George McGovern Dies At 90

[Peter Lemkin]

George McGovern, former US presidential candidate, dies at 90

South Dakota senator suffered one of the most crushing defeats in presidential election history against Richard Nixon in 1972
Associated Press in Sioux Falls
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 21 October 2012 14.02 BST

George McGovern in January 2011. Photograph: Getty Images

George McGovern, who argued fervently against the Vietnam war as a senator and suffered one of the most crushing defeats in presidential election history against Richard Nixon in 1972, has died aged 90.

A family spokesman said McGovern died at 5.15am on Sunday at a hospice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, surrounded by friends and relatives.

"We are blessed to know that our father lived a long, successful and productive life advocating for the hungry, being a progressive voice for millions and fighting for peace," a family statement said. "He continued giving speeches, writing and advising all the way up to and past his 90th birthday, which he celebrated this summer."

A decorated bomber pilot in the second world war, McGovern said he learned to hate war by waging it. In his disastrous race against Nixon, he promised to end the conflict in Vietnam and cut defence spending by billions of dollars. He helped create the Food for Peace programme and spent much of his career believing the United States should be more accommodating to the former Soviet Union.

Never a showman, he made his case with a style as plain as the prairies where he grew up, often sounding more like the Methodist minister he had once studied to be than a longtime US senator and three-time candidate for president.

McGovern never shied from the word "liberal", even as other Democrats blanched at the label and Republicans used it as an insult. "I am a liberal and always have been," McGovern said in 2001. "Just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be."

Americans voting for president in 1972 were aware of the Watergate break-in, but the most damaging details of Nixon's involvement would not emerge until after election day. McGovern tried to make a campaign issue out of the bungled attempt to wiretap the offices of the Democratic national committee, and he called Nixon the most corrupt president in history, but the issue could not eclipse the embarrassing mistakes of his own campaign.

McGovern chose Thomas Eagleton as vice-presidential nominee but 18 days later, after the disclosure that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for depression, decided to drop him from the ticket despite having pledged to back him "1,000%". It was the most memorable and the most damaging line of his campaign, and was said by one political writer to have been "possibly the most single damaging faux pas ever made by a presidential candidate".

McGovern and Thomas Eagleton in 1972. Photograph: AP

He went on to carry only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning 38% of the popular vote. "Tom and I ran into a little snag back in 1972 that in the light of my much advanced wisdom today, I think was vastly exaggerated," McGovern said at an event with Eagleton in 2005. Noting that Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, would both ultimately resign, he joked: "If we had run in '74 instead of '72, it would have been a piece of cake."

McGovern's campaign left a lasting imprint on US politics. Determined not to make the same mistake, presidential nominees have since interviewed and intensely investigated their choices for vice-president.

Defeated by Nixon, McGovern returned to the Senate and pressed to end the Vietnam war while championing agriculture, anti-hunger and food stamp programmes in the US and food programmes abroad. He won re-election as South Dakota senator in 1974 but was defeated in his bid for a fourth term in the 1980 Republican landslide that made Ronald Reagan president.

McGovern went on to teach and lecture at universities, and founded a liberal political action committee. He made a long-shot bid in the 1984 presidential race with calls to end US military involvement in Lebanon and Central America and to open arms talks with the Soviets. The former vice-president Walter Mondale won the Democratic nomination and went on to lose to Reagan by an even bigger margin in electoral votes than had McGovern to Nixon.

After his career in office ended, McGovern served as US ambassador to the Rome-based United Nations food agencies from 1998 to 2001 and spent his later years working to feed needy children around the world. He and the former Republican senator Bob Dole collaborated to create an international food for education and child nutrition program, for which they shared the 2008 world food prize.

"I want to live long enough to see all of the 300 million school-age kids around the world who are not being fed be given a good nutritional lunch every day," McGovern said in 2006.

McGovern's wife, Eleanor, died in 2007 aged 85; they had been married 64 years, and had four daughters and a son. "I don't know what kind of president I would have been, but Eleanor would have been a great first lady," he said after his wife's death.

One of their daughters, Teresa, was found dead in a snowdrift in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1994 after battling alcoholism for years. He recounted her struggle in his 1996 book Terry, and described the writing of it as "the most painful undertaking in my life". It was briefly a bestseller and he used the proceeds to help set up a treatment centre for victims of alcoholism and mental illness in Madison.

[Keith Millea]

Published on Sunday, October 21, 2012 by Truthdig

McGovern: He Never Sold His Soul

by Chris Hedges

In the summer of 1972, when I was 15, I persuaded my parents to let me ride my bike down to the local George McGovern headquarters every morning to work on his campaign.

