The Last Hurrah: John Bartlow Martin and the 1972 Presidential Election

In early September 1972 John Bartlow Martin, who had worked as a speechwriter for every Democratic presidential candidate since Adlai Stevenson in 1952, traveled to Washington, D.C., to offer his writing skills for his party’s new nominee for the nation’s highest office, George McGovern, U.S. senator from South Dakota, in his longshot effort to unseat incumbent President Richard Nixon.

In the early primaries leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, Martin, who had been teaching at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, had supported the candidacy of Edmund Muskie. “The thing I like about him is his thoughtfulness. He’s not erratic, not impulsive,” Martin said, and he sometimes traveled with the senator or went to Washington, D.C., to meet with Muskie’s senior advisers, including Clark Clifford, Jim Rowe, and U.S. Senator Al Gore Sr. Muskie had been an effective vice presidential candidate running with Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and, four years later, political pundits crowned him as the front-runner for the nomination.

Muskie had piled up endorsements from several of the nation’s leading Democratic politicians, who expressed admiration for his “Lincolnesque” calm and aura of electability. The man from Maine stood, they all agreed, as the only Democratic candidate capable of defeating Nixon. The early campaign failed to excite Martin, who wrote a friend that he believed the politicians were doing their best to “bore the people to death. I’ve never seen a year with so many candidates, so many primaries, and so much vacuity.”

The Muskie presidential boom imploded, however, after the crucial New Hampshire primary in early March. Muskie won the primary, but by a smaller margin than many had predicted, seriously damaging his stature as the inevitable choice of the Democrats for the November election; by late April he had dropped out of the race. In the end, Martin said that Muskie proved to be “a surprisingly weak candidate, and he was overwhelmed by the sudden surge of revolt and fragmentation that swept the Democratic party.”

The beneficiary of Muskie’s fall from grace was McGovern, the prairie populist described by Robert Kennedy as “the most decent man in the Senate,” whose strong showing in New Hampshire and straightforwardness impressed even conservative members of his party. He had articulated his campaign theme, “Come Home, America”— what he called a restatement of America’s treasured values—at a March 21, 1970, speech in Denver before a roomful of fellow Democrats. McGovern called upon the nation to “come home from the wilderness of needless war and excessive militarism to build a society in which we cared about one another—especially the old, the sick, the hungry, the jobless, the homeless.” Such a message seemed tailor-made for the huge influx of young voters now eligible to vote because of the passage of the Twenty-sixth Amendment adopted in 1971 that had lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.

With Muskie floundering, McGovern used his effective grassroots organization, drawn to his sincere commitment to end the Vietnam War, to achieve victories in such key primary states as Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Nebraska, and California. McGovern survived a bitter, last-ditch effort from Humphrey to deny him the presidential nomination at the convention in July. The GOP tried to win over the blue-collar, normally Democratic voters who had turned to George Wallace in 1968 by repeating the erroneous charge from his fellow Democrats that McGovern was the candidate of the three A’s—Amnesty (leniency for those who resisted being drafted to fight in Vietnam), Abortion (favoring legalized abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision), and Acid (the legalization of drugs, in particular marijuana). As the son of a Methodist minister and a decorated World War II bomber pilot, McGovern disputed the notion that he was too militant to be president, noting, “Ordinarily, we don’t send wild-eyed radicals to the United States Senate from South Dakota.”

Just eighteen days after the Democratic convention ended on July 13, McGovern’s quest to topple Nixon suffered a fatal blow when his vice presidential running mate, Thomas Eagleton, a first-term, politically moderate U.S. Senator from Missouri, stepped down. The McGovern team had turned to Eagleton, a Muskie supporter, after their candidate’s other choices for the job, including Ted Kennedy, Humphrey, and Walter Mondale, had turned him down, and after Eagleton had assured them he had no skeletons in his closet that might come back to haunt them.

