret deals to sell out the public interest for campaign contributions, you know, and routing money through Mexican banks and all kinds of things that just seemed to me to be scandalous.
HST: Wasn’t there a Harris Poll that showed that only 3 percent of the electorate considered the Watergate thing important?
McGovern: Yeah. That’s right. Mistakes that we made seemed to be much more costly. I don’t know why, but they were. I felt it at the time, that we were being hurt by every mistake we made, whereas the most horrendous kind of things on the other side somehow seemed to—because, I suppose, of the great prestige of the White House, the President’s shrewdness in not showing himself to the press or the public—they were able to get away with things that we got pounded for.
HST: Do you think it would be possible to, say, discount… if you could just wipe out the whole Eagleton thing, and assume that, say, Mondale or Nelson had taken it and there had been no real controversy, and try to remove the vice-presidential thing as a factor. What do you think…
McGovern: I think it would have been very close. I really do. I think we’d have gotten off the ground fast, and I think we’d have capitalized on those early trips and that the press would have been more enthusiastic about it and they’d have been reporting the size of the crowds and the enthusiasm instead of looking at the staff problem. See, once we got into the Eagleton thing, they seemed to feel almost a constraint to report that everything was unfortunate about the campaign. The campaign, actually, was very well run, compared to others that I’ve seen. The fund-raising was a miracle the way that was run. The crowds were large and well advanced, and the schedules went off reasonably well day after day. I didn’t think there were major gaps being made in the campaign, but there were some right at the beginning that haunted us all the way through. I think if we’d have gotten off to a better start just like a—I remember when I was at Northwestern there was a great hurdler that was supposed to win the U.S. competition and probably win the Olympics, and he hit the first hurdle with his foot, and then he hit about the next four in a row, you know, and just petered out. After he hit that first hurdle, that’s kind of what happened to us. We got off—we broke stride on that thing right after the convention, and from then on in, I think millions of people just kind of turned us off. They were skeptical and I think the mood of the country was much more conservative than we had been led to believe in the primaries. We were winning those primaries on a reform program and rather blunt outspoken statement of what we were going to do.
HST: That was the next question I was going to ask. Have you thought about what might have happened if you’d kept up that approach?
McGovern: Well, I think we did keep it up. I never did buy the line that we really changed our positions very much from the primary to the general. I can’t see where there was all that much of a shift.
HST: I think it was a perceived shift. There was a definite sense that you had changed your act.
McGovern: I’m not sure how much different we really were. I think we were pretty much hitting the same issues. What did you perceive as the difference? Maybe I can answer your question better if I…
HST: Well it seemed to me, when you’d selected Eagleton it was the first step sort of backwards. If we assume that your term “new politics” had any validity, your choice of Eagleton was the point where it turned around and you decided that the time had come to make friends with the people you’d been fighting the whole time. And without questioning the wisdom of it I…
McGovern: You mean because he’d been with Muskie and…
HST: Yeah, Eagleton struck me as being a cheap hack and… he still does, you know, he strikes me as being a useless little bastard… When I went up to St. Louis to do what I could to get hold of some of those records to try to find out more about it, I was treated like someone who’d come up to the North Pole to blackmail Santa Claus, even by your people. But I kept hearing, from what I considered pretty reliable sources, that there’s more to Eagleton’s mental problems than you or anybody…
McGovern: Well, see, nobody’ll ever know that for sure, ’cause those records are never gonna be available. I think the FBI has them.
HST: How the hell does the FBI have them? On what pretext did they get them?
McGovern: I don’t know. But I was told by Ramsey Clark that the FBI had a very complete medical file on Eagleton, and that he (Clark) knew it at the time he was Attorney General.
HST: Including the shock?
McGovern: Yeah, but I never saw the records. I was never able to get access to them.
HST: Do you think that original leak to the press, Frank, and Gary came from the FBI?
McGovern: They might have been directly, they might have, they’ve been known to leak things like that to the press, and it may very well have been an FB
I leak, but the Knight newspapers never would divulge the source.
