1 August 1972-Senator Thomas Eagleton withdraws as Democratic VP Nominee

Senator Thomas Eagleton, D-Missouri

The 1972 Presidential campaign is mostly known for the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s landslide victory over Senator George McGovern, but one of the factors in that victory was the selection and removal of Senator Thomas Eagleton as McGovern’s running mate.

By the time the Democrats convened for their convention in Miami, President Nixon appeared unbeatable, with a double-digit lead over McGovern in almost all national polls. Polling showed that the only way McGovern had a chance to beat Nixon was by selecting Senator Edward Kennedy as his running mate. Despite the Chappaquiddick disaster in 1969, Kennedy was still immensely popular amongst the Democratic faithful, but Kennedy adamantly refused to be on the ticket. His refusal was echoed by other high profile Democrats such as Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey (who had served and been humiliated as Johnson’s VP, losing the 68 election to Nixon by a whisker), Edmund Muskie and Birch Bayh, all of whom could smell the landslide defeat coming to McGovern in November. McGovern decided to offer the slot to Thomas Eagleton, Senator from Missouri, even though he knew very little about Eagleton. This lack of knowledge would prove to be his undoing.

Eagleton accepted the nomination, and promised to bring his medical records with him to Miami for McGovern’s review, but he didn’t. He also failed to tell McGovern and the Democratic party leadership that he had checked into a hospital 3 times between 1960 and 1966 for mental and physical exhaustion, depression, and on at least one hospital stay he had been given electro-shock therapy. His use of Thorazine, a powerful anti-depressant medication was also not disclosed, but when it came up during the initial meeting with McGovern, Eagleton dismissed any concerns about the drug, stating that the prescriptions were in his wife’s name, not his. That subterfuge should have been a red flag for McGovern, but he did nothing about any concerns he had.

When McGovern got the medical records, he read that Eagleton suffered from “manic-depressive” and “suicidal tendencies”. McGovern then called two of Eagleton’s doctors, both of whom said they had “grave concerns” about Eagleton’s mental health. Now McGovern was in trap. On the public level, if he dropped Eagleton, the Republicans would pounce on his terrible decision making and lack of vetting. If he didn’t drop him, he would face tremendous pressure from rank and file Democrats, many of whom already didn’t like him and saw him as an enormous albatross taking the party towards a massive electoral defeat in November.

On a private level, McGovern worried about how his daughter Teresa would handle the announcement that he was dropping Eagleton because of his mental health problems. Teresa, like Eagleton, also suffered from depression, which would ultimately lead to her death in 1994. The editorial pages of The Washington Post and New York Times added fuel to the fire, when both papers said that Eagleton had to be dropped from the ticket, warning that a man with these problems could not be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

McGovern initially said that he stood by Eagleton “1000%”, but pressure from party leaders continued to mount. Finally, McGovern made the decision to drop Eagleton, with Eagleton officially leaving the ticket on 1 August, 1972. Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law to Ted Kennedy, agreed to be the sacrificial lamb for the November slaughter, accepting McGovern’s offer of the VP nomination.

Later in life McGovern said he should have stuck by his initial decision to keep Eagleton, and he blamed his own ignorance of mental illness as the main reason for his decision to force Eagleton off the ticket. The selection of Eagleton and the cursory vetting showed just how much of the leadership of the Democratic party has passed out of the hands of the precinct captains and ward bosses and into the hands of the “people”, who proceeded to drive the party into a massive ditch. Nixon routed McGovern on 7 November 1972, carrying 49 states and 62% of the popular vote. McGovern carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. As the Watergate scandal erupted, I started seeing bumper stickers around my hometown of DC that read “Don’t blame me, I live in Massachusetts/DC”.

Eagleton went on with his Senate career, getting re-elected in 1974, 1980 and deciding not to run in 1986. After the Senate he was instrumental in brining the LA Rams to St. Louis. He died in 2007, and shortly after his death he was revealed as the source behind one of Robert Novak’s most explosive columns during the 1972 campaign. In May of 72 Novak published that “a Democratic senator says ‘people really don’t know McGovern. Once they get to know him, especially in the Midwest and heavily Catholic areas of the country, they’ll find out that he stands for amnesty, acid and abortion’” Amnesty, acid and abortion quickly became the smear Republicans used against McGovern, and when Novak was pressed to name his source, he approached Eagleton for permission to use his name. Eagleton refused, and Novak kept his secret until Eagleton died. There’s no doubt that McGovern would never have picked him as a running mate had he known the source of that quote.