Those Other Campaigners, Pat and Eleanor

WHETHER or not American politics makes strange bedfellows, it assuredly is making for active, absent ones in election year 1972. Last spring, George McGovern was flying over the Eastern seaboard in a private airplane, headed for a primary campaign stop, when a companion recognized another craft off the wing. "George," he advised, "get to the window. This may be your only chance to see Eleanor the rest of this campaign."

That was only a slight exaggeration.

Since January, Eleanor McGovern has covered more ground and logged more flying hours than any other presidential candidate's wife in memory. Almost as if a white kid glove had been thrown at her feet, Pat Nixon seems to have risen to Eleanor's challenge. In the 1968 campaign, Pat left her husband's entourage only once--for a quick ribbon-cutting ceremony in Reno. This year, uncharacteristically stepping out from the President's shadow, the First Lady undertook the most extended solo campaign trip of her long career--a 5,500-mile, six-day tour that took her to seven states and exposed her to rough weather and even rougher questioning. Never before in the history of U.S. politics have the wives of two presidential candidates squared off so directly.

Both of the wives bring to their campaigning a remarkably similar poise and professionalism, to say nothing of chic good looks that are the envy of their contemporaries in the crowds that turn out to greet them (Pat is 60, Eleanor 50). They project a warmth that reaches their listeners in a way that their spouses manage only rarely. The rest is a study in contrasting styles. Eleanor, often in pantsuits, looks like the petite, bubbly cheerleader she once was back in high school in Woonsocket, S. Dak. Pat, slim and regally straight-backed, has only once appeared on the hustings in slacks. She seems in photographs to be aloof, brittle, a shade too manicured and coiffed to be quite real or approachable.

In fact, as the voters are constantly rediscovering, both appearances are somewhat deceiving. Pat on the stump is full of banter and mildly flirtatious, brimming with a zest for meeting people. She tackles a crowd of strangers like a bee that has spotted a new clover field. She does not simply shake a hand, she cuddles it in both of hers. She hugs, touches, pats, squeezes. She scoops up small children with easy endearments like "Dolly," or "Sweetheart." She almost never makes formal speeches, nor does she directly praise her husband. "I can't boast for my family," she explains.

Pat's long suit is small talk, the simple, spontaneous gesture. On a visit to the Oklahoma State Fair, she took cotton candy, stroked a prize Hereford on the head and rode the merry-go-round, saying, "This is part of the American spirit--you don't need much to be happy." Is she happy? someone dared ask the First Lady. "Yes, I am. I've got the greatest guy in the world." Presented with a sunbonnet, she put it on and kept it on all the way back to Washington, ex plaining whimsically: "I think this is the real me. I could really be a pioneer." In a sense she is, and while sophisticates may dismiss such doings as cornpone, the crowds love it.

Eleanor McGovern works a different vein. Tiny though she is, her handclasp is as firm as a bricklayer's. There is no coyness at all in the level gaze of her round, china-blue eyes. She gives speeches everywhere, serious ones that she writes herself; and they are almost always new ones, an incredible practice in the jet-stop era of set speeches.

Though she professes that public speaking makes her nervous, it seldom shows: her remarks are made in neatly polished prose, delivered in a soft, low voice unhurried and convincing in its earnestness. She talks often of George: "A gentle man with a spine of steel.

He is a man who would bring out the best in us," a man who would create an America united so that "each man can say, 'He has been fair, he has been my friend; I gave my best to the country, I received the best from it.' "

Like a heat-seeking missile, Eleanor is drawn to burning issues. This past summer, she spotted a young man carrying a large anti-McGovern poster in a San Antonio crowd.

It depicted her husband mouthing the words: "Isolation Now. Isolation Tomorrow. Isolation Forever." Darting through the throng, Eleanor drew herself up in front of the youth and asked him where he had got the poster. "I made it myself," he announced proudly, having no idea who she was. "Well, it's inaccurate," snapped Eleanor. "He only wants to cut defense waste." Pulling a scrap of paper from her shoulder bag, she asked for the boy's name and address and promised to send him some explanatory literature about McGovern's stance on the issues. "By the way," she added almost as an afterthought, "I'm Mrs. George McGovern."

She is ready to talk on any subject, without whispering in an aide's ear or thumbing through her notes. She has, some McGovern staffers ruefully admit, perhaps a better grasp of her husband's positions than his own official running mate Sargent Shriver; but then, she has been at it longer than Sarge.

She is also remarkably game in her choice of campaign stops. In Bayonne, N.J., she picked the Maidenform bra factory, because it happened to be manned, or rather womanned, by a pro-McGovern union. Finally, she was introduced to Miss Maidenform herself, an ample 36-C, who was wearing a pair of McGovern-Shriver buttons where they would get the most exposure. Eleanor, hardly five feet tall, managed to stare up at the girl's eyes rather than the Maidenform-McGovern propaganda before her. Said she: "This has been a very uplifting experience."

