McGovern was the very definition of an underdog. His numbers in the polls failed to exceed 5 percent, and no one but his immediate family, and possibly a couple of cows in South Dakota, recognized his face. He was severely challenged in the charisma department, “painfully earnest,” as Hunter Thompson described him, going on to call him the “Willy Loman of the Left.” Beatty himself, in a rare unguarded moment, compared him to “Mr. Peepers.”
After the horror show of Chicago 1968, reform Democrats had rewritten the byzantine rules that governed the selection of delegates to the convention, boosting the importance of the primaries at the expense of the party bosses. The process became more reflective of the will of the voters, but it also turned the primary campaign into a free-for-all, with all kinds of candidates tossing their hats into the ring. Maine’s Ed Muskie was the odds-on favorite, a shoo-in who had locked up the endorsements of the Democratic Party power brokers, with Humphrey, the candidate of Big Labor (how quaint that sounds today), also expected to make a strong showing, trailed by Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson—the “candidate from Boeing,” as he was known—stubbornly holding aloft the banner of Cold War anti-Communism. Finally, three antiwar liberals brought up the rear, McGovern, New York City mayor John Lindsay, and Brooklyn congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. And then there was former Alabama governor George Wallace, who was truly beyond the pale.
Beatty met with McGovern’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, a bright, articulate lawyer and policy wonk from Colorado. There were some coincidental similarities between Hart and Beatty. They were about the same age (Hart was six months older), and shared the same middle name: “Warren.” (Beatty’s actual first name was Henry.) Both had tinkered with their last names, Beatty adding the “t” to “Beaty,” Hart dropping the last syllable from “Hartpence.” Hart had tried his hand at acting, and both were avid readers, fascinated by Russia. Beatty had already made several trips to Moscow, while Hart was a student of Leo Tolstoy, particularly War and Peace, although, as things turned out he should have paid more attention to Anna Karenina. Loosely speaking, Hart’s model for McGovern’s campaign was the same as that of General Kutuzov, who turned back Napoleon with his live-off-the-land guerrilla strategy that depended on cunning, perseverance, and organization to defeat an adversary who was better armed and financed. Like Beatty, Hart was good-looking in that tousled Jack Kennedy–esque sort of way. (Thompson wrote that he looked like a “ski instructor.”) During the campaign, people—particularly those unschooled in fandom—confused the two men.
In any event, it was love at first sight. Later, when Hart himself ran for president and the two became even closer, friends would say, glibly, that each wanted to be the other, have what the other had. Both scoffed at the idea, probably because there was more than a little truth in it. Observes journalist/politico Bill Bradley (not to be confused with the former New Jersey senator), who befriended both men and worked in various capacities on Hart’s presidential campaigns, “The potential of women, and the glamorous lifestyle was something that intrigued Gary, obviously, but if it had only been that, Gary would not have stayed friends with Warren. With Jack Kennedy, Sinatra did not bring a lot of intellectual chops to the party. With Gary, on the other hand, Warren did. When you’re with Warren in that context, you feel you’re at a very high level, and that’s where Gary wanted to be. Warren would say, ‘Let’s call Senator so and so, and see what he thinks of this,’ ’cause Warren could get anybody on the phone. It was that as much as the glamour component.”
