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vii On an unusually cool mid-August day in 1994, a groundbreaking 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 extraordinarily 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 cases—and tried them extraordinarily well—in 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.”1 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 be Preface Preface viii a 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.2 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...

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