As the dutiful daughter of liberal
Democrats, it behooved me to work on the McGovern campaign during the summer of
1972. McGovern ran on an anti-war platform against President Nixon’s well-oiled
Committee to Re-elect the President (derisively known as CREEP).
Of course, it turned out that
the Watergate burglars were not so well-oiled. But that story gained
traction only after the election, which McGovern lost in one of the largest
landslides in American history.
The Democratic candidate
didn’t get off to a good start. While the 1972 party convention lacked the violent clashes between protesters and the police which marked the 1968 Chicago convention, the four days at the Miami Beach Convention
Center generated plenty of turmoil.
Following 1968, the party
revised longstanding formulas for choosing delegates in order to ensure greater
representation of women, young people, and minorities. These changes boosted
the importance of state primaries and loosened local pols’ control over the
choice of delegates. The new rules were complicated and old-timers challenged the
credentials of more than 80 of the delegates.
Notwithstanding, the faces in
the convention hall certainly looked like a new crowd.
The 1972 party platform,
entitled “For the People,” was the most liberal of its time. It proposed ending
the Vietnam War immediately in exchange for POWs. It called for reduced defense
spending, amnesty for draft evaders, a crackdown on illegal handguns, equal
opportunity, racial integration, and abolishing the death penalty. Reproductive
rights were alluded to with a carefully worded affirmation of the right to
privacy and freedom of choice. A gay rights plank, eloquently presented by
California delegate Jim Foster, was considered and rejected (although McGovern supported
it).
Feminists split over whether there
was a greater imperative to nominate a “winner” or a woman. Betty Friedan endorsed
McGovern’s nomination but Gloria Steinem’s contingent supported the black
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who had received 430,000 primary votes.
Finally, on the last night of
the convention, a contentious vice-presidential roll call pushed back
McGovern’s acceptance speech to 3 in the morning.
Needless to say, there was no
“convention bounce.”
A few days later, I took the
bus from Mt. Vernon up to White Plains, where McGovern’s Westchester County
headquarters were located right on Main Street.
Inside, a few volunteers
wandered around while a college student set things up. There would be a table
outside with buttons and pamphlets about McGovern and his vice-presidential
pick, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. We would focus, our leader said, on
winning over the lunchtime crowd.
He was serious, but now that
line really makes me smile.
We also stuffed envelopes and
made phone calls, working from old-fashioned typed voter registration lists. I
think there were push-button telephones by that time. . .
And so things went along until
journalists learned that Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and
anxiety three times and underwent electric shock therapy during the 1960s.
On July 31, after a week of supporting
his pick “1000%,” McGovern asked Eagleton to withdraw from the ticket and chose
Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law and first director of the
Peace Corps, to replace him.
The day after, people flocked
to our table on Main Street. Everyone wanted McGovern-Eagleton stuff.
Now we needed to redouble our
efforts. So we bore down through the rest of the summer; corralling voters here
and there, squinting into the noonday sun.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/07/mcgovern.summer.html
Oh boy, I remember how sad that campaign made me. I always thought of it as an apocalyptic loss, and then came 1980,84, 88, 2000 and 2004 respectively.
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