James N. Giglio - Call Me Tom: The Life of Thomas F. Eagleton

On an unusually cool mid-August day in 1994, a ground breaking ceremony took place on South Tenth Street in downtown St. Louis. The honoree was a sixty-five-year-old white-haired longtime native about to have a building named after him. After the ceremonial shoveling, he said in that familiar deep, raspy voice, A poll indicated that a majority of Americans felt that life had not treated them fairly. I'm of the other point of view. Life has been extra ordinarily good to me. Today is, in a demonstrable physical sense, the culmination of my public career. That physical structure became the Thomas F. Eagleton United States Courthouse, completed in 2000, at the time the largest courthouse in the nation, if not the world. His continuing remarks provide a significant clue to an understanding of Tom Eagleton, for they revealed the important influence and unusual relationship he had with his father: I deem today's honor to be a shared event. The name Thomas' is mine, he went on. But the name Eagleton I inherited from my father. He tried casesand tried them extraordinarily wellin the Old Courthouse across the street, and in the Civil Courts Building immediately to our north. Old timers claim they could, on a hot, summer, open-window day, hear some of his closing arguments ricochet down Market Street. That relationship constitutes an important aspect of this book.

The twenty-nine-story Eagleton federal courthouse has become a lasting symbol of one of the most significant Missouri political figures ever, who still holds the record for being the youngest circuit attorney of St. Louis, state attorney general, and state lieutenant governor. In 1968, while still in his thirties, he was elected to the United States Senate, where he remained until retirement in 1987. Never in a lengthy career did he lose an election. His crowning senatorial achievements include his crucial role in the environmental and social legislation of the 1970s, his sponsoring of the War Powers Act of 1973, as well as his amendment that ended U.S. military participation in Southeast Asia that same year. He proved to bea leader who commanded the respect of his peers for his debating skills, tenacity, integrity, independence, and lack of pretense that urged people to call him Tom. Hence, the title of this book. He also served his state well in providing federal funding for an array of projects. Later he became an important figure in St. Louis in higher education, various service activities, and in urban development that encompassed the restoration of a National League football team to the city. There is so much more about Eagleton's career that has escaped coverage.

Yet when people think of Tom Eagleton, they remember only one event that has become a footnote in American history textbooks: he was forced to resign from the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1972 because of shock treatments for depression. The Eagleton affair has become a metaphor that even appeared in Sports Illustrated in 2007 in connection with, of all things, the University of Miami's quest for a football coach. The feature story's opening paragraph referenced the affair in discussing the athletic director's probing questioning of a top coaching candidate so as to avoid the pitfalls of the George McGovern selection process. After Sarah Palin's thinly vetted vice presidential nomination in 2008, Eagleton's name reappeared once again. To some extent the Eagleton affair has stigmatized both McGovern and Eagleton, with the latter coming out of it more as a victim and a hero, particularly in his own state. Yet it lingered with Eagleton as something he regretted and wanted to forget. The real story resides in the way that he put it behind him in remaining a productive public servant for the remainder of his life.

Biography is about more than a subject's career. It encompasses a person's personality, including his idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, and character. It shows how the environment and peers affect that individual and how he affects the people around him. It also reveals the extent to which a person develops over time. Tom Eagleton was such an outspoken, entertaining, and humorous personality, which was so often disclosed in his letters, that I have relied on his own words more than I have done in previous works.

While Eagleton remains the admirable person whom I favored in his senatorial elections, I nevertheless sought to retain my critical judgment as a historian. That is what Tom Eagleton would have expected. Eagleton abhorred autobiographies because they were self-serving, and, most of all, he detested hagiography. Two letters in his voluminous papers touch on this very point. One concerns the subject of heroes: It is a truism, he wrote, that everyone is a sinnerto a greater or lesser degree. I believe that it is terribly misleading to pretend that the Mt. Rushmore four (and others) were pure and perfect. George Washington padded his expense account during the war. Lincoln had to be pushed by time and events

The second letter, written to his son and daughter, focuses primarily on Thomas Jefferson. It responded to a newspaper account of Jefferson and his child by Sally Hemings, his slave. Eagleton began by writing:

As school kids, we were all taught certain patriotic fictions. George Washington never told a liethe cherry tree bit. Thomas Jefferson supposedly had conscience pangs all of his life about slavery. Tru[th] is Jefferson said, All men were created equal, but he believed that a black was worth only 3/5th of a white man. As he got older, he became a George Wallace type and thought that the best way to solve the black-white issue was to send the blacks back to Africa. This does not mean that Washington and Jefferson are unworthy of being our beloved heroes. They are most worthy, but they weren't perfect humans. No one since Christ has been. The Jefferson matter simply reminds us of the continuing fallibility of us all.

As for himself, Eagleton would only insist that he be treated fairly and empathically. That is what this biography seeks to do.

I have leaned heavily on the untapped Eagleton Papers for Eagleton's story. Housed in the Western Historical Manuscript Collection of the University of Missouri, it consists of three components: the processed 674 collection that Eagleton sent shortly after he left the Senate in 1987 and the two unprocessed accessions that followed, 4720 and 5736. Several boxes of 5736 came in 2010. The Eagleton Papers contain not only Eagleton's press releases and other public documents but also personal correspondence to and from Eagleton. Even in his last years, when he relied on handwritten notes or electronic mail, he saved copies of his own submissions. Also an important part of the papers is an extensive newspaper (and magazine) clipping collection that made it less necessary to use newspapers elsewhere. Whenever the need arose I relied on the