TWELVE YEARS AFTER MCGOVERN'S DEFEAT, another Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, saw him on a street in Washington, not long after Mondale had been wiped out in the 1984 election by incumbent Ronald Reagan. He asked McGovern, who he thought ought to know, just how long it would take to get over the pain of the loss.
"I'll let you know when I get there," McGovern said.
South Dakota's George McGovern, a prairie populist who lost badly to Richard Nixon in 1972.
(D.A. Peterson)
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Historically, elections trigger melancholy among losers. What feels like a personal rejection, and the end of a dream, can be hard to handle. The reactions range from withdrawal to defiance. Al Gore, who won the 2000 popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, largely disappeared for a couple of years after his defeat, growing a beard, losing contact with key supporters. He later reemerged and flirted with the idea of running in 2004, then pulled back again. After losing the 2004 presidential contest to President Bush, John Kerry wasted little time before vigorously telling supporters at a dinner that he was a "fighter, and I've come back before," sending out e-mails to supporters that were interpreted as signals he was seriously contemplating another try at the White House. He contacted Newsweek editor Evan Thomas to complain about the coverage of his failed campaign. But he also agonized, telling Thomas at first that he had connected well with voters, then worrying that his rhetoric may have been too lofty for the electorate.
McGovern isn't surprised by Kerry's conflicted assessment. He thinks most losing candidates lurch between bravura and self-doubt, and he believes Kerry has just begun to experience the hurt and self-flagellation that accompany a presidential defeat; that he needs a lengthy period of rest and quiet reflection before making any bold strategic decisions. "You're not yourself immediately afterward, because the pain is great and you're still feeling the pressure," McGovern says. "You're vulnerable to not making your best decisions. I'd advise him not to make any life-determining decisions right away. He should go out and do some of his windsurfing for a while; do some skiing. Do things other than politics."
Similarly, Mondale, who also lost a Senate race in 2002, believes that no political disappointment remotely compares with the desolation felt by a failed presidential nominee. "John Kerry is more exhausted and tense than he thinks he is right now," Mondale says. "There's no school of medicine that deals with that kind of [disappointment] . . . You move on. But you carry what you did, that history, for the rest of your life."
The electorate has been kindest to the rare politician who takes a sabbatical and is touted by his supporters, upon his return, as a wiser candidate. Richard Nixon exemplified both the dangers of rushing back into a political race and the political wisdom of waiting. In 1962, only two years after his razor-thin defeat to John F. Kennedy, he lost a gubernatorial race in California to incumbent Pat Brown. Humiliated and angry at the press, he famously told reporters that they would never "have Nixon to kick around anymore." Urged by admirers to challenge Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Nixon resisted, waiting four years to reemerge in 1968 as a candidate viewed by admirers and critics alike as "the New Nixon."
McGovern looked for ways back, too -- but the magnitude of his 1972 defeat was so great that rehabilitation on the national level would not be in the cards for him. So, part of his life since has involved making peace with that reality.
He was a history professor at Dakota Wesleyan before he ever entered politics, which has been a blessing and a curse: The What Ifs never go away. He wonders, for example, what would have happened to his political career had one of the many men to whom he offered the vice presidential nomination in 1972 -- including Edward Kennedy and defeated rival Edmund Muskie -- said yes. Running out of choices and time at the Democratic National Convention, he turned finally to a young senator from Missouri, Thomas Eagleton, who enthusiastically accepted, only to be forced off the ticket after it was learned that he had been hospitalized three times for depression and had twice undergone electroshock treatment in the 1960s.
What if, McGovern asks, the Democratic convention that year in Miami had not been so chaotic that the vice presidential nomination process, which consumed hours and included several surprise challenges to Eagleton, delayed McGovern from delivering his acceptance speech until 2:48 a.m. Eastern time, by which time most Americans had gone to bed?
What if, he asks, a group of anti-McGovern forces at the convention had been successful in their effort to unseat a bloc of committed McGovern delegates? "I would [then] probably have lost the nomination, unjustly," he says, smiling faintly. "The ['76] nomination would then have been mine for the asking. I mean no disrespect to Jimmy Carter, who won our nomination that year, but I was the much better known figure at the time. I think I would have beaten both Carter and [then- President] Gerald Ford."
Instead, four years later, Carter won the White House, and McGovern was out of elective politics, losing a bid in Republican South Dakota for a fourth term in the U.S. Senate.
"I move ahead, I live," he says -- sitting on his couch to take another call about the library. The house that the McGoverns inhabit rent-free belongs to Dakota Wesleyan. It is a middling ranch-style house, indistinguishable from the rest of the neighborhood's homes, with the McGoverns' old blue Subaru, bought used some years ago, sitting out in front, a little dusty on the outside and full of Ursa's shed hair on the inside. "It's a good life," McGovern says. "I met my wife in South Dakota. I discovered my love of politics and public service here. It all started here. You get reminded how far you've journeyed from your beginnings. There's some satisfaction in that, even with the disappointments."
MCGOVERN'S SOFT-SPOKENNESS and dovish politics always obscured the intensity of his ambitions. He contemplated running for the presidency as early as 1962, even before being elected to the Senate, while serving as the director of the Food for Peace program in the Kennedy administration. After the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, he agreed, at the urging of some Kennedy supporters, to be a late entry for the Democratic nomination, an alternative to the candidacies of Eugene McCarthy, a fellow dove, and Hubert Humphrey, then Lyndon Johnson's hawkish vice president. Humphrey won the nomination but lost to Nixon. McGovern ran unofficially from the moment the '68 campaign ended, trekking back and forth across the country, spending four years gathering names on 3x5 cards.
