Lessons From Theodore White:Part 1: How The Left's First Attempt To Take Over The Democratic Party Ultimately Led to Failure

 

Theodore White was a brilliant writer because despite being an old school liberal he remained objective. As I've written indirectly in previous articles White believed that what he referred to as 'The Liberal Theology' – the philosophy involving governing during the Great Society combined with the antiwar movement led to a formation of the left which he referred to as The Movement. He summed up their philosophy simply in his 1972 volume of Making of the President:

"a: War is bad -and the American military was almost, if not quite a criminal institution, wasteful and profligate of life and treasure, patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and the adventure in Vietnam immoral.

b) Black is good – and the demands of blacks on the general society must become, in the revision of priorities that would follow after the war, priority number one

c) since money comes easily under the modern managed economy, the believe that Money Solves All Problems is the rhetoric of hope…

Thus, out of such thinking, there developed in the years between 1968 and 1972 a formless but very powerful action group within the Democratic Party that can only be called The Movement…

Like so much regarding Theodore White its striking how much of the basic tenets of nearly half a century ago are still relevant today. Everything that White wrote about in 1972, with certain details changed for time, be considered doctrine of the left wing thinking of the Democrats today.

White was more than willing to admire their strengths particularly in regards to African-Americans as well as the cause of what women in politics. But he was also very clear of their weakness and one of their biggest true today as it was fifty years ago was about 'big city life':

The old Liberal Idea of the sixties had provoked many experimental approaches to city problems, most had been passed into legislation – and most had failed…By the early 1970s it was clear that the Liberal-inspired ideas of the Great Society had failed the cities; they had been based on a political misreading of how those cities functioned, and what communities in those cities needed for community survival. What had actually happened in the great cities of America in the 1960s, and was continuing to happen as America entered the seventies, mocked all the billions of dollars spent on programs to 'save' them,

All the programs had been advanced by Democratic thinkers practicing the best doctrine of the day but theologians put doctrine above experience. The Movement insisted on more of the same for the seventies – and in the big cities, where the Democrats get their core votes, more of the same frightened too many of the communities who were being driven from their home.

In the revisionism thinking of the left today this has been phrased as 'white flight' and dismissed under the label of racism, just as White said was gospel among the left as early as the 1960s. To this day the overwhelming majority of progressive thinkers still embrace the Liberal Doctrine and choose to argue whites fleeing the city and voting Republican as 'proof' of that fact and therefore absolves them of looking closer at their flaws. What was clear as the seventies began was that the Movement was hoping to use this as a force for political power.

White wrote that it was difficult in 1970, particularly for the Democrats, to see how the country was changing. He correctly points out the rise of the New South during that period and how moderates were winning the fight there. He also points out several major spokesmen for the peace movement were winning critical governors Democratic primaries. Jessie Unruh in California, Sander Levin in Michigan, John Gilligan in Ohio, Patrick Lucey is Wisconsin and Milton Shapp in Pennsylvania.  Unruh would be trounced by the incumbent Governor Ronald Reagan  and Levin would lose to William Milliken but the other three candidates did win election. There were also peace candidates winning in notable Congressional primaries – in Manhattan, Berkley, Denver and Newton-Cambridge.

He also points out how the forces of this movement could do in states whose conventions and politics rested on the caucus system. Critical was one in Oklahoma in which an anti-war county chairman packed his convention with anti-war activists:

His convention wrote a party platform calling for legalized abortion, a timetable for withdrawal from Vietnam and reduced penalties for possession of marijuana. One candidate warned that they were murdering candidates for the Senate and the House in the hawk and bible state. Replied a liberal candidate "Any candidate we murder, let him be murdered."

More than any other statement in White's book this makes it clear how little the Movement cared about winning elected office rather than making a point.

It was clear the Movement held tremendous weight within the party itself but as White points out the average voter was not swept away. In 1970 the Movement would sweep over the Washington state convention and endorse a primary challenger to Henry Jackson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. Jackson would win his primary with 84 percent of the vote and then crush his Republican opponent by nearly five to one in the general election. And as for the most colorful members of the new theology won primaries but their votes totals in the general fell off. Bella Abzug and Ronald Dellums would win election to the House and be faces among the far left of the party for the decade to come. But Robert Drinian in the Massachusetts fifth would only win by two points in tight three way race. Craig Barnes the Democratic nominee in the first would lose in the general to Mike McKevitt the first time, flipping the district to the Republicans. And in Connecticut Reverend Joseph Duffey had led an insurgent campaign to primary the Democrat Thomas Dodd. Dodd would run as an independent as a result Lowell Weicker would be elected to the Senate – a position he'd hold for the next eighteen years.

