[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 67 (Thursday, May 19, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1017-E1018]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO ELEANOR McGOVERN

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 18, 2005

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, when George McGovern ran for president in 
1972, his wife Eleanor inspired the slogan, ``Put another Eleanor in 
the White House.'' Eleanor McGovern, like Eleanor Roosevelt, has a deep 
love for this country and has dedicated much of her life to causes and 
campaigns that would make this country--and the world--a better place.
  I've known Eleanor for many years and have admired her intellect and 
compassion. She was an early advocate for early childhood education 
and, like her husband, has been a voice of peace and tolerance.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to insert into the Record a recent article 
about Eleanor McGovern which appeared in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader 
on May 15th. I ask all my fellow colleagues to join me in paying 
tribute to this remarkable woman.

           [From the Sioux Falls Argos Leader, May 15, 2005]

                             A Devoted Life

                           (By Jill Callison)

       Mitchell.--Eleanor McGovern entered marriage hoping only 
     that her husband, George, would return from war unscathed.
       If he did come back, she expected to be the wife of a 
     history teacher.
       Instead, she found herself spending more than 50 years as a 
     politician's wife. But she also carved out a place for 
     herself, becoming more than ``the wife of.''
       Indeed, George McGovern's career--which includes 12 years 
     as a U.S. senator, Democratic presidential candidate and 
     ambassador to United Nations agencies--may not have soared as 
     high as it did without his wife's support, some say.
       ``He may not have had the political career he has had 
     without her,'' says Judy Harrington of Hill City, who served 
     as George McGovern's state representative from 1973 to 1980.
       ``I think her support, her insights, ideas and gentle 
     corrections have helped him all along his path of public 
     service.''
       The senator himself describes his wife of 61 years as his 
     most helpful critic and most trusted adviser.
       On June 23, ground will be broken for a new library and 
     center for public service at Dakota Wesleyan University in 
     Mitchell. The building will carry two names: George and 
     Eleanor McGovern.
       ``Eleanor's done a lot of great things, and we're proud of 
     her at Dakota Wesleyan,'' says Greg Christie, vice president 
     for institutional advancement.
       But a public life can come at a cost.
       Eleanor McGovern, now 83 and growing frail, prefers to shun 
     the spotlight that once shone on her family, sometimes with a 
     scorching heat.
       ``George still travels a lot, but I don't go with him very 
     often,'' she says, sitting in the living room of their 
     Mitchell ranch-style house. ``Going from city to city and 
     lecture to lecture isn't my idea of fun. I like to go to one 
     place and stay for a while.''
       Last week, the McGoverns took off on a three-day trip to 
     reach their summer home in southwestern Montana, in the 
     shadow of the Bitterroot Mountains.
       The trip takes three days, Eleanor McGovern says, to make 
     it easier on the pets, an 8-year-old Newfoundland named Ursa 
     and a 1-year-old tortoiseshell cat found on the highway. Its 
     name, she admits with a trace of embarrassment, is Kittycat.
       Ursa, they say, is George's dog. But the nurturing Newfie 
     proved her loyalty about three years ago. Eleanor McGovern 
     had fallen, breaking her leg in two places. She dragged 
     herself to her bedroom but was unable to reach the phone. 
     Ursa curled herself around the prone woman for 24 hours, 
     until help arrived.
       Yet, although she's often alone and sometimes lonely, 
     Eleanor continues to support her husband's public service, no 
     matter how often he must leave.
       ``She started off carrying that load when he was gone in 
     the war after they were married,'' says Paul Jensen of Rapid 
     City, a longtime friend.
       ``But today I am more aware of the juxtapositions of love 
     and deprivation in my childhood, of freedom and 
     responsibility in my youth, and of tenderness and chaos in my 
     maturing years. Without those myriad strands it would have 
     been more difficult, I know, to accept the different drives 
     and natures of five children, to support a gentle, questing 
     man as he moved from teaching to the ministry to politics, 
     and to keep something in reserve for myself.'' From ``Uphill:

[[Page E1018]]

