[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 128 (Tuesday, November 14, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10909-S10910]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      BOB DOLE ON GEORGE McGOVERN

  Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, civility is alive and well in the great 
State of South Dakota.
  During the recess, there was an extraordinary, bipartisan celebration 
honoring our former colleague, Senator George McGovern. The occasion 
was the dedication of the George and Eleanor McGovern Library at Dakota 
Wesleyan University in Mitchell, SD.
  The dedication brought together former President Bill Clinton, former 
majority leader Bob Dole, former majority leader Tom Daschle, Senator 
John Thune, Representative Stephanie Herseth, Governor Mike Rounds, and 
5,000 of Senator McGovern's closest friends and admirers.
  Governor Rounds noted that Senator McGovern was a ``patriot'' and 
that ``all of us gathered here today have a whole lot more in common 
than what divides us as Americans.'' Senator Thune noted that his 
father always voted for George McGovern, even as the children urged him 
to vote Republican, because George was a decorated WWII fighter pilot. 
Perhaps it was Senator Dole, with his characteristic humor, who best 
captured the significance of Senator McGovern's inspiring career.
  I ask unanimous consent that the remarks of Senator Dole be printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       Thank you very much for that generous introduction, and for 
     the honor of receiving the first McGovern Prize for 
     Leadership and Public Service. It is something that I will 
     cherish, not least of all because of its namesakes who have 
     set the standard--in friendship as well as in leadership. 
     This week's events remind us once again that George McGovern 
     is a uniter and not a divider. Who else could bring together 
     Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Al Neuharth, Tom Daschle, John Thune, 
     and Peter, Paul and Mary?
       As you know, at times George and I have had our political 
     differences. Though not the differences you might think. For 
     example, here at Wesleyan he was twice elected president of 
     his class. I have yet to be elected president of anything--
     though I'm thinking of running against Bill Clinton for 
     president of the Senate spouses.
       For me tonight is both an opportunity to salute an old 
     friend, and to repay an old debt. You see, three years ago 
     George came to the dedication of the Dole Institute of 
     Politics at the University of Kansas. What he said about me 
     then more than made up for what he said about me when I ran 
     for President in 1980, 1988 and 1996. So I figured the least 
     I could do was to return the favor, and make up for what I 
     said about him, when he ran for President in 1968--and 1972--
     and 1984.
       I've long since accommodated myself to a career pitching 
     Pepsi and other stimulants. And George has happily resigned 
     himself to the fact that the only presidents in South Dakota 
     are on Mount Rushmore. At our stage of life we both adhere to 
     the wisdom of W.C. Fields, who expressed his philosophy as 
     follows: If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then 
     give up. No use being a damn fool about it.
       Of course, in all that truly matters, George has never 
     given up. Neither has his beloved Eleanor. Sixty-six years 
     after they enrolled as undergraduates on this campus, sixty-
     three years after they declared their marriage vows, the 
     McGoverns of Mitchell are still making a difference, still 
     living every day in the spirit of this school's motto: 
     sacrifice or service.
       Having been both a candidate and a candidate's spouse, I 
     speak from experience when I say that for spouses it isn't 
     sacrifice or service, it's sacrifice and service. But then 
     Eleanor McGovern has always been a leader and humanitarian in 
     her own right. What ever else you can say about us, it's 
     pretty clear that both George and I married above ourselves.
       That's not all we have in common. ``There is a 
     wholesomeness about life in a rural state. . .life tends to 
     be more authentic and less artificial.'' The words are 
     George's but the sentiment applies as much to Russell, Kansas 
     as to Mitchell, South Dakota. We both can attest to the fact 
     that small towns nurture large dreams, and a generosity 
     unbounded as the Great Plains. Generosity is what this 
     evening's all about--the generosity of donors, and of those 
     who seek their donations. I want to congratulate Ambassador 
     Kimmelman and President Duffett as well as the trustees and 
     the campaign committee and every single individual whose 
     generosity has helped to realize a dream called the McGovern 
     Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service.
       Since we're all being so generous, maybe george would let 
     me borrow his fundraising team. We could use your help at KU. 