"The new politics," White wrote, "could mobilize for caucuses and win primaries within the party – but it lost force in the strangest of ways, whenever it penetrated the hearts of the cities. He adds:

The Liberal Theology drew new lines – men of morality must take over the party, politics was too important to be left to the craftsmen of accommodation. The theologians saw no riddle in the contrary dictates of morality and reality. Life must conform to the highest principles – what was morally right, they felt,  must be politically sound."

I underlined those last two words because it is incredibly clear to outside observers that today the  Bernie Sanders-AOC wing of the Democratic party agrees with that theology one hundred percent. They believe that this is absolutely true and underperformance, if not outright rejection, from the voters has done nothing to diminish their certainty.

And  its worth a reminder of  what happened when George McGovern tried to harness The Movement to become President of the United States.

 

Both the implosion of the Nixon Presidency and multiple academics (many of whom are left-wing) have done much to rehabilitate McGovern's failed candidacy that it is worth remembering many of the failures at the time which White himself recorded. They reveal many ironies that those who choose to see McGovern as a martyr or prophet overlook.

The first is the most surprising. It is well known that after the 1968 convention McGovern himself sponsored a commission that would draft new reforms for the Democratic nominating process four years later and that have been part of any nominating process going forward. Many have suggested McGovern rigged the game so that he could get the nomination four years later and that is utter nonsense.

What is ironic is that these reforms were meant to allow the voters more of a choice when it came to nominating their candidate for President then they'd had before. And as the primary votes demonstrated very clearly they did not want George McGovern.

Much of this was due to McGovern's strategy which meant only competing in a certain number of primaries and leaving many of the others to other candidates. But it doesn't change the fact that as late as May 15^th McGovern was running a distant third in the overall count of primary voters, more than 1.1 million votes behind George Wallace and nearly half a million votes behind Hubert Humphrey. (Wallace would withdraw after the attempt on his life on May 15^th.) And by the time the primary process was over McGovern still had earned exactly 25 percent of all primary voters which was still behind Humphrey. 

And when it came to competing in the states that would be electoral prizes McGovern's track record was worse. He basically left Illinois to Edmund Muskie, finished third in Pennsylvania behind Humphrey and Wallace, lost Ohio in a close vote to Humphrey, finished a distant third to Wallace in Michigan (it was a crossover state and Wallace received nearly 800,000 votes) and barely contested Texas which Wallace won easily. By New York the race was over and his victory counted for little. Only in California did he win a competitive primary and he did in the aftermath of a series of debates in which Humphrey skewered him so badly that his once insurmountable polling lead turned out to be less than five points – and did enough damage to him nationally that his campaign never recovered.

McGovern's campaign was successful for much the same reason Goldwater's was eight years earlier: his organizers has spent the last year and a half doing great work at a caucus and state level getting all delegates to committed to him so that none of the other candidates knew what was happening until it was too late. Wallace admitted it was impressive that he'd managed to get the most votes but only had 324 delegates pledged to him by May 15 while McGovern, who had far fewer votes, had 560. In other words the game was just as rigged as four years ago: the only difference was it was the Left doing it rather than the establishment.

McGovern's beliefs were very much the theology of the left. He had in a sense always been a Progressive: he'd worked for Henry Wallace as a young man and had been a delegate to his Progressive Party Convention in 1948, a convention that in hindsight might well have been a model for what McGovern's own convention turned out to be nearly a quarter of a century later in terms of diversity, left wing viewpoints – and complete chaos in the eyes of a viewing audience. As White put it in an interview: "In George McGovern's mind the polarity was that of Good and Evil. He was a virtuous man, he knew what was right and wrong."

This no doubt made him appealing to The Movement who thought along those exact lines. But as White pointed out after multiple interviews you came away with conversations with McGovern with no idea what the man was thinking.

After a while, those who saw him frequently came away wondering what George McGovern thought himself. Eugene McCarthy made the cruelest comment. "Talking with George McGovern is like eating a Chinese meal. An hour after its over, you wonder if you really ate anything."

Because McGovern was the peace candidate that was more then enough for those who organized for him, those who followed him and those who listened to him on college campuses. McGovern said he was in favor of all the issues that were prominent to the left at the time: abortion, amnesty, busing of African-Americans, legalization of marijuana. McGovern did this because he needed to mobilize these forces to win the nomination and control of the party. But as White pointed out:

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, high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the past – more of the same, and frightening.

