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All this—the editorials, the party pros, his own senior staff—led McGovern to buckle late last week. On Friday afternoon he telephoned Jules Witcover of the Los Angeles Times at the Hi-Ho Motel in Custer. McGovern invited Witcover to his cabin for an hour-and-a-half interview. Witcover's lengthy piece conveyed McGovern's message: public reaction to the disclosure of Eagleton's past health problems has been so negative that Eagleton must withdraw —voluntarily. McGovern told Witcover that he was confident of Eagleton's capacity to be President, but that Eagleton's failure to disclose the medical background reflects on McGovern's own credibility. Credibility has been McGovern's rallying cry in the campaign. Also, he had said during the campaign that he would listen to the people—and the people, he told Witcover, seemed to be against Eagleton.
Just to make certain that his message got through, McGovern table-hopped during dinner with his family that night at the Sylvan Lake Lodge, moving from one table of reporters to the next. He never said flatly that he wanted Eagleton to quit, but the hints were plain to all present. Next day McGovern even suggested that he had been doubtful all along. After telephoning Eagleton in San Francisco, he announced: "I have insisted and still insist on a proper period of evaluation by both of us on this difficult question." Later, still leaving Eagleton a dangling man, McGovern said: "I'm with Senator Eagleton all the way—until he and I have a chance to talk."
It seemed a curious way to do business. Why not directly tell Eagleton to quit, rather than send him messages through the headlines? Was McGovern trying to avoid the onus of firing his man? Or was it perhaps that Eagleton was having none of it? Eagleton seemed to suggest as much in his account of a Saturday telephone conversation with McGovern. McGovern, he said, had told him that he "had been under pressure" about Eagleton's candidacy. Yet, Eagleton insisted, three times in the course of the conversation he had wrung from McGovern the phrase "that he's 1,000% for me." Defiantly, the vice-presidential candidate told newsmen: "I'm going to stay on the ticket. That's my firm, irrevocable intent." Even if McGovern decides to keep Eagleton after all, the net effect has been to make McGovern look either devious or weak or both, or at the most charitable, indecisive.
Just before he returned to Washington and the confrontation with his running mate, McGovern stopped off in Aberdeen to address the South Dakota Democratic convention. Since he picked Eagleton, he said, "we have had some heart-rending days." He added: "I do not know how it will all come out, but I do know that it gets darkest just before the stars come out. I ask for your prayers and your patience for Senator Eagleton and me while we deliberate on the proper course ahead."
Most Americans who deliberated on the proper course for McGovern and Eagleton raised some serious questions about both men and their way of doing things.