Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Walter R. Mears, who reported on government and politics for The Associated Press in Washington for 40 years and covered George McGovern in the Senate and in his 1972 presidential campaign, writes this memoriam for Senator George McGovern who passed away today. George McGovern dies; lost 1972 presidential bid:
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.
A proud liberal who had argued fervently against Vietnam War as a Democratic senator from South Dakota and three-time candidate for president, McGovern died at 5:15 a.m. local time Sunday at a Sioux Falls hospice, surrounded by family and lifelong friends, family spokesman Steve Hildebrand told The Associated Press. McGovern was 90.
The family had said late last week that McGovern had become unresponsive while in hospice care.
"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.
Hildebrand said funeral services were to be held in Sioux Falls and details would be announced shortly.
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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 decorated World War II bomber pilot, McGovern said 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."
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Former President Bill Clinton got his start in politics when he signed on as a campaign worker for McGovern 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."
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Glad my first vote in ’72 was for a progressive (vs. “I an not a crook”). Glad my 2012 vote will be for another progressive. (vs. “Corporations are people, my friend.”)
I saw McGovern a lot from afar in 1972 during the campaign, but only once close up on the street in Coney Island outside Trump Village the weekend before the election 40 (yikes!) years ago. I was close enough to shake his hand, and the crowds were enthusiastic although by then we knew it was all over after such a long, winding road.
We started organizing for McGovern at a caucus at Brooklyn College in January 1972. My friend, another BC student, was one of the delegates elected in our Brooklyn-Rockaway congressional district, as was our slate’s leading vote getter Peggy Cass (1957 Tony for playing Agnes Gooch in “Auntie Mame”, panelist on TV’s “To Tell The Truth”) — who lent a celebrity name to our slate of delegates (then in New York’s June primary, elected not by Presidential candidate but by delegate slate but then didn’t show up for the convention in Miami Beach. (Tellingly, by then the Kings County boss Meade Esposito, like many Northeastern party bosses who were resistant to us “reformers,” also had the “regular” slate of Democratic delegate candidates endorse McGovern, but people knew to vote for the real McGovernits.)
My delegate friend and I and two other friends drove down to Miami Beach and stayed at my grandparents’ condo for the July Democratic convention, which really was an amazing experience (I have my daily diary from that as a Kindle ebook: http://www.amazon.com/MIAMI-BEACH-CONVENTION-21-Year-Old-ebook/dp/B004HB1VU6 ) It was one of my most formative pollicial experiences and a seminal moment in American politics.
As McGovern’s obit in the NY Times said, “The nominating convention in Miami was a disastrous start to the general election campaign. There were divisive platform battles over Vietnam, abortion, welfare and court-ordered busing to end racial discrimination. The eventual platform was probably the most liberal one ever adopted by a major party in the United States. It advocated an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for war resisters, the abolition of the draft, a guaranteed job for all Americans and a guaranteed family income well above the poverty line.”
Pretty amazing platform. Sadly, whatever slim chance McGovern had was ruined with the VP fiasco. I can remember a chilly and rainy October Saturday afternoon standing on the elevated platform of the Kings Highway station near my house watching the replacement VP candidate Sargent Shriver speak (He said, “It’s great to be here on Kings Road” and the old man standing next to me said, “He thinks this is London, not Brooklyn.”)
We did have a lot of fun in our local McGovern HQ, even those of us who realized the campaign was going to lose big. I learned so much from McGovern and that campaign. (By the way, to show how Midwestern he was, during that Brooklyn visit, McGovern went to a kosher deli and ordered a pastrami sandwich with a glass of milk.)
It never occurred to him or us or anyone in his antiwar campaign to bring up what an incredible WWII hero he was. In retrospect, it was such a naive campaign, filled with bleeding-heart idealists, a term he proudly referred to himself by. McGovern did what he thought was right. (In the election after he was the Democratic nominee, in 1976, he voted for Republican President Ford.) George McGovern will always be the presidential candidate I most loved.
The Times’ front page headline said, “Trounced But Never Silenced.” As someone who’s proably going to struggle to get the 1.4% of the vote for Congress in my district in Arizona that I got in 2010, I’m happy to have learned from George McGovern.
Yep, My first vote too, and one I’m still proud of.
A truly great man, and I am proud that I cast my first presidential vote for McGovern in 72. Nixon proves that voting for a Republican that lies through his teeth will not rewarded by history. A true war hero who would have been labeled, “not a true hero”‘ by the early Rove types, the Watergate criminals.