Historical Series: Why The Failures oF Gary Hart’s Political Life Were His Own And Not America’s
Part 1: 1972: Hart’s Work on The McGovern Campaign: A Foreshadowing of His Own Flaws
Two years ago in one of my first articles on presidential politics I made it very clear that I fundamentally believe that Gary Hart’s campaign implosion due to the Monkey Business Scandal involving Donna Rice was not a failure of the system or destroyed the way politics works but a personal failure of Gary Hart that he and a large number of smart people have somehow compounded to show as institutional failure at every level.
In many ways that is Hart’s legacy. It has nothing to do with his actual political accomplishments which by any reasonable standard was underwhelming and disastrous. He was one the architects of George McGovern’s successful campaign for the Democratic nomination for President in 1972 that ended up being the biggest electoral disaster for the Democratic Party in history to that point. Hart managed to win a seat in the Senate, representing Colorado in 1974. He was labeled a rising star in the party, had a role in the Church Committee and examined Three Mile Island. Narrowly winning reelection in the Reagan landslide of 1980 his most prominent legislation in Congress was the co-sponsorship of the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984. This new category of intellectual property rights was groundbreaking and earned his respect even from Republicans. He chose not to run for reelection to the Senate in 1986, choosing to run for the 1988 Democratic nomination.
His challenge for the 1984 Democratic nomination caused him to rise like a meteor and though he ran a strong campaign Walter Mondale won the nomination for President. After his loss he attempt to run for President and after the Monkey Business scandal, he chose to withdraw from the race — and then rejoin it. After a disastrous performance in Iowa, his political life ended.
This is not the kind of political life so many of Hart’s contemporaries in the Senate such as Frank Church and Henry Jackson managed nor did he break ground the way that Jesse Jackson did in the same primary campaigns Hart was a part of. Yet Hart has a special place in the hearts of Americans because he seems, perhaps more than any political figure who doesn’t have the last name Kennedy, a sign of what America lost when he failed politically.
But there’s an argument that Hart got infinitely more bites at the apple and got more success than so many other Presidential candidates during this period, including his mentor George McGovern. Leading up to his run for the Presidency, he was actually bragging about it when it came to why he was not liked by the media or so many other politicians. “I’m the only guy who bucked the system twice and won,” he told one reporter, referring to his managing of McGovern’s campaign and his 1984 primary campaign.
But what did he actually win in those previous campaigns? Why did he believe that same method would earn him the Presidency in 1988 when both previous attempts and failed? Why didn’t he learn the lessons that were already crystal clear before he announced for the nomination back in 1987? And why do so many people truly think that somehow his failures — which he brought upon his own head — are somehow democracy and American politics?
What I will do in this series is look at the three campaigns Gary Hart was a part of: as McGovern’s campaign manager in 1972, his failed run for the nomination in 1984 and how the problems that were part of his approach to politics almost certainly guaranteed that he would have faced electoral disaster even had the Monkey Business incident not become the mess it was. And I’ll start by describing the McGovern primary campaign as well as the failures in the election. I should mention that Hart’s role in this was more negligible: as campaign director his job was focusing more on the caucus states then the primaries. But considering that he was central to it — and that so much of its failures were responsible for Democratic campaigns for a generation — one needs to look at it with care.
I should give credit to Hart for his work on this part of the campaign. Four years later Jimmy Carter’s spending a year in Iowa to focus on his long-shot run for the Presidency led to Iowa taking the forefront in Presidential Politics ever since. Lost to history is the fact that a full four years before this Gary Hart had been at the forefront of the work in Iowa working for McGovern.
This has been forgotten by history for understandable reasons, not the least of which McGovern didn’t do nearly as well as Carter did. In the caucuses McGovern finished with 22 percent of the vote to Edmund Muskie’s 35 percent. (No one else got more than one percent of the vote; the official winner was undecided.) McGovern finished third behind Edmund Muskie and Mayor John Lindsay in Arizona. However Hart’s work did play off in states such as Idaho, Vermont and Nevada.
Understandably far more attention was paid to McGovern’s remarkable second place finish in New Hampshire. Muskie’s disappointing ‘win’ led to the beginning of the fall of his campaign and the focus of the McGovern campaign’s approach to the primaries. It is there that I shall focus because the primary campaign that followed is one that would be foreign to any American 40 and under.
(Note: I covered some of this material in entries in my previous articles on Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace last year. While I shall do my best to avoid repetition due to nature of primary campaigns some information will be covered again.)
McGovern’s strategy to win the Democratic nomination was a long shot. He had announced his campaign in March of 1971 and was almost immediately dismissed. The early favorite was Edmund Muskie, Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and a strong presence during the fall campaign. High expectations for Muskie had led to the beginning of the end and his meltdown in Florida where he finished with less than nine percent of the vote eliminated him.
