Running to lose

Henry Fairlie

If even Americans today would understand, one might describe George McGovern as the Roy Riegels of American politics. But one can at least be sure, Writing in this magazine, that Denis Brogan does not need to be reminded that Roy Riegels was the University of California football player who lost the Rose Bowl in 1929 to Georgia Tech by running sixty-four yards the wrong way.

"It takes a long time to get to know a fellow like me," the Senator has been quoted, as saying. But does it? The impression which he gives is of simplicity of culpable simplicity, one might say — and not of complexity. Is there any depth there at all?

The tears brushed from her eyes, Shirley Maclaine has just published a picture-book about George McGovern, and one turns even to it for help. By quotations from the Senator, she says, she hopes to " capsulise " the reasons for the " visceral response" of the people to him. Damn it, we journalists have got it wrong again; we thought it meant that the people were just not interested in the man.

Let me illustrate what I mean by his culpable simplicity. George McGovern has toured the big cities of the east and the north-east with Edward Kennedy, and the two of them have been drawing crowds Which have been as enthusiastic as they have been large. Night after night, the Pictures of these crowds appeared on television network news across the Country: marvellous free publicity of exactly the kind which George McGovern, With little gold in his treasure chest, desperately needs.

Whatever the electors might think, at the back or even at the front of their Minds, as they watched, it was not for George McGovern to suggest to them that the crowds had come out to see, not him, but Edward Kennedy. Yet that is just what he did; the cameras picked it up; and such Was the news of George McGovern which Went out all that night. "The only trouble he said after Edward Kennedy had sPoken, "that it is a tough act to follow "; and he proceeded to tell how in one of the crowds a woman had leaned across him to clutch at Edward Kennedy, how she had shouted that it was 1976 to which all of them were looking, and how she had then noticed the candidate himself, and had said: "I'm sorry, Mr McGovern, but that's

110v, we feel in Philadelphia."

It was all very candid; it even made one warm to the man. But it did not make one think any better of him as a candidate. He must have known — he certainly should have known — that he was saying exactly what the newspapers and television news were hoping he would say, but what they cannot have believed, he ever would say for them in public. It would have been dangerous enough if had speculated off the record about the appeal of , Edward Kennedy as compared with his own; but there he was announcing it in public, for two precious minutes on television. That is culpable simplicity.

I do not believe that the voters see George McGovern as the "wild radical" which the propaganda of the Republican Party so vividly depicts. They are much more canny than that. But they are finding it difficult to find George McGovern at all.

Before his nomination when he was being generally presented as strong and fearless, I kept saying that there would be time enough to discuss the views of George McGovern when he had decided what they were. Well, it is clearly time when one should be discussing his views, but the difficulty remains. Even at this stage, he is still producing policy papers to revise his previous policy papers. The papers in themselves do not matter much; but where is he?

It is right and proper that, having become the candidate of his party, he should have sought to reunite it, even to the extent of seeking the support of men such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Daley, whom he and his supporters set out, in the first place, to destroy. But he should have approached them as if it was he, and not they, who was in a position of strength.

John Kennedy, when he was a candidate, made his homes in Hyannis Port and in Georgetown seem like potential White Houses; there were always pictures of them on television, with their police cordons and their road blocks, the news coming from them — as Richard Nixon now makes it come from his various White Houses — the news being made by him wherever he was. But one has only the dimmest impression today of George McGovern's homes, either in South Dakota or in Washington: he goes to see people, but where does he command people to come to see him?

After all, he did to some extent, have Richard Daley on the run after the national convention. He had shown that he had votes in Illinois which he could withhold from Richard Daley just as certainly as Richard Daley had votes which he could withold from him. He should have moved with confidence from this position; he should have approached the mayor with some sense of his own new situation. But he did not. He went to the mayor; he pleaded with the mayor; he in effect begged the mayor in much the same way as he had said that he would beg the rulers of North Vietnam to release the American prisoners. In fact, he seems more beholden to Richard Daley, Mayor of Chicago, than a Hubert Humphrey ever was. That is the point.

At this level in American politics, the relationship which counts most is what the Romans called amicitia. It is best described by Lily Ross Taylor in her Party Politics in the Age of Caesar: " Amicitia in politics was a responsible relationship. A man expected from his friends, not only support at the polls, but aid in the perils of public life, the unending prosecutions brought from political motives by his personal enemies, his inimici, his rivals, in the contests for office and the manifold rewards of public life." As she points out, when Cicero wrote to Crassus confirming their reconciliation, he urged Crassus to regard the letter as a treaty. There has been no sense of a treaty between equals in George McGovern's approaches to Richard Daley.

Where parties are as weak and as fluctuating, and as dependent on the fortunes of an individual, as in Rome or in America, the giving and the demanding of amicitia in the relationships which a politician forms is more important than almost anything else. That is how one deals with a Richard Daley, by treating with him; and that is how one deals with a George Meany. But the method of George McGovern has put him in the position either of submitting to Richard Daley altogether, or of altogether losing George Meany. This is why one legitimately worries about the lack of command in a politician who aspires to the highest office in the land, whatever his other virtues.

The majority of people, I believe, were stimulated by the defeat of Richard Daley by the supporters of George McGovern at the party's convention. There was a marvellous cheek about it, for one thing; but there was also some serious encouragement in seeing a powerful party machine beaten at its own game. George McGovern could have gone on from there; he could have unnerved Richard Daley enough, with the threat to defeat his candidates in November, to force the mayor to treat on equal terms.

He did not; he picked up the ball from Richard Daley's fumble, exactly as Roy Riegels picked up the fumble of Georgia Tech, and then he has run with it to score for Richard Daley. It is no way to win a Rose Bowl.