I know this is long enough that I should jump it, but I can't bring myself to do it.
Fly Like an Eagleton
Remembering the man whose vice presidential aspirations were dashed by shock treatments.
by Liz Spikol
It’s been a week of learning.
This week I learned that if you make sugar-free, fat-free chocolate pudding, you’ll feel so elated by the lack of calories you’ll fall asleep with your face in the pudding bowl.
(Yes, I have a designated pudding bowl.)
I learned my cell phone has been snapping photographs while it’s in my purse, thus producing a memory-taxing backlog of lint pictures.
And I also learned—and this was the most sobering realization of all—I will never be president. Or—even sadder—vice president.
This isn’t because I hate wearing pants and thus can’t look like Hillary; nor is it because I was born in Jakarta, or am not yet 25 years old. I have the right stuff, except maybe the Jewish thing, but that can be negotiated. It’s not like I keep the Sabbath, and I haven’t worn a yarmulke in years.
No, the reason I can’t hold presidential or vice presidential office is that I’ve had shock treatments. And shock treatments, as American history has shown, are a deal-breaker.
Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton died last week at 77. He spent many colorful, sometimes controversial years in the U.S. Senate, making friends across the aisle and bringing humor and brisk intellect to 18 years of public service. He retired from the Senate in 1987, but never stopped having an opinion, as his 50 columns in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch can attest.
A tenacious pacifist, the senator was perhaps best known as the chief author of the federal War Powers Act, a piece of legislation that doesn’t much appeal to our current president—the plenty-mannish, native-born, old-enough, very non-Jewish head of state.
In 1970 Eagleton was a principal sponsor of the Clean Air Act. In 1973 he wrote an amendment to a defense bill that eliminated funding for the bombing of Cambodia. He founded the National Institute for Aging. He wrote a book called War and Presidential Power: A Chronicle of Congressional Surrender, and penned clean-water legislation.
You get the idea.
But Eagleton lost his most public quest. In 1972 he was George McGovern’s running mate on the Democratic ticket, but journalists got a tip that Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression three times—and had electroshock therapy twice.
McGovern wasn’t willing to have his campaign’s so-called dirty laundry aired without taking action first. So they preempted the news reports with a press conference at which Eagleton sheepishly admitted that, yes, years before—in the ’60s—he’d been … in the bin. And zapped.
Less than a month later he was forced to step down as McGovern’s running mate—a decent, bright man who left a campaign because people believed there was something shameful about hiding his illness, and indeed about having it in the first place.
It would be nice to think times have changed, that journalists in 2007 wouldn’t win a frickin’ Pulitzer (as they did in 1973) for revealing a politician had been treated for depression. After all, everyone’s depressed these days: Britney Spears, Zach Braff, Mandy Moore—all the great statesmen.
But electroshock treatments are another matter. They convey a sticky, almost contagious desperation—and a degree of illness we’re not comfortable with.
As Clark Hoyt, the Knight Ridder bureau chief who won that Pulitzer, recently wrote in the Houston Chronicle: “I believe Eagleton’s mental health history was relevant to his fitness for the office he was seeking, a heartbeat away from control of the nation’s military and nuclear arsenal, perhaps in a moment of international crisis.”
Dick Cheney may have accidentally shot someone in the face, but he’s never been depressed, by golly. Thank God.
I can’t believe Hoyt actually had the balls to memorialize the very man he brought down. In his self-justifying piece, Hoyt suggested that though Eagleton was a good man, he made a fatal error: He tried to hide his mental illness.
I think Eagleton’s mistake was admitting it.
Pre-deinstitutionalization, post-deinstitutionalization, it’s always the same. Trying to confront stigma only accrues it. When I tell people I’ve had electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), their eyes get a little unfocused and they look around the room. I’ve become part of “them”—no matter how “us” I feel.
At a recent public speaking engagement I spoke of ECT carefully because I knew that after I did so, only a few people would see me as they see themselves: without especial pity, without a significant remove.
But there are always folks at such gigs who come up to me afterward, and say, quietly, “I appreciate your talking about your experience because my brother/son/mother/father/sister-in-law/stepgrandchild/friend-from-the-second-grade/favorite-vice-presidential-candidate also has those problems.” That’s what makes disclosure rewarding.
Tom Eagleton got nothing positive from his disclosure, and I imagine if I were running for office, people would stop telling me how brave I am and start questioning my fitness. What if I had my finger on the button?
Of course if I ran for office in Philadelphia—the city of Mariano atop City Hall, the city of Milton Street, for God’s sake—I’d probably be fine. If someone challenged me, I’d say, “I got your Cianfrani right here,” and make a gesture unbecoming of, say, a vice president.
Just the Facts
>> Other famous people who’ve had electroshock therapy: Dick Cavett, Lou Reed, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath.
>> Most recent English-language book about both electroshock and (less so) politics: Kitty Dukakis’ Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy.
>> Most annoyingly arty any-language movie to feature ECT: Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.