Eleanor's special blend of hard-nosed politicking and motherly instincts can produce startling changes in mood and tone. In New Haven, she was haranguing a luncheon gathering on the implications of the Watergate bugging and burglary. "If we as a nation accept bugging a private office," she said, "we are conditioning ourselves to accept the same kind of intrusion on the precious right of privacy. Next it could be a law office, a business office or a home..." At that moment, she happened to look down at the dishes in front of her and exclaimed, "Oh my goodness, your ice cream is melting!"

While Eleanor was playing the themes, Pat was off playing the heartstrings in her self-appointed role as Dignified First Lady, above and removed from politics. Flying in a presidential 707 with nine White House staffers, six Secret Service men, one hairdresser (on loan from Elizabeth Arden) and 30 reporters and cameramen, Pat always came on to carefully chosen audiences. Her advance army did its best to hide dissenters, discourage rude questions and avoid unpleasant encounters. The atmosphere for most of the trip was summed up by Ed Reimers, M.C. for an American Cancer Society dinner in Los Angeles. Speaking to the press, Reimers cautioned, "I have been asked to announce that the only question we will entertain is: 'Can we take another picture, please?' "

In Chicago, however, the traveling press, incensed that their questions had been limited to receiving-line niceties, managed to put to Pat the toughest questions she had ever fielded as First Lady. "When you and your husband discuss the election and the campaign, does the Watergate situation concern him?" one reporter asked. Clearly upset, Pat responded tensely, "We don't discuss it, because all I know is what I read in the papers. That's the only knowledge I have, so there's no reason to discuss it. I think it has been blown completely out of proportion."

The reporters pressed in closer. Did it bother Mrs. Nixon that Martha Mitchell had said she was manhandled by a security agent now with the committee to re-elect her husband? "I don't know anything about what happened in her [Mrs. Mitchell's] room," she replied. Finally, someone asked what Pat thought of her daughter Julie's comment that she would willingly die for the South Vietnamese government. Again, Pat said she was not familiar with Julie's comment but that, yes, "I would be willing to die" to save the freedom of 17 million South Vietnamese.

Whatever trouble she has with issues, Pat is proving that she can cope with any physical hardship. As she says of herself, "I do or die. I never cancel out." Certainly she has had plenty of excuses. In Yellowstone National Park she sat through a seemingly interminable speech by Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton, her hands gloveless and numb as sleet pelted the frozen, huddled crowd. In Billings, Mont., a 40-m.p.h. wind ripped down the WELCOME PAT banner at the airport, left the assembled Crow Indians shivering in their buckskins, and carried away Pat's words in spite of the microphone in front of her. She finished her speech anyway, as the band struck up the tune whose lyrics begin, "When you walk through a storm/ Keep your head up high..."

There was no rain or wind in Riverside, Calif., but it might have been better had there been. Pat had to stand beneath the sun in 102DEG F. heat to dedicate a new wing of a senior citizens' community center in honor of her late mother-in-law, Mrs. Hannah Milhous Nixon.

Stoicism has always been part of Pat Nixon's stock in trade, and the inclement weather simply played directly to her strength. Time and again, spectators came away wondering at her true grit. Commented one journalist after her Yellowstone performance: "If every park ranger doesn't snowshoe to the polls to vote for Richard Nixon in November, they've got no sense of gratitude."

The aplomb and success of Pat and Eleanor on the hustings is hardly unexpected. For Pat, this is the ninth campaign and 26th year of politics, including those years when Nixon was politicking out of his law office instead of a public office. She has had eight years as second lady and four as First Lady in which to burnish her image to a high gloss. For Eleanor, this is the seventh campaign and 16th year in the field. For whatever advantage Pat has in experience, Eleanor can claim compensating interest. Of the two, Eleanor was far more exposed to politics in her youth. Otherwise, their backgrounds contain notable parallels.

Pat Ryan was born in 1912 in the small town of Ely, Nev. to an Irish copper miner and his German wife. Before she was two, her father moved the family to Artesia, Calif., where he bought a ten-acre truck farm. Pat's mother died when she was 13, leaving her to do all the housework and some of the fieldwork. Eleanor Stegeberg was born in 1921 on a South Dakota farm at the outset of the great farm depression. Her mother died when she and her twin sister Ila were eleven. There was never much money but there was always plenty of talk. "I grew up thinking that the only way one spent a Sunday afternoon was discussing politics," recalls Eleanor. Her father, a local politician who went on to become the Democratic county chairman, never missed an F.D.R. fireside chat. By the time she was 13, Eleanor could milk a cow as expertly as her father could. Soon she could milk an argument almost as well. The twins joined the high school debating team, and that is how Eleanor met George McGovern.