McGovern, who died early Sunday morning in South Dakota at the age of 90, embodied the core values I had been taught to cherish. My father, a World War II veteran like McGovern, had taken my younger sister and me to protests in support of the civil rights movement and against the Vietnam War. He taught us to stand up for human decency and honesty, no matter the cost. He told us that the definitions of business and politics, the categories of winners and losers, of the powerful and the powerless, of the rich and the poor, are meaningless if the price for admission requires that you sell your soul. And he told us something that the whole country, many years later, now knows: that George McGovern was a good man.

McGovern, even before he ran for president, held heroic stature for us. In 1970 he attached to a military procurement bill the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, which would have required, through a cutoff of funding, a withdrawal of all American forces from Indochina. The amendment did not pass, although the majority of Americans supported it. McGovern denounced on the Senate floor the politicians who, by refusing to support the amendment, prolonged the war. We instantly understood the words he spoke. They were the words of a preacher.

"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave," he said. "This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval [hospitals] and all across our landyoung men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us."

McGovern's moral condemnation was greeted in the chamber with stunned silence. When one senator told McGovern he was personally offended by his remarks, McGovern answered: "That's what I meant to do."

Here was a politician who cared more for his country and for human decency than he did for his political ambitions or his career. Here was someone I could believe in. I, at 15 years old, was not about to lose this moment. I stuffed envelopes, handed out fliers and made phone calls until my dialing fingers were red and swollen. That was the summer of my political awakening. It taught me about the venal nature of power, the clever lies used by the power elite to manipulate the masses, and the deep fear and loathing these elites have of those, like McGovern, who possess the personal integrity and moral courage to speak the truth. The business titans, the generals, the defense contractors, the wealthy, Richard Nixon and the Democratic Party establishment set out to destroy McGovern. They failed.

The tiny campaign headquarters in Hamburg, N.Y., was chronically short of money. We survived on pizza. Workers slept on the floor. I mingled that summer with angry Vietnam veterans, hippies, anti-war activists, union organizers and feminists. Tattered copies of "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Soul on Ice," "The Other America" and "The Wretched of the Earth" were shoved into my hands by older campaign workers. None of us, until that summer, had a voice in Democratic or national politics. And the Democratic establishment, once that summer ended, rewrote the nomination rules to make sure none of us ever had a voice again.

When the 1972 Democratic convention, the first and last open political convention in American history, took place in July at the Miami Beach Convention Center, I was being sullenly dragged to New Mexico for our family vacation. Our Nimrod popup camper had been set up in the desert at Ghost Ranch. I was determined to hear McGovern's nomination and his acceptance speech. I took the keys to my father's Impala, lay down on the front seat looking up at the canopy of stars and followed the chaotic and glorious convention on the radio. McGovern spoke at 2 a.m. in Miami. It was midnight in New Mexico. He closed with these words:

From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sickcome home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for "this is your land, this land is my landfrom California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream watersthis land was made for you and me."
So let us close on this note: May God grant each one of us the wisdom to cherish this good land and to meet the great challenge that beckons us home.
And now is the time to meet that challenge.
Good night, and Godspeed to you all.

And then the battery on my father's Impala went dead. My father, the next morning, walked down the dirt road to find someone with jumper cables.

The history books will tell you Richard Nixon won the 1972 election, that George McGovern went down to the worst defeat of any presidential candidate in history. But those who write history do not take into account the moral or the good, what is right or what is wrong, what endures and what does not. And even the historians have to acknowledge that Nixon's victory was attained by lies and fraudulent propaganda, by dirty tricks, by state crimes and acts of theft and burglary. Nixon, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote, may have embodied the "successful" politician but he "was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions."

"George McGovern, for all his mistakes… ," Thompson went on, "understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose…. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

I had dinner in New York a few years ago with McGovern and Rick MacArthur, the publisher of Harper's Magazine. McGovern and I spoke about our experience in war and the lies, deceit and empty patriotism used by politicians and war profiteers to sustain war, of our life as the sons of preachers and of the time each of us had spent as seminary students. I told him about the summer I spent working for him, about the thrill of hearing his acceptance speech and about exhausting the battery of my father's Impala. I told him he had set the ethical and intellectual standards by which I had attempted to live my own life. He mentioned, ruefully, the loss of 49 states.

"Senator," I said. "You never betrayed that 15-year-old boy."

© 2012 Truthdig

[Dawn Meredith]

When I have time I really need to write something. I spent much of 72 working for his presidential election bid, in forur states and it totally changed my life.

I met him twice, also his wife...wonderful lovely people. Every life has a handful of events that alter the course , for me the assassination of JFK in 63 and the campaign of McGovern in 72 are two such MAJOR events.

RIP, you were too pure for this world.

Dawn

[Peter Lemkin]

McGovern was too good/moral a man to be President in the USA after the assassination of JFK....instead we got Tricky Dick. I too worked hard for McGovern at the time. And look at the choices we get now....
A man for our times, a politician not afraid of the word Peace, who was not allowed to be for our times by those who hide behind the curtain.