(6 of 11)
Off Stride. McGovern toured the delegation caucuses with other candidates, arguing his case. Before the credentials fight, says Gary Hart, "he was as apprehensive as I've ever seen him. It knocked him off his stride." As McGovern monitored the battle on TV, he sat shoeless and tieless on a couch eating a T-bone steak and ice cream, and occasionally fondling his month-old baby grandson Matthew. At 3 that morning, Eleanor McGovern drove back to the Doral from the convention center; when she got there, she found that the candidate had gone to sleep.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, his nomination assured, McGovern labored over his acceptance speech. He had no shortage of suggestions. Old Kennedy Aides Adam Walinsky, Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin contributed ideas in lofty, cadenced prose. Campaign Speechwriter Robert Shrum submitted drafts; McGovern rejected all but a few ideas and an occasional phrase, preferring to write the speech himself on lined yellow legal pads—a practice of Richard Nixon's.
The afternoon before the nomination, some 300 protesters appeared in the lobby of the Doral. They were incensed by a McGovern statement the night before to a group of P.O.W. wives. He had said that he would "retain the military capability in the region—in Thailand and on the seas—to signal and fulfill" his resolve to win the release of the prisoners. It was a curious inconsistency in McGovern's war position, an apparent apostasy from his vows of complete withdrawal. The protesters angrily called him on it, and McGovern explained that he would close U.S. bases in Thailand and remove all U.S. naval forces from waters adjacent to Southeast Asia once the prisoners were "free and those listed as missing were accounted for." When they went on to demand that he sign an S.D.S. proposal calling for life imprisonment of police officers who kill members of minority groups, McGovern said evenly: "I'm not going to sign it."
The presidential balloting Wednesday night had an air of anticlimax. Not all of the Old Politics was gone: as the states were called to declare their votes, delegation chairmen delivered their traditional commercials. Delaware was "the home of corporations, chickens, chemicals and charisma"; California was "the state that began the lettuce boycott"; North Carolina was "the summerland where the sun doth shine."
Despite an utter lack of suspense, delegates in the hall kept close tallies of the vote, as did Eleanor McGovern, who appeared at the convention center to savor the moment. McGovern stayed at the Doral, tracking the ballots, fiddling with the television dial. "Illinois will put us over," said Yancey Martin, McGovern's black director of minorities. It was a small irony that McGovern soared over his required 1,509 with the Illinois delegation that he had rather reluctantly claimed from Richard Daley. In the hall, a brief, almost polite pandemonium broke out and then subsided. McGovern smiled in his hotel room, shook hands with his staff and kissed his relatives, murmuring "Thank