In the days before extensive background checks were a regular part of such decisions, McGovern and his staff were unaware that Eagleton had been hospitalized for physical and nervous exhaustion on more than one occasion and had twice received electroshock (today known as electroconvulsive) therapy. Reports about Eagleton’s medical problems began circulating among the national press. “I was not plagued with haunting memories of my medical past,” Eagleton later said, adding that he did not consider what had happened to him “as illegal or immoral or shameful.” He said his health problems were the furthest thing from his mind when McGovern asked him to be his running mate, and compared his health problems as nothing worse than “a broken leg that had healed.”

GaryHart, one of McGovern’s top advisers, noted that Eagleton’s health issues had even escaped the scrutiny of the senator’s home state newspapers, including the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, well regarded for its investigative journalism. “Those who claim the McGovern staff could, or should, have uncovered this kind of information about an individual not even under serious consideration prior to the convention don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Hart.

Before all the facts about Eagleton’s health had been presented to him, McGovern impulsively and unwisely told Dick Dougherty, his press secretary, to put out a statement that he was “a thousand percent behind Tom Eagleton.” Later, McGovern talked to Eagleton’s psychiatrists and learned specific details about his running mate’s medical history that he believed “raised serious doubts about his capacity to carry the burdens and responsibility of the presidency.” Calls were also coming from the editorial pages of major national newspapers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, for Eagleton to resign from the ticket.

On July 31 Eagleton finally agreed to do so, and a special session of the Democratic National Committee ratified McGovern’s replacement candidate, former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver. McGovern’s reputation for competence and integrity took a major hit with the Eagleton affair, as the public sympathized with the Missouri senator, who had stonewalled any release of the most damaging details about his previous hospitalizations, making McGovern the villain in the affair in the eyes of the public. “I did what I had to do,” McGovern noted years later, “but the Eagleton matter ended whatever chance there was to defeat Richard Nixon in 1972.”

The fifty-seven-year-old Martin went to Washington in early September 1972 to start working as a McGovern speechwriter. From that point until Election Day in November, he traveled back and forth between the nation’s capital and his Illinois home so he could teach his classes at Northwestern. While in Washington, Martin stayed at the Hay-Adams Hotel and toiled out of offices on the seventh floor at McGovern headquarters at 1910 K Street, an eight-story former apartment building that had also once been Muskie’s campaign headquarters.

Several people asked him to assist McGovern, Martin recalled, and he could not resist helping anyone who ran against the one man he most despised in politics—Nixon. Headquarters had the uproarious and informal atmosphere of a college dormitory, with “scores of barefoot girls in blue jeans and boys in long hair and beards racing about mindlessly, taping up funny signs in the corridors,” said Martin. With affection, Hart described the offices as possessing an “exquisite madness,” and praised the “unbound enthusiasm and wry humor” possessed by the young staff and volunteers.

Martin possessed a more jaundiced view of the proceedings, recalling that if he left his desk unguarded at headquarters, he found upon his return that his pens, paper, and sometimes even typewriter had vanished. “The kids are rude, insensitive, heedless, discourteous,” he said. “Not all; but most.” His arrival had “raised the average age of the staff to 10 ½,” Martin said in a letter to his wife, Fran. Lawrence O’Brien, named chairman of the fall campaign by McGovern to ease the concerns of traditional Democrats, wondered what he might be getting himself in for when he noticed that the sign over the door at the headquarters did not include any mention of the Democratic Party. McGovern’s followers seemed to view the party as the enemy, “or at best as a slightly repugnant means to an end,” said O’Brien.

Latecomers to the McGovern cause were often treated harshly by those who had been with McGovern from the beginning. Robert Shrum, who had written speeches for Muskie before assuming the same role for the South Dakota senator, noted that “resentment toward those who hadn’t been with McGovern from the start were rife.” According to Martin, the “cocksure young staff” jealously guarded access to the candidate.

At McGovern headquarters, however, Martin worked with two men he knew from previous presidential contests—Ted Van Dyk, the director of issues and speeches, and Milt Gwirtzman, who parceled out assignments and transmitted speech material to the McGovern campaign plane by telecopier after Van Dyk had reviewed the text. The plan called to rotate speechwriters on the candidate’s Boeing 727 campaign plane, the Dakota Queen, named so in honor of the B-24 bomber he flew in World War II, with each of them spending a week with McGovern and then returning to headquarters. The rotation might never happen, Martin told Fran, something that was fine with him as he much preferred eating lunch at the Federal City Club in Washington than at, for example, the Ypsilanti, Michigan, airport.

