DEMOCRATS: The Long Journey to Disaster

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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.