DEMOCRATS: The Long Journey to Disaster

ON the last day of his quest, George McGovern hurtled across the country in a fishhook pattern: New York City, Philadelphia, Wichita, Kans., Long Beach, Calif., and then eastward again to Sioux Falls, S. Dak. He covered 4,399 miles in that final exhausting spasm, as if to demonstrate his fealty to the crusade through its crushing climax. He still posed the question in terms of morality and righteousness; Richard Nixon was guilty of the “big lie” in general and of “deliberate conniving deception” concerning the Viet Nam negotiations. At one point he talked about how Lincoln put his faith in God in facing the burdens that lay ahead. This election, the preacher-teacher-Senator from South Dakota said, could be “more important and more fateful” than Lincoln’s 112 years ago. As he spoke at Long Beach Airport, a bell somewhere began to ring inexplicably and repeatedly. It was that kind of day in that kind of fall.

Toward the end, even McGovern seemed to know where matters stood. The smile could still be summoned; the handshake could be made to seem firm and confident. But his face was haggard and furrowed, his voice hoarse. He threatened to punch a Cincinnati heckler in the nose, whispered to an especially annoying Nixonite in Battle Creek, Mich., “Kiss my ass.” Huffed the astonished youth: “He said a profanity.”

America would not come home to McGovern’s vision. Even McGovern’s extraordinary faith in himself could not survive the unanimous resonances of reality. Tuesday night brought an end to the longest declared quest for the presidency in modern times. In January 1971, still an obscure figure in national politics, McGovern said: “I seek the presidency because…! believe the people of this country are tired of the old rhetoric, the unmet promise, the image makers, the practitioners of the expedient.” Yet McGovern was to stumble into those same pitfalls—and more.

Even as the nomination was won, Gary Hart remarked that the campaign had “lost its direction, if not its soul.” Throughout the meticulously planned primaries, McGovern had seemingly remained his own man, stubbornly glued on his own course and vindicated by the thumping first-ballot victory in Miami Beach. Yet trouble had begun as early as the Nebraska primary, Issues Director Ted Van Dyk says now, when McGovern’s Democratic opponents “went after him on the triple-A issues” —abortion, amnesty and acid. McGovern was soon trying to disengage himself. Even his defense programs were “clarified.” Then in the California debates with Hubert Humphrey, McGovern was forced to admit that he did not know exactly what his ill-starred $1,000-grant-to-every-citizen would cost. When he later came up with a more cogent program, he dismissed the “Demogrant” idea as something he had never really supported. Instead of shaking the radical label, he began coming across merely as a vacillating radical.

Strident. As campaign pressures increased, the measured tone turned strident. Nixon was running “the most corrupt Administration in history.” The President’s war policy was compared to Hitler’s atrocities. As for his most ambitious promises, McGovern said that Congress would never let him do all that he wanted anyway. That sort of wiggling, designed to demonstrate reasonableness, won derision from the undecided. For those who were committed strongly and early, there seemed to be more kneeling than healing in the courtship visits to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Daley and other Democratic powers. Yet many of those powers never believed he had a chance, never ceased to be irritated by McGovern’s entourage and its intellectual arrogance (Frank Mankiewicz on Humphrey: “An embittered failure of an old man”).

The Eagleton episode caused an all-but-fatal hemorrhage. McGovern’s “1,000%” support of Eagleton in public while he was preparing to dump him in private blunted forever his claim to credibility. The “telephone book” search for a successor mercilessly extended the agony. Even so friendly an observer as the New York Times’s Tom Wicker conceded that the Eagleton affair had “at least four disastrous effects.” It hardened the suspicion of incompetence, compounded it with “the appearance of indecisiveness,” added a strain of “ruthlessness” and “perhaps more important than anything else” compromised irreparably “the idea of the decent and honest man.”

It also used up precious time that should have been devoted to organizing the presidential campaign. Planning was supposed to begin a month before the convention, but the Credentials Committee challenges to the California delegation and others deflected attention. Organizer Gene Pokorny, for instance, was pulled off his preparations in Illinois and did not get back to them until late July. In Washington, though Larry O’Brien was tacitly put in command, the lines of authority were never established. “You guys work it out,” McGovern told his aides at one point. “I’m going out to campaign.”

But to say what? For a time he yielded to centrists’ advice and talked about the traditional Democratic bread-and-butter issues of inflation, unemployment and high taxes—the economic concerns that polls confirmed were high in voters’ minds. But on these points he somehow lacked passion or even conviction. Also, some of his positions further alienated the middle and lower-middle classes. Radically increased inheritance taxes might soak the Rockefellers, but it also seemed to threaten every man’s chance to pass a little something of himself on to his children.

Even when he returned to the issues that deeply stirred him—the war, corruption, morality—he could not often arouse his audiences. Nothing could have been more personally painful to him than the findings by the TIME/Yankelovich Poll, among others, that the former “Tricky Dick” Nixon was now judged the more “open and trustworthy” by two-thirds of the sample and was seen as the “peace candidate” by 54%. The Kissinger announcement that a Viet Nam settlement is “at hand” merely reinforced Nixon’s peace image. The Watergate incident and related activities, McGovern supporters felt, never had the popular impact that they deserved. Yet even if people did worry about these and other flaws in the Nixon Administration, McGovern never established himself as a believable alternative to Richard Nixon; he never seemed sufficiently “presidential.”

Combination. There were many more difficulties—Nixon’s 2-to-1 advantage in campaign funds, the labor split, Nixon’s success in insulating himself in the White House. But there was something else, something that went beyond a litany of the Democrat’s blunders and bad breaks. “A combination of circumstances may have conspired against McGovern’s success,” observes TIME Correspondent Dean Fischer, “but more significant are the shortcomings of the candidate himself. He failed to articulate a vision of the nation. He talked vaguely of his goals once peace is restored, but they sounded like campaign promises instead of a philosophic summons to national greatness.” His personality thus became an additional reason for resisting the change he urged.

McGovern will now return to the Senate, at least until his term expires in 1974. And he has indicated that he would like to stay longer. “McGovern’s rigidity,” concludes Fischer, “his sense of moral conviction, was at once a strength and a weakness. It is a strength that will enable him to survive the overwhelming defeat; he won’t be shattered because he believes that his cause is just. But it is a weakness because it causes him to ignore shadings and to consider problems in an inflexible, moralistic manner. The issues McGovern discussed during the campaign are central to the nation’s future. He deserves credit for focusing on them. But he failed to persuade the public that he had the ability to guide the nation in the direction he pointed to.”