     A Personal Story'' by Eleanor McGovern with Mary Finch Hoyt.
       Eleanor McGovern began that uphill climb Nov. 25, 1921, 
     when she arrived 30 minutes after the birth of her twin, Ila.
       Her parents, Earl and Marian Stegeberg, farmed near 
     Woonsocket. It was a hard life, made even more difficult by 
     the early death of her mother when the twins were 11 and 
     their sister, Phyllis, was 4.
       Her father withdrew into a sadness that truly never broke 
     until the birth of his first grandchild, the McGoverns' 
     oldest daughter, Ann, in 1945.
       Eleanor and Ila became the family housekeepers.
       ``I have a memory of trying to bake a cake,'' Eleanor 
     McGovern says. ``I had a recipe, but I came to an ingredient 
     I didn't know--baking powder. So I left it out. That was a 
     very flat cake.''
       In high school, the twins stayed in Woonsocket, doing 
     housekeeping in exchange for room and board. They took turns 
     going home weekends.
       Living in town allowed them to take part in activities such 
     as debate. That was how they first encountered a Mitchell 
     teenager who already had made a name for himself. George 
     McGovern and his partner debated the Stegeberg twins--and 
     lost.
       ``Having high admiration for George, we adore the woman who 
     beat him,'' says Harrington, McGovern's former state 
     representative.
       But the two didn't really meet until they were freshman at 
     DWU. In ``Uphill,'' Eleanor McGovern talks about how he asked 
     her on a first date.
       Now she admits she had advance warning. Eleanor worked in 
     the dean's office, Ila down the hall. Ila stuck her head in 
     the door to tell her sister a request for a date was coming.
       ``And don't you dare refuse him,'' Ila hissed at her twin.
       ``It never occurred to me he would ask me for a date,'' 
     Eleanor McGovern says. ``He was a big man on campus.''
       ``I'd say within a year of that our first date I was pretty 
     sure Eleanor was the one,'' George McGovern says.
       ``It was a dreamy spring. I had never known anything like 
     it before. My only concern was that George might not care so 
     much as I. Then on a beautiful clear afternoon he urged me to 
     skip class with him and as we strolled slowly down the street 
     south of campus, he reached down and took my hand. I had my 
     answer. A clasping of hands meant everything then.''
       Their campus life was short. Eleanor McGovern quit her 
     business courses at DWU. Her sister left for Rochester, 
     Minn., and nurse's training, and Eleanor gave financial 
     support.
       The world had changed, too. After Pearl Harbor was bombed 
     on Dec. 7, 1941, George McGovern volunteered for service in 
     the Army Air Corps. He was called up in 1943.
       The couple considered delaying marriage until after he 
     returned from combat but decided not to wait. On Halloween 
     Day 1943, they were married in the Methodist church in 
     Woonsocket.
       ``My father liked George very much, but he didn't think we 
     should get married, and he said he would not take part in the 
     wedding,'' Eleanor McGovern says. ``But he came that day and 
     gave me away.''
       The newlyweds took a train to Muskogee, Okla., the next 
     day, Eleanor sometimes sitting on their suitcase in the 
     aisle.
       She lived alone in a rented bedroom while her husband 
     returned to the base. They saw each other twice a week.
       She followed him to Kansas, Texas, Nebraska and Idaho, 
     before returning home to await the birth of their first baby.
       ``I had really wanted to get pregnant,'' she says. ``George 
     was going overseas, and I wanted to have a baby.''
       He would not see Ann until she was 5 months old.
       After the war, he completed his degree at DWU. The son of a 
     Wesleyan Methodist pastor thought he, too, would follow that 
     path.
       As a student pastor's wife, Eleanor McGovern had her first 
     taste of being in the public eye.
       ``A lot is expected of a minister's wife,'' she says. ``And 
     with two children very small (daughter Susan had arrived a 
     year after Ann), I wasn't ready.''
       In any case, it didn't last long. George McGovern left 
     seminary, earning a doctorate in history. He taught at DWU 
     before leaving to help reinvigorate the South Dakota 
     Democratic Party.
       Three more children, Teresa, Steven and Mary, arrived.
       And in 1955, Eleanor McGovern officially became a 
     politician's wife when her husband ran for the U.S. House of 
     Representatives. ``I was happy when George went into 
     politics,'' she says. ``People in my family cared about what 
     was happening in the country.''
