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How to Lose Everything in Politics (Except Massachusetts}

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Kristi Witker in 1972 was a journalist on a skiing vacation in Switzerland when she received an invitation to help with the McGovern campaign. It was the chance of lifetime. She took it.
She later decided she had made the wrong choice, but she stuck it out and wrote about it.

She received the offer because she traveled with Robert Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign,having been assigned to write a book on him for American Heritage Press. "Kennedy turned out to be an accessible candidate," she writes. "Traveling with the Kennedy campaign was a relaxing and enormously pleasureable experience."

This book by a young woman who later became a successful television reporter is both hilarious and profound. Reading it provides a baseline for the political progress women have made.

As Deputy Press Secretary, she was McGovern's highest ranking female staffer. Yet she was denied basic office furniture, and treated disrespectfully by other staff, who both withheld cooperation that she needed in order to do her job, and spread rumors about her sex life, which, she complains, was much more boring than she would have liked.

A basic problem of the McGovern campaign was that it was led by the remnants of the Robert Kennedy campaign, who saw in McGovern's politics a chance to reclaim Kennedy's vision. But McGovern was not as well known, as charismatic, as politically skilled, and--perhaps most importantly--anywhere near as wealthy as Kennedy.

"It looks like McGovern is nothing on his own, that he has to rely on the Kennedy ghost," Whitker fumes early in the campaign when a McGovern television commercial contains praise from RFK.

Running as the Kennedy legacy candidate is hampered by Ted Kennedy's disinclination to campaign for McGovern in the primaries, and his refusal to accept McGovern's offer of the Vice-Presidential nomination. Ultimately, after various false starts (remember Tom Eagleton?), McGovern winds up with Kennedy borther-in-law Sargent Shriver as a runningmate, but it is too little, too late to secure the Kennedy constituency and unite the Democratic Party.

She assails McGovern's lack of mastery of public policy mastery.
"We have to do something on the economy," he tells a staff member." The staffer members asks what. "Something," McGovern repeats. McGovern's hatred of being committed to specific details led to a fatal lack of clarity and inability to weed out bad ideas. His $1000 per person tax rebate was the quintessential bad idea.

The limitations of McGovern's staff were also deadly. "His campaign was at first a minor effort appropriately run by minors, but as he came up, they felt they owned him and were determined not to share him. The candidate became their captive and they, in time, his limitation. These kids always had wildly impractical, rigid, theological notions about politics....(E)veryone had a title which suggested he was the boss. In fact, no one was."

In the McGovern campaign, closeness to the center of the action was all. People wanted to be central staff, not field staff. Gary Hart did parlay his position as campaign manager (outranked by National Political Director Frank Mankiewcz though) into two terms in the U.S. Senate and two presidential candidacies. But a guy not mentioned in the book--Texas field staff director Bill Clinton--went a lot farther of course. So may his Texas co-worker Hillary Rodham, also not mentioned.

What Clinton learned from McGovern was the importance of conducting a primary election campaign with the general election in mind. McGovern taught this lesson by failing to understand it.

"Throughout the primaries," Witker writes,"McGovern and his staff had been running like a group of lemmings with blinders on, toward the sea, which, in their case, happened to be The Nomination. The Nomination was their only goal, a goal now out of all proportion because McGovern's longshot candidacy had made it seem unattainable. And because it had seemed unattainable, McGovern now credited it with mystical powers. If he won The Nomination, he would somehow become invincible and have anything he wanted."

McGovern, a strong moral leader and an enduring political figure in the years since his 1972 campaign, could have been elected with a better campaign, Witker implies. That is difficult to say: in the 20th Century only Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton were able to defeat incumbent Republican presidents, and all had the benefit of deeply divided a Republican Party at the time.

Both Witker's humor and political insights are still valuable today. No one should attempt to put together a large scale political operation without reading this book. And anyone grappling with the problems of how to run an extensive volunteer operation of any kind would also benefit. This is a great case study of the human resources issues involved in running a large volunteer operation.

The campaign "was a once in a lifetime experience," Witker concludes. And, indeed, she never worked in a Presidential campaign again.

Her summary of Republican appeal is an enduring one. "It was already a depressing year on top of a succession of depressing years: rising prices, falling stock market, scandals, the War, crime. Who wanted to think about goodness and justice and truth just now? It only reminded you of how little of it was around. Not many people trusted Nixon, but he wasn't taking away their money, or so they believed. No one knew whether to trust McGovern, but he was threatening to take away their money, so why bother to find out? Why listen?"

Those who listen to Kristi Witker will benefit from the experience. If you are reading this review, you should read this book.

I discovered this title by pure chance while browsing in a used bookstore. An out of print and sadly forgotten work, it is the saga of Kristi Witker, who, in the spring of 1972 had done volunteer work in George McGovern's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and had an offer to become a television reporter. Then, the McGovern campaign director offered her a job on the campaign staff, telling her McGovern would be the next president and working in the White House would be even better than television. No less an authority than Shirley MacLaine advised Witker not to pass up this wonderful opportunity. It turned out to be probably the biggest mistake Witker made. Her co-workers seemed to enjoy petty power games. Whenever she asked for reimbursement of her expenses or even her paycheck, she would get a royal runaround (she had to moonlight as a news photographer). George McGovern comes across as a man of great personal decency, but he seemed unwilling to impose discipline on his unruly campaign staff. In the end, his was to be one of the most inept campaigns in history, winning just one state and the District of Columbia and carrying less than 40% of the popular vote. McGovern tried to alert people to the wickedness of President Richard Nixon, but in the eyes of many voters, if Nixon was a scoundrel, McGovern was a fool, which was no improvement. So what is the book's relevance for today? With the Occupy Wall Street protests in the news, this is a book that people on both sides might wish to seek out. Activists will find it a useful cautionary tale about how a movement similar in outlook to theirs started out with such high hopes (and the promise that it represented a "new politics") but ended so badly. Critics on the right will enjoy a sense of schadenfreude as the idealistic (and sometimes self-righteous) McGovern campaign implodes and they can speculate when OWS might suffer a similar fate. It is a story that is sad and funny at the same time and Kristi Witker tells it with great charm.

Just one thing I want to know. Is this the same Kristi Witker who C. David Heymann alleges had an affair with RFK?