HST: Frank knew the name of that anaesthesiologist, that woman who gave him the gas during one of the shock treatments, but he wouldn’t tell me…
McGovern: There were a number of journalists that were trying to get more information on it, but it’s tough, very hard to do.
HST: Did you ever find out what those little blue pills were that he was eating?
McGovern: No.
HST: I think I did. It was Stelazine, not Thorazine like I heard originally. I did everything I could to get hold of the actual records, but nobody would even talk to me. I finally just got into a rage and just drove on to Colorado and said to hell with it. It seemed to me that the truth could have had a hell of an effect on the election. It struck me as being kind of tragic that he would be perceived as the good guy…
McGovern: I know, it was really unfair. What he should have done, he should have taken the responsibility for stepping down rather than putting the responsibility on me.
HST: He almost threatened not to, didn’t he? As I recall, he wasn’t going to do it…
McGovern: That’s right. That’s right.
HST: Was it true that he actually told you at one point not to worry about those pills, because the prescription was in his wife’s name?
McGovern: He told me they were in his wife’s name.
HST: Let me ask you this: Sioux Falls was such a bummer I didn’t even want to talk to you up there, but how much of a surprise was the overall result?
McGovern: I was very surprised at the landslide proportions of it. I had felt… the last couple of days, I’d pretty well gave up. I thought we—we kept going hard, but I thought we were gonna get beat, but it never occurred to me that we’d only carry a couple of states, you know, the District and Massachusetts. I thought we’d carry a minimum of eight or ten states.
HST: Which ones?
McGovern: Well, I thought we’d carry both California and New York which would have given us some big electoral blocs. I thought we’d carry Illinois. I thought we’d carry Wisconsin, and I thought we’d probably carry my state.
HST: That was a shock…
McGovern: Those were all ones that I thought we’d get, and I thought we’d get Rhode Island, Connecticut—you know, I was surprised at the landslide character of it.
HST: Did you go into a kind of brooding or thinking about exactly why there’d been so much difference in the proportions than you’d thought…
McGovern: No, and I still haven’t figured it out. I mean, I still haven’t really figured out the dimensions of it. I think the war thing had a big impact at the end there, the fact that Kissinger was able to say that peace was at hand, just give us a few more days. It almost looked like if we threw them out it would disrupt all this effort that has gone on over the last months. You know, they kept him in orbit for weeks ahead of the election. I think that had an impact. And then the way they threw money into the economy. They ran up a hundred billion dollar deficit in four years he was in office. That’s the old FDR deficit-financing technique, and obviously that money ended up in somebody’s pockets. So I think that is a subtle factor there, that the economy wasn’t good, but it was much better than it would have been had they not been pumping that kind of deficit financing into circulation.
HST: Do you think the kind of campaign you ran in the primaries, a real sort of anti-politician campaign—would have any chance in ’76, or do you think we all misconceived the whole thing—not just the temper of the time but the whole basic nature of the electorate.
McGovern: I don’t think there ever was a majority for the approach I was using. I think we had a fighting chance.
HST: No better than that? Even with all those new voters? That was a hell of a natural power base for you, wasn’t it? What happened?
McGovern: I think we exaggerated the amount of the enthusiasm for change among young people. We saw the activists in the primaries, but it’s always a small percentage that were really working, and you’d see those stadiums packed Saturday after Saturday with tens of thousands of people. There really are a great number of people in this country that are a helluva lot more interested in whether the Dolphins beat the Redskins than they are in whether Nixon or George McGovern ends up in the White House. I think there was a lot of apathy and a lot of feeling—also a lot of kind of weariness over the activism of the sixties—the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the crusades, the marches, the demonstrations. Nixon kind of put all that behind us. Things quieted down. He disarmed the peace movement—there were no riots, no demonstrations, and I think that people were afraid of anything that kind of looked like a fundamental change—that maybe we’d be right back into that same kind of energetic protest, dissent, and demonstrations that they’d grown weary of in the sixties.
