TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/70s/70nixon

Text File | 1990-12-01 | 11KB | 197 lines

                _`abD                                                  ^««Nixon-McGovern Campaign

  [Ellsberg and Colleague Anthony Russo were freed in 1973 when the
judge declared a mistrial in their case.]

                                * * *

  [In the 1972 Presidential elections, while Hubert Humphrey and
George McGovern were fighting it out for the Democratic nomination,
Alabama's George Wallace was once again running strongly as a gadfly,
attacking "pointy-headed intellectuals' and other assorted liberals.
Then, in a gruesomely familiar scenario, Wallace was shot be a crazed
loner.]

                                                       (May 29, 1972)

  As his entourage rolled into the Laurel shopping center at 3:15 for
another rally, Wallace knew that he was in unfriendly country. About
2,000 people had gathered on the parking lot in front of a specially
erected stage. Everywhere were Maryland county police, Secret Service
men and Wallace's own bodyguards. In place, as always, was Wallace's
special, 600-lb. bulletproof podium, draped in red, white and blue.

  After 50 minutes, he advised the folks to vote in the primary "to
shake the eyeteeth of the Democratic Party. Let's give 'em the St.
Vitus dance. And tell 'em a vote for George Wallace is a vote for the
average citizen." The applause was thunderous. Wallace walked down the
steps from the stage and decided to shake a few hands, as he often
does after speeches.

  Among the crowd, in opaque sunglasses and short, pale blond hair,
was a 21-year-old from Milwaukee named Arthur Bremer. Almost a parody
of the failed young loners from rented rooms who seem to end up
assassinating American politicians, Bremer had apparently been
stalking Wallace for weeks. Now, as Wallace moved easily through the
crowd, Bremer suddenly thrust his arm through a ring of onlookers. In
rapid fire, about 18 inches from his target, he blasted five shots
from his snub-nosed revolver. Even as he was shooting, security men
jammed his arm downward and fell on him.

  Though ashen from shock and loss of blood, Wallace never lost
consciousness. After a seemingly interminable ten minutes, an
ambulance arrived. Then it was 25 more minutes from Laurel to Holy
Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Md.

  By nightfall, a team of Holy Cross surgeons were at work on
Wallace. Four, perhaps all five of the bullets had struck him.

  The real problem came from a slug that entered the fluid-filled
spinal canal and came to rest head downward opposite the first lumbar
vertebra, just at the waist. At week's end the doctors still could not
say whether the bullet severed all or part of the bundle of nerves
that carries impulses from the lower body to the brain.

  As a sheer political happening, the shooting of George Wallace was
melodramatically timed. The very next morning, the voters of Michigan
and Maryland went to the primary polls to give Wallace two of the most
impressive victories of his career. In Maryland, Wallace took 39% of
the vote, trailed by Humphrey with 27% and McGovern with 22%.


  [The final Democratic choice of South Dakota Senator McGovern, a
product of the party's liberalizing reforms after the 1968 convention
fiasco, to challenge Incumbent Richard Nixon had never presented
voters with a more vivid contrast. But circumstances and McGovern's
own mistakes blurred the choice, none more so than his first,
disastrous Vice Presidential selection.]

                                                     (August 7, 1972)

  I assume that everyone here is impressed with my control of this
convention in that my choice for Vice President was challenged by only
39 other nominees. But I think we learned from watching the
Republicans four years ago as they selected their vice-presidential
nominee that it pays to take a little more time.

  With those wry words, George McGovern began his acceptance speech
in Miami Beach three weeks ago. Only moments before, Senator Thomas
Francis Eagleton of Missouri had stood on the podium with his running
mate, arms raised in triumph, a partly dazed but wholly rapturous grin
spread across his boyish, Jack Lemmony face.

  In fact, of course, George McGovern and the Democrats had not taken
more time; they had probably taken less time than any major party in
history to choose their vice-presidential candidate. The great
Democratic reforms had somehow not got round to improving the
haphazard system of choosing a Vice President.

  Tom Eagleton, 42, was the product of a half day's furious
scrambling, a choice agreed on only an hour before the deadline, after
five or six other men had turned down the No. 2 spot. Last week, when
it was revealed that he had been thrice hospitalized for mental
illness, the disclosure threatened to wreck the McGovern candidacy
before the presidential candidate ever hit the campaign trail against
Richard Nixon.

