Meeting a presidential hopeful — a decade after his lopsided defeat
AUSTIN — As the dual roller derbies we call presidential campaigns hurtle toward their respective nominating conventions this summer, I drift back in time to my own brush with presidential players. On a fine fall morning in 1983, my friend and fellow editor Geoff Rips nosed his little Nissan station wagon into the driveway of Austin’s iconic Villa Capri Motor Hotel on Interstate 35 next to the University of Texas campus, and I hopped out to retrieve our distinguished passenger. Waiting for us in the lobby, he was easy to spot. A decade earlier, he’d been the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, a race he lost by a margin more lopsided than almost any presidential election in American history.
George McGovern was a little grayer, the sideburns a bit bushier, but he still had that distinctive prairie twang. We shook hands, and I wondered briefly what to call him — Sen. McGovern (though he had lost his bid for a fourth term three years earlier)? Mr. McGovern? George? I think I called him, “How are you?” as in “Good morning, how are you?”
As Geoff headed north on I-35 (an easier task in those days) and then east on U.S. 290, McGovern explained to us that he had lectured nearly an hour the night before to some 600 listeners in the Texas Union ballroom, offering a critique of Ronald Reagan’s defense policy. We were his ride to Aggieland, where he was scheduled to make a similar talk that evening. I wondered if he’d get 600 Aggies to turn out.
Headed toward Manor, Geoff driving and me in the back seat, I tried to think of some weighty, worthy question to ask our passenger. I had been a politics reporter for some time, but I hadn’t covered any national figures. I knew Mark White, Bill Hobby and Jim “Whole Hog” Hightower, and I had seen W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel campaigning in Waco when I was a little boy, but I’d never been in the presence of a presidential candidate. I wanted to pick his brain, hear the latest political gossip, learn what the plain-spoken South Dakotan really thought of the man who beat him so handily (only to resign the presidency two years later).
I leaned toward the front seat. “Where do you live?” I asked.
“In D.C.,” McGovern said. I didn’t know it at the time, but he and his wife Elinor lived in the historic Bates-Warren apartment building on Connecticut Avenue. Overlooking Rock Creek Park, it’s still one of the most handsome buildings in northwest D.C.
“Why not in South Dakota?” I asked.
McGovern glanced over his shoulder. “You ever been to South Dakota?” he asked.
I had not.
A quixotic adventure?
While I tried to come up with a more promising conversational gambit, Geoff got our passenger to talking about the president. McGovern told us he believed there was a possibility that Reagan wouldn’t run in ’84. “You get the impression that he’s enjoying the job less,” he mused. “I don’t feel strongly about it, but it would not surprise me if he pulls out late this year. I would think that would make it easier for George Bush to move in and be the nominee.” (The quotation comes from a 1983 article Geoff wrote about the trip.)
I had a question for McGovern, a complicated query underscoring my political erudition, my in-depth knowledge of electoral politics from a Lone Star perspective. With a string of clauses and complex phrases, it took me a while to get it unspooled. I glanced at the former senator, eager for his equally erudite reply. He was silent, no doubt formulating a complex response. I glanced at Geoff, then back at Silent George.
He was asleep. I had put the man to sleep.
We crossed a bridge over a dry creek and the slight bump startled him awake. He apologized. He explained that the Villa Capri had honored him with a night in the Red Skelton Suite, where every wall was festooned with paintings of clowns by the legendary comedian himself. Every time he opened his eyes, there were those damn clowns staring down at him in the gloom. After awhile he gave up trying to sleep and just stared back.
Approaching Lexington, Geoff asked him a cheeky question about running for president again: “Isn’t this a quixotic adventure?”
As Geoff recalled, “The senator came as close to bristling as his courtly manner would permit.” He reminded us that a recent poll had showed him in third place, favored by 10 percent of the Democrats questioned.
Our prairie Don Quixote was hungry for a hamburger, but we couldn’t find an eating place in Lexington. (This was years before Snow’s, Lexington’s incomparable barbecue joint.) We drove on to Caldwell, where we spotted a Dairy Queen. An older couple seemed to recognize the stranger in their midst. Unlike the gregarious Mark White, who would have struck up a conversation, McGovern nodded at them between bites of his Hunger Buster. A couple in their 20s seemed to know he was somebody famous; they stared back into the little dining room from the parking lot.
As we approached the outskirts of Bryan a half hour later, McGovern was talking about the state of the nation more than a decade after his White House bid ran aground.
“Compared to 1972, the nation is more conservative in the sense that it is more skeptical of government solutions,” he said. “There was more faith in the capacity to find political solutions to problems than there are now.”
He sounded a bit like the Methodist minister he had been briefly, after coming home from World War II as a decorated combat pilot.
“This country is hungry for a vision that will lend purpose to their lives,” he told us. “There’s a kind of loneliness and despair in the country today that is not entirely new, but it’s more evident than it was years ago. I think we haven’t had a leader in a long time who could really tap the spiritual hunger of the American people.”
After all these years
Geoff and I were left to ponder that rumination as we arrived at the Ramada Inn a half block from the A&M campus. We left McGovern standing on a thin beach of Astroturf near an indoor pool. He thanked us graciously, then walked to the registration desk to check in and prepare for an evening of Aggies. I hope he got a nap.
McGovern continued his presidential odyssey for another few months but dropped out after finishing third in the Massachusetts primary behind his former campaign manager Gary Hart and the former vice president and eventual nominee, Walter Mondale. He died in 2012 at age 90, not long after moving back to South Dakota. (I’ve still never been there.)
Geoff and I remain friends after all these years, even though, when he told the McGovern tale at dinner a few nights ago, he forgot that I had been in the back seat that memorable day.
The Villa Capri, home away from home to politicians, UT parents, visiting scholars and the occasional celebrity (including a young Bob Dylan in 1965), declared bankruptcy and was demolished in 1988. The Longhorns’ football practice field occupies the site these days.
And those Red Skelton paintings? The comedian produced hundreds. If you have one hanging in a back bedroom or stored in the attic, you might want to dust it off. Originals have fetched upwards of $80,000.