McGovern: Should've fought 'ridiculous' attacks

McGovern was surprised his military background didn’t inoculate him to the attacks.

“I tried to convince the public that we needed to take a more critical look at spending on the Pentagon,” McGovern said. “And that got me labeled as weak on defense, notwithstanding the fact I was a decorated bomber pilot from World War II and I think Nixon was a clerk of some kind far away from any guns.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given the fact it later forced Nixon from office, the Watergate scandal played almost no role in the 1972 election.

While the initial break-in took place months before the November vote and the cover-up consumed parts of Nixon’s political apparatus, the burgeoning scandal was dismissed by the White House and mostly ignored by the public.

In fact, one poll at the time suggested voters widely believed that Nixon was more trustworthy than McGovern.

“I remember that poll and being shocked by it,” McGovern said. He attributes the trust gap to the abrupt removal of his running mate just days after his selection. The decision followed Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton's admission that he had been treated for depression with electroshock therapy.

McGovern's regret
Buchanan doesn’t think there’s much McGovern could have done differently to win the election.

“I don’t think he made many mistakes. To win the nomination he went hard left,” Buchanan said of McGovern. “And he went that far left because that’s where the energy and the fire were with the youth and the Democratic Party. But once you’re over there, you’ve got to get back to the center. And our job was not to let him get back to the center, which was what we accomplished.”

While Perlstein, the historian, thinks the GOP came up with a new template for success in 1972, McGovern believes Democrats may have learned some lessons from his defeat.

“If [Clinton] was criticized even in the slightest he had a release on the wire in 30 minutes responding to it. I think he learned that working for me in 1972,” McGovern said. “So if the Republicans learned some things and applied them in 1972, I think Democrats are beginning to understand that they have to be more sensitive to criticisms and quicker to respond.”

Despite being on the losing side of one of the biggest landslides in presidential history, McGovern said the election left him with just one regret.

“I can take the defeat. I’d had defeats before that,” he said. “But the hardest thing for me to live with since 1972 has been the feeling that the American people didn’t really get an accurate reading either on Nixon or me. I think they had two twisted and distorted views of the kind of person I am and the kind of president I would have made, and I think they had a mistaken view of Nixon, as Watergate later demonstrated.”

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