     I can't imagine a more appropriate tribute to the McGoverns 
     than a library, and not just because George taught here at 
     Wesleyan before he put classroom theory to the test in a 
     public career that spans half a century. In fact, he and 
     Eleanor are both educators at heart. They understand, for 
     they personify, the essential truth of education--that so 
     long as books are kept open, then minds can never be closed. 
     In years to come, this place will be an incubator of informed 
     Citizenship. What more could any teacher ask for?
       Generosity takes many forms. In the case of the McGoverns, 
     it means a lifetime of principled service, and a personal 
     decency that transcends any party label. I'm tempted to say 
     it transcends generations as well. It has been said by this 
     state's second most famous son, Tom Brokaw, that George and I 
     belong to the greatest generation. Actually, we were fairly 
     average americans, who suddenly found ourselves caught up in 
     the historical whirlwind--a tornado as random and 
     devastating as any that slashed across the prairies of my 
     youth.
       If we were prepared for the curve balls that came our way, 
     it was only because of the values passed on to us by pioneers 
     and parents who had confronted more than their share of 
     challenges. When hard times engulfed the American farmer like 
     a Kansas dust storm, we clung all the tighter to our 
     neighbors. I don't know about George, but my own commitment 
     to feeding the hungry is rooted in those distant days when 
     millions of Americans struggled to put food on the table. 
     Hunger is bipartisan. So is compassion.
       It wasn't only economic democracy that was called into 
     question during those bleak years. Also on the line was the 
     idea--enshrined in places like Mitchell and Russell--that 
     every life is precious because every human is created with a 
     plan and a purpose. The great test of our time was moral as 
     well as military. It was met by 16 million citizen soldiers, 
     backed by millions more on the home front. All of them heroes 
     in the age old struggle for popular government.
       The word hero gets thrown around a lot. It's a lot easier 
     to be a hero if someone is shooting at you, as happened to me 
     on an Italian hillside--or attempting to shoot down your 
     plane, as George will recall from 35 missions with his fellow 
     B-24 bomber pilots. Nor was it any accident that he named his 
     plane the Dakota Queen--for the young bride to whom he would 
     return after the war, with a Distinguished Flying Cross 
     pinned to his uniform. When in another context George said, 
     ``Come home, America,'' I think it was that America to which 
     he referred--a country that in every generation has produced 
     heroes, and is, in turn, a land fit for heroes to come home 
     to.
       In this America we fight as one, though we vote and pray 
     and speak as many. One of the unfortunate aspects of modern 
     politics is our tendency to label, dehumanize and even 
     demonize opponents who are, after all, opponents--not 
     enemies. George McGovern is a leader, not a label. The man we 
     honor this evening is a proud liberal who nevertheless found 
     much to admire in such common sense conservatives as Bob Taft 
     and Barry Goldwater. A Methodist preacher's son, raised in a 
     republican household, he cast his first vote for Henry 
     Wallace. As a young activist he was spellbound by the 
     eloquence of Adlai Stevenson. But in later years he would 
     praise my hero, Dwight Eisenhower, for his statesmanship and 
     restraint while in the White House.
       George got to Congress ahead of me. By the time we served 
     in the Senate, it's a safe bet that our votes usually 
     cancelled each other out. As fate would have it, I was 
     Republican national chairman in 1972, the year George ran 
     against President Nixon. In politics, as earlier, I tried to 
     be a good soldier. but there are times when party loyalty 
     asks too much. More than once I returned speech drafts 
     objecting to the official line against the Democratic nominee 
     for President. By election day, I think I had upset more 
     people around the White House than George did. enough, 
     anyway, so that I became expendable once the votes were 
     counted.
       Come to think of it, George, there's another thing we have 
     in common. We were both left unemployed by the Nixon White 
     House.
       If ever a candidate was entitled to nurse a grudge, it was 
     George McGovern. Except no man I know is less inclined to 
     waste time or energy in holding grudges. His generosity of 
     spirit extended to the man who defeated him in 1972. I will 
     never forget a day in June, 1993, when we buried Pat Nixon in 
     the rose gardens at the Nixon Library and birthplace. After 
     the formal service concluded, we were invited inside--away 
     from the prying eye of television--so that President Nixon 
     could deliver a tribute of his own to his wife of fifty-three 
     years. Among other things, he spoke of the joys of 
     grandparenting, describing what happened when their youngest 
     granddaughter, Jennie, asked Mrs. Nixon how she wished to be 
     addressed.