McGovern barely gave much attention to Florida but their intention was simple: they wanted to split the far-left vote with John Lindsay. Lindsay was the other left-wing candidate in the race and if they’d ignored it Lindsay would have finished second or third in Florida as a strong contender. Their strategy worked: Lindsay finished fifth with 7 percent, McGovern with 6.2. They then chose to ignore Illinois altogether, where they suspected Muskie would win (he did) and then move to Wisconsin. There Humphrey and Henry Jackson would split the moderate vote and allow them to leapfrog to Wisconsin where they would breakthrough and become the frontrunner.
It is during his coverage of Wisconsin that Theodore White makes mention of Gary Hart for the first time. White describes him as a true believer as well as the flaw of the campaign over all:
“His chief weakness was one he shared with most of McGovern’s top commanders: for all of his skill and subtlety in the machinery of a campaign he was a primitive on the issues. He hated the (Vietnam) war; McGovern hated the war; his heart belonged to McGovern — beyond that, Hart’s attention was not distracted by any deeper contemplation of America and its problems. McGovern would think for the nation, once elected; his task was to organize the election of McGovern.”
Of what was to be the most radical and leftist nominee of a major party before — and critically, since — it’s telling how well White foreshadows the thinking of the true believer that will make up so much of politics for the next half-century. What separates Hart from, say, the Lee Atwater’s or Karl Rove’s of the world is that they had a belief system to go with their ability to campaign. Hart’s strategy was essentially to win the nomination and then the White House for their candidate, and then decide how to run the nation.
And its worth discussing the weaknesses in the McGovern primary strategy because while it never seemed to bother them, it would have sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party. That problem first manifested after Florida when George Wallace utterly routed all comers. In Wisconsin when McGovern took his first win with just under 30 percent of the voter it was nearly as shocking when Wallace, with almost no organization beat Humphrey for second place. McGovern’s approach to Wallace during the primaries was to not directly challenge him, perhaps knowing their campaign would do poorly in the South. As a result Wallace won Tennessee and North Carolina with no opposition and would also carry the Texas caucuses easily. The larger problem was Wallace’s strength in so many states with crossover primaries as Wallace finished second in Pennsylvania, Indiana and won Maryland.
Just as problematic was how badly McGovern was doing in states that the Democrats would need to win in November. Deciding to walk away from Illinois showed him getting less than half of one percent. He finished a distant third in Pennsylvania to Humphrey, narrowly lost Ohio (in a race many McGovernites considered stolen) and finished a distant second in Michigan. He only managed to narrowly win California and won New York only because it was uncontested by that point. McGovern managed to win a plurality of the 22 contested -primaries and four of them were on Super Tuesday (California, New Mexico, New Jersey and his home state of South Dakota). His major wins, other than Wisconsin, were Massachusetts, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island. And the primaries themselves revealed McGovern’s limitations as a vote getter: he finished second in Humphrey when it came to total votes cast and only a quarter of a million votes ahead of Wallace (who’d stopped campaigning after his shooting but was still drawing on the ballot in many states). All told McGovern was the choice of just over 4 million Democratic primary voters, barely 25 percent of all cast. This was hardly a mandate of the passes and many establishment candidates were understandably upset.
And if how the candidate won troubled them, his platform terrified them. Few could argue with his sincerity about the immorality of the war in Vietnam — he’d been approached by Allard Lowenstein to run in New Hampshire in 1968 and had turned him down and after Kennedy’s assassination, he had taken up the doomed mantle of his campaign in Chicago. But unlike Kennedy or even Eugene McCarthy, McGovern seemed less interested in dealing with a platform beyond that initially. After his victory in the Massachusetts primary and he officially became the front-runner he now had to get an issues team organized. And White who had traveled with him, believed that the coalition of the young demanded that, regardless of his own feelings, that he must have their issues the center of his campaign. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog. McGovern views were never as extreme as his campaign but he ended up being labeled the candidate of ‘Acid, Abortion and Amnesty’. These views he believed necessary to win the nomination at all in order to seize control of the party:
“Yet what he said and spoke in the spring months could not be limited to audiences of his choosing. On the college campuses within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar ringing high minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past — more of the same, and frightening.
White compares McGovern’s campaign style to Goldwater’s and while the two men were complete polar opposites when it came to their style of approach, the devout nature of their followers and how most of America views them, he was completely accurate. It was also a reverse of the conservative agenda: where as Goldwater believed in increased defense spending and cutting public assistance, McGovern’s agenda was based on cutting the defense budget and increasing public assistance. This strategy, quickly labeled ‘the $1000 giveaway’ became the most ridiculed element of McGovern’s very mockable campaign.
