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| FILE - In this July 14, 1972 file photo, Sen. George S. McGovern makes his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. At left is his running mate, Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, and at right, convention chairman Lawrence F. O'Brien. A family spokesman says, McGovern, the Democrat who lost to President Richard Nixon in 1972 in a historic landslide, has died at the age of 90. According to the spokesman, McGovern died Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012 at a hospice in Sioux Falls, surrounded by family and friends. |
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- George McGovern once joked that he had wanted to run for president in the worst way - and that he had done so.
It
was a campaign in 1972 dishonored by Watergate, a scandal that fully
unfurled too late to knock Republican President Richard M. Nixon from
his place as a commanding favorite for re-election. The South Dakota
senator tried to make an issue out of the bungled attempt to wiretap the
offices of the Democratic
National Committee, calling Nixon the most
corrupt president in history.
But the Democrat
could not escape the embarrassing missteps of his own campaign. The
most torturous was the selection of Missouri Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as
the vice presidential nominee and, 18 days later, following the
disclosure that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for
depression, the decision to drop him from the ticket despite having
pledged to back him "1,000 percent."
It was at
once the most memorable and the most damaging line of his campaign, and
called "possibly the most single damaging faux pas ever made by a
presidential candidate" by the late political writer Theodore H. White.
After
a hard day's campaigning - Nixon did virtually none - McGovern would
complain to those around him that nobody was paying attention. With R.
Sargent Shriver as his running mate, he went on to carry only
Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning just 38 percent of
the popular vote in one of the biggest landslides losses in American
presidential history.
"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."
A
proud liberal who had argued fervently against the Vietnam War as a
Democratic senator from South Dakota and three-time candidate for
president, McGovern died at 5:15 a.m. Sunday at a Sioux Falls hospice,
family spokesman Steve Hildebrand told The Associated Press. McGovern
was 90.
McGovern's family had said late last
week that McGovern had become unresponsive while in hospice care, and
Hildebrand said he was surrounded by family and lifelong friends when he
died.
"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. He
continued giving speeches, writing and advising all the way up to and
past his 90th birthday, which he celebrated this summer," the family
said in the statement.
A funeral will be held in Sioux Falls, with details announced soon, Hildebrand said.
A
decorated World War II bomber pilot, McGovern said he learned to hate
war by waging it. In his disastrous race against Nixon, he promised to
end the Vietnam War and cut defense spending by billions of dollars. He
helped create the Food for Peace program 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, sounding
often more like the Methodist minister he'd once studied to become than
longtime U.S. senator and three-time candidate for president he became.
And he never shied from the word "liberal," even as other Democrats blanched at the word and Republicans used it as an epithet.
"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."
McGovern's
campaign, nevertheless, left a lasting imprint on American politics.
Determined not to make the same mistake, presidential nominees have
since interviewed and intensely investigated their choices for vice
president. Former President Bill Clinton got his start in politics when
he signed on as a campaign worker for McGovern in 1972 and is among the
legion of Democrats who credit him with inspiring them to public
service.
"I believe no other presidential
candidate ever has had such an enduring impact in defeat," Clinton said
in 2006 at the dedication of McGovern's library in Mitchell, S.D.
"Senator, the fires you lit then still burn in countless hearts."
George
Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922, in the small farm town of
Avon, S.D, the son of a Methodist pastor. He was raised in Mitchell, shy
and quiet until he was recruited for the high school debate team and
found his niche. He enrolled at Dakota Wesleyan University in his
hometown and, already a private pilot, volunteered for the Army Air
Force soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The
Army didn't have enough airfields or training planes to take him until
1943. He married his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg, and arrived in Italy the
next year. That would be his base for the 35 missions he flew in the
B-24
Liberator christened the "Dakota Queen" after his new bride.
In
a December 1944 bombing raid on the Czech city of Pilsen, McGovern's
plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire that disabled one engine and set
fire to another. He nursed the B-24 back to a British airfield on an
island in the Adriatic Sea, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. On
his final mission, his plane was hit several times, but he managed to
get it back safety - one of the actions for which he received the Air
Medal.
McGovern returned to Mitchell and
graduated from Dakota Wesleyan after the war's end, and after a year of
divinity school, switched to the study of history and political science
at Northwestern University. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees,
returned to Dakota Wesleyan to teach history and government, and
switched from his family's Republican roots to the Democratic Party.
"I
think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic
Party was more on the side of the average American," he said.
In
the early 1950s, Democrats held no major offices in South Dakota and
only a handful of legislative seats. McGovern, who had gotten into
Democratic politics as a campaign volunteer, left teaching in 1953 to
become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party. Three
years later, he won an upset election to the House; he served two terms
and left to run for Senate.
Challenging
conservative Republican Sen. Karl Mundt in 1960, he lost what he called
his "worst campaign." He said later that he'd hated Mundt so much that
he'd lost his sense of balance.
President John
F. Kennedy named McGovern head of the Food for Peace program, which
sends U.S. commodities to deprived areas around the world. He made a
second Senate bid in 1962, unseating Sen. Joe Bottum by just 597 votes.
He was the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from South Dakota
since 1930.
In his first year in office,
McGovern took to the Senate floor to say that the Vietnam war was a trap
that would haunt the United States - a speech that drew little notice.
He voted the following August in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution
under which President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the U.S. war in the
southeast Asian nation.
While McGovern
continued to vote to pay for the war, he did so while speaking against
it. As the war escalated, so did his opposition. Late in 1969, McGovern
called for a cease-fire in Vietnam and the withdrawal of all U.S. troops
within a year. He later co-sponsored a Senate amendment to cut off
appropriations for the war by the end of 1971. It failed, but not before
McGovern had taken the floor to declare "this chamber reeks of blood"
and to demand an end to "this damnable war."
