My life

Alas, it was all downhill from there. McGovern entered the convention well behind but still within striking distance of President Nixon in the opinion polls, and we expected to pick up five or six points during the week, thanks to several days of intense media coverage. Getting that kind of bounce, however, requires the kind of disciplined control of events our forces had demonstrated with the delegate challenges. For some reason, it evaporated after that. First, a gay-rights group staged a sit-in at McGovern’s hotel and refused to budge until he met with them. When he did, the media and the Republicans portrayed it as a cave-in that made him look both weak and too liberal. Then, on Thursday afternoon, after he picked Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri to be his running mate, McGovern allowed other names to be put in nomination against him during the voting that night. Six more people got in the race, complete with nominating speeches, and a long roll-call vote. Though Eagleton’s victory was a foregone conclusion, the other six got some votes. So did Roger Mudd of CBS News, the television character Archie Bunker, and Mao Tse-tung. It was a disaster. The useless exercise had taken all the prime-time television hours, when nearly eighteen million households were watching the convention. The intended media events—Senator Edward Kennedy’s speech nominating McGovern and the nominee’s own acceptance speech—were pushed back into the wee hours of the morning. Senator Kennedy was a champ and gave a rousing speech. McGovern’s was good, too. He called on America to

“come home . . . from deception in high places . . . from the waste of idle hands . . . from prejudice. . . . Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream . . . to the conviction that we can move our country forward . . . to the belief that we can seek a newer world.” The problem was that McGovern began to talk at 2:48 a.m., or “prime time in Samoa,” as the humorist Mark Shields quipped. He had lost 80

percent of his television audience.

As if that weren’t enough, it soon became public that Eagleton had had treatment, including electric shock therapy, for depression. Unfortunately, back then there was still a great deal of ignorance about the nature and range of mental-health problems, as well as the fact that previous Presidents, including Lincoln and Wilson, had suffered from periodic depression. The idea that Senator Eagleton would be next in line to be President if McGovern were elected was unsettling to many people, even more so because Eagleton hadn’t told McGovern about it. If McGovern had known and picked him anyway, perhaps we could have made real progress in the public’s understanding of mental health, but the way it came out raised questions not only about McGovern’s judgment but also about his competence as well. Our vaunted campaign operation hadn’t even vetted Eagleton’s selection with Missouri’s Democratic governor, Warren Hearnes, who knew about the mental-health issue.