Journalist who shared Pulitzer for revelations on Eagleton therapy
Robert Boyd, a journalist whose unearthing of 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas F. Eagleton’s mental-health history — including shock-therapy treatment for depression — caused Eagleton to withdraw from the campaign and earned a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, died Sept. 18 at a Philadelphia retirement home. He was 91.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Clark Hoyt, with whom Boyd shared the Pulitzer for their reporting on the Eagleton story.
Starting in 1967, Mr. Boyd spent two decades as Washington bureau chief of Knight Newspapers and then Knight Ridder, a nowdefunct newspaper chain whose once-muscular reach extended from Miami to San Jose, Calif.
The towheaded Mr. Boyd, who had once been in the CIA, was an idiosyncratic blend of Midwestern reserve and Harvard erudition: plain-spoken, but in six languages. Averse to punditry, he was not a marquee name on the Sunday talk-show circuit but commanded dooropening respect in political circles.
His career included notable reporting trips to Cuba after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to the Dominican Republic during a revolt there in 1965, to Hanoi in 1970 amid the Vietnam War and to Communist China accompanying President Richard Nixon on a groundbreaking February 1972 diplomatic visit.
But the expedition for which Mr. Boyd was best remembered was a trek to the Black Hills of South Dakota that July to inform the presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., that his recently selected running mate had not been entirely forthcoming about his mental-health history.
Little known outside his home state of Missouri, Eagleton was a bright, witty and telegenic first-term senator whose ardent opposition to the Vietnam War made him a natural political ally of McGovern, who had long denounced the conflict.
At 42, Eagleton served as a youthful counterweight to the World War II-era combat pilot at the top of the ticket. In all, he seemed a sensible second choice after McGovern’s failed courtship of Sen. Edward Kennedy, DMass.
McGovern announced his selection of Eagleton on July 13. At a time when psychiatric care carried a politically insurmountable stigma, McGovern’s staff had been aware of Eagleton’s earlier hospitalization for fatigue and other rumors circulating about his mental health, but the campaign plowed forward with assurances that his time under care was brief.
Acting on a tip from an anonymous caller that Eagleton was trying to hide the full extent of his health issues, Mr. Boyd’s colleague Mr. Hoyt dug further and gleaned enough information — from a doctor at a St. Louis psychiatric hospital — to feel confident he was on the right track.
(The tipster, Mr. Hoyt said, was a friend of the doctor who had been involved in Eagleton’s treatment. The friend was a McGovern supporter who had wanted the disclosure to come out fast in the hope that Nixon’s team would not use it as an “October surprise” close to the general election.)
With Mr. Boyd along for added support, the Knight Newspaper reporters showed up unannounced in South Dakota to confront McGovern’s team with their investigation.
They turned over a twopage memo of their findings, including Eagleton’s history of depression that at least twice had required hospitalization and electroshock therapy. They gave the campaign an opportunity to respond, hoping in return for official corroboration and an exclusive interview with Eagleton.
“It was the only fair and decent thing to do,” Mr. Boyd told the Harvard Crimson decades later.
After keeping the journalists hanging for a day or two, the campaign spoiled the scoop by compelling Eagleton to reveal at a news conference he had “voluntarily” undergone treatment for nervous exhaustion and depression three times since 1960. Eagleton also said his treatment regimen included psychiatric counseling, chemotherapy and electricshock treatment.
As what a McGovern’s aide later called a “consolation prize,” Mr. Boyd and Mr. Hoyt were allowed a private trip to the Rapid City, S.D., airport with Eagleton.
“Still in the sweat-soaked sport jacket and open-collared shirt he wore at the news conference, Eagleton sat in the back seat of a sedan and answered all our questions reluctantly but graciously,” Mr. Hoyt later wrote. “He chain-smoked unfiltered Pall Malls, lighting one from another and throwing the butts out the window as we sped through a national forest.”
McGovern, who had initially declared himself “1,000%” behind Eagleton, soon reversed himself. Eighteen days after Eagleton had been named to the ticket, he was replaced by Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps founder and Kennedy inlaw. McGovern lost in a landslide, despite foreshocks of the Watergate scandal that would topple Nixon two years later.
“What we did right was we didn’t just run with an incomplete story when we really didn’t have the full facts and properly confirmed,” said Mr. Hoyt.