Jackson was an enormously popular U.S. senator in his homestate, part of a powerful senatorial pair along with Warren G. “Maggie” Magnuson. In 1970, two years before his presidential run, Jackson had been re-elected to the Senate with an extraordinary 82 percent of the vote. Unlike Maggie, Scoop drew bipartisan, crossover support. Just as Washington’s then popular Republican Gov. Dan Evans redefined the liberal wing of the GOP as “Dan Evans Republicans,” Scoop defined the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, “Scoop Jackson Democrats.” Scoop was pro-union, pro-environment, pro-Boeing, pro-Israel, pro-defense, advocate of human rights and a Cold Warrior. He was a hawk on Vietnam.
The field of Democrats other than Jackson included Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president, who lost to Nixon in 1968; Humphrey’s former running mate, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine; antiwar candidates Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy and South Dakota Sen. George McGovern; New York U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to be a major party presidential candidate; George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, who had bolted the Democratic Party in 1968 to run as an independent but was now running again as a Democrat; former New York Mayor John Lindsay, a Republican who bolted his party, and a bevy of others.
As primary and caucus season approached, a February Gallup poll had Muskie leading at 29 percent, followed by Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was not running that year, at 24 percent, and Humphrey at 23 percent. Everyone else was in single digits, with McGovern at 5 percent and Jackson at 3 percent. For Scoop, his run was a longshot. The newspapers called him a dark horse. His path to victory lay in running to the right of everyone, save George Wallace.
Jackson made clear he was no peacenik; he advocated a Constitutional amendment against school busing. He criticized welfare and advocated public works projects instead. Nixon had won a narrow victory in ’68 by peeling off Rust Belt blue collar workers — the so-called “silent majority” — who embraced the flag and didn’t want “surrender” in Vietnam. Scoop also embodied that approach on the hustings. In Ohio, he accused McGovern of “appeasement” in his Vietnam policy.
Critical to Jackson: winning his home state. On March 7, Washington, without a presidential primary, held its party precinct caucus, which would start the process of picking delegates for the Democratic National Convention. Scoop wanted to go to the convention with all the state’s delegates committed to him; supporters of Muskie, McGovern, Chisholm and others begged to differ.
I remember well what happened next. I was 18 years old, a high school senior and was picked by my precinct to be a delegate to my legislative district and then on to the King County convention. I was young and idealistic, and assumed that, because many of my neighbors and fellow delegates supported McGovern, everyone else did. Eighteen-year-olds had just gotten the vote and we surged into youth activism.
Scoop was nothing, if not organized. His political machine and grassroots operations were impressive. Two slates of delegates emerged from those caucuses: the Jackson slate and the anti-Jackson slate. I was a member of the latter. Seattle Times columnist Dick Larsen said the county convention promised a Democratic fight that could be an ideological “bloodletting,” but the anti-Jackson forces were steamrolled on a series of votes that eliminated them from moving on. The Jackson juggernaut took all of the state’s delegates. McGovern, the closest rival, with about 25 percent delegate support, ended up with zero. There was no proportionate representation. It was a successful blitzkrieg by Washington’s favorite son.
But it didn’t last. Jackson underperformed in the primaries. But it wasn’t all his fault. We know now that Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters went out to sabotage the campaigns of moderate rivals. Moles were installed in Muskie’s campaign, and he was falsely accused of having slandered French Canadians. Jackson had to fight false rumors that he had fathered an illegitimate child. His son, Peter Jackson, says the sabotage was more than pranks. He says the tricksters turned out the landing lights at an airport where Scoopon was headed for a campaign stop. That could have caused a crash.
But there was some self-sabotage as well. Peter Jackson says his father was tone-deaf to the anti-war war movement. He’d supported the 18-year-old vote, but couldn’t tap into the youthful energy it unleashed. He took to lecturing the baby boomers. Jackson says of his father “In 1972 Scoop was still in a 1960 presidential mindset, back when he served as JFK’s Democratic National Committee chair and decision-making was insular and boss-centric.”
Between the passion of anti-war people, like me, and such election interference — which, by the way, also included the soon-to-become-famous Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee — McGovern won the nomination with the help of some new not-boss-centric party rules. While delegates backing other candidates generally got behind the winner, Jackson stubbornly did not release his delegates. He came in a distant second, garnering a kind of bitter protest vote for right-leaning Democrats.
After the Democratic National Convention, Jackson could barely bring himself to support McGovern. In October, in a Seattle Times story headlined “Jackson lends chilly support to McGovern,” Scoop predicted, correctly, that the Democratic nominee would carry only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. I attended a fundraiser featuring Ted Kennedy, Scoop and Maggie where Jackson refused to utter McGovern’s name and blandly suggested fellow Democrats support “the Democratic ticket.” As an anti-Nixon voter, I resented Jackson’s unwillingness, once he’d lost his party’s nomination, to not lift a finger to beat Tricky Dick.”