George was the star debater from Mitchell, S. Dak., some 30 miles away. As Eleanor puts it, "George and I met on the opposite sides of a question, 'Resolved: That Britain and the United States Should Form a Permanent Alliance.' " No one remembers who argued which side, but everyone remembers who won: Eleanor and Ila. It was the beginning of a long, old-fashioned romance.

Eleanor and Ila were local beauties.

George was already a handsome and promising catch. In his sophomore year at Dakota Wesleyan, the college he attended along with the twins, he was dubbed "glamour boy" by the yearbook editors. George and Eleanor nursed their courtship along over sodas at the Tiger's Lair in the basement of the main hall. George remembers that things really got serious when both he and Eleanor tied for top grades on TIME'S annual current-events quiz. "The professor gave us the test," recalls McGovern. "We both got a 98 out of a possible score of 100. It kind of impressed me. I made a mental note to get to know her better."

They have been talking and debating ever since. Their neighbor and close friend in Washington, Mrs. Gilbert Hahn, concurs. "I love to hear them discuss issues: the interchange is that of two equals. And it goes on all the time, even when they are relaxing around the pool." Eleanor began well to the political left of George, whose family and earliest affiliations were Republican. She was the one who grew up a Democrat ("I tease him about that"), but it is now Eleanor who pulls slightly to the right. George is in favor of total amnesty for draft dodgers; Eleanor favors a two-year period of volunteer service. A few years ago, Eleanor also argued that George was too harsh on American policy in Viet Nam and not harsh enough on North Viet Nam.

It is Eleanor's insatiable curiosity and interest in domestic and international affairs that have invited inevitable if premature comparisons with Eleanor Roosevelt. At a recent fund-raising party in Westchester County, N.Y., the cocktail napkins were imprinted "The New Eleanor." Here and there the campaign trail has been punctuated with signs saying LETS PUT ANOTHER ELEANOR IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

Helpful. Such comparisons make Eleanor McGovern very uncomfortable, as well they might. The White House remains a long reach away, and the achievements of Eleanor Roosevelt farther still. The truth is that Eleanor is a harddriving, idealistic woman trying to get her man elected, and trying to run a household at the same time. On the first score, she has achieved considerable success in the past. Back in 1962, three weeks before Election Day, George McGovern was hospitalized with hepatitis. It fell to Eleanor to carry on his Senate campaign. She did, and he won by a margin of 597 votes. This spring, Eleanor was equally valuable during the primaries. "I don't think we could have won Rhode Island without her," says McGovern Adviser Gordon Weil. "The Senator didn't even go into the state. She was enormously helpful in California, and in New Hampshire she was so effective that the Portsmouth paper editorialized that if she was what candidates' wives were like, just send us the wives and leave the candidates at home."

The difficulty has been that neither George nor Eleanor has been home much of the time during campaigns. When the children were younger and more of them were at home, she says, "I always felt I was at the wrong place, whether I was at home or with George." The McGovern family (see box) has managed to muddle through so far. Of the campaigning, Eleanor says, "It's been difficult, especially for Mary." Before Mary's 17th birthday in July, her mother remarked, "It's funny. I've had four 16-year-olds before her, but I am not prepared to cope with a 1972 16-year-old. There is a generation gap in my own children."

To keep herself going, Eleanor McGovern relies on an odd assortment of props and rituals, as well as sleeping twelve or 14 hours straight after one of her four-day jaunts. She nibbles on wheat-germ and sesame-seed snacks throughout the day and exercises for half-an-hour every night. Because, in her husband's words, "she has some retention problem," Eleanor has tried vitamins to help her memory. "It hasn't worked," she admits. Instead, she relies on spiral notebooks that she carries about in her huge canvas carryall. Throughout the day, she pulls out one of them to jot down ideas, quotes, statistics, names and reminders. "I'm on my third now," she says, displaying a bulging specimen.

False eyelashes, plus the frosting she has done on her hair three times a year, are Eleanor's major concessions to age and vanity. Like Pat, she seems to have turned back the clock--enough, at any rate, to make her identical twin mildly envious and set idle Washington tongues wagging. From time to time, it is suggested that both Eleanor and Pat have had their faces lifted. It would be extraordinarily out of keeping for either woman, but if true, as one wit put it, the results are "a hell of an advertisement for face-lifting."

