When You Can't Stand Your Candidate

The party has nominated someone who cannot win and should not be president of the United States. We anticipate a landslide defeat, and then a struggle to take the party back from his team and his supporters and win the following presidential election. Meanwhile, we need to figure out how to conduct ourselves.

No, not Donald Trump and the Republican party today. George McGovern and the Democratic party in 1972. I was in those days a law student and active supporter of Henry M. “Scoop" Jackson, whose staff I joined when I got out of school. Jackson, who served in Congress from 1941 until his death in 1983, ran for president twice—in 1972 and 1976—and led the foreign policy hardliners in his party.

Watching conservative Republicans writhe in anguish over Trump, it's worth looking back at what Jackson and the foreign policy hawks who surrounded and supported him—and detested McGovern and McGovernism—did back then.

Jackson's biographer, Robert Kaufman, describes the time well in Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics(2000):

Jackson regarded McGovern's impending triumph [at the Dem­ocratic Convention in Miami Beach, in July 1972] as an unmitigated disaster for the party. .  .  . [H]‌e stoutly resisted the inevitability of the McGovern candidacy by all means at his disposal right up until the Democrats nominated McGovern in July.