The Making of the President 1972 by Theodore H. White

Author:Theodore H. White [White, Theodore H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-202711-5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE EAGLETON AFFAIR

THE way Americans choose Vice-Presidents has always been absurd—but never quite so absurd as in the Democratic exercise of 1972.

For seventeen of the past twenty-seven years, America had been governed by Presidents who made their entry to that office from the Vice-Presidency; Harry Truman came that way and history chose him to loose the atom bomb; Lyndon Johnson came that way and plunged the nation into the most disastrous war of its history. In the Vice-Presidency lies all the potential power of the Presidency itself—yet the choice is the most perfunctory and generally the most thoughtless in the entire American political system.

The traditional script in both parties reads the same: the Presidential candidate is nominated on Wednesday of convention week. His speech is usually unfinished at that point, and with the mantle of history being pleated for him, he insists on fussing with the speech once more, giving it that final gloss which will shimmer through time. The choosing of a Vice-President at this point is not only a bother to him—it is a curse. Matters never look quite the same to the principal candidate the night of his victory as they did when he arrived at the scene in full combat ardor. His defeated party rivals must now become tomorrow’s allies; their supporters must be appeased; the half-promises, half-commitments he has given to friends on the way hang over him; the names he or his staff has floated to test public reaction have frozen into print. Concern about who could best govern the nation fades to the far corner of the tired mind. The immediate problem seems always to be who can best help carry the nation for the ticket in November; politics weighs more heavily than history.

All Presidential nominees for twenty years have handled the problem as their personalities shaped them.

Eisenhower, the conqueror of Europe, went to sleep in Chicago after defeating Robert Taft in 1952; with the calm of the veteran commander, he had told his staff to assemble the party leadership and get him a name for Vice-President. The leadership argued all night, then in exhaustion settled on the name of Richard M. Nixon—because he was young while Eisenhower was old, because he was conservative and Eisenhower liberal, because he was from California and Eisenhower from New York; and because, said Paul G. Hoffman, who was there, “we were all so very tired by that time.” Eisenhower rarely questioned staff decisions and did not question this one. Richard Nixon, with a characteristic that later became familiar, made it quite clear that the contract was binding on both men; when the leadership two months later tried to dump him, and Tom Dewey telephoned asking him to withdraw from the ticket, Nixon replied that he had to get that word from Eisenhower himself—and that it was time for the chief to spit or get off the pot.

Stevenson, in 1956, left the decision to the convention, the only open choice of Vice-President in modern history—and thereby took Estes Kefauver to defeat with him, while preserving John F.

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