In addition to Shrum and Martin, other speechwriters on the staff included Sandy Berger, Bob Hunter, and Stephen Schlesinger, the son of Martin’s good friend, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “We had a good crew,” recalled Van Dyk. Shrum spent most of his time traveling with McGovern, assisting the candidate’s main writer, John Holum, his longtime legislative assistant. It proved to be a perplexing situation for Martin. “Having started out in this business 20 years ago with Arthur and now finding myself sitting next to Arthur’s son, doing what I was doing 20 years ago, I find myself wondering if there is a message I’m not getting,” he wrote Fran.

Martin praised Van Dyk and Gwirtzman as “able professionals,” but lamented that none of the young staff assembled at headquarters had ever before worked on a national campaign and, because they had won the primaries against phenomenal odds (early on McGovern had support from only 4 percent of the voting public) and faced strong opposition from the party establishment, thought they could do no wrong. Theodore H. White, the famous chronicler of presidential races with his The Making of the President series, described the attitude of McGovern’s young workers as not the politics of exclusion, but “the politics of the faithful few.” They had plunged into national politics, Martin observed, without understanding that a national campaign was “a vastly different exercise from a bunch of scattered primaries.” Some of the senior staff also seemed more interested in gaining publicity for themselves than working selflessly on behalf of the candidate, noisily resigning every few days and expressing their opinions freely to the traveling press corps. “The old tradition of the staff with a passion for anonymity was junked,” Martin said.

           

As nearly as he could figure out, Martin believed that the McGovern campaign’s strategy involved writing off most of the South, except for Arkansas and Texas, as well as the states west of the Mississippi River except for California, Minnesota, and South Dakota. The candidate planned on concentrating on the larger states in a belt from Illinois to Massachusetts, plus Wisconsin. “As to issues, forget credibility and trust—he [McGovern] destroyed that issue himself,” said Martin, especially with the Eagleton fiasco. “Instead, concentrate on the old Democratic bread and butter issues—jobs, high prices, populism, government for special interests vs. government for the people. . . . Plus Vietnam.”

By focusing on such tried-and-true Democratic issues, McGovern hoped to win back defecting blue-collar members of the party, as well as the still powerful figures who had opposed him at the convention, including Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and former President Lyndon Johnson, paying courtesy calls on both men. As Van Dyk pointed out in a memorandum to key McGovern advisers in late August, traditional Democratic voters, located primarily in the big industrial states, needed to be reminded that McGovern and the Democratic Party “are good for ordinary people. They are good for them economically. They listen to them. They believe in them.” 

Unfortunately, Martin said, following this strategy hurt McGovern “heavily among the people who had supported him because he was anti-politician. He revealed himself as practicing the crudest kind of old politics—and doing it far more clumsily than Nixon or Daley.” Martin also questioned the staff’s initial decision to run what he called “a strictly TV campaign—they hit 3 cities a day in order to stage TV visual events, thus hitting the network news programs plus 3 local TV outlets.” On these stops McGovern or Shriver might eat with workers at a local factory’s cafeteria; visit a farm, supermarket or bowling alley; or tour an area in need of highlighting because of a specific social problem.

Animated by their opposition to the Vietnam War, the McGovern staff fought just as hard against uphill odds as the Humphrey campaign had just four years earlier, said Van Dyk. “I had great confidence in my policy and speechwriting staff,” he said. The few experienced professionals at headquarters were realistic about their candidate’s chances against Nixon. Only a major blunder on the president’s part or some “major unforeseeable outside event” could give McGovern a chance at victory, said Martin.

