The Eagleton Affair

What is most noteworthy about the late Tom Eagleton’s political career, mostly as a Democratic U.S. Senator from Missouri, is not that he received shock therapy for depression in the 1960s, the news of which forced him to resign as George McGovern’s running mate.

The real Eagleton legacy is that he had to resort to blatantly dishonest and deceitful tactics to win re-election to the Senate in 1980 for what turned out to be his final term before political retirement, and that he screwed his niece and nephew out of their rightful share of their father’s (Eagleton’s brother’s) estate.

* 1980 was year was when Ronald Reagan’s landslide Presidential victory had coattails so wide that it swung 12 U.S. Senate seats from D to R, and 30 House seats that way. In Missouri, Eagleton, the incumbent, faced a very strong Republican challenge from then-St. Louis County Executive Gene McNary. Remember, this was 1980, when St. Louis County was prosperous and Republican.

As it turned out, Eagleton won narrowly, but he had to trick certain white voters in the St. Louis area in order to pull it off. Four days before the election, his campaign sent out a mass mailing to largely white zip codes in St. Louis City and County, touting the supposed fact that Eagleton was against school busing for racial integration, and the literature even used the anti-busing logo of the anti-busing activist forces in St. Louis. (That wasn’t the only time pro-busing forces stole the anti-busing logo to trick anti-busing whites).

The trick worked, and that was the last time Tom Eagleton made any hints about being opposed to busing and deseg.

* Not long after Eagleton resigned from the McGovern ticket in 1972, he was appointed as the trustee of his brother’s estate, which involved a manufacturing firm in St. Louis that the brother started.  The terms of the estate were that the brother’s two children, Eagleton’s niece and nephew, were to get the lion’s share.  Eagleton himself drug his feet and failed to carry out his duties as guardian of the estate, and the niece and nephew threatened to tell the media about Eagleton’s  homosexual proclivities (he liked those Key West, Florida vacations) if he didn’t give them their rightful shares.  Eagleton used his sway over the U.S. Attorney’s Office in St. Louis to get them to charge the niece and nephew with blackmail, and they were convicted and sent to Federal prison.  Meanwhile, Eagleton kept most if not all of his brother’s estate.