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."