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.