I Blame You, George McGovern

George McGovern, the former senator and presidential candidate, died in October. Since McGovern was an outsized presence in my family narrative, I expected, even wanted, to feel solemn and hagiographic when I saw the news.  Instead, I found myself unexpectedly full of snark and bitterness. OK, I do blame him for the food pyramid, and the bullshit dogma of low-fat under which we all have suffered for thirty years. Even if the direct result was the current public health crisis of obesity, he did not act alone and he certainly meant well. But it turns out that I blame him for much more than that. 

What bothers me about McGovern, I realize, is that I hold him directly responsible for the moment when my father gave up.

My father ran McGovern's campaign in Kentucky during the Democratic primary. He went to Miami for the Democratic National Convention and rushed into the surf, delirious with happiness, after the famous 3am speech. It's a story I have heard many times, but as hard as I try I can never summon the image. I get the surf, faded and green like a 70's Polaroid. I even get my father, with his wavy red hair, wearing some kind of raffia-colored, big-lapeled suit. I just can't put him in the water. Because my father delirious with happiness does not exist in any memory I can access.

Because it all happened when I was a very small child, I learned about my father's aborted political career in bits and pieces. There was a china planter of alphabet blocks on my bathroom windowsill and once I asked my mother where it came from. Oh, Ron Mazzoli sent that when you were born, my mom said, naming a Kentucky Congressman. For awhile I thought that Congressmen sent plants to every newborn in their district.

Once in high school a female politician came to speak at my school and when I mentioned it to my mother the anger coming off of her was palpable. I asked her why she didn't like the woman. I don't think she was very nice to your father, she said. She stabbed him in the back. She did not elaborate. My father denied it all and changed the subject.

A year or two later I was looking through family photographs when I found a yellowed Courier-Journal in the red-topped Rodes department store box. My father's picture was on the front page. I read the accompanying article, which shed some light on things. It contained the memorable quote "I'm a straight," in which my father tried to convince the suspicious voters of Kentucky that you didn't have to smoke pot and live in a camper van to vote for McGovern. The 60's slang sounded weird to my ear, and obviously it didn't work. After the convention, my father was dumped by the campaign in favor of some other operative with closer ties to Senator Wendell Ford. Then came the election and McGovern's landslide defeat. After that, whatever career my father had contemplated in politics was over.

Whether anyone in my family admits it or not, we all believe that it is possible to fly too close to the sun. This was my father's Icarus moment. What he imagined his future would be, I don't know. Was he going to run for Congress? Was he going to run the state Democratic party machine?

So I was just a kid and an innocent bystander, but here's what I took from events: prior to November of 1972 there was hope. By 1973 it was just about carrying the yoke. Maybe it didn't feel that way to my father, but if not, how did this belief I have coalesce? He was thirty-six years old in November of 1972. Did it have to turn out this way? I've spent a lot of time thinking about how people respond to setbacks, which seems more important in terms of predicting success than anything else. I tell myself that he didn't have to give up, that it was a choice he made. It was easy to tell myself that, before Balthazar died.

*

When I was twenty-one and home from college for Christmas, my mother and I had a conversation that was ostensibly about my brother. We were in the kitchen, in the upholstered teal armchairs where our many lengthy discussions inevitably took place.

"I worry about Scott," my mother said. "He seems depressed. Have you talked to him?"

"He hates school," I said. My brother was a sophomore at the kind of private school where the guidance counselor meets with all of the new ninth graders at the beginning of the year and helps them formulate a plan for making friends. Presumably without this plan they'd be eating lunch in a bathroom stall for the next four years.

"It's a cold, cold place," my mother said. "Didn't you think so?"

I thought back to my admired European history teacher, and how he had refused to speak to me after a senior prom drinking episode. The following year I'd written him a letter, which he never answered.

"It is cold," I agreed. "I guess by the time I got there"—I had transferred there as a junior—" I just wanted to take what I needed from it and move on."

"Somehow I never worried about you," my mother mused.

I'd always known this to be true, but she'd never admitted it before. "Why not?" I said.

"I don't know," she said. "I guess I always thought you were so strong. You would find a way.  Remember when you were eight and you had that terrible fever? I wanted to keep you home from the swim meet…"

"It was the Junior Olympics," I corrected her, the rush of adrenaline of that long-ago day flooding me, despite the fact that it had been thirteen years and that Junior Olympics tag was just a name they gave to a third-rate meet to impress gullible kids like me.

"I'll never forget you marching out of the house and down the driveway in your warmup suit. You were going to walk all the way to Jeffersonville. With Scott…" she let her thoughts drift for a minute. "He might just let things happen to him."

She had recently read an article about a group of high school students who had been caught in a snowstorm on a mountain. The students who had gone for help survived. Those who stayed behind to make a snow cave had not. Strange now to think that many years later I would make my home in Portland, Oregon, where the students were from, and hike Mt. Hood, the mountain on which they died.

"I always imagined that if you were in that situation, you'd be one of the ones going for help," my mother said. "One of the strong ones."

This is the line on me, and always has been. Whatever it is, I can take it. Physically, emotionally. It was a belief that served other people's interests. You don't have to feel bad about not taking care of someone if they don't need you.

I have a lot invested in believing that I am tough and resilient, too, but I no longer think it's true. What I fear is that Balthazar's death is my McGovern in '72. Maybe I'm finished. From here on in is it going to be just put your nose to the grindstone and eke out an existence for the good of the family? Go through the motions and hope my kid doesn't notice? Because he will. I don't think he has a writer's temperament: he's not watching me and making notes. Mostly, he's on the playground selling his Bok Choy Boy figurines at inflated prices. But he's got his eye on me just the same, and it would be unfair to him to give up now.