Index of University Press Releases

July 11, 2007

At birthday celebration, McGovern recalls
events around Democratic nomination

Seth Tupper - The Daily Republic

Seth Tupper/Republic - Former U.S. sen. and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, of Mitchell, signs a copy of one of his books Tuesday in the Sherman Center at Dakota Wesleyan University for Jan and Katrina Jarding, both of Alexandria. The Jardings were among about 75 people who attended an 85th birthday party for McGovern. that featured cake and refreshments, music by the band East of Westreville and an onstage conversation between McGovern and former NBC news correspondent Sander Vanocur.

The 1969 Chappaquiddick incident simultaneously sunk the presidential aspirations of Ted Kennedy and opened the door to the presidential campaign of George McGovern.

At least that’s how McGovern remembers it.

McGovern, who was a U.S. senator in ’69, recalled his memories of the incident Tuesday evening during a conversation onstage with Sander Vanocur at the Dakota Wesleyan University Sherman Center in Mitchell. Vanocur, a television news correspondent for NBC during the 1960s and ’70s, was one of about 75 on hand to celebrate McGovern’s 85th birthday. He will turn 85 on July 19.

McGovern, of Mitchell, said he was vacationing in the Virgin Islands when the Chappaquiddick news broke. Ted Kennedy, the younger brother of John and Robert and a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, had driven his vehicle off a bridge after attending a party on Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy swam to safety but a passenger in the vehicle, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. Kennedy’s account of the accident and its aftermath is still a source of controversy.

Up until Chappaquiddick, McGovern had assumed Kennedy would be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. McGovern fell asleep that night in a chair outdoors after hearing the Chappaquiddick news, and he awoke the next morning with a premonition.

“A quiet feeling came over me: ‘I’m going to be the next president of the United States. I’m going to be the nominee,’ ” McGovern said as he cast his thoughts back Tuesday. “I couldn’t see anybody else.”

The Chappaquiddick memory was one of many that Vanocur drew out of McGovern, 35 years to the day since the opening of the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. Further events to commemorate the anniversary of the convention and McGovern’s birthday will be held this weekend in Washington, D.C.

Before the 1972 campaign, McGovern had made a brief run for the nomination in 1968 after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. McGovern’s strong showing in a debate that year with fellow Democrats Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey had propelled McGovern into the national spotlight and set the stage for him to seize his opportunity in 1972, he said Tuesday.

So when it became clear that Ted Kennedy would not run in ’72, McGovern was convinced he could win the Democratic nomination. His own pollsters said the support for Democratic frontrunner Ed Muskie was “a mile wide but only an inch deep,” McGovern said Tuesday, quoting his former staffer Pat Caddell.

Though the press tagged him an underdog, McGovern entered the race and surged to the front with a seemingly perfect campaign operation.

“In the bid for the nomination, for almost a year and a half, I don’t think we made a mistake,” McGovern said. “We just did everything right. The press was just dumbfounded.”

But the fight for the nomination had exhausted campaign workers, McGovern said, and they went to the convention “dead on their feet.” Following the convention, the campaign unraveled. McGovern said Tuesday that three main factors caused him to lose the general election to Republican President Richard Nixon.

The first event was the shooting of Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace about two months before the convention. Wallace had won nearly 10 million votes as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968, and McGovern thought many of those votes would have gone to Nixon. Had Wallace not been knocked out of the ’72 race, McGovern said, Wallace might have taken millions more votes from Nixon and made a McGovern victory possible.

The second event that McGovern said contributed to his defeat was his selection during the convention of Thomas Eagleton as a running mate. Shortly after the convention, reporters revealed that Eagleton had received electric shock treatments during his past struggles with mental illness. McGovern said Tuesday that Eagleton was the campaign’s seventh choice for a running mate, but he had earned the blessing of such highly regarded party members as Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale.

McGovern dropped Eagleton from the ticket, but he regrets doing so.

“Knowing what I know now, I would have stayed with him anyway,” McGovern said. “I wouldn’t have gone through such business of being for him one week and then off the ticket the next. I think he’d have been a good vice president. He was a good senator. But I didn’t know anything about manic-depressive illness, and neither did anybody around me.”

The third contributing factor to his general election loss, McGovern said, was his ill-timed acceptance speech at the convention. Due to poor management of the convention’s floor activities, McGovern’s speech was delayed until about 3 a.m. McGovern delivered what Walter Cronkite later told him was his best speech, but hardly anyone was awake to watch it on television.

Added together, McGovern said, the three factors were more than enough for the incumbent Nixon to cruise to victory in November. Nixon would soon be forced to resign because of the Watergate scandal, which McGovern said he tried unsuccessfully to use against Nixon before all the facts of the story emerged during the campaign. McGovern lost all but one state in the general election.

Today, some use the word “McGovernism” to describe a doomed brand of liberal politics. When Vanocur asked about that, McGovern cracked a joke:

“Well, I’m one politician that’s in the dictionary, even though it’s as a swear word.”

McGovern said he hopes his efforts to reduce world hunger and end the war in Vietnam will be his lasting legacies. Vanocur summed up another aspect of McGovern’s legacy by quoting George Orwell’s description of Gandhi.

“… ‘Regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind.’ ”