                                                    (August 14, 1972)

  The dropping of Eagleton because of the uproar over his medical
history was virtually unprecedented. The rebuffs encountered by
McGovern as he sought a reassuring replacement only added to the party
humiliation. McGovern wooed them and practically begged, but one by
one, Edward Kennedy, Abraham Ribicoff, Hubert Humphrey, Reubin Askew
and Edmund Muskie all declined for various reasons their party's
second highest honor. The selection of Shriver, a personable Kennedy
inlaw and former head of the Peace Corps and Office of Economic
Opportunity, may turn out to be a good choice, but had the public aura
of an act of desperation.

  There is no doubt that the party has been seriously set back by its
incredible two-week ordeal over the vice-presidential candidate.
Conceded (Campaign Manager) Gary Hart: "It's our darkest hour. Only
time will tell how badly we've been hurt." The fumbling start had
knocked much of the glow of a new political movement off the McGovern
candidacy. The most difficult immediate task may be to regenerate
enthusiasm among McGovern's followers.


                                                  (November 20, 1972)

  The rumble of the landslide was heard early. By the end of the
comparatively brief Election Night a few hours later, the President
had all but 17 of the nation's 538 electoral votes, taking 49 states
with 60.7% of the vote, v. 37.7% for George McGovern. It was the
greatest popular vote for a President in the nation's history.

  Something more complicated was occurring than the presidential
landslide indicated. In one sense, America had clearly swung toward
conservatism and Nixon may take the vote as an essentially
conservative mandate. Still, almost any other big-league Democrat--
Hubert Humphrey or Edmund Muskie or Edward Kennedy--would probably
have come closer than McGovern. For against all earlier theories that
the famously unloved President might be beaten in a personality
contest, it was McGovern himself who became the issue of 1972. Many
voters obviously cast their ballots not primarily because voters they
admired Nixon but because they feared McGovern. He seemed, at last,
to be the wrong candidate at the wrong time, in part the invention of
liberal chic, a man who seemed disastrously out of his political
league.


  [The Nixon campaign was plagued by accusations that it sold influence
in return for cash contributions. In one case International Telephone
and Telegraph Lobbyist Dita Beardpassed over $400,000 in return for
possible lenient treatment in the matter of some antitrust suits; in
another, a secret $200,000 payment was received from Fugitive Financier
Roberto Vesco. But the laws started out as a risibly inept burglary at
Washington's Watergate apartment complex in June 1972. It grew to
engulf the Nixon Presidency.]

                                                       (July 3, 1972)

  It was just a strip of masking tape, but it is fast stretching into
the most provocative caper of 1972, an extraordinary bit of bungling
of great potential advantage to the Democrats and damage to the
Republicans in this election year.

  Walking his late-night rounds at Washington's Watergate office
building, a security guard spotted the tape blocking the bolt on a
basement door. He removed it-but on his return a few minutes later he
found the lock taped open again. He called police, and a three-man
squad found two more taped locks-as well as a jimmied door leading
into the shadowy offices of the Democratic National Committee on the
sixth floor. Just outside Chairman Larry O'Brien's inner sanctum, they
flushed five men wearing fingerprint-concealing surgical gloves and
laden with a James Bondian assortment of cameras, tools, intricate
electronic bugging gear and $6,500 in crisp, new bills.

  The White House, through Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler,
at first tried to dismiss the incident as a "third-rate burglary
attempt." That it was considerably more serious became clear when the
five arrested men were identified. One was in the pay of [Attorney
General John] Mitchell's committee; several had past links to the CIA.
Beyond that, shadowy trails reached close enough to the White House,
as one Republican admitted privately, to shake the G.O.P. with fears
that another ITT scandal-or worse-was in the making.

  The man on the Republican payroll was James W. McCord, Jr., 53, the
$1,209-a-month chief security coordinator and electronics expert of
the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. (In the best
Mission: Impossible tradition, he was promptly disavowed by Mitchell
and fired.) He had retired in 1970 as a CIA security specialist.


                                                 (September 11, 1972)

  Asked in his San Clemente press conference about the Watergate
fiasco. President Nixon in careful lawyer's language said that he had
determined that no one "in the White House staff, no one in this
Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre
incident." The operative phrase was "presently employed." Four former
White House and Administration job holders have resigned, quit or been
fired from their positions with the C.R.P. since the arrests in June:
John Mitchell, Nixon's former campaign manager; G. Gordon Liddy,
former White House aide; Hugh W. Sloan Jr., former C.R.P. finance
committee treasurer; and E. Howard Hunt, sometime White House
consultant.