All of these flaws convinced establishment Democrats that when it came to the McGovern campaign, the inmates were running the asylum. At the convention in Miami, the rest of America got to witness this firsthand and it turned out the leader was essentially being led by his followers.
The stop-McGovern forces at the convention focused all their energy on California. McGovern had won in based on the winner-take-all rule but it had been decided in forming the rules for primaries in the lead-up that it would only be in play for 1972 and after that, like every other primary, proportional. McGovern had won with 43 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 38 but all 271 delegates were his under the rules. If the stop-McGovern forces could win the vote on the floor and force the convention to award the delegates proportionally, McGovern would not have enough delegates to clinch the nomination on the first ballot. If that happened, the old guard might be able to wrest the nomination from him.
Well before this battle was fought the McGovern delegates were determined to make it clear to the old guard they were in charge and if that meant burning the party down, so be it. This meant a fight over the Illinois delegation which was still controlled by Mayor Richard Daley. Despite the fact that the voters had chosen 59 delegates hand-picked by Daley, the McGovern people argued these delegates were improper. Their main argument was that the delegation was inadequately balanced — there were not enough young people, women or minorities. As a result, it had to be rejected.
To be clear the delegates might well meet the standards of McGovern but were not at all representative of Illinois. As Mike Royko would write, there was only one Italian and three Poles. “Your reforms have disenfranchised Chicago’s white ethnic Democrats, which is a strange reform…The other thing that bothers me about your delegation is that about half of it ran in the primary and it got stumped…Your co-leader (Jesse Jackson) didn’t make it to his local polling place. He’s being hailed as a new political powerhouse and he couldn’t deliver his own vote.”
But in keeping with a tradition that progressives hold with to this day, virtue mattered more than practicality. McGovern’s delegation was seated and Daley’s was thrown out. Frank Mankiewicz’s an old Democrat pol, said: “I think we may have lost Illinois tonight.” It was a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. All that mattered was that they won over the establishment; that it might cost them the election was irrelevant.
Mankiewicz managed to negotiate things behind the scenes to arranged that the committee had won California. But before that came the ruling on South Carolina. The McGovern delegation realized the only way to win the California delegation was to stage a victory elsewhere. South Carolina was chosen.
This state was the battleground of the Woman’s Political Caucus. Their leaders wanted to challenge the seating of 20 of their delegates. The McGovernites knew that if that they had to lose there in order to win the battle for California and thus the nomination. White sums up the dilemma this way:
“We have 150 women out of our 1500 votes who love women more than they love McGovern… That means we’ve got to balance the psychological cost of losing South Carolina against the need of carrying California.”
The women’s caucus, as White wrote had no real case to present in South Carolina. But the women were upset by it
The larger problem with the McGovern convention was among the delegates. It had the face of the voters but not their elected representatives. As White wrote:
“With the exception of Lindsay, none of the big city mayors were there. The Democratic Party is a party that lives or dies in the big cities, of the 20 largest cities in the country the Democrats governed all but two. Yet these Democratic Mayors, who the people had elected, were absent…Of the 255 Congressional Democrats only 30 were present…The floor was the picture and the picture told the nation the story…blacks, youth women swirling around a podium at which they were only occasionally given contact with a Democratic past.”
For a group that proudly called itself anti-establishment the McGovernites called it a victory. But for the Democrat voters at home who had voted based on the past, this was a horror show. For half a century afterward, those of this guard have considered everything that followed as a reason to completely reject any form of politics. The nation had failed, not them. But as White points out it leaves aside the fact the difference between true believers and the average person.
The chaos that unfolded played out on the floor in front of America, most definitively in the Vice Presidential nomination. By this point McGovern had chosen Thomas Eagleton as his nominee. But rather than nominate him by voice, six symbolic nominees were listed, the most prominent Sissy Farenthold by the women’s caucus. The delegation also nominated Cesar Chavez, Dr. Spock, the Berrigan Brothers, Jerry Rubin, Archie Bunker and Chairman Mao. McGovern gave his acceptance speech at nearly 3:00 am and it was unseen by most viewers.
Then the delegates took over the proceedings behind the scenes. McGovern offered the chairmanship to Lawrence O’Brien. O’Brien had overseen the entire chaos with calm and fairness. But when McGovern talked to his inner staff, Hart was quoted as:
“Rightly or wrongly, the role of the new chairman had elevated itself into symbolism. Were we only to have been used to get McGovern the nomination and then to be discarded as unneeded? Was he just another politician?”
To his staffers, Hart included, he was the symbol of old politics and had to be discarded. So McGovern betrayed the man who had worked for both JFK, LBJ and Humphrey for Jean Westwood. O’Brien had torched his reputation with the old guard in the name of fairness and to the new guard that wasn’t enough.
