Former Sen. Thomas Eagleton dies at 77

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Thomas F. Eagleton, whose star-crossed nomination in 1972 as George McGovern’s vice presidential candidate sealed his place in American political history, died Sunday of heart and respiratory ailments. He was 77.

The St. Louis Democrat recovered from that debacle - he left the ticket after news surfaced that he had undergone psychiatric treatment and had been hospitalized for depression - to serve Missouri for 14 more years in the U.S. Senate, becoming the grand old man of Missouri Democratic politics.

In retirement, he was a sage counsel for office seekers and a political handicapper for journalists. As evidence that he never lost his passion for the tumult of the political arena, he asked in lieu of flowers at his memorial that contributions go to the Catholic Charities of St. Louis or the Democratic National Committee.

He was a close adviser to Claire McCaskill, who won a U.S. Senate seat last fall. Though he strongly opposed her decision to challenge the then Missouri governor, Bob Holden, in the Democratic primary in 2004 - she won the primary, but lost the election - he helped persuade her to run for the Senate last year.

“Today, Missouri has a hole in its heart,” McCaskill said Sunday.

Friends noted his distress at how his health prevented him from accompanying McCaskill to her swearing-in ceremony.

In one of his last public appearances, Eagleton joined an array of Missouri Democrats on stage at an outdoor rally in November on the final weekend of the campaign, headlined by Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Eagleton, who had been ailing in recent years, didn’t speak, but his presence drew boisterous and sustained applause.

His death comes just weeks after the passing of Harriett Woods, who also was a Democratic lieutenant governor.

In a public career of four decades, Eagleton enjoyed a productive, and at times illustrious, tenure in the Senate. Yet he will be forever remembered as the ill-fated choice for McGovern’s ticket.

For a two-week period in July 1972, Eagleton was on the front pages every day and on the network news every night. He was the main character in a tortuous political drama involving his medical history.

The story of his quick descent from rising political star to national embarrassment in just a fortnight could have flown from a playwright’s pen.

Yet Eagleton, the “boy wonder” of Missouri politics in the 1950s, never lost support at home. His national political ambitions permanently snuffed, Eagleton then settled into his job in the Senate. He steadily gained influence as he rose in seniority in the Democratic-controlled Congress.

He was a principal sponsor of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, fought for children with disabilities, and co-wrote the Pell Grant law that aided countless college students.

In 1973, he successfully offered an amendment to a defense appropriations bill to cut off funding for the bombing of Cambodia. He later called this key step to ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War the proudest moment of his career.

He was never one of the great orators, but when he spoke, his voice gravelly from years of chain smoking, he could be passionate, his face rapidly reddening at whatever was his outrage of the moment. He also could be wry, and his loud laughter would rock the chamber. The target of his humor often was himself.

Once, standing in a driving rainstorm, he teased the gathered that the only library groundbreaking speech he knew “takes 40 minutes.”

In a 1970 New Yorker profile, Kansas Citian Calvin Trillin wrote: “In small Missouri towns, Eagleton has the advantage of a friendliness and informality that make it seem natural for people who have just met him to call him by his first name, even if he is a senator. He also has to his advantage a nonsenatorial way of not taking himself completely seriously.”

He was always just “Tom.”

In his third and final election to the Senate in 1980, he survived a muscular GOP campaign that overthrew nine senators, including Birch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho, and McGovern.

The Republican tide, Eagleton said, “got up to my chin.”

Eagleton made a surprisingly comfortable adjustment to being in the minority. The change seemed to energize him.

“You have the luxury of free commentary,” he said. “You don’t have to be a rationalizer, an explainer or an excuser.”

Eagleton suffered a mild heart attack in 1985.

After he announced his retirement in 1986, his Republican colleague, Jack Danforth, offered this tribute on the Senate floor: “What has set Tom Eagleton apart from the rest of us is not his intellect and his energy, impressive as they are. It is his moral passion, his capacity for outrage, his insistence that justice be done, that wrongs be made right.”

He was 57 when he left to teach, write commentary (much of which appeared in The Kansas City Star) and practice law. “I wanted to make this metamorphosis while I was still suitable to be recycled,” he joked.

Turning serious, Eagleton said: “There is no sadness in leaving public life while you still have something worthwhile to do and the time and motivation to do it. There is profound sadness in staying in public life beyond human endurance and beyond the drumbeat of the times.”

Thomas Francis Eagleton was born in St. Louis on Sept. 4, 1929. He seemed to be bred for politics. His father, Mark Eagleton, had been a prominent St. Louis attorney who once ran unsuccessfully for mayor and then served on the school board and board of police commissioners.

His own ambitions thwarted, he turned to his son.

Young Tom Eagleton’s political schooling commenced at the age of 10 when he accompanied his father, a Republican delegate, to the 1940 GOP convention in Philadelphia. While his father backed Wendell Willkie, young Tom supported Thomas Dewey, saying: “He had better buttons.”

The training ranged from dinner table conversation, where politics was the topic of choice in the household, to after-school activities, when his father had him tutored in public speaking and world affairs.

“I became fascinated,” Eagleton once recalled. “The way other kids wanted to be farmers or firemen or cowboys, I wanted to be a politician.”

