McGovern offered several other prominent Democrats the position, among them Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, Minnesota senator Walter Mondale, Indiana senator Birch Bayh, Maine senator Edmund Muskie, Boston mayor Kevin White, and Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson. Out of these White was the only who showed interest in the position but Massachusetts delegates cried foul at this, as White had campaigned for Muskie during the primaries. Risking controversy at the DNC McGovern thus had to reject White.

These politicians rejected McGovern’s offer due to Nixon’s popularity making a Democratic victory an uphill battle and due to McGovern being (perhaps unfairly) viewed as the public as too far left for the party. Following McGovern’s win in the Massachusetts primary, an anonymous Democratic senator was quoted by journalist Robert Novak as saying:

“The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot. Once middle America — Catholic middle America, in particular — finds this out, he's dead.”

This quote was sometimes written as “Amnesty, abortion, and acid”, a memorable threesome that stroke fear in the hearts of many Americans in the early 70s.

It was actually Nelson who recommended Eagleton to McGovern with the campaign doing minimum background research on the Missouri senator. Just two weeks after the Democratic Convention, Eagleton confirmed to the press that the rumors that he had suffered depression in the past were true and that he had received electroconvulsive therapies when he was Attorney General of Missouri. Amidst the discussion over the announcement McGovern reassured the public that he was “1000 percent behind Tom Eagleton, and I have no intention of dropping him from the ticket.” In private however McGovern talked to psychiatrists about the issue, some who showed concerned that Eagleton’s health might impair him if he was thrust into the role of president.

Just two days after the 1000% comment, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket and swiftly replaced with "Great Society" darling Sargent Shriver, the architect of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty". A Time magazine poll at the time showed that 77% of respondents said that Eagleton’s health would not affect their vote, regardless McGovern wanted the dialogue to be on his platform, not on the private lives of his associates. Shriver mattered little, it was abandoning Eagleton so shortly after his hyperbolic public support for him that harmed him more, McGovern came across as a man who made choices impulsively, not admit to his blunders, and then go back on his words. It was perhaps this more that McGovern’s own policies that affected his public image and his campaign.

A final tragicomic note arose after Eagleton’s death in 2007. Novak claimed that Eagleton was the anonymous senator who gave us the “amnesty, abortion, and acid” quip, to the knowledge of only the two of them, Eagleton not wanting to make his opinions on the party’s presumptive nominee public. It is then ironic that the two most notable controversies of the McGovern campaign came from the same man without anybody knowing. But to many, it was McGovern’s own flipflopping on the Eagleton issue that harmed him more than the mental health controversy did.