George McGovern never got over his landslide loss to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential race, in which he won only one of 50 states. Walter Mondale recalled approaching him after his own, equally lopsided defeat in 1984 and asking, “George, how long does it take for the hurt to wear off?” “Fritz,” said McGovern, “I’ll call you when it does.”
McGovern came from “humble beginnings” in rural South Dakota, the son of a disciplinarian Methodist minister, said The New York Times. He joined the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor and flew B-24 bombers over Austria, Germany, and Italy during World War II, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his exploits. McGovern trained as a teacher in South Dakota after the war, but in 1956, thanks to “the support of farmers who had become New Deal Democrats during the Depression,” he was elected to Congress—the first Democratic representative from South Dakota in over 20 years.
McGovern’s first major achievement was starting the Food for Peace program, said The Washington Post, which “gave foreign nations credit to buy surplus U.S. crops.” He served as the program’s first chief, under John F. Kennedy, and after being elected to the Senate in 1962 made a lifelong cause of alleviating hunger both at home and abroad. But McGovern’s name was also “synonymous with the anti-war movement” from the very beginning of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. After visiting the country in 1965 and seeing coffins and “maimed soldiers in military hospitals,” he grew increasingly dedicated to ending the war. When he co-authored a Senate amendment to do just that in 1970, millions applauded his courage. “Millions of others considered him a traitor.” The bill failed.
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Having run in vain for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, McGovern announced his intention to run on an anti-war platform in 1971, said the Associated Press. When the “prairie populist” won the nomination, “the Left felt revived.” McGovern’s anti-war stance gave him “hip cachet” in the 1960s counterculture. Warren Beatty, John Lennon, and Hunter S. Thompson were among his admirers; Simon and Garfunkel reunited to perform on his behalf. Among the young people who flocked to volunteer for his campaign were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. But it was all for nothing. McGovern was “whipped in a landslide.”
McGovern’s campaign was undone by “a list of missteps,” said the Sioux Falls, S.D., Argus Leader. He was forced to dump his vice presidential choice, Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton, after it was revealed he had undergone shock treatment for mental illness. His promises to decriminalize marijuana, create universal health care, and slash defense spending “made ‘McGovern Liberal’ a pejorative still occasionally in use.” Nixon characterized him as a “dangerous leftist” out of touch with mainstream Americans, and his humiliating defeat on an overtly liberal platform still divides Democrats today. Some feel he damaged the party by “branding it as soft on foreign threats” and too apt to seek government solutions for social problems. But others argue that his candidacy “offered a lifeline to Americans long left out of the political, social, and economic mainstreams,” paving the way for the party’s current multicultural coalition.
McGovern lost his Senate seat in 1980, said The Wall Street Journal, and sought the Democratic nomination again in 1984 but “dropped out early.” He went on to write many books, including a memoir about his alcoholic daughter, Terry, who died of hypothermia in 1994 after collapsing into a snowdrift while intoxicated. He continued fighting against famine, and was appointed the first U.N. global ambassador on hunger in 2001, but admitted that his loss to Nixon still stung. “You never fully get over it,” he said in 2005. “But I’ve had a good life. I’ve enjoyed myself 90 percent of the time.”
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