His former campaign finance director and close friend Henry Kimelman once jokingly described him as a "self-effacing egomaniac." That reality was always at odds with McGovern's peace-and-love image. A resolute and tough man, a World War II bomber pilot who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his 35 missions over Europe, he was rough-hewn enough that, during moments of frustration in the '72 campaign, he lashed out at strangers who got under his skin. Once, while apologizing to fellow passengers for tardily boarding a commercial airline flight that had been held for him in Illinois, he encountered a woman who snapped at him over the delay. When he tried apologizing again, she bellowed at him to take his seat. He leaned over to her and, as he recalls, whispered, "I've been traveling this country for two years, and you're the biggest horse's ass I've ever met." (The incident was quickly reported by Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko.) Weeks later, McGovern threatened to punch a heckler.
By then his campaign was coming apart, its miseries compounded by his handling of the Eagleton affair. Soon after the convention, with the country digesting news of Eagleton's hospitalizations, McGovern released a statement insisting that he backed Eagleton "a thousand percent." When he swiftly dumped Eagleton, critics trotted out his phrase as proof of his insincerity and lack of backbone; some Republicans jeered that McGovern backed everyone and everything a thousand percent. He was transformed into a caricature. Kennedy in-law and former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver replaced Eagleton, but the McGovern campaign never recovered from the debacle.
Still, amid all his problems, it was easy for him to believe he could still win. Twenty-five thousand people packed the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Even three decades later, the names of his supporters from the Hollywood community tumble from his lips easily: "Barbra Streisand was a headliner for me at a fundraiser in L.A. at The Forum. Carole King helped me; Lauren Bacall; James Taylor; Paul Newman; Goldie Hawn; Linda Ronstadt; Burt Lancaster; Jack Nicholson; Peter, Paul and Mary. Shirley MacLaine appeared with me. Warren Beatty came out, too, and did a lot of fundraising for me. They were with me from the beginning to the end."
Such zeal had catapulted his underdog campaign to the nomination, for which he beat 16 other Democrats, including early favorite Edmund Muskie, who was cast as the race's centrist. McGovern was the striking liberal alternative -- a prairie populist who emerged as the darling of the antiwar vanguard. Engaging and folksy, he faced none of the problems in personality or oratorical style that would later be said to plague Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. But it was McGovern's social agenda that drew the most attention. He favored amnesty for draft resisters, advocated deep cuts in military programs, vowed to dramatically overhaul a tax system that he said favored the rich, and pledged to push for a new family-assistance program that would guarantee an annual income of $1,000 for every American adult and child.
The same stances that had served him well in the Democratic primaries dominated by his left-leaning constituency doomed him against Nixon, whose campaign pounced on McGovern's liberalism, turning the word into an albatross for decades to come. The '72 battle was nasty: McGovern characterized the Nixon officials as warmongers with blood on their hands; Nixon's campaign portrayed McGovern as a patsy whose stances would open the door to economic decline, national dishonor and communist expansion.
As the campaign moved deep into autumn, not even McGovern's famous supporters could stop the fall of his poll numbers. On election eve, he began the day in New York City before traveling to Pennsylvania, to Kansas and, in the evening, to Long Beach, Calif. The Long Beach rally was scheduled for a hangar at the airport, and, as the McGovern plane descended, "there were lines of cars for miles trying to get in," he recalls. "The crowd was enormous and screaming, and I realized that the next night we were going to be beaten overwhelmingly. Nixon was right about something: He really did have the Silent Majority. They didn't attend rallies. But they were lying in the woods."
When that last major rally ended, his campaign plane brought him home to South Dakota. Wishing to thank his driver and the other Secret Service agents around him, anticipating that they would be leaving him for good after the evening's verdict, McGovern said jocularly during the ride to his hotel, "It's going to be strange to drive my own car again."
Eleanor flashed him a stricken look. "You think we're not going to make it," he recalls her saying, accusingly.
He didn't disagree. There was a pause.
"I'm worried, too," she admitted.
As McGovern remembers it, shortly after they arrived at their room in a Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, S.D., about 6 p.m., he told his aide Jeff Smith that he wanted to take a nap. He asked not to be awakened for what he expected would be a couple of hours -- until a trend had been detected from the early returns in the East. No sooner had he put his head on a pillow and closed his eyes, he recalls, than Smith was waking him. Perhaps half an hour had passed. "It's all over," McGovern remembers Smith saying in a choked voice. "They're kicking our ass. We're losing everywhere except in Massachusetts and D.C."
McGovern forced himself to get up and go into the bathroom to shave, contemplating what he would say to the nation, doing the best he could to prop up those around him. "He was very composed; he was trying to help us," Eleanor remembers. Smith was sobbing. McGovern tried to console him. "Jeff, the sun is going to rise in the morning," he said.
"That's easy for you to say," Smith groaned.
McGovern was on his way to losing 49 states, falling by more than 20 percentage points in the popular vote to Nixon, who would receive 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17. "I thought, even when we had troubles in the campaign, that we could carry 10 or 15 states," McGovern says.
Even South Dakota, so loyal to him in the past, despite its Republican tendencies, was voting against him. "It was a
special sadness to lose in South Dakota," Eleanor says. "We knew these people; we'd raised our kids here; we'd done our life's work here."
