RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT
10.5.08
PAGE 1
TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, the director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum,and on behalf of John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all my Library colleagues, I welcome you to this afternoon’s very special Forum. Let me begin by thanking our sponsors, including our lead sponsor, Bank of America, and our other forum supporters including the Lowell Institute, Boston Capital, the Corcoran-Jennison Companies, the Boston Foundation, and our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, NECN, and WBUR, which broadcasts Kennedy Library Forums on Sunday evenings at eight P.M.
This afternoon we honor- and are honored by- the presence of two men who sought our country’s highest office and who made immeasurable contributions to the common good through their careers in public service. Rather than my reminding you of their many accomplishments in this introduction, I thought it might be more interesting to pause and relive two moments in history, the first July 21, 1988, the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Let’s listen:
[Video]
[Applause]
As governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis was credited with digging the Commonwealth out of one of its worst financial crisis, with a reformer’s eye, an entrepreneurial spirit and, as he once famously put it, “a meat cleaver to cut wasteful government spending.” Governor Dukakis’ reputation as a fiscal conservative is well known. As Governor his daily commute on the T to the State House endeared him to many voters, like my own father, who since he is with us today I will politely describe as parsimonious—who recognized a kindred spirit in Michael Dukakis, the type of man David Nyhan once wrote who, when told by the car salesman that the new model has air conditioning immediately asked, “Air conditioning? What for? Don’t the windows work?”
Michael Dukakis was the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee in a race that many cite as the beginning of the slash and burn campaigns that have come to dominate our national politics. These days he is as dedicated to his students at Northeastern and UCLA as he has always been to his lifelong political advocacy, promoting universal healthcare and public transportation. He currently divides his time between Boston and Los Angeles where he and his wife Kitty can be closer to their children and his six grandchildren.
Kitty Dukakis is here with us today with their oldest grandchild, Allie, a student at BatesCollege. And I ask them to stand to receive our warm welcome.
[Applause]
Michael Dukakis sums up his life this way, “I’m just a guy who loves his country. Lots of us have dreams. I have lived mine.”
Our moderator this afternoon is Tom Oliphant, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and columnist for The Boston Globe, who often frequents the stage of the Kennedy Library, bringing out the best of our guest speakers from Robert McNamara to Sharon Robinson—who spoke here last year to mark the 50th anniversary of her father, Jackie Robinson’s breaking of major league baseball’s color barrier. This gave us an opportunity to see another side of Tom Oliphant, the young boy who grew up in Brooklyn rooting for the Dodgers, which he writes movingly about in his memoir, Praying for Gil Hodges.
Baseball is often a metaphor for life. And one of today’s themes concerns how we as citizens best support good people in the public spotlight as they face difficult times. So perhaps there’s a lesson for us from the title of Tom Oliphant’s memoir. Gil Hodges was the Dodger’s first baseman who suffered through one of the most famous slumps in baseball history. One steaming Sunday on a morning after Hodges had gone hitless again, a Brooklyn priest famously told his congregation, “It’s far too hot for a homily. Go home. Keep the commandments and pray for Gil Hodges.” The slump ended soon afterwards.
Lastly with us this afternoon and tying us directly to the man we honor in this Library, is Senator George McGovern. After two terms representing South Dakota in Congress, George McGovern served as a special assistant to John F. Kennedy and the first director of the US Food for Peace Program until 1962, before being elected to the Senate where he served for three terms. In 1972 he was the Democrat Party’s nominee for president.
When John F. Kennedy traveled to Berlin in 1963, he opened his speech by saying, “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today in the world of freedom the proudest boast is, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” Given what we later learned about George McGovern’s presidential opponent, and with the more, broader understanding of the war in Vietnam, perhaps for some in today’s audience one of their proudest boast would be that in the 1972 presidential election, “I voted in Massachusetts.”
Senator, I have one confession to make: 1972 marked the year when my family moved from the Boston area to Maine. I served as your campaign manager in the Mock Election that was held in my 5th grade classroom. [Laughter] Yet new to the more Republican leanings of my hometown I was astounded in counting the votes to see that there was a chance that you might not win. So in a moment of panic I stuffed the ballot box [Laughter] adding three extra McGovern-Schriver votes to secure your victory. Yet I didn’t realize quick enough that in doing so I needed to remove three of the Nixon votes [Laughter] to cover my tracks and I was caught red handed.
Continuing work begun in the Kennedy years, George McGovern served as the ambassador to the United Nations agencies on food and agriculture in Rome during the Clinton Administration. And in recognition of his lifetime commitment to those issues, he received our nation’s highest honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom for humanitarian service.
