The Myths of McGovern

Thirty-five years later, what the 1972 campaign can—and can’t—teach liberals today.

If you happen to find yourself listening to Conversation 62 of Tape 33 of the new Nixon documents released this summer, this is what you will hear: On Election Night 1972, Richard M. Nixon, having served George McGovern the biggest electoral college defeat in history, took a congratulatory phone call from Hubert H. Humphrey, who all but admitted he had wanted McGovern to lose, and that he had tried to keep him from winning.

It is oblique, as the wink-wink, nudge-nudge understandings of backroom politics so often are. Nixon had earlier dispatched Henry Kissinger to convey to Humphrey the (false) message that the Vietnam peace deal he would sign after the election was perfectly marvelous. On the tape, Humphrey agrees that, yes, Nixon was better for peace than McGovern. Nixon grants Humphrey absolution for having nonetheless campaigned for the Democratic nominee (“you had to fight for your man”), and Humphrey’s voice turns conspiratorial: “Well, I’ll have a talk with you some time. .a€‰.a€‰. I did what I had to do. If not, Mr. President, this whole defeat would have been blamed on me and on some of my associates.” They both share a hearty laugh. Nixon, delighted to confirm that the man he shivved to get to the Oval Office preferred to keep him there for four more years, waxes effusive, reminding him that Winston Churchill returned to the prime minister’s chair at age 68–“so what the hell, you’re still in your sixties!” Then he rings off, thanking Humphrey “for being such a statesman.”

This astonishing conversation condenses so much about that strangest of American presidential elections, 1972: its battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, fought by an antiwar insurgency far to the left of the Cold War consensus and an ossified, go-along-to-get-along establishment; the dishonest and dishonorable way Nixon settled Vietnam to secure reelection; the crashing irony that the nation delivered a 60.67 percent popular majority to a man they claimed to trust more than the antiwar insurgent, but who had already directed a criminal coverup. Dwell, however, on Humphrey’s line–“this whole defeat would have been blamed on me and some of my associates.” For condensed in that is an entire subsequent history that, like Faulkner said of the South’s, isn’t even past: It is the battle for the meaning of 1972.

Losing campaigns–especially thumpingly, head-spinningly losing campaigns–are objects of talismanic power in the minds of politicians. Their response is almost pre-rational. No wonder partisans of the center and right still invoke McGovern whenever they can to scare Democrats who would stray from their preferred ideological course. In 2003, Al From and Bruce Reed wrote, “What activists like [Howard] Dean call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at home.” A Democrat was quoted in the New York Times the next year worrying that John Kerry was veering left on Iraq–”[c]oming off like George McGovern.” When Ned Lamont won the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary, Jacob Weisberg recalled in the Financial Times how McGovern lost 49 states because of “his tendency toward isolationism and ambivalence about the use of American power in general.”

The warnings turned out to be of limited portent; politicians who called for Iraq withdrawal in 2004 now look more like political prophets than harbingers of landslide defeats. But the M-word short-circuits thought. McGovern lost because he was an isolationist? If you had said that in 1972, people might have looked at you funny. Whatever his preference for deep cuts in the defense budget, Republican surrogates who hauled out the isolationist charge were labeled “silly” by no less an honest broker than the New York Times’ Scotty Reston. Over the following six years–according to my ProQuest search–the words “McGovern” and some variant of “isolation” were mentioned in the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune a mere six times. If McGovern campaigned as an “isolationist,” then Richard Nixon–whose main appeal was that he could better end the war, whose “Nixon doctrine” was a promise to the American people not to send troops to more foreign countries, and who literally blamed America’s financial woes on “international money speculators”–campaigned as one, too, only more effectively. As for From and Reed, they’re the silliest of all: Walter Mondale was handpicked for the 1984 Democratic nomination by the leadership of the AFL-CIO, while George McGovern was persona non grata to those same leaders. Mondale and McGovern are more like oil and water than a “wing.” But that’s the way it goes. The McGovern epithet has become so handy that it can be stuck to anyone you want to label a “loser,” whatever your claim’s relation to the complexities of history. McGovern explains everything, precisely because no one seems to know what McGovern and 1972 actually meant.

The monomania of the latest entrant into the Battle of ’72 is abortion. Why the Democrats Are Blue: How Secular Liberals Hijacked the People’s Party, by conservative journalist Mark Stricherz, tells a familiar story that in its broad outlines is, if incomplete, not false: The forces that brought George McGovern the nomination did so by wresting the Democratic presidential nominating process from the de facto control of Catholic urban machine bosses. But Stricherz claims McGovernism somehow disenfranchised “the Catholic wing of the party” with malice aforethought, and in doing so sabotaged Democratic electoral fortunes to this day.

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