According to Van Dyk, possible setbacks for the Nixon administration included either a ghastly military setback in Vietnam or damaging details being uncovered from a scandal involving the June 17 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., then being seriously investigated by only a few newspapers, including the Washington Post. Such a miracle seemed more and more unlikely, especially given Nixon’s decision to do as little campaigning for his re-election as possible. Instead, he used his position as the chief executive to garner headlines, watching his approval rating steadily climb as a result of his foreign policy successes, including normalizing relations with China and easing tensions with the Soviet Union at a Moscow summit meeting.

The president sought to remain above the political fray, saying and doing as little as he pleased “without being held properly accountable” by the press, said Van Dyk. McGovern, however, faced daily scrutiny from a host of reporters as he barnstormed across the country. Late in the campaign Martin wrote a speech in which he pointed out that for the first time in American history the country had a presidential contest with only one candidate. “The whole speech elaborated that theme. It got a line or two in the paper,” he said. “Why? Don’t people care? Or when McGovern said it, maybe they didn’t believe it.”

Unlike his previous experiences with Democratic presidential candidates, Martin never really got to know McGovern, possibly because, for the first time, he did not have the opportunity to travel with the candidate; he could not remember even seeing McGovern in person since the 1968 Chicago convention. “Never before had I worked for a candidate I didn’t believe in,” Martin said. “I am afraid I don’t believe in him. He knows Vietnam and hunger; but that’s all. He’s not a national politician, has no national feeling.”

Martin compared McGovern unfavorably to the other Democratic presidential candidates he had previously worked for, faulting his leadership abilities and failure to make issues he talked about in his speeches resonate with the public. “Someone wrote that the words are fine but the tune is all wrong when he speaks,” Martin said. “When he showed anger, it came through as whining, complaining; when he showed compassion, he sounded like a hick preacher. He never sounded Presidential. . . . No eloquence. Nothing to inspire. No joy. No fun. No wit or humor.”

Despite all his criticisms of McGovern, Martin said there was something good and decent about the man. In October, when HenryKissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, announced, falsely, as it turned out, that “peace was at hand in Vietnam,” Martin had been impressed by McGovern’s reaction to the news. He remembered that McGovern had been cornered by the press and given little time to reflect on Kissinger’s announcement, but had agreed with a reporter’s assertion that if Nixon ended the war it meant certain defeat for his presidential campaign. McGovern asserted, however, that losing the election would be a small price to pay for ending the bloodshed in Vietnam and finally bringing American troops safely home. “Furthermore,” said Martin, “he said it with conviction and force.” McGovern made many mistakes during the campaign, but also his luck had finally run out. “During the primaries,” said Martin, “he got every lucky break; but at and after the convention, he got every bad break.”

Martin had found it hard to be effective writing from McGovern headquarters in Washington. Staff on the plane with the candidate usually ignored what headquarters sent them and preferred to use the material they had prepared while on the campaign trail. The casual attitude displayed by some of McGovern’s writers also bothered Martin. He noted that during the Stevenson and Johnson campaigns, every time the candidate made a major speech, a number of drafts were written “amid much agonizing, and the final was polished and repolished endlessly—and the result was damn good. But McGovern’s writers seemed to dash off [a] major speech on the backs of old envelopes—and the results showed it.” Portions of the speeches he wrote did get used, but the material was never central to the campaign and “it never changed or sharpened” McGovern’s image for the voters, Martin said.

Scheduled to join the McGovern party on the plane near the end of the campaign, Martin, who had gone home so he could teach his classes at Northwestern, received a telephone call from Holum telling him there was no room for him on the plane. “So I stayed home, idle,” Martin noted. On Election Day, November 7, Martin voted, something he called a gloomy formality. In the election pool at headquarters, he had guessed McGovern winning 270 electoral votes—the bare minimum needed to win. He made a more realistic guess of 85 electoral votes in the pool at his class at Northwestern.

The voting results were a disaster for the McGovern campaign, as Nixon swept into a second term, winning 60.7 percent of the votes; McGovern only won one state, Massachusetts, and lost in the Electoral College by a 520 to 17 margin. By dinner time on election evening, Van Dyk and others at McGovern headquarters knew their candidate would lose in a landslide. Near the end of the campaign, McGovern also knew that defeat loomed ahead. Some of his advisers expressed worries that the candidate still harbored hopes of an upset, so Shrum decided to break the bad news to McGovern, doing so in a hotel room in an unnamed city near the campaign’s end. McGovern greeted Shrum, asked him to sit down, poured each of them a vodka on the rocks, handed one to him, thanked him for coming, and said, “Bob, I know, I know. But I just need to believe for one more day.”

