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>Why did Eagleton not tell McGovern his medical history right away? Either he deliberately concealed it, or, as he suggests, he did not consider it serious enough to bring to McGovern's attention. Either way, his judgment and thus his fitness for high office is in question. Before McGovern telephoned him in Miami Beach, Eagleton's wife Barbara warned him that if vice-presidential lightning struck, the health issue would be raised. Eagleton says that rumors about drinking and nervous exhaustion were around on the convention floor the night before he was picked; he says flatly that McGovern's staff knew about the rumors and never asked him about them. Says one McGovern aide: "He did not fully appreciate the intensity of public attention in a national campaign." Tom Eagleton is an unlikely Macbeth, but it seems that vaulting ambition confused his judgment and now threatens to destroy him politically.
Missouri Governor Warren Hearnes, no close friend of Eagleton's, had an explanation: "It is hard for people not in politics to understand Eagleton's position. Eagleton's lifelong ambition to be Vice President overshadowed any rational consideration."
> What effect does Eagleton's medical history have on his fitness for the vice presidency—which means, potentially, for the enormous burdens of the presidency? Past U.S. Presidents have had their emotional problems: John Adams had several nervous breakdowns, Franklin Pierce was an alcoholic, Abraham Lincoln had recurring periods of near-suicidal depression, Rutherford Hayes as a young man wandered about the streets of Sandusky, Ohio, weeping uncontrollably. Lesser officials have also been afflicted. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal committed suicide in 1949 while hospitalized for involutional melancholia. Alabama Governor George Wallace, who announced last week that he would not seek a third-party nomination this year, still receives a 10% disability check from the Veterans Administration because of "psychoneurosis" incurred during World War II. As for Eagleton's illness, medical experts know neither what causes depression nor why electric-shock therapy is effective against it, but most of them insist that it is a relatively common ailment and by no means a permanent disability (see story, page 16).
There may be in Eagleton's background a clue to those psychiatric difficulties. Says a Republican acquaintance: "He was always being pushed by his father. This may have contributed to his difficulties." His lawyer-father was once an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of St. Louis, and when Tom came home after Amherst and Harvard Law, he soon plunged into the politics he had been weaned on. He was always the youngest—youngest city circuit attorney at 27, youngest state attorney general at 31, youngest Lieutenant Governor at 35. When he first arrived in Jefferson City, the rural, stodgy state capital, his breezy manner made a few influential enemies. They are thought to have started the drinking rumors that have plagued Eagleton's career and are, by every reliable account, without foundation. He was a one-of-the-boys drinker as a weekday bachelor in Jeff City, but no one there recalls that alcohol was ever a problem.