George McGovern – R.I.P.

For his and my generation, a symbol of haplessness, of fumbling. He’s the man whom Richard Nixon, as Deep Throat told Bob Woodward with more than a touch of smugness in All The President’s Men, wanted to run against. But the GOP didn’t repudidate Barry Goldwater after 1964. The Democratic Party did McGovern, to its lasting shame. As Charles Pierce wrote, “McGovern was the last of so many things — the last true prairie populist, the last truly antiwar war hero, and, really, the last true insurgent to rise through the primaries and capture the nomination of a major party.”

From Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: He was a war hero who’d come away wit ha sense of war’s madness seared deeply onto his conscience, a Cold War skeptic who thought he people ravening for another go at Russia were nuts. He cranked the Dakota Wesleyan history department’s mimeograph machine for Henry Wallace’s 1948 third-party, left-wing presidential bid, fought the bill Richard Nixon cosponsored with McGovern’s home-state senator Karl Mundt to require Communists to register with the federal government, then fell in love with Adlai Stevenson and nearly singlehandedly built the South Dakota Democratic Party. When it came time to run for office himself, to win the loyalties of the conservative farmers and farm wives of South Dakota, he mastered a difficult straddle. “I can present liberal values in a conservative, restrained way,” he explained. “I see myself as a politician of reconciliation.” The young professor won a congressional seat in 1956 despite the suspicious American Legion members who sat in on his classes, taking notes. In his first roll call he was one of only sixty-one congressmen to vote against the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” a kind of 1957 Gulf of Tonkin resolution for the Middle East.

…He won the Senate seat he coveted in 1962, then in 1963 became the first member to speak against the gathering U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy called him “the most decent man in the Senate,” adding: “As a matter of fact, he’s the only one.”

I learned a few months ago after reading Elizabeth Drew’s book on the 1984 campaign that he ran for the nomination but made no traction, losing to the former vice president whose administration did much to redress McGovern’s liberalism.