Cleaning and rearranging my desk this week brought me in touch with a memento of a long-ago event that meansĀ much to me to this day.
It is a campaign button, given to me not many years ago by a gentleman — a friend of mine — who had a similar political coming of age at the same time.
It is a McGovern-Shriver presidential campaign button.
I cast my first voteĀ for presidentĀ on Nov. 7, 1972 for Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota and former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver of Maryland. McGovern was the presidential nominee selected at a tumultuous Democratic National political convention in Miami; his running mate, Shriver, wasn’t his first pick, as you’ll recall. The first selection was Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, who then revealed he had gone through treatment for depression; McGovern dumped him because at the time the public didn’t understand fully that Eagleton was cured of whatever ailed him.
But that was a vote of which I remain perhaps most proud of all the votes I’ve ever cast for any candidate running for any office.
I was nearly 23 years of age. The Constitution had been amended the previous year granting 18-year-olds the right to vote. But because the voting was still 21 when I was 18, I couldn’t vote in the 1968 election — even though I had a keen interest in that contest.
My own interest came from uncertainty about the Vietnam War and whether we were engaging in a conflict that was worth fighting. I had just returned home from my own service in the Army and came away from my time in Vietnam asking questions about the wisdom of our continuing along that futile course.
There also was that break-in at the Watergate office complex that would grow into a significant constitutional crisis.
Sen. McGovern was a war hero who rarely mentionedĀ his combat serviceĀ along the campaign trail. Meanwhile, his Republican foes kept denigrating his opposition to the Vietnam War as some sort of chicken-hearted cop-out. This man knew war. He’d fought it from the air as a bomber pilot in Europe during World War II.
McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War didn’t sell in the final analysis. Even though public opinion was deeply split on that war, McGovern would lose the election almost immediately after the polls closed. The TV networks declared President Nixon’s re-election literally within minutes of the polls closing.
It was over. Just like that.
I had taken on a duty for the McGovern campaign in my home state of Oregon. IĀ helped spearhead a voter-registration effort at the community college I was attending. Our task was to register young Democrats to vote that year. We did well on the campus.
As a result — I’d like to think — Multnomah County went for McGovern narrowly over Nixon that year. Mission accomplished in our tiny portion of the world.
I’ve voted in every presidential election since. This was the first — and so far only — election in which I served as a foot soldier in a cause in which I believed. By the time 1976 rolled around, my journalism career had just begun. Therefore, all I could do was vote.
The campaign button reminds me of how idealistic I was in those days. It also reminds me of how much energy I possessed as a young man who saw politics as fun, exciting and quite noble.
Age has rubbed some of that idealism and energy away. But only some of it.