Sneak Peek at Uncontemplated

I wrote a book about the year I sipped martinis with McGovern and traded barbs with DeSantis. Here's your sneak peek.

George McGovern was drunk – very drunk – when he decided to run for the 1972 presidential nomination. 

For America, 1968 was a very bad year. Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Robert Kennedy was dead. Subsequent riots divided the nation. For George McGovern, 1968 had personally sucked. His daughter, Terry, had been arrested for pot, which, thanks to the federal reclassifying of cannabis, could come with serious prison time. McGovern’s eighteen-day Presidential bid was too little too late and Nixon finally found himself in the Oval Office.  

George hadn’t really believed he would be the President in 1968 but he felt compelled to run after the shock of Robert Kennedy’s assassination lifted. Kennedy supporters quickly began asking who would carry RFK’s legacy on peace and civil rights forward to election day. The actual conversation started on the slow-moving train carrying the fallen Kennedy. George was devoted to the Kennedy family. It was President Kennedy who created the Food for Peace Program that would become George’s most cherished legacy. And here he was, invited on the precession train as if he were family.  Having that conversation in that place, at that time, was unthinkable to George. And running against Teddy, the last Kennedy brother was a fool’s errand. 

Senator George McGovern and Robert Kennedy, 1968

Bobby was not shy about telling people that he was in the race, in part, because of Vietnam, and had “someone like George” entered first, he wouldn’t have run. Today, sitting in the family car with Bobby’s body onboard, left George with the distinct feeling that had he decided to challenge President Johnson, Robert Kennedy may still be alive. George looked out the train window at the faces of thousands of weeping Americans and realized that three one-inch-long bullets in the hands of an intoxicated man who disagreed with America's support of Israel killed a man who would have made an exceptional president.

“I think it’s up to you,” Kennedy advisor Bill Dougherty whispered to George. 

On July 19th of 1969, just thirteen months after that train ride to Bobby’s graveside, George and Eleanor gathered to celebrate George’s forty-seventh birthday. The event was hosted at the home of Henry and Charlotte Kimmelman. Henry is considered to be the kingpin of U.S. Virgin Island development financing. In attendance were accomplished author Frances “Scottie” Scott Fitzgerald - the only child of F. Scott Fitzgerald - and novelist Gore Vidal who was Jackie Kennedy’s step-brother. It was a fabulous and private way to celebrate one’s birthday.  

Forty years later, during one of our martini Monday dates, George said it was Scottie who first broke the news that would change George’s life forever. 

“George! George, have you heard?”

Scottie detailed what she heard on her car radio. There was a girl and a bridge and a crash. “She’s dead, George.” The last Kennedy brother, the one in mourning who every Democrat was deferring to, was not going to be President of the United States of America. Somewhere on Chappaquiddick Island, Teddy Kennedy had driven off a bridge into icy water and left a woman to die on July 19, 1969. 

“Isn’t it just awful, George?”

“The girl,” he asked, “what’s her name?” 

“Mary Jo Kopechne.” 

Mary Jo… Mary Jo. He knew the name. She had been a devoted campaigner for Robert Kennedy’s presidential run and when he was killed, she joined the last-minute McGovern campaign. Less than a year later, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in Poucha Pond near Martha’s Vineyard when she was just twenty-eight years old.  

In his memoir, George wrote, “that night I sat for hours in the moonlight around the Kimmelmans’ beautiful pool thinking alternately about Ted, about my own future and about the American spaceman - Neil Armstong, Edwin Aldrin and Micheal Collins - who were about to reach the moon.” George continued, “The next morning when I awakened late with the sun streaming in my face, I experienced a vague feeling that I might well be the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972.”

Privately, George told me he was in a sleep-where-you-fall condition. That is to say, early the next morning, George found himself alone by the Kimmelman pool with lounge chair strap marks embedded in his cheek. As he gingerly opened his bloodshot eyes, he realized.

“I’m going to be President of the United States of America.” 

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