This Day in the History of Crazy: Thomas Eagleton

Thomas Eagleton (September 4, 1929 – March 4, 2007) a United States Senator from Missouri serving from 1968-1987 is perhaps best known for briefly being the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee, sharing the ticket with George McGovern in 1972. Between 1960 and 1966, Eagleton checked himself into the hospital three times for physical and nervous exhaustion, receiving electroconvulsive therapy twice. The hospitalizations, which were not widely publicized, had little effect on his political aspirations. George McGovern had asked several politicians to join him and run on his ticket including Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie and Birch Bayh, all of whom refused. McGovern sought to ask then-ambassador to France and minor celebrity Sargent Shriver to run with him but Shriver was reportedly unreachable by phone on board a flight for Moscow. McGovern next asked Senator Gaylor Nelson who declined but suggested Eagleton. Perhaps frustrated, McGovern asked Eagleton with only minimal background check. Eagleton accepted with alacrity making a decision in the process not to inform McGovern of his history of serious mental health issues including a powerful course of anti-psychotics which allowed him to serve as Senator though they were issued in his wife’s name. The first whiff of Eagleton’s possible instability may have come when he made anonymous mention of McGovern’s fondness of Acid to journalist Robert Novak. It has since been speculated that Novak may have manipulated the overly-suggestible Eagleton. Eventually Eagleton admitted to McGovern some of his history of hospitalizations but admonished McGovern that if he tried to remove him from the ticket he would fight it with everything he had (left). Eventually Eagleton agreed to withdraw but only after McGovern read a statement that Eagleton had prepared which essentially said that Eagleton was not crazy and that it was those who suggested such that were actually crazy. McGovern went on to lose the 1972 presidential election in what was then the second largest landslide in U.S. history.