McGovern may have suffered a humiliating loss, but other Democratic candidates running for office weathered the storm, and the party held on to its majorities in the U.S. Senate and House. Martin saw the results as an indication that there was a great deal of anti-McGovern voting rather than a pro-Nixon surge. “Then, having voted for Nixon, they split their tickets and voted for Democratic candidates for Senate, Governor, House, and local,” he said. Muskie or Humphrey might have managed to beat Nixon, and at least they would not have lost time in August and part of September trying to win back the support of labor unions and the Democratic organization, Martin said.

The most unfortunate outcome of the election for Martin was that “one of the worst, if not the worst, Presidents in American history now has the biggest mandate, or nearly the biggest, in history.” He worried that Nixon’s landslide gave the president the misapprehension that he had a “license to do anything. I really fear for the country.” Martin shared similar concerns to one of his classes at Northwestern, especially about where the Watergate scandal might lead. One day after class one of his students, Joe Gandelman, asked Martin in a private conversation to share his opinion about the Nixon administration. “He seemed truly frustrated and fearful,” Gandelman recalled.

Even before any evidence had been uncovered about the extent of the White House’s involvement in the break-in of DNC headquarters and the cover-up that followed, Martin had been convinced that Nixon and his advisers knew about the crime. Gandelman remembered Martin softly saying something that chilled him: “We’ve heard there have been people going through Larry O’Brien’s tax returns. This is a scary bunch. I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re thugs.” A little less than two years after the election, on August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned as the nation’s thirty-seventh president after congressional and media investigations had uncovered the extent of his administration’s crimes and dirty tricks—vindicating many of the charges McGovern had made in the campaign and confirming Martin’s darkest suspicions.

The McGovern campaign proved to be the last hurrah for Martin when it came to direct involvement in Democratic Party presidential politics. The experience proved to be “liberating” for him. When he had been on the plane with such presidential candidates as Stevenson and John F. Kennedy during an election, Martin had forgiven them when they made mistakes—after all, it was his candidate, sitting only a few seats away, who had made the error. “But if you’re on the outside, you see him for what he is, a blunderer,” he said.

The malaise Martin experienced during the McGovern campaign had not all been the fault of the candidate, but had reflected the fact that the country had changed and he had not. The increasing role of primaries in deciding presidential nominees troubled Martin, who thought it was foolish that a “few farmers in Iowa and New Hampshire should choose the leader of the Western world.” Control of politics had been reformed from the rule of party bosses and handed over to the people, as had been intended, but now lay with pollsters, advertisers, and television. Martin lamented the rise of “television consultants,” who instructed their candidates not only in what words and gestures to use, but concocted strategy and selected what issues to address. Television converted serious political questions into mere theater, and thereby killed the notion of “serious political speeches,” he added.

Remembering the colleagues he had worked with on presidential campaign staffs—Carl McGowan, John Kenneth Gaibraith, Schlesinger, Ted Sorensen, Kenny O’Donnell, Fred Dutton, Lawrence O’Brien, Van Dyk, and Gwirtzman—Martin said that none of them imagined they were molding their candidate’s image, “not one talked to the press much or leaked anything to the press that harmed the candidate; not one ever imagined that he was himself the candidate.” Martin viewed the well paid poll takers and image consultants dominating campaigns as “monsters” seeking to advance their own cause instead of that of their candidates.

Martin also believed that journalists had also grown too dependent on polls, spending far too much time in horse-race reporting, wondering who was ahead and if a candidate’s campaign might be headed for trouble if he or she failed to meet expectations created by the polls. “Why don’t reporters go out and report?” Martin wondered. “Reporters ought to be out in bars and union halls and places where people are and find out what they’re thinking instead of just taking Gallup’s word for what people think.”