The Nation: Eagleton: McGovern's Man from Missouri

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WHEN the call finally came late last week, Tom Eagleton had almost given up hope. The junior Senator from Missouri had been informed that he was on George McGovern's "short list" of vice-presidential choices, and the waiting was withering. He had stayed up half the previous night sipping gins and tonic and wisecracking with his aides to ease the tension. His lame jokes were not half so funny as the fact that he was wearing unmatched shoes. The next morning he paced his hotel room like a caged cat, twitching each time the telephone rang. By 2 p.m. he had grown testy and was convinced that he had been bypassed. Then, at 3:30 p.m., the call came. Hanging up, he embraced his wife Barbara and exclaimed: "It's great! It's great!"

Thomas Francis Eagleton has never been anything but exuberant about politics. His father, the late Mark Eagleton, made certain of that. A prominent St. Louis attorney who once ran unsuccessfully for mayor, the elder Eagleton invested his political ambitions in his younger son. The indoctrination was early and intensive. Tom Eagleton's first exposure to national politics came in 1940 when he accompanied his father to the Republican Convention in

Philadelphia. Just ten, he manifested an early maverick streak by differing with his father, a Missouri delegate who supported Wendell Willkie. Young Tom backed Thomas Dewey because, he says, "he had better buttons." As with the Kennedy clan, current events were the staple fare at the Eagleton dinner table, and it was not long before Tom was hooked on politics. "I became fascinated," he recalls. "The way other kids wanted to be farmers or firemen or cowboys, I wanted to be a politician."

When Tom was in high school, his father hired one tutor to broaden his son's knowledge of national and international affairs, another to teach him public speaking. Then it was on to Amherst (cum laude) and Harvard Law School (cum laude), with a side trip to Northwestern to take more speech courses. At Amherst he was "the Jim Farley of my class, the campus politician"; at Harvard he was noted for his custom of faithfully reading five newspapers daily. He returned to St. Louis in 1953, joined his father's law firm and lost no time plunging into politics.

At 27 he became the youngest candidate ever to be elected St. Louis circuit attorney; he looked so boyish that he stumped the What's My Line? panel. At 31 he was the state's youngest attorney general, and at 35 the youngest Lieutenant Governor. Describing himself as a "moderate liberal, whatever that is," he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968 and unseated the Democratic incumbent, Ed Long, in a primary fight following a LIFE expose of Long's unsavory dealings with the Teamsters Union. He met George McGovern soon after arriving in Washington, but the two men do not know each other well. Says Eagleton, with characteristic diffidence: "The longest conversation I had with him was one hour in the Senate steam bath in early 1969."