HST: Do you think the sixties ended in ’68 or ’72, just using very rough kind of numbers.
McGovern: I think they were beginning to—I think Nixon’s election in ’68 really signaled the end of that.
HST: In a sense you were running a sixties campaign in the seventies.
McGovern: Yeah.
HST: I’ve heard that said. I’ve thought about that.
McGovern: We were running a campaign that might have won in 1968. Might have won. Might have… You know, all of this is speculating, Hunter. I don’t think any of us really know what’s going on. I think there’s always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there’s going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by ’76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of a platform that I was running on in ’72.
HST: I don’t know. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. What the hell happened and where do we go from here and…
McGovern: Yeah. The letters they’re sending in here, though, are—Jesus, they’re encouraging. That’s what kept my spirits from collapsing. The pendulum did take a big swing but it’s going to come back. I really believe that.
HST: How much damage do you think Humphrey did?
McGovern: Well, he cut us up in California to the point where we probably never fully recovered from that, either.
HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice-presidency to Humphrey in public? Did you think he would take it or if he did take it it would really help?
McGovern: I thought it was an effort to maybe bring some of his people back on board who otherwise would go for Nixon or sit out the election.
HST: Jesus! To think that after all that stuff in California, that we might possibly end up with a McGovern/Humphrey ticket. I might have voted for Dr. Spock, if it had come to that.
McGovern: Well, it seemed to be something that had to be done to get a majority coaltion, but maybe not.
HST: What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic Party together, if it’s really a party of expediency, something that’s put together every four years? That’s one of the things I’ve been hammering on over and over: Where do we go from here? Is this the death knell of what we dimly or vaguely perceive as the new politics?
McGovern: I don’t agree with that at all. I think it was the first real serious shot at it and that 28.5 million Americans said yes, and I think if George Wallace had been running to siphon off that right-wing vote from Nixon, we’d have come close to winning the election. And even without him we did almost as well as Humphrey did in terms of total percentage that we got. You know there was about four points difference between Humphrey’s percentage and mine.
HST: I’d like to close with some kind of optimistic shot for the next time around. Somebody said at Yale the other day that the
kind of campaign you ran in the primaries probably couldn’t win on a national level even four years from now. But there are places in the country where it could definitely work on a state or local level.
McGovern: Well, I believe that. I think I demonstrated in those primaries that you can go into states that are supposedly hostile and with the kind of direct-neighborhood person-to-person campaign that we were doing, you can win. And we did that in Wisconsin. We did it in Massachusetts. We did it in ten primary states. We damn near did it in New Hampshire. I got 38 percent of the vote against Muskie, you know, and that was really one of the miracles of the campaign. So I think there’s no question but what the techniques and the open style campaign will work on a state level.
[Editor’s Note: The tape of Doctor Thompson’s interview with Senator McGovern ends abruptly at this point. But several weeks later, in his suite at the Seal Rock Inn, we were able to record the following conversation.]
Ed: Do you agree with McGovern’s analysis of why he lost the election?
HST: I’m not sure it really amounts to an analysis. I spent about two weeks in Washington talking to fifteen or twenty of the key people in the campaign, and I was surprised at the lack of any kind of consensus—no hard figures or any kind of real analysis—except the kind of things that McGovern said in his interviews which were mainly speculation…. He was saying, I think this, and that might work, and I’m sure this could happen if….
But when I asked him, for instance, who the 45 percent of the voters were—eligible voters who didn’t vote this year—he said he had no idea. And when I asked that same question to Mankiewicz, he said I should ask Pat Caddell…. I just talked to Pat on the phone yesterday, and he said it would take him a long time to get the figures together on a nationwide basis, but the one thing he could say was one of the most noticeable hard facts of this ’72 presidential campaign was that, for the first time in almost anyone’s memory, fewer people voted for the president in, I think it was, half the states, than had voted for the state level offices—which on the average runs about 15 percent higher in terms of voter turnout… no, excuse me, the presidential vote runs on an average about 15 percent higher.