With charismatic figures like Jack and Bobby Kennedy dead, and Ted sidelined by Chappaquiddick, the Democrats were glamour-challenged, and McGovern realized he needed more than a little of that Hollywood stardust. Beatty was of two minds as to how public a role to play, but in the early days of the campaign, he traveled with McGovern, introduced him at rallies in Iowa and New Hampshire, states whose early caucus (Iowa) and primary (New Hampshire) led the pack. He did whatever needed to be done, whether it was knocking on doors, chatting up Tupperware ladies in tract-house living rooms, speaking to boisterous audiences of antiwar students on college campuses or union halls sparsely filled with assembly-line workers. But an unpleasant public appearance at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in September 1971, around the time of the Attica riots, helped him decide his role. This was one of the most radical campuses in the country. Beatty had just had a tooth pulled, and then flown in from London to attend the rally. “It was a howling mob,” recalls McGovern. “The first battle cry was a boozy ‘Bullshit!’ coming from the first row. The marijuana smoke was pretty heavy, and the potheads heckled him, shouting him down for his wealth, his social position: ‘What do you have in common with ordinary people?’ He didn’t handle it well, got flustered, probably because he’d never heard that kind of heckling before.” Said Beatty later, “It was not only an embarrassing encounter, but it made me think about my role in the campaign.” He added, “I felt that the advertising aspect of the participation made me feel silly. I think the public is innately suspicious of the self-forwarding, publicity-seeking, capricious artist who would like to attach some mood of seriousness to his persona by participating in public affairs. I guess it was hard for me to risk that kind of criticism.” Beatty started to worry about the erosion of the firewall between politics and entertainment, which in the future would become one of his favorite themes. On his way back from Wisconsin, he decided to play a less public role.
For Beatty, the McGovern primary campaign was punctuated by the opening of Dollars, which premiered on December 12, 1971, and released two days later, to tepid reviews. Meanwhile, the British press reported in March 1972 that Beatty and Christie had finally parted ways. She had called him from the beach at his Beverly Wilshire penthouse one night, told him it was over. He hung up the phone, thought, She’s in bed with somebody, I can tell, and he muttered out loud, mournfully, “They’ve all dumped me.” She went off to Venice to do a supernatural thriller, Don’t Look Now, directed by Nicolas Roeg and co-starring Donald Sutherland, with whom she had an affair.
Hart told Beatty about a twenty-one-year-old wunderkind named Pat Caddell, a volatile black Irish-American pollster he had recruited straight from Harvard. Caddell’s brain worked faster than his mouth, if that were possible; he spoke in machine-gun bursts, chopping off sentences in midcourse as new thoughts thrust their way to the forefront. He spritzed ideas and favored dramatic gestures. Newsweek called him “the permanent enfant terrible of the Democratic Party, a connoisseur and exploiter of voter anger, alienation and fear. He specializes in protest candidates who try to win by running against the party.” Aflame with the arrogance of youth, brash and acerbic, and in later years angry as well, Caddell had little patience for those who disagreed with him. He fought with numbers, marshaling them to crush his opponents; they enabled him, like every pollster in every campaign, to assume the mantle of a shaman. Best of all, he delivered. He would call the primary results to the decimal point. He recalls, wistfully, “I was so young, I had no enemies. It was the only time I would never have any enemies.”
Caddell, of course, had heard about Beatty as well. He finally met him in Miami for the Florida primary, on March 14, 1972. The two men hit it off immediately. They would sit next to each other on the campaign bus, take adjoining hotel rooms. “I was like his kid brother,” says Caddell. Unlike Beatty and Hart, theirs was a friendship of opposites. “Warren was nice to everybody,” the pollster continues. “He was never arrogant, a great people person, made everybody feel important, never exaggerated, never called attention to his role, what he was doing. He didn’t want any credit, didn’t want any attention. Plus, Warren is really smart about issues. He’s well read, he thinks. He was a much beloved figure. But it was the most ego-depressing thing in the world to be around him. There were droves of women, and they’d ignore you. You didn’t exist.”
Beatty threw himself into the arcana of campaigning—he asked a lot of questions and listened to the answers, so
aking up information—and then confined his input to dispensing behind-the-scenes advice in the areas he knew best—media, public opinion, networking. He never demanded limos, but rather rode the campaign bus like the rest of the staff, catnapped on sofas, ate fast food, pizzas, and hot dogs. When Beatty did make suggestions, they were often bold and dramatic. “Other people were going about their jobs,” Caddell continues. “Warren thought about big things.” Gradually, Beatty gained more influence with the McGovern campaign than any other Hollywood figure had before him in a comparable situation, with the possible exception of Arthur Krim, who advised Lyndon Johnson. According to author Ron Brownstein, “Beatty operated at the heart of the campaign, a ghost in the machine.”
