What do we do about Nixon? somebody asked McGovern as the losses mounted. There would be no telephone call to the victor, for reasons that McGovern struggles to explain today: "I didn't give it a lot of thought." He merely sent a telegram offering congratulations. Then he sat on a hotel bed and wrote his concession speech on Holiday Inn stationery, handing it to a secretary to be typed on index cards.
Two weeks later, back in Washington, life was newly quiet. "No press," he says. "No morning talk shows. There weren't any more crowds raising the roof. You feel diminished as a human being."
South Dakota's George McGovern, a prairie populist who lost badly to Richard Nixon in 1972.
(D.A. Peterson)
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Barry Goldwater, who had been swamped by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, sent McGovern a newspaper political cartoon depicting the two of them together -- "like Grandpa and Granny [in the painting 'American Gothic'] -- linked by our defeats," McGovern remembers. Goldwater had jotted a note on the cartoon: "George -- If you must lose, lose big."
But a lightening of McGovern's mood wasn't coming anytime soon. He had problems sleeping. "I thought the world had died -- or that I had departed from it," he recalls. "I'd go into the kitchen, have a bowl of cereal, go into the living room, think about what I should have done, make a few notes about what I did wrong."
Eleanor, devastated herself, watched her husband carefully. Within the first couple of weeks after the election, she confronted him, hoping to lift his mood. She spoke with a spouse's bluntness, appealing to his vanity, among other things. "You're frowning all the time," he remembers her saying. "You're going to get wrinkles." Next she was pushing for a night out. "It's not so bad," she'd say. "Let's get out of here tonight. Let's start going to dinner."
But there were new unpleasant limits to his energies. "It wasn't merely emotional," he remembers. "I was tired. I hadn't slept eight hours in two, three years. I lived on four, five hours of sleep. You can do it during a campaign because thousands are screaming for you. You're getting adrenaline shots each day. Then the campaign ends, and there are no more shots."
It was not long before -- disregarding the advice he would give to future also-rans -- he began critiquing his victorious rival's governing style. He skipped Nixon's second inauguration, flying instead to England to speak at Oxford University about what he saw as the abuses of the Nixon presidency. And with the Watergate investigations underway but not yet stirring the American public, he criticized the press for inadequately scrutinizing Nixon's political operations.
Back in Washington, the reaction to his speech was swift and unfavorable. Privately, even some of McGovern's Democratic friends in the Senate did not hide their disappointment with what struck some as a public breach of manners. "I probably shouldn't have done it," he says. "It was just that the thought of sitting there listening to Nixon articulate his vision -- and not being able to respond -- was so unpleasant."
The unpleasantness dragged on. Why, he asked himself, had he and his advisers stood still for the convention chaos that had deprived him of an opportunity to take the stage until nearly 3 a.m. in Miami, squandering his chance to be heard by tens of millions of Americans? But, most of all, he asked himself, why had he not better handled the Eagleton mess? How had the psychiatric problems of Eagleton -- who had assured McGovern aides before his selection that nothing in his life would embarrass the ticket and had disclosed nothing about his medical history -- gone undiscovered? McGovern came to see the answer. In the weeks before the convention, he had told himself he had time for nothing but to fight off a challenge mounted to unseat a bloc of his committed delegates from California -- and so the matter of thoroughly vetting vice presidential contenders was deferred.
A fervent McGovern says now that his original support of the embattled Eagleton was genuine, stemming from reasons both nakedly political and intensely personal. Certainly, he says, he did not want the fallout that would follow the jettisoning of a running mate. But neither, he adds, did he wish to send a discouraging signal to his daughter Teresa, who was seeing a psychiatrist at the time for her own depression, and who, McGovern feared, might view Eagleton's downfall as evidence of a stigma borne by anyone who received psychiatric treatment.
"I wish I had stayed with my initial judgment to keep Tom" on the ticket,
McGovern says. "I could have stood up
for him had I known more about mental illness at the time. I didn't, and the price I paid politically was -- " He can't settle on the right word.
"Catastrophic," he mutters finally.
