Remembering George McGovern 
George McGovern was an American original: unrepentantly and defiantly liberal.I met McGovern during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, after he had just published The Essential America: Our Founders and Their Liberal Tradition. We spoke in the Harvard Book Store while they readied the table for him to sign books.
Born in South Dakota, he told me his mother was Canadian, “from Toronto…and I spent from ages two to six in Calgary…so I’ve got Canadian roots.”
Decorated WWII bomber pilot, the first senator to oppose the Vietnam War (in 1963), he was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972. It was a melancholy campaign. His first vice presidential nominee resigned after admitting he’d undergone therapy; Thomas Eagleton would be replaced by Sargent Shriver, a member of the Kennedy clan by marriage. Derided as the candidate for ‘acid, abortion and amnesty’, McGovern would win only Massachusetts, the worst debacle for any candidate since Alf Landon lost to FDR in 1936.
After his senatorial defeat in the Reagan victory of 1980 he taught. Bill Clinton named him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. When I met him, he told me he took great pride in his role as UN Ambassador for Global Hunger.
Liberalism, said McGovern, was responsible for American progress. He continually challenged, successfully he claimed, his conservative friends to name a single federal program now generally approved by both major parties that had not first been pushed by liberals and opposed by conservatives.
McGovern remarked that liberalism had enjoyed a successful run, with only an interruption during the twenties, from 1900 until its demise with the election of Ronald Reagan. The high-water mark was FDR.
It was less the excesses of the sixties that had pushed liberalism out of favour, observed McGovern, than the later Cold War and Vietnam. Vietnam was a “massive mistake” that tore American liberalism asunder and divided it into ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’. The war in Vietnam put both the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson into early graves.
McGovern subscribed to Arthur Schlesinger’s cyclical theory of liberalism: the rank-and-file enjoy the benefits of liberalism and then it shifts back to the conservatives.
McGovern wistfully observed that liberals were often their own worst enemies. Too often, they exemplify Robert Frost’s aphorism that “a liberal is someone who won’t take his own side in a quarrel.” He thought the muscular liberalism of Tony Blair was a better approach.
During World War II, McGovern flew 35 combat missions (and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross) on the B-24 ‘Dakota Queen, named after his bride, Eleanor, who died in 2007.
Stephen Ambrose portrayed McGovern and his fellow warriors in his The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45. Ambrose, the poet-laureate of that conflict would later call McGovern “one of the greatest patriots I know” and that “you don’t necessarily have to be a hawk to be patriotic.” McGovern would later serve as U.S. senator from South Dakota from1962 until 1980.
Speaking of Vietnam and Iraq, McGovern recalled Walter Lippman’s admonition that ‘old men should not send young men to war’. He lamented the American attitude that equated leadership with cowboy-like hardness and toughness. He remarked during the years of Senate debate on the war in Vietnam that the most savage war hawks were those who had never experienced war, noting “It’s easy to be brave and militant with someone else’s blood”.
Edmund Burke got it right, said McGovern, when he observed that “a conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood”. The louder the war cry, said McGovern, the weaker the war experience. In matters of war and peace, he thought Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush were “far wiser” than George W. Bush. McGovern said his personal role model on defence was Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower, he thought, had been unfairly relegated to the presidential attic. Overdue for rehabilitation, “he needs a good biographer like McCullough”. Eisenhower, said McGovern, was strong and wise – a theme captured in Evan Thomas’ new biography Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World.
McGovern said that all policy-makers, foreign and domestic, should have as required reading two of Eisenhower’s speeches: the Cross of Iron and his Farewell Address. Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April, 1953, Eisenhower lamented “every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”
Eisenhower’s January 1961 farewell warning of the mounting power of the ‘military industry complex’ was the most powerful since Washington cautioned America to avoid the “necessity of those overgrown military establishments which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
McGovern thought that terrorism was a threat but containable and that the ‘scare tactics’ of the Republicans were deplorable. McGovern’s approach to terrorism? Begin with the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq while returning to traditional American multilateralism at the UN and making best efforts to end the bloody tit-for-tat killing going on between Israel and the Palestinians.
Most importantly, and reflective of his commitment to Food for Peace, he said he would have increased food, medical, educational, water and housing aid from the wealthy to the poor nations. “The root cause of terrorism” he argued “is poverty, hunger and illiteracy…we can do better…we should do better. Aid is America’s best advertisement.”
We spoke of political will.
Leadership, he told me, means taking on the conventional wisdom. Sometimes there is a harsh price; he observed that he’d gone down to defeat in 1980 with fellow senators Birch Bayh, Frank Church and John Culver, accused of ‘being out of touch and too liberal’.
America’s great strength, observed McGovern, is its morality. It forgets this at its peril because the world admires the idea of America, if not its administrations. The problem today is that America, like Rome, is suffering from what William Fulbright described as ‘the arrogance of power’.
Our conversation concluded – he asked to be remembered to my colleague, Jeremy Kinsman – McGovern went to sign books.
Liberalism was alive that day in Cambridge. The line to buy Essential America snaked around three aisles.
When my turn came to have my book signed, McGovern told me that he would spend the afternoon “with Harvard’s Canadian…John Kenneth Galbraith…he understands liberalism.”
McGovern was then off to the DNC convention where his presence was briefly acknowledged (before prime time and network coverage) by the chair. There would be no podium address for McGovern in the tightly scripted and remarkably disciplined proceedings.
As I left the store, picking up a McGovern button (to advertise the Essential America), I recalled his parting words: “Tell Canada not to lose its soul. Canada needs America… but America also needs Canada.”