As White reports McGovern's candidacy was not taken seriously until after the Massachusetts primary when he was officially the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Now that he was the candidate, the voters needed to know what McGovern stood for.

Ending the Vietnam War was by far his strongest issue but White pointed out that McGovern's view of it frequently made him sound like a demagogue, as bad as Nixon or Wallace at times. White quotes him:

Our government would rather burn down schoolhouses and schoolchildren in Asia than build schools for Americans at home…The Nixon bombing policy on Indochina is the most barbaric action that any country has committed since Hitler's effort to exterminate Jews in Germany…He's playing politics with the lives of American soldiers and with American prisoners rotting in their cells in Hanoi."

These were exactly the kind of statements that appeal to the Left then and now, which is no doubt why that get a pass from academics in a way that the more conservative demagogues do not.  These statements would no doubt work on a college campus; to more conservative voters it was always going to be a challenge. And that argument was McGovern's greatest strength as a candidate.

One of the biggest flaws in a campaign that had too many to count was his economics program. Designed in August of 1971, it was so broadly socialist that an eyewitness was outraged that McGovern went along with it without even once challenging them on their findings. It was released in a speech during the leadup to the Iowa caucuses which White describes as 'a long loose ramble which McGovern presented not as a blueprint but rather as suggestions or options… It proposed sweeping tax reforms that would close all loopholes gut the rich, comfort the middle class and sustain the poor." Two took on a life of their own: a new taxation of inheritance which no individua would be able to receive half a million dollars in gifts from their families during their lifetimes or after their deaths and a program that would give a way $1000 a year to every man, woman and child. This was not entirely unheard of but McGovern gave no idea of how he would pay for it.

Those who might be inclined could say that ideas such as this would evolve into many aspects of the beliefs of left-wing candidates like Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang. But in an era far less polarized it was universally greeted by Democrats, Republicans and all forms of media as completely ridiculous and was an absolute gift to Republicans for rich donors.

It was statements like this that made the Democratic establishment certain that if McGovern was the Democratic nominee they would be headed for electoral disaster in the fall – a prophecy that turned out to be accurate, of course. Which meant they were determined to do anything in their power at the Democratic Convention in Miami to stop McGovern from getting the nomination.

George McGovern, for all his morality, was not naïve when it came to politics. Having attended the 1968 convention as a last-minute nominee for President, he knew the only way for him to win was to have the party unite behind him at the convention. But that was always going to be impossible. For even if the old guard had been willing to get behind him as White makes very clear, McGovern's own people had no interest in it.

Their thinking on politics was not unlike the slogans of the activists: they were here and the rest of America would have to get used to it. This convention was about them first and everyone else would have to bow to them. They didn't listen to the old guard, they didn't care what the electorate watching on TV thought, they barely gave lip service to what the candidate himself wanted. The 1972 Democratic Convention is the clearest example of what happened when the left took over a major party – and White makes it very clear what a shitshow it was.

He shows how the delegations had almost none of the Democratic elected officials on the convention floor that Democratic voters in those states had seen in previous conventions are on TV. He shows how the delegates engaged in seating delegations that would hurt any chance they had of winning states like Illinois a few months down the road. He shows how the delegates pushed their choices for chairman and vice-chairman of the McGovern campaign over the head of McGovern and the people who'd helped get him the nomination. He shows that they voted on a platform so radical that McGovern himself didn't agree with it – and then spent so much time and energy clowning around by nominating Archie Bunker and Mao for Vice President that he couldn't give his acceptance speech clarifying his views until 3 AM when the entire country was asleep. And he illustrates that by taking out any professionals who could successfully vet a Vice Presidential candidate it laid the groundwork for Thomas Eagleton's candidacy which sunk any remote chance McGovern had of winning in November.

And as White illustrates in the final chapters the people running McGovern's campaign were completely clueless on how to run a national campaign. I will deal with this in a later article but White points out by September it was clear the campaign McGovern was planning had nothing to do with his campaign planners. There was no head of the campaign per se to take orders from, McGovern had no idea how to delegate a campaign. No one was coordinating the themes of the campaign, its ideas, its television, its travel plans. The headquarters itself as White illustrates became filthier, with mail not being delivered, the Xerox machines being clogged, and obscenities being regular shouted. No one wanted to talk to anyone who had anything to do with politics, dismissing anyone who had a history of even being part of the JFK campaign as being a freak.