For many the name of George McGovern invokes the image of a good and decent man who tried throughout his long career to heal suffering, confront injustice and promote peace. Yet for others, the term McGovern liberal has become a pejorative label to bandy about. Asked once how he felt about that, Senator McGovern quipped that he was proud to be a politician whose name is in the dictionary, quote, “even is it is as a swear word.” [Laughter]
So let’s go back once more in history to the 1972 Democratic Convention in the wee hours of the morning when the son of a minister, a decorated war hero, an international crusader for justice and a grass roots reformer, facing an unpopular war overseas and unrest in our land, appealed to the nation and to the better angels of our nature, calling us all to come home. And at the conclusion of the film clip, please join me in welcoming Tom Oliphant, Michael Dukakis and George McGovern to the Kennedy Library. Let’s watch now together.
[Video]
[Applause]
TOM OLIPHANT: Thank you, Tom. One thing I’m especially grateful for is that you didn’t show any pictures of me in those. [Laughter] In the Senator’s case my hair went halfway down my back. I wore high-top Converse tennis shoes on his presidential campaign start to finish. I was a little cleaner when the Governor ran, not much though. So I’m grateful the change that has occurred in me is not shown. Though I must say as a professional observer, the first thing that amazes me about those clips is how similar these two people look today, which must be--
[Applause]
I don't know if that’s vitamin pills, clean living or whatever. But I thought it might be fun to start by meeting these two people as human beings instead of stick figures. We will do the serious stuff in a minute. Politics is a great game. There are a million stories. And in the case of these two, a couple of great ones. And to sort of introduce them as presidential nominees, I thought we might begin on the human side.
Senator McGovern, it was about two weeks out from the election. We were in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The dimension of what was about to happen was becoming apparent. You were working the rope line at the airport in Grand Rapids and there was a particularly obnoxious heckler that afternoon. And you took it for a while and for a second I thought you were going to (I was right on your shoulder.) I thought you were going to walk away from the guy.
But Senator McGovern stopped, turned around, slowly walked back to this heckler, beckoned him close and said, “I got a little secret for you.”
GEORGE MCGOVERN: Well, before I tell you that secret—
TOM OLIPHANT: It could be off the record.
GEORGE MCGOVERN: Before I get into that I just want say what a privilege it is, always, to meet with the wisest voters in the United States--
[Applause]
--And to share this moment with Governor Michael Dukakis. When he bore that title there was a survey, which indicated that he was the most respected of all the 50 governors in the country, even the one in Alaska. [Laughter] I think that had he been elected in 1988, he would have become one of the great presidents in American history.
[Applause]
And Tom Oliphant already is one of the most respected and honored journalists in the country. Now, for the secret. [Laughter] It was near the end of the campaign in ’72. I was exhausted and so was Eleanor, my wonderful wife of 63 years, who is now gone, unfortunately. We were working our way down a woven wire fence at this Grand Rapids, Michigan airport. And there was one of the most obnoxious creatures I think I encountered in that campaign that somehow managed to squeeze himself between the crowd and that fence. I don't know how he did it because they were just jammed in there. Maybe 20,000 people, you think?
TOM OLIPHANT: Easily. Easily.
GEORGE MCGOVERN: And he kept—as we went down the fence, he just kept up a steady drum beat, “McGovern, you’re going to get your come-uppance on Election Day. Nixon is going to drive you right into the ground.” I didn’t know he was telling the truth. [Laughter] But I did know that it was a really unpleasant experience. I won’t go into all the four-letter words and everything else. But it particularly ticked me off because Eleanor was there. She was a tiny, beautiful little person. And he was just saying the ugliest things you can imagine.
So I finally, as Tom said, I said, “Come here.” I said this almost in a whisper. Nobody would hear what I said. But I leaned over to him and I said, “You little SOB, why don’t you just kiss my ass.” [Laughter] [Applause] No one heard that but him. But unfortunately, there was a CBS camera there and probably Tom Oliphant.
TOM OLIPHANT: It is in the pool report.
GEORGE MCGOVERN: And they could either hear it or when they asked him, “What did Senator McGovern say to you?” He said, “He said a profanity.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard the—that was a three-letter word, called a profanity. They said, “Well, what did he say?” So he repeated it loud and clear. It hit all the networks that night, all the front pages of the metropolitan papers. If I can just say one word about it, Tom.
TOM OLIPHANT: Anything.
GEORGE MCGOVERN: Five years later I was sitting on the floor of the Senate one day. I think I was the only one out in the Senate. Somebody else was making a speech. And Jim Eastland, the old Senator from Mississippi came in. He stood way across over there and I’m here. And he started chuckling, looking at me. And I looked down to see if my fly was unzipped and if I had spilled any gravy or something. Then he sauntered over.