Despite the exhausting pace, Beatty was enjoying himself, and retained his sense of humor. During the Wisconsin primary, Frank Mankiewicz checked into his hotel and was given a message from Beatty. In those days, in order to return a long distance call, it was necessary to call back a specific operator. Mankiewicz did so, and while he waited, she got Beatty on the line and asked, “‘Mr. Beatty, what is your special billing?’ ‘Well,’ he deadpanned, ‘always above the title, in a size of type no smaller than that of the director.’”
McGovern won the Wisconsin primary on April 13, a stunning victory that surprised even his staff. Muskie dropped out after the Pennsylvania primary on April 25, leaving McGovern and Humphrey—now the front-runner—to duke it out, with Wallace the wild card. Beatty quickly became indispensable. In addition to figuring out ways to spend money, he proved to be surprisingly effective at raising it. In Cleveland, one starstruck contributor wrote out a check for $50,000. Beatty told him, “I won’t take that money. People of your standing—if you can’t give six figures, we want nothing from you.” The man tore up the check and wrote another for $125,000. With that money, McGovern ads went on the air the next day. McGovern made a strong showing, losing Ohio to Humphrey by only nineteen thousand votes, and his staff was convinced that the primary election had been rigged by the state Democratic machine. By some accounts, roughly ten thousand of those votes were sacrificed to his relationship with Beatty, who offhandedly told a reporter that he favored the legalization of marijuana, an admission that was picked up by Scoop Jackson and exploited for all it was worth.
Beatty’s biggest contribution to the party coffers came from the proceeds of the rock concerts he organized, the first time that anyone had systematically tapped performers for a political campaign. As Bill Bradley puts it, “Warren invented the rock political benefit concert.” He called in favors, twisted arms, cajoled, guilt-tripped, and just plain inspired the likes of Barbra Streisand, James Taylor, and Carole King to play five concerts, starting on April 15 at the Forum in L.A., where Nicholson, Christie, Burt Lancaster, Gene Hackman, and Sally Kel-lerman, among others, did usher duty, another one of Beatty’s ideas. The concert injected $300,000 into the campaign in California, before making its way to major cities across the country. All in all, according to McGovern, Beatty raised more than a million dollars. Beyond the money, the concerts introduced scores of Hollywood stars to direct participation in American politics, finally ending the legacy of the HUAC years, which had discouraged them from involvement with politics for fear of blacklisting.
Beatty and Christie attended the Democratic convention in Miami Beach from July 10 to July 13, despite their reported breakup. It was a fractious affair. The party was badly split. It seemed to the old guard, the back room crowd that included Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, the AFL/CIO’s George Meany, both of whom backed Humphrey, that the lunatics—antiwar activists, feminists, black power militants—had taken over the asylum. Indeed, voters watching the proceedings on TV might have been excused for mistaking it for an SDS convention, with formations of every stripe doing battle. The Miami Beach Convention Center was atremble with the cries of “ABM” (“Anybody But McGovern”). The “Stop McGovern” forces spearheaded by Jimmy Carter, among others, coalesced around Humphrey, much to the displeasure of the insurgents.
Bill Clinton, then a long-haired twenty-six-year-old McGovern volunteer, recalled trying to twist the arm of a recalcitrant female member of the Arkansas delegation in an effort to secure her vote on an arcane parliamentary point. “I said, ‘Is there any way in the world I can convince you to vote with us?’ She said, ‘Yeah, if you get Warren Beatty to walk on the beach with me,’” Clinton recalled. “As God is my witness, 30 minutes later I get on an elevator and there he is. I explained the deal to him. He said, ‘Sure I’ll do it.’ He walked 100 yards on the beach. That woman voted for us on every single thing.”
