The American Presidential Election of 1972

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The 47th episode in a very long series about the American presidential elections from 1788 to the present. In 1972, Richard Nixon is on top of the world. What could go wrong?

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The 47th Presidential election in American history took place on November 7, 1972. It was the first one in which Americans aged 18 to 20 could vote in, thanks to the recent passage of the 26th Amendment to the Constitution.

Richard Nixon acted like a madman. Well, he pretended to, making the Soviet Union and North Vietnam think he was unpredictable and crazy so that they would be more afraid of the United States. Really though, Nixon just wanted the Vietnam War over, but he found it difficult to just bring all the troops home at once. In some ways, he made the conflict worse after he continued to bomb Cambodia. Still, each year, more and more American troops came back home.

Nixon seemed to contradict himself with foreign policy. On one hand, he wanted more involvement abroad to prevent the spread of Communism, including having the C.I.A. continue to secretly take out Communist leaders in foreign countries. On the other hand, Nixon advocated a policy called detente, which is a fancy word for easing relations between two countries. Nixon visited Communist China, for example, which was an important step in improving relations with them.

Going into the election, Nixon had an approval rating of over 60 percent, but he did have two opponents trying to get renominated by the Republicans. Pete McCloskey, a Representative from California, ran against him because he thought all the troops from Vietnam should have been brought home a long time ago. Nixon’s other opponent was John Ashbrook, a Representative from Ohio, who criticized Nixon for being too liberal and too much of a big government-guy. Ashbrook was also against detente.

But McCloskey and Ashbrook never had much of a chance. Nixon was easily renominated, with Spiro Agnew again as his running mate.

15 people declared themselves as candidates for the Democratic Party. One of them, Shirley Chisholm, a Representative from New York, became the first African American to run for a major party nomination. Another, Patsy Mink, a Representative from Hawaii, was the first Asian American candidate to run for President for a major party.

The guy who was the favorite for the nomination originally was Senate Majority Whip Ted Kennedy, the youngest brother of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. But he said he wouldn’t be a candidate.

Hubert Humphrey went ahead and gave it another go, but did not campaign aggressively. It’s almost like he didn’t want to go through it all again. Edmund Muskie, Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, was the frontrunner for awhile until a successful smear campaign shook him up, to a point where it looked like he was crying, and there’s no crying in baseball, I mean politics, even if they were just snowflakes, and this hurt his chances, believe it or not.

Then there was George Wallace, who was back with the Democratic Party after leaving them in 1968 with his fairly successful third party run. Wallace, surprisingly, did well in the primaries again, but his campaign was cut short after he was shot multiple times by a kid named Arthur Bremer, who, believe it or not, was released from prison back in 2007 for good behavior and is still alive. Wallace survived, but he was paralyzed from the waist down and would be in tremendous pain for the rest of his life.

So that just leaves George McGovern, a Senator from South Dakota who had a big grassroots campaign. McGovern stood out as the leading anti-war candidate, who also thought all the troops from Vietnam should have been brought home a long time ago. Although the Democratic Party establishment again wanted Hubert Humphrey as their guy, the grassroots movement to get McGovern as the nominee overcame them. McGovern became the nominee, and, what became known as the McGovern Commission, or the principle that the most primary votes should actually determine who the nominee was, has been the norm ever since. Some of the Democratic Party establishment didn’t like McGovern, though, and refused to support him.

The Democrats nominated Thomas Eagleton, a Senator from Missouri, as his running mate. As it turns out, Eagleton, had health concerns, and was pressured to drop out of the race. After Eagleton dropped out, McGovern had a hard time finding his replacement. He asked six different people to be his running mate, and they all turned him down. That’s a little embarrassing.