WITHIN A MONTH OF THE ELECTION, McGovern's closest allies effectively had been purged from positions of Democratic Party leadership. Democratic critics pointed to the McGovern campaign's demise as proof that unabashed liberalism was hurting the party. Centrists reclaimed control, and "McGovernism" became a pejorative -- synonymous with quixotic doves and losing leftists. "Eleanor and I would go to party dinners and affairs, and we wouldn't be introduced," McGovern remembers. "No Democrat at a podium would even say, 'Well, they put up the good fight.' You went from nominee to kind of forgotten."
Returning to his Senate office in January 1973, McGovern tried losing himself in work, only to feel dispirited some days. He'd leave his office, alone, and go on long walks. But sometimes, returning to his office, he'd find messages from colleagues and acquaintances offering solace. Letters poured in. "The nice thing about an election is that you can lose overwhelmingly," he says wryly, "and still have millions of people who like you."
In March 1973, agreeing with close advisers that it was time to show that his loss had not destroyed him, he spoke at the Gridiron dinner in Washington, an annual event in which comic skewering is the rule and self-deprecation the most valued art form. Armed with a carefully drafted speech, McGovern told the crowd: "Ever since I was a young man I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way -- and I did."
But his best therapy derived from worry. He sensed that he would be in professional peril if he didn't soon get back to politicking in South Dakota: He had a tough reelection campaign a year away.
He occasionally saw Goldwater, who, nearly a decade removed from his own landslide loss, had discovered a new perspective on defeat, marveling over how dreadful it would have been to lose a close election. McGovern recalls: "Barry said to me, 'You and I got beat badly. Just imagine how awful it must have been for that son-ofabitch Nixon [in 1960], getting so close to the White House but losing to Kennedy by a hundred thousand votes."
McGovern can't say how or why exactly, but one day his spirit lifted, in the latter half of 1973. He remembers lying on his stomach on a rubdown table in the Senate gym, receiving a massage, when a grinning Walter Mondale walked in, took one look at his friend, turned to the masseuse and said, "While you've got McGovern flat on his belly, pour some turpentine up his ass."
It was an inane frat-boy line, but McGovern howled. "I laughed and laughed, I hadn't laughed like that in a long time," he remembers. "And I realized I'd hit a turning point."
He decided he was going to be okay. The worst of the sadness went away. But the What Ifs remained, and it was clear by then they always would.
HE AND ELEANOR ARE HAVING DINNER at one of their favorite hangouts in Mitchell, Chef Louie's Steak House and Lounge, when McGovern begins thinking aloud about his regrets, particularly about the toll that his political career took on his family life. He says he never became "terrifically involved" in the lives of his children until long after he lost the presidential race and then in 1980 was voted out of the Senate. Losing power brought pain, he acknowledges, but it also yielded some personal benefits.
"Politics is the worst profession for family," McGovern says. "You literally are the public's servant . . . There are gains to not being under the everyday pressures of politics. You notice some things you never did. You see the [fleeting] character of life. What happened to our daughter Terry obviously changed things for me."
What happened to Terry, who battled depression and alcoholism, is that she came apart under the strains, losing primary custody of her two daughters after a divorce, wandering in and out of detox centers, and eventually passing out and dying of exposure, at 45, on the frigid streets of Madison, Wis., in December 1994.
Nothing about McGovern's life, or perspective, has been the same since. He wrote a book about Terry and lectured about alcoholism. He expressed regret over his frequent absences from Terry and his four other kids during their childhood, and later during the worst of Terry's troubles. "I had a lot of pain remembering that she'd pleaded with me to get more involved in [counseling sessions] for families of alcoholics," he remembers. "I'd excused myself at the time by saying I had a very demanding schedule."
His agony mounted. "It was a terrible time for all of us, but especially George," Eleanor remembers. "He had feelings of guilt -- too much guilt, which he shouldn't have had." But, thinking about the differences between two generations of aspiring political dynamos, she adds, "I think most politicians now realize [the challenges of family life] and try balancing their lives a little better."
Out of the Senate and governmental work altogether during the 1980s, a decade of Republican power, McGovern entered the hotel business in 1987, buying an inn in Stratford, Conn. "But then Marriott built a much bigger hotel in the area," McGovern remembers, "and we couldn't compete. We sold in '90. I'm not much of a businessman, I guess."
He also owned a Montana bookstore in recent years, until deciding there wasn't enough of a marketplace for it, selling it, too.