McGovern finally mustered the delegates he needed to capture the nomination. His “Come home, America,” acceptance address was a stirring call for the country to return to the ideals from which it had strayed, lost, as it had become, in the steaming jungles of Vietnam. But McGovern had slipped in a gratuitous lump of undigested Emersonian verbiage, like a basketball swallowed by the proverbial snake, or so it seemed to speechwriter Bob Shrum, who was desperate to get rid of it. The candidate, however, dug in his heels. Shrum enlisted Beatty, whom he had just met, in his cause. Beatty “looked at the draft and the two of us headed for McGovern’s suite,” he recalled. “Once there, Warren offered a pithier, more persuasive argument than I’d thought of. ‘Look, George,’ he said, ‘you can’t do this to this speech. It would be like making love to a beautiful woman—it’s wonderful, it’s as good as it’s ever been—and then at the last minute pulling out and saying, ‘I’ll let Ralph finish for me.’ McGovern laughed and the Emerson quote was gone.”
McGovern had won the day, but he had lost the war, which is to say, the fight had so inflamed passions that he found himself presiding over a badly divided party, ill-equipped to win a national election against an incumbent president, even one as dubious as Nixon. Then, in the middle of the convention frenzy, McGovern made a fatal error, and compounded it by dealing ineptly with the fallout: he selected Missouri senator Tom Eagleton to be his running mate. The bombshell exploded in the press about ten days later: Eagleton had a history of mental illness, including depression, for which he had had shock treatment or, as Caddell succinctly puts it, “Eagleton went out without his shorts.”
But Beatty believed that within every defeat lies an opportunity, and in this case, the Eagleton fiasco offered McGovern another chance to reach out to his enemies within the party. Beatty thought that McGovern-Humphrey would constitute the strongest ticket the Democrats could field, appealing both to the young, disaffected antiwar activists as well as the Democrats’ traditional base, who were older and more conservative. Despite Humphrey’s equivocation on the Vietnam War four years earlier, Beatty had a good relationship with the senator. He was, in fact, the perfect emissary to the Humphrey camp. Beatty went to persuade him to replace Eagleton. But Humphrey had already served as vice president under Johnson, had run for president against Nixon, and had just been on the losing side of the brutal Anybody But McGovern fight. His amour propre would not allow him to accept. Still, Beatty also knew that Humphrey lived and breathed politics and would run for dog catcher if he were approached in the right way. The actor spent four hours applying salves and unguents to Humphrey’s bruised ego, and finally came up with a scenario that would allow Humphrey to accede to the wishes of the Democratic candidate without losing face. He maneuvered him into a corner by asking, “Don’t you think that anybody—if the party called him—would have to serve? How could anyone turn the party down?” Humphrey found himself agreeing that yes, no true-blue Democrat could refuse if he were drafted by the Democratic National Committee.
Excited, Beatty went to McGovern and told him, “You can get Humphrey if you go before the DNC and say you want whomever the party thinks is the best candidate, meaning Humphrey, and Humphrey will take it. But what you cannot do, George, is you cannot call him yourself, ’cause he’ll say no. ’Cause who wants to be number two on the ticket? He’s sticking his head into oblivion.” But knowing that
McGovern was too much the gentleman to have the DNC make Humphrey an offer he could not refuse, he told Caddell, “You know what? I’ve just told him not to, and you watch—he’s going to call him.” Sure enough, McGovern did call Humphrey, and Humphrey turned him down. Says Caddell, “Swear to God. We were that close to having it done.” Whether Humphrey’s presence on the ticket would have prevented the Nixon landslide and changed the course of history is questionable, to say the least, but McGovern believed that had he put together a Democratic slate that would have appealed to the conservatives within the party, the election, in his words, “would have been very close.”
In the event, Nixon slaughtered McGovern at the polls, amassing a plurality of 23 percent of the popular vote. McGovern’s collapse enabled the old guard to retake the Democratic party in December. Texas senator John Connally’s protégé Robert Strauss was installed as chairman of the DNC, moving the party to the right, and thereby setting the stage for three decades of Republican rule, briefly interrupted by Democratic me-too centrists like Carter and Clinton.
The Nixon landslide buried the hopes of everyone who sought a quick end to the Vietnam War; his apparent mandate, bellicose and overwhelming, spawned an atmosphere of gloom best expressed by Hunter Thompson’s overheated but prescient prose. Nixon “represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character,” he wrote. He is “America’s answer to… the Werewolf in us.… At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn… pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness… towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue.”
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