They regularly turned down anyone who might be able to help them in the general election. As one state Democratic Chairman said: "They felt they owned George McGovern, they had him long before anyone else and by God, they weren't going to share him." And that wasn't just politicians: the headquarters was mostly white with very few black faces and almost no women. They truly believed that McGovern winning primaries was the same as the general. "They were angry when we pointed out what the working man was resented was us."  They couldn't come up with a theme for their campaign until the final months, finally focusing on the corruption and Watergate. And this just made him look increasingly inept. By October White quotes one Democratic leader as saying: "The only way to save the party is to lose big."

Watergate and Nixon's presidency imploding less then two years after the election would do much to make many members of the candidate claim that Nixon had only won because of corruption and cheating. But as White points out as early as mid-May the Nixon campaign was sure of victory and all they cared about was building a landslide.  As White points out after the Democratic convention Nixon had 57 percent of the vote to McGovern's 34 percent – and that was before the Republican convention.

The McGovern campaign would later say that a list of 600,000 donors to their campaign – considered the most 'significant legacy of it' – was lost after the campaign, with some McGovernites arguing that new chairman Richard Strauss destroyed it in an act of vengeance. Given the incompetence of the McGovern campaign that White lays forth in great detail, I'm more inclined to side with Strauss when he says he never received it. If they couldn't deliver mail within the campaign, I find it more than believable that someone could have accidentally thrown it out after election day, saying they wouldn't need this anymore. And more to the point, it ignores a very real question. Having given their money to a campaign in which Richard Nixon had won with an unprecedented 60.7 percent of the popular votes and 49 out of fifty states why would anybody who gave money to McGovern want to make any political donations ever again?  And considering that the campaign was radically underfunded from day one, any Democrat worth their salt wouldn't trust them for helping fund a local party campaign, much less a Presidential one. They got what they paid for.

 

 

The Movement, in the form it represented, would break down in the aftermath of McGovern's defeat combined with the end of the Vietnam War in January of 1973.  Many of those who as part of it, such as Abzug and Dellums would remain in Congress and major liberal causes for the rest of their careers but they would be outliers as those who had been part of it chose to return to the activism that they had been loyal to during the previous decade.

Others from the McGovern campaign were prominent figures in Democratic politics in the decades to come. Gary Hart, McGovern's major campaign strategist, would win election to the Senate in Colorado two years later. Two members of the Arkansas delegation, a young couple named Bill and Hilary Clinton, would become active in Arkansas state politics with Bill first winning the office of  attorney general in that state in 1976. And at that convention the current governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had attended and had made a play to be McGovern's running mate.

All of them would be derided by former McGovernites as neoliberals who sadly seem to have taken the exact message that White would consider the greatest possible mistake: "Had they known the truth (about Richard Nixon after Watergate, they would have turned (him) out. In fact McGovern's own campaign workers took a very different perspective – arguably the correct one.

Ted Van Dyk, McGovern chief speechwriter, would actually say before election day, "The Republican Party is the place where people go when they want to go slow, and I think they want to go slow now." After that 49 state landslide, there's an argument that all those Democrats who enjoyed success in the aftermath had learned that lesson. Indeed for the rest of the 20^th century and well into the first decade of the 21^st  both political parties would sharply go to the right because of the 1972 election – the Republican Party was already heading there and the Democratic Party knew the only way to be competitive was to whittle away from the territory the GOP was co-opting. 

Patrick Caddel, McGovern's pollster would have a similar reaction after the election: "American is not geography, it's an idea. Watergate fouled up that idea."

In the final chapter White sums up what the 1972 election taught him:

The idea that prevailed was that America should go slow. Go slow abroad, go slow in the cities, go slow with power wherever it interfered where a child grew up, where she went to school, or where he was sent to die…The Americans were for slowing the pace of power and they chose Richard Nixon.

In the years that have followed many academics from that error have made the argument that the liberal theology was successful until the conservative revolution killed it. White – writing nearly a decade before Reagan's election – would argue the opposite: the conservative revolution happened because the liberal theology had failed. The struggles that take place today may very well be happening because the Movement, either then or now, has never accepted that message. But that is to be expected because as we shall see in later articles, those among the Movement had language for those who chose to give any alternate views to theirs – and McGovern's defeat had been failed spectacularly because their candidate had failed to understand it.