At Amherst College in Massachusetts, he said he was the Jim Farley of his class, a reference to the legendary Boston political leader. At Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude, he used to read five newspapers a day. He also studied at Oxford and served in the Navy.

After graduation, he returned to St. Louis to become assistant general counsel to Anheuser-Busch Inc. and to practice law with his father. Then in 1956, he began his political ascent.

At 27, Eagleton became the youngest person ever elected St. Louis circuit attorney. He looked so young, he even stumped the panel on the popular television show “What’s My Line?” A second milestone came four years later when, at 31, he became the state’s youngest attorney general.

At 35, he became the state’s youngest lieutenant governor. Then in 1968 he decided to challenge Sen. Edward V. Long, a Democrat saddled with misconduct allegations. Eagleton won a three-way primary against Long and former ambassador True Davis.

(Davis came back to haunt him during his brief vice presidential candidacy as the source of unfounded allegations about Eagleton’s driving record published by columnist Jack Anderson.)

On his way to defeating Rep. Thomas B. Curtis in the 1968 Senate race, Eagleton polished his liberal credentials to a high gloss. He opposed the bombing in North Vietnam and called for a cease-fire. He also called for defense cuts and more aid to cities, and he attacked Curtis for opposing both Medicare and the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

When he was sworn in, it seemed his certificate of appointment was missing. Finding it a few minutes later, Eagleton joked in his trademark style: “Whew, that was close. I’ve been out of office for 34 minutes and it’s the first time I’ve been off the public payroll in 12 years and I can’t quite afford it.”

He became a vocal member of the Senate’s anti-war bloc, in which McGovern was prominent. The two men did not know each other well. “The longest conversation I had with him was one hour in the Senate steam bath in early 1969,” Eagleton said after being tapped three years later.

Eagleton wasn’t McGovern’s first choice - nor his second, his third or even his fourth. He was seventh. But as Sens. Edward Kennedy and Abraham Ribicoff and Florida Gov. Reubin Askew, among others, all turned him down - McGovern turned to the Missouri first-termer.

“George, I’m flabbergasted,” Eagleton said when McGovern called his suite at the Doral Hotel in Miami Beach during the 1972 convention. It was July 13.

“No, this is on the square,” he recalled McGovern saying.

“George, before you change your mind,” Eagleton told him, “I hasten to say yes.”

Eagleton had all the right qualifications as defined by the political landscape at the time. He was young - 42 - handsome, ambitious and Catholic. He had an attractive family. He opposed the war in Vietnam, was progressive on race and had ties to labor.

Though a liberal, he was from a key border state that was moderately conservative. And coming from Amherst and Harvard meant fine Eastern establishment credentials.

It was a golden opportunity. Even if the ticket lost, Eagleton was assured of gaining national stature. His political star was in ascension. It appeared to be yet another move of perfect timing and opportunity.

It was not.

It came out that Eagleton had undergone psychiatric treatment, including electroshock therapy, and had been hospitalized three times for depression. The smart political calculus of his career was scrambled.

Eagleton hadn’t told McGovern or the aides who vetted his past about his medical history. And signals that things in his background could pose political problems either never made it up the campaign chain or weren’t taken seriously.

As the story grew and began to dominate the campaign coverage, McGovern initially said he planned to weather the disclosures. On July 26, he declared that he was behind Eagleton “1,000 percent” and had no intention of dropping him from the ticket. The next day, Eagleton said he had no plans to quit the race.

But McGovern’s support soon dropped to near zero. On July 31, both men jointly announced that Eagleton was off the ticket.

McGovern chose R. Sargent Shriver as a replacement. But President Richard Nixon, even with the Watergate scandal smoldering offstage, routed the Democrats.

McGovern, with the advantage of a quarter century of hindsight, told a mental illness forum in 1997 that he regretted dropping Eagleton. Given the chance to do it all over again, he said, “I probably would have gone the other way.”

Missourians never had regrets. Former Kansas City mayor Richard L. Berkley recalled Eagleton getting a rousing show of support from the crowd at a Chiefs game that fall of `72. When Eagleton ran for re-election two years later, his courage and candor were rewarded with a quarter-million-vote victory margin.

When Eagleton left the Senate in 1986, he lectured at Washington, Webster and St. Louis universities and Rockhurst College, now Rockhurst University, in Kansas City.

He led a fundraising effort for the Truman Library, served on President Bill Clinton’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, helped get the Rams football team moved to St. Louis, and was active in last year’s campaign to protect stem-cell research in the state.

He joined the law firm of Thompson & Mitchell (now Thompson Coburn) and would see the new federal courthouse in St. Louis named after him.

He collected Expressionist and contemporary German art and wrote two books, one on presidential war powers and one on government and business. He also helped update a textbook on the Constitution.

He was working on his memoir before his death at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond Heights, Mo., near St. Louis.

He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Barbara; two children, Terence and Christy; three grandchildren; and his younger brother, Kevin Eagleton.

Eagleton asked that his body be donated to the Washington University School of Medicine for research. Plans for a memorial are pending.

Eagleton wrote his own epitaph nearly 40 years ago. In a prescient letter to his older brother, Mark, just after he was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1968, Tom Eagleton wrote:

“I want to be a great United States senator. I’d like to be re-elected three terms, acquire some seniority and get some good committees and hear James Reston and David Brinkley say someday, `He’s a pretty good senator. He works at it.’”