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At the same time, because of his easygoing style, his youth and his ability, Tom Eagleton made a lot of friends in Jeff City and around Missouri. He is known as a smooth, effective campaigner, charming his constituents with his informality and wry, self-effacing wit. Pulling into small towns, he has been known to pop out of his Cadillac and announce: "Here I am, folks, in living color." In rural areas he can be as folksy as the soybean farmers in his audience. "I know," he will drawl, "that you don't want to hear this on a hot day. But somebody wrote this speech for me and said it was a 'major policy address.' So I guess I've got to give it."
Eagleton has been in the Senate since 1968, and with all of his attractive qualities it is no surprise that he caught George McGovern's attention, though the two men did not become close friends. By all accounts, his behavior in the Senate and around Washington was exemplary. Understandably —if in sharp contrast to last week's ringing statements that mental illness is no disgrace—Eagleton and his family were extremely careful all along to disguise the facts. When Eagleton was first hospitalized for shock treatments in 1960, his father gave out the story that Tom was suffering from gastric disorders and a virus. Eagleton's office gave the same reason for the 1964 visit to the Mayo Clinic. In 1966, when he returned to Mayo for shock treatments, his law office issued a statement that he was at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for gastric tests. Eagleton admitted last week that the story was "a ploy, because when you need rest you need rest from the press." Eagleton's brother Mark, a physician, told newsmen after the rumors about Tom had started that Tom had really never left St. Louis. Last week Mark finally confessed: "The truth is important, but for us now the most important thing is what is going to hurt or help my brother."
All this is a partial answer to yet another puzzling question about the affair: Why did McGovern and his staff fail to check Eagleton's background more carefully? Both the candidate and his aides were busy with other things in the important period between McGovern's California primary victory and nomination night five weeks later: winning the California credentials challenge, defeating amendments to the party platform that could have proved politically embarrassing, polishing his acceptance summons to "Come Home, America." Campaign Manager Gary Hart admits: "There were no formal staff meetings, no requests to check people out. I take the blame for not setting up a committee on selection. I should have thought of that." McGovern's key staff and advisers met for four hours, recalls Gary Hart, to "consider every legitimate name and pare down to a list of no more than six." At first there were about 30 names. Most were politicians, but the list also included John Gardner of Common Cause, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame and Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, even Walter Cronkite.