President Barack Obama remembered McGovern in a statement Sunday as "a statesman of great conscience and conviction."
"He
signed up to fight in World War II, and became a decorated bomber pilot
over the battlefields of Europe," the president said. "When the people
of South Dakota sent him to Washington, this hero of war became a
champion for peace. And after his career in Congress, he became a
leading voice in the fight against hunger."
McGovern
first sought the Democratic presidential nomination late in the 1968
campaign, saying he would take up the cause of the assassinated Sen.
Robert F. Kennedy. He finished far behind Vice President Hubert H.
Humphrey, who won the nomination, and Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy,
who had led the anti-war challenge to Johnson in the primaries earlier
in the year. McGovern later called his bid an "anti-organization" effort
against the Humphrey steamroller.
"At least I have precluded the possibility of peaking too early," McGovern quipped at the time.
The
following year, McGovern led a Democratic Party reform commission that
shifted to voters power that had been wielded by party leaders and
bosses at the national conventions. The result was the system of
presidential primary elections and caucuses that now selects the
Democratic and Republican presidential nominees.
In
1972, McGovern ran under the rules he had helped write. Initially
considered a longshot against Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, McGovern
built a bottom-up campaign organization and went to the Democratic
national convention in command. He was the first candidate to gain a
nominating majority in the primaries before the convention.
It
was a meeting filled with intramural wrangling and speeches that verged
on filibusters. By the time McGovern delivered his climactic speech
accepting the nomination, it was 2:48 a.m., and with most of America
asleep, he lost his last and best chance to make his case to a
nationwide audience.
McGovern did not know
before selecting Eagleton of his running mate's mental health woes, and
after dropping him from the ticket, struggled to find a replacement.
Several Democrats said no, and a joke made the rounds that there was a
signup sheet in the Senate cloakroom. Shriver, a member of the Kennedy
family, finally agreed.
The campaign limped
into the fall on a platform advocating withdrawal from Vietnam in
exchange for the release of POWs, cutting defense spending by a third
and establishing an income floor for all Americans. McGovern had dropped
an early proposal to give every American $1,000 a year, but the
Republicans continued to ridicule it as "the demogrant." They painted
McGovern as an extreme leftist and Democrats as the party of "amnesty,
abortion and acid."
While McGovern said little
about his decorated service in World War II, Republicans depicted him
as a weak peace activist. At one point, McGovern was forced to defend
himself against assertions he had shirked combat.
He'd
had enough when a young man at the airport fence in Battle Creek,
Mich., taunted that Nixon would clobber him. McGovern leaned in and said
quietly: "I've got a secret for you. Kiss my ass." A conservative
Senate colleague later told McGovern it was his best line of the
campaign.
Defeated by Nixon, McGovern returned
to the Senate and pressed there to end the Vietnam war while
championing agriculture, anti-hunger and food stamp programs in the
United States and food programs abroad. He won re-election to the Senate
in 1974, by which point he could make wry jokes about his presidential
defeat.
"For many years, I wanted to run for
the presidency in the worst possible way - and last year, I sure did,"
he told a formal press dinner in Washington.
After
losing his bid for a fourth Senate term in the 1980 Republican
landslide that made Ronald Reagan president, McGovern went on to teach
and lecture at universities, and found a liberal political action
committee. He made a longshot bid in the 1984 presidential race with a
call to end U.S. military involvement in Lebanon and Central America and
open arms talks with the Soviets. Former Vice President Walter Mondale
won the Democratic nomination and went on to lose to President Ronald
Reagan by an even bigger margin in electoral votes than had McGovern to
Nixon.
He talked of running a final time for
president in 1992, but decided it was time for somebody younger and with
fewer political scars.
After his career in
office ended, McGovern served as U.S. ambassador to the Rome-based
United Nation's food agencies from 1998 to 2001 and spent his later
years working to feed needy children around the world. He and former
Republican Sen. Bob Dole collaborated to create an international food
for education and child nutrition program, for which they shared the
2008 World Food Prize.
Clinton and his wife,
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said in a statement Sunday that
while McGovern was "a tireless advocate for human rights and dignity,"
his greatest passion was helping feed the hungry.
"The
programs he created helped feed millions of people, including food
stamps in the 1960s and the international school feeding program in the
90's, both of which he co-sponsored with Senator Bob Dole," they said,
adding, "We must continue to draw inspiration from his example and build
the world he fought for."
McGovern's
opposition to armed conflict remained a constant long after he retired.
Shortly before Iowa's caucuses in 2004, McGovern endorsed retired Gen.
Wesley Clark, and compared his own opposition to the Vietnam War to
Clark's criticism of President George W. Bush's decision to wage war in
Iraq. One of the 10 books McGovern wrote was 2006's "Out of Iraq: A
Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now," written with William R. Polk.
In
early 2002, George and Eleanor McGovern returned to Mitchell, where
they helped raise money for a library bearing their names. Eleanor
McGovern died there in 2007 at age 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 in 2007.
One
of their daughters, Teresa, was found dead in a Madison, Wis.,
snowdrift 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 best seller
and he used the proceeds to help set up a treatment center for victims
of alcoholism and mental illness in Madison.
Before
the 2008 presidential campaign, McGovern endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton
for the Democratic nomination but switched to Barack Obama that May. He
called the future president "a moderate," cautious in his ways, who
wouldn't waste money or do "anything reckless."
"I
think Barack will emerge as one of our great ones," he said in a 2009
interview with The Associated Press. "It will be a victory for moderate
liberalism."