       After rejecting ``grandmother'' as too formal, and 
     ``grandma'' as a bit too elderly for her liking, Pat 
     suggested to the little girl that she call her ``Ma.'' Jennie 
     then put the same question to her famous grandfather. To 
     which he replied, ``Oh, you can call me anything, Jennie, 
     because I've been called everything.'' At that moment I 
     wasn't the only person in the room who was struggling to 
     control his emotions. Not twenty feet from Nixon stood 
     George, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief.
       Later that day, a reporter approached him, curious to know 
     why he was there. George

[[Page S10910]]

     replied that he had always admired Mrs. Nixon, and wished to 
     honor her memory. The reporter persisted. Why should he honor 
     the wife of the man whose alleged dirty tricks may have 
     denied him the White House?
       And you know what George told him? In what may be the 
     classiest remark I've ever heard, George looked him straight 
     in the eye and said, ``You can't keep on campaigning 
     forever.''
       Four years later I had my own taste of defeat, following a 
     hard fought campaign as President Ford's running mate. When 
     it was over, I got some bracing advice from Hubert Humphrey--
     yet another proud son of South Dakota who knew what it felt 
     like to lose a close one. Hubert, like George, had a gift for 
     bipartisan friendship that made him a genuinely beloved 
     figure in the Senate. We worked closely on issues dealing 
     with agriculture and nutrition. He was promoting Minnesota 
     dairy farmers, and I was pushing Kansas wheat, but we shared 
     a common vision--the same vision with which George McGovern 
     gave life to President Kennedy's Food for Peace Program--with 
     which he inspired school lunch programs and food stamps and 
     which, even now, underlies his dream of a world in which no 
     child goes to bed hungry.
       George and Eleanor call this the third freedom. They have 
     even set a deadline of 2030 by which they hope to banish 
     hunger around the globe. To some this may seem impossibly 
     visionary. Not to the McGoverns. ``People call me an 
     idealist,'' Woodrow Wilson once said. ``Well, that is how I 
     know I am an American.''
       Is it idealistic to insist, as George and I do, that school 
     children deserve not only a square lunch, but breakfast as 
     well? Is it idealistic to demand that the children of low 
     income and working families have the same access to basic 
     nutrition as their well-heeled classmates? Is it idealistic 
     to want to share American's bounty with hungry children in 
     other lands--to feed their bodies out of our abundance, to 
     demonstrate that the freedom we cherish is not the freedom to 
     starve, but the freedom to soar.
       Is that idealistic--or just plain American? Here in the 
     Heartland our ideals and our interests are inseparable. To us 
     freedom is a theory, a mere abstraction, unless it improves 
     the quality of life for those who are set free. Earlier I 
     mentioned Mount Rushmore. One of the four Presidents 
     enshrined there is Theodore Roosevelt. One hundred years ago 
     TR professed horror when told of Americans who, when 
     traveling abroad, apologetically asked their foreign hosts to 
     refrain from judging the United States based on its 
     politicians.
       But they must judge his country by the actions of its 
     politicians, said TR. Was that idealistic? Or was it simply 
     the old rugged faith in the ability of so-called ordinary men 
     and women to govern themselves? It is easy to be cynical 
     about modern day politics. But the easy course will never fix 
     what is broken. In America, government is nothing if it is 
     not self-government. For in the mirror of democracy we see 
     reflected back to us both our noblest, and our meanest, 
     attributes. It is the purpose of this college to promote the 
     best that we can be. It is the goal of the McGovern Center to 
     foster service before self. And it is the hope of America 
     that our politics can be as decent as our people--that 
     civility need never be confused with weakness--nor compromise 
     with surrender.
       When we come home to this America, we will fulfill the 
     promise of our birth. We will create a legacy to inspire 
     generations yet unborn. And we will uphold the McGovern 
     tradition of idealistic leadership--for that is how we know 
     we are Americans.
       Thank you very much.

                          ____________________