Worse came when he nominated his choice for Vice-Chairman. His choice was Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary and former Senator to California. After he did so a hand was raised by a Mississippi delegate. Arguing to Westwood that in following with the rules they should have a woman chairman and a black vice chairman. The nomination was Basil Paterson, a black man from New York. No one in the group knew anything about Paterson; indeed someone actually who he was. But he was chosen because he was black and Salinger was white and in the eyes of the McGovernites that was more than enough. Paterson was nominated.
In both of these cases McGovern could have changed the minds of the voters had he expressed his preference which were O’Brian and Salinger. But McGovern charitably wasn’t the kind of man who believed in confrontation. As this represents he was completely willing to do whatever his followers saw fit, regardless of whether it was detrimental to his cause. The convention battles destroyed any chance he had to win over the old guard. Everything involving his selection of a Vice President — the so-called Eagleton affair which I have discussed in previous articles — destroyed whatever credibility he had with the average voter. At the end of the convention McGovern was trailing Nixon in the polls with 34 percent to Nixon’s 57 percent — all before the Republicans met in Miami. McGovern may have been the last to accept it, but even before Nixon was nominated for a second term he was already beaten.
None of the McGovern people, Hart included, ever considered anything that happened in the fall campaign their fault. “George McGovern just doesn’t understand organization.” For him, the preservation of the integrity of the organization that had won the nomination was all that mattered. O’Brien didn’t understand how primaries how won. He described his method of organization as
“..confirmation of the initiative, responsibility, ability, equality of the enormously skilled, highly talented volunteers that won the primaries…But as one went on reporting, it all became confused. The regulars were of a state of mind, not a managerial group. And no one was in charge of reaching the state of mind of confused Democrats around the country. Hart did, indeed, manage his volunteer storefront organizations; but no one coordinated the ideas of the campaign, the themes of the campaign, the television of the campaign, the travel of the campaign”
And as a result the McGovern headquarters interior matched the campaign. By October:
“the scene…could only be described as filthy. Wastebaskets spilled over; cigarette buts littered the floor; paper cluttered offices; the corridors smelled…Xerox machines, clogged with paper clips might or might not work, mail might or might not get out that day…children roamed the floors…volunteers as young as 12 or 13 rode up and down on elevators…”
And because of this new breed’s inexperience they had no regard for all of the democratic elders who would have been willing to help. “The new people had in their minds their own structure of politics; their own activist cadres plus a national reserve of volunteers who would eventually carry the cause.”
One old guard Democrat said: “They felt that they owned George McGovern, they had him long before anybody else, and by God , they weren’t going to share him.” The campaign it should be mentioned may have claimed to speak for the disenfranchised but headquarters had almost no black faces and only three women who had given loyalty to McGovern early.
There was a level of delusion that bordered on insanity. Command insisted that the primary victories would stand for the general when it came for the blue-collar vote. “Our people deluded themselves. They were angry when we pointed out what the working man resented was us.” I’ve italicized this part because it indicates that this is something the left, even after half a century refuses to accept.
Because of Watergate and much of the recent effort to reclaim McGovern’s ability to win over certain constituencies during his campaign that would become vital to the Democratic coalition in the 21st century, there has always been a theory among certain people — mostly in the left — that McGovern was either cheated from the White House or a prophet who was misunderstood. The fact that he lost 49 of 50 states and that his campaign almost from the start was more about organization of the faithful then winning over the undecided has essentially been overlooked, particularly by the left. I have little doubt that Hart came away from the campaign with the mindset of almost all of McGovern’s followers: the nation, the establishment had failed, not them. The only real difference was that almost all of them chose to abandon electoral politics altogether and take the attitude that their rejection was not their fault. It takes a lot of imagination to argue where you get 37 percent of the popular vote — a dubious mark that not even Walter Mondale managed to beat when he was landslided by Reagan — but the left is very capable of self-delusion. Watergate was not only a vindication of their cause but erased their memories as to the failures of their candidate. All of the utter inadequacies of McGovern as both a candidate and a campaigner were irrelevant. He hadn’t failed the cause; the nation had. And this blindness is the kind the left has seen to this day.
Hart was different in that he chose to run for elective office. In the 1974 midterms he would be part of the ‘Class of 74’ which gave the Democrats super-majorities in both Houses of Congress. He managed to survive the 1980 Senate Elections which took out a huge number of the old guard of liberal Senators, including McGovern himself. And then he began to consider higher office.
In the next article I will deal with Hart’s attempt to win the 1984 nomination for President, his meteoric rise as well as the flaws in his character that began to burden him.