       The first campaign was the toughest, she says. Then, they 
     fell into a similar rhythm.
       She began the last campaign, in 1980, with typical humor. 
     As a temporary home in Mitchell, staffers rented the 
     McGoverns an aging apartment, with linoleum floors, ancient 
     cupboards and poor lighting.
       ``When George and Eleanor arrived for the first time to see 
     it--looking ever so much like an apartment they had when they 
     first married--Eleanor looked around, smiled and said, `Well, 
     George, it looks like we're starting over,' `` Harrington 
     says. ``They didn't seem to mind at all.''
       While he served in Congress, she pursued her own interests, 
     primarily children and families and the choices confronting 
     women as the stay-at-home '50s transformed into the turbulent 
     '60s.
       Eleanor McGovern spoke out for adequate day care. ``She was 
     ahead of her time in accepting that as appropriate,'' says 
     Berniece Mayer of Sioux Falls, a former McGovern staffer.
       Until the demands of her husband's political career--
     particularly his bid for the presidency in 1972--required her 
     to travel, Eleanor McGovern served as, often, a single 
     parent.
       ``I'm sure Eleanor's had periods where she wishes she'd 
     never been married to a politician, somebody running for 
     Congress, running for the Senate, running for the presidency, 
     running, running, running,'' George McGovern acknowledges.
       ``There was one period when I was representing South Dakota 
     in the House of Representatives when I came out here 25 
     weekends in a row, and that plays havoc with your wife and 
     your kids,'' he says.
       ``I was determined to help with George's career, not only 
     by taking responsibility for the family, but by contributing 
     ideas. In fact, I never considered it `George's' career--it 
     was `ours.' ``
       Sometimes Eleanor McGovern did think ``Stop!,'' she says, 
     but ``I never said it. It meant so much to him. He loved 
     being a politician, and he accomplished a lot.''
       But if she could change anything, she would not have moved 
     the children so often. ``If I had to do it over again, I'd 
     stay with them in South Dakota,'' she says.
       The McGoverns have 10 grandchildren and one great-
     grandchild. A second great-grandchild is on the way.
       Their children are scattered from Montana to England. There 
     are only four now, since their middle child, Terry, died in 
     1994, after years struggling with alcoholism.
       The sadness from her daughter's death will never leave 
     Eleanor McGovern.
       ``There are pictures of her in the bedroom,'' she says. 
     ``When I go by, I always find myself softly reaching out and 
     touching her picture.''
       Her husband later wrote a book about their daughter, 
     ``Terry.'' It was therapy for him, she says, but Eleanor 
     McGovern has chosen to speak only rarely about her daughter's 
     addictions.
       It's OK that they have differences of opinions, he says.
       ``We don't worry about the fact that sometimes there could 
     be a little tension and differences of opinion and 
     irritation,'' he says.
       ``We just take that as a part of life. You can't expect 
     complete harmony in a marriage. You have to give the other 
     person a little freedom, too, to move to the things that 
     they're interested in.''
       ``Even today I have fleeting pangs of anxiety when I leave 
     where I am to go to someplace else. I can describe it only as 
     a vague sense of loss of place.''
       So he travels the country, and she generally stays home.
       ``She's had lots of opportunities in her lifetime to be in 
     the public eye, and she goes out of her way to stay out,'' 
     Christy says. ``Some time ago she decided to let George do 
     that.''
       The death of her sister, Ila, in 1996 also was a blow. ``It 
     left quite a void in my life,'' Eleanor says.
       Books can't fill that gap, but they often fill her days. 
     Her husband calls her the best-read woman he knows. Eight or 
     10 magazines come to the house every week; she reads them 
     all.
       She loves birds, particularly meadowlarks. Mayer remembers 
     taking Eleanor McGovern out in the prairie to hear their 
     sweet sound. When time wouldn't permit, a local radio 
     announcer would tape the bird calls for her.
       It would take her home, even in a Washington, D.C., suburb.
       ``Many times I ached for Woonsocket and Mitchell, for 
     cottonwoods and elms, for schools, shops, markets, doctors' 
     offices, more often than not sprinkled with dear friends or 
     relatives, all within walking distance.''

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