July/August 1997
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for
Scrap.
In 1970, recycling was a new and provocative idea, especially for the press. So when Thomas Eagleton, the Democratic senator from Missouri, agreed to speak at one of NARI’s regional meetings in St. Louis that year, I was sent in to publicize his appearance and arrange a press conference at which the senator could be interviewed by the leading reporters of his hometown press.
Eagleton was born in St. Louis and educated at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Harvard Law School before becoming a circuit attorney and later the attorney general of Missouri. A bright and articulate member of the Democratic Party, he served as lieutenant governor of Missouri beginning in 1964. He was 40 when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1968.
In a lifetime of securing speakers for meetings, I can attest that there’s always a degree of nervousness before the speaker appears. Will he or she make it? Has the person been able to catch the plane and will the plane be on time? Did the speaker suddenly suffer a bout of illness? Many an afternoon I have paced the ballroom floor as the clock ticked away the minutes and the audience restlessly grumbled, “So where’s the speaker?”
Not so with Sen. Eagleton. To my great relief, he came early, and I found myself waiting with him for the press to arrive. I had earlier alerted the leading St. Louis newspapers—beginning with the illustrious St. Louis Post-Dispatch—that the senator from Missouri would be the principal speaker.
To my delight, editors from these papers said they would send reporters to interview the senator at our press conference. They wanted to learn about this intriguing concept of recycling. I could visualize the headline—“Senator Addresses Recycling Group”—followed by a complete account of his talk and, hopefully, a photograph as well.
The press conference was scheduled for 1 p.m., and it was slated to be followed at 2 p.m. by the formal meeting, featuring the senator’s speech.
The time was now 12:30 p.m., and Eagleton and I were waiting in an embarrassingly empty room, chitchatting to kill time. True to his excessively polite nature, the senator had not mentioned the fact that so far not one reporter had shown up.
At 12:45, with still no reporters in sight, the situation began to look desperate. Murmuring apologies, I headed for the nearest phone and called the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When I finally reached the city editor, I asked in the calmest voice I could manage, “Where’s your reporter? What’s happened?”
“Haven’t you heard?” the city editor replied.
“Heard what?” I inquired testily.
“President Nixon came to town unexpectedly this morning and called a press conference, right here in St. Louis.”
“What?” I asked incredulously. At that moment, it seemed to me that President Nixon had planned his press conference with the sole intent of jinxing our press conference.
“Yep, that’s it,” the city editor said without a hint of apology in his voice. “We sent two reporters there.”
After hanging up, I stared blankly at the telephone a few seconds. Then I slowly walked back to give the senator the bad news that he had been upstaged by the president.
Eagleton, a veteran politician, was remarkably unperturbed. “Listen,” he said, “that’s the reality of politics. I’m one of many senators, but there’s only one president of the United States.” He put his hand on my shoulder and added, “That’s the breaks.”
Two years later, the senator would indeed make front-page news and have all the top reporters asking him questions. But it would not be the kind of interview you’d want to remember.
In 1972, the Democratic National Convention chose him as a vice presidential running mate to Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota. About two weeks later, after the cheering was over, the newspapers had discovered and were blazing front-page stories that Eagleton had been hospitalized three times between 1960 and 1966 for emotional exhaustion and depression. The tabloids ran lurid headlines in which “psychiatric” became the key word. Pressed to the wall—and at McGovern’s request—Eagleton resigned his candidacy and was replaced by Sargent Shriver.
Today, sadly, Eagleton is remembered in encyclopedias as “the only man ever nominated by a National Convention for vice president who withdrew his nomination.”
But that afternoon in St. Louis in 1970, Sen. Eagleton went on to give a fine talk to a modest-sized audience. Yet it isn’t the talk that I remember, but rather the letter I received a week later in which the senator comforted me for the failed press conference. “You did a good job,” he wrote. “Too bad the president had to interfere.”
There aren’t many public officials I remember as warmly as I do the senator from Missouri. •
In 1970, recycling was a new and provocative idea, especially for the press. So when Thomas Eagleton, the Democratic senator from Missouri, agreed to speak at one of NARI’s regional meetings in St. Louis that year, I was sent in to publicize his appearance and arrange a press conference at which the senator could be interviewed by the leading reporters of his hometown press.