With the schedule Eleanor has been holding to during the past year, there has been little time to daydream about life in the White House. Still, she has managed to give it a thought or two. Noting that there is no office for the President's wife, other than a sitting room, Eleanor says cheerfully, "We'll have to fix that." Her role would be that of a "children's advocate," she explains. "It would be a very broad program, including nutrition, emotional and physical health, help in providing stimulating care at home and in day centers. I bore everybody to death talking about it." One thing is certain: if Eleanor reaches the White House, she will be active.

It is quite possible that should the Nixons be returned to office, Pat will prove a more active First Lady the second time round. For one thing, both Julie and Tricia are now married and living outside the White House, leaving her more time for her job. For another, she seems to have become more outgoing. Because of her flawless performances during the trips to Russia and China, and her recent successes on the campaign trail, there is even talk about a "new" Pat, just as there has been periodic talk of a restyled Richard. She deals with the question of a new self directly: "I hope I've matured some. Everyone should as one reaches a great age. I'm still enthusiastic; I'm the way I've always been. I hope I'm not like 14 or something, with no brains."

Curlers. The reality is largely that the "old" Pat has simply grown less selfconscious. Says Mrs. Jack Drown, one of her few close friends from a vast universe of acquaintances: "The confidence that radiates from Pat now is normal for any person who has been in a job for a while. It's like the third baby compared with the first." In Russia, Pat displayed what was for her an almost Eloise streak. Wanting to witness the signing of the SALT agreement, yet not formally invited to take part in the ceremony, she hid from the press while watching from behind a massive column. In China, she even managed to trick a newsman into eating the same fiery delicacy that she dispatched with a flick of her chopsticks and a bat of her eyelashes. She left the man gasping for water.

Certainly the wife of Nixon's vice-presidential years has been left far behind. That was the Pat who attracted such honors as Outstanding Homemaker ('53), Mother of the Year ('55) and Nation's Ideal Housewife ('57) by forever curling her own hair and pressing her husband's suits. The curlers and the traveling iron have now been packed away, as have many of the plain Republican cloth coats that Nixon made so much of in his famous 1952 Checkers speech. With the spotlight constantly trained on her, the First Lady has succumbed at last to the world of mink and designer labels.

It is doubtful that she could ever attain the instant star quality and studied grace of Jackie, or the sensitivity and charm of Lady Bird, but Pat has far outdistanced her own exemplar, Mamie Eisenhower, as White House hostess. More people, 124,805, have passed through the White House during her residence than ever before. Pat also has quietly been carrying on Jackie's restoration, redecorating the Blue, Green and Red rooms and acquiring museum-quality paintings and furnishings.

Pat complained once, with perhaps a trace of bitterness, that she has always been too busy working to "just sit back" and think of herself or her "ideas," but she does seem to have her own vision of America. Reports TIME Correspondent Bonnie Angelo: "Her view of life is that of Pollyanna going steady with Horatio Alger. With hard work and the old dependable virtues, there is nowhere you can't go. That's the way it was for her and Dick, and the America she sees agrees with her."

Asked what she found wrong with the country on her cross-country trip, Pat replied, "I didn't see any problems on this trip--I have on others." She seems to feel that what disquiet she once saw has been erased by her husband during his first term. She insists that "you can't find any field where we haven't become better off, and the people know this--they're not dumb."

Eleanor McGovern, for one, believes Pat is not looking in the right places, though she is careful not to criticize her opposition. Pat, says Eleanor, is "doing well campaigning." Eleanor's style is to go out looking for the sore spots, instead of skirting them. As often as not, they are to be found in ghetto child-care centers, rehabilitation centers and senior-citizen complexes. Any out-of-office politician, or his wife, would do the same, but Eleanor draws positive rather than negative conclusions from the experience. "I believe Americans are ready to dig in their heels and make this the country that they want it to be. They are looking for guidance, direction. They ask, 'Why haven't people asked something of us?' All they need is someone to say 'Let's do it.' "

Up or Down. To Eleanor that someone is, of course, her husband. Whether he will ever get the chance to test her theory is still undecided, but if he does, a share of the credit will belong to her. No one realizes that better than George McGovern. By week's end he had interrupted his own schedule for two days to help brief his wife for her weekend television appearance on Meet the Press. It was the first time a candidate's wife had ever appeared on the show in its 25-year history, and thus a tribute of some significance.

Tributes will be small consolation if in the end the two McGoverns' campaign falls short. The seemingly gloomy prospects do not daunt Eleanor. "My husband does not give up easily. And neither do I," she says with a glint in her eyes. Nor is Pat Nixon ebullient over certain success. "Listen," she says, "you can never worry too much about being an overdog. Politics is a funny business: you're up one day, down the next." Up or down, the other campaigners of 1972 have measurably warmed and enhanced the unprepossessing political landscape.

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