He said, “George, did you really tell the guy out there that?” And I said, “Well, Jim, I’m afraid I did. That was not one of my better days.” He said, “That’s the only thing you said in that campaign I agreed with.” So that’s my story. [Laughter]
[Applause]
TOM OLIPHANT: You know, the Senator is right in one respect. It was a relatively innocent time, 1972, still. And there were deep and profound discussions in media boardrooms all over America that night, “What do we do with this quote?” And it got printed and broadcast virtually everywhere.
GEORGE MCGOVERN: I think so.
TOM OLIPHANT: And I always thought it had something to do with—there was an aura of respect in those last ten days. And I think the Democratic vote sort of solidified. And I date it from that incident.
GEORGE MCGOVERN: Is that right?
TOM OLIPHANT: I’m not going to take any more. Governor, you can proceed any way you want to but my humanizing question is based on the assumption that the events we think we know something about often turn out to be the events we know nothing about. And I wanted you to talk a little bit about that day in Michigan when you got into an Army vehicle, sometimes referred to as a tank. And what you think happened, it’s a better story than it was at the time. But I was going to also—Did you work for this guy or did you work with Muskie?
MICHAEL DUKAKIS: Actually, I was with Muskie.
TOM OLIPHANT: Yeah, that’s what I thought.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS: I mean, after all, BatesCollege. Where, by the way, my mother, the woman you heard about in the film clip, arrived in 1921 as the first Greek-American young woman, George, ever to go away to college in the history of the United States. And when Allie arrived at Bates last year, she called us very excitedly soon after she got there. She had apparently gone to library and she looked up and there was a picture ofmy mother, her great-grandmother, on the wall.
She called us and she said, “I was in the library studying and there was a picture of Yiayia on the wall.”So there was this long tide and Muskie had been a great debater at Bates and all that kind of stuff, George. But obviously, once you won the nomination, I was an enthusiastic supporter. And apart from Kitty’s and my enormous respect and admiration for this man, think about how different things would have been had George McGovern, not Richard Nixon been elected in 1972. We’d have never heard of Watergate. We wouldn’t have had the spectacle of a president having to resign before he was impeached. I could go on and on. So it’s great to have him with us and back again. It’s true. The only state in the country that exercised its God-given intelligence in a way that made sense.
Actually, Tom, the tank ride, until the Bush people decided to use it in an ad was just another day on the campaign trail. What I had been trying to do was to try to make the point that we were under-investing in conventional weapons and over-investing in a lot of exotic, high technology stuff. And as a result our military base in the best sense of the word was being eroded by these huge expenditures for exotic weaponry at a time when our troops didn’t have the kind of stuff they needed. And that included tanks and, you know, since you’ve got to wear a helmet if you are in one of those things…
The other thing is this. I think, Tom, when I think in retrospect, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this. You’ve got to understand, folks, when you run for the presidency you are out there for a year and a half, day after day after day. And I don't know how you felt about this, George but I was beginning to get bored out of my mind. Now, part of that, I think, may have something to do with the way we ran the campaign. And I think there are ways to try to break into that boredom.
But particularly in those closing weeks, it’s up in the plane, down, up in the plane, down, up in the plane, down. I’m sorry we didn’t do some of the bus tours that Clinton and Gore did where at least you are on the ground, and you are seeing real people and interacting with them. But I didn’t consider at the time anything other than this was another day on the campaign trail.
These days, folks, when I speak and every once in a while my introducer will say, “You didn’t happen to come here in a tank, did you?” [Laughter] My standard response is, “No. And I’ve never thrown up all over the Japanese Prime Minister.” [Laughter] Can I tell one more story?
TOM OLIPHANT: Any number.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS: Notice, I haven’t—I’m not doing a Palin here. I did answer the question, right? [Laughter] [Applause]
TOM OLIPHANT: It’s a quaint habit that used to be practiced in presidential politics. It’s considered passé today, guys and gals.
MICHAEL DUKAKIS: You’ve all heard of the new button, three parts? The top third says, “Attention, Sarah Palin.” The middle third says, “Jesus was a community organizer.” The bottom third says, “Pontius Pilate was a governor.” [Laughter] Actually, the story—there are great moments, as you know, George, I mean good ones as well as not so good ones. But when you saw me referring to my mother, who was 85 and campaigned all over the country for me, and effectively and well—Sitting next to her was a guy named John Grennell, a distinguished graduate of TuftsUniversity, one of the great athletes and my basketball coach.