[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 164 (Wednesday, December 19, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1959-E1962]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                HONORING FORMER SENATOR GEORGE McGOVERN

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, December 18, 2012

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, George McGovern was a leader in the battle 
to end hunger--here in the United States and around the world. His 
recent passing should remind all of us of the need to continue his 
fight. Hunger is a political condition. We have the food and know-how 
to end it--what we're missing is the political will. As a tribute to 
Senator McGovern, let's all help create that political will.
  Mr. Speaker, I submit a number of tributes to the great man.

[[Page E1960]]

    George McGovern--An Outstanding Leader on Children's Hunger and 
                               Nutrition

                          (By Gus Schumacher)

       George McGovern will be remembered for much during his 
     extraordinary 90 years--for some it is for his difficult loss 
     to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, for 
     others it is for his heroics while serving as a WWII bomber 
     pilot. I will always remember the former Congressman and 
     Senator from South Dakota for his unflinching public service, 
     his integrity and his great courage over decades to sustain a 
     passionate commitment to assisting the poor and hungry both 
     domestically and overseas.
       I was fortunate to get know Senator McGovern in the late 
     1990's during my tenure as Undersecretary at the USDA while 
     he served as our Ambassador to the United Nation's Food and 
     Agriculture Organization in Rome. During those meetings he 
     continually pressured us for more support to the world's 
     hungry, especially children. When he returned to the United 
     States, he continued his pressure on us to fund what soon 
     would become the McGovern-Dole International Food for 
     Education and Child Nutrition Program.
       On his return from Rome, Senator McGovern convinced former 
     Senator Bob Dole of Kansas to write a joint OpEd column in 
     the Washington Post on the paucity of good nutrition for 
     school children in developing countries--children trying to 
     learn, but their learning impeded by scarce food and 
     classroom hunger. Building on his domestic lifelong efforts 
     to improve nutrition for school lunches in America, he 
     fostered the initial Woman, Infants and Children (WIC) 
     program for pregnant mothers and their young children. With 
     the help of Senator Dole, the two senior statesmen from 
     opposite sides of the political aisle helped generate major 
     improvements in the food stamp program, together again the 
     Senators said, we need to generate support and funding for 
     such programs overseas.
       Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), no relation to Senator 
     McGovern, read that Washington Post article, called President 
     Clinton and asked him to invite McGovern to the White House. 
     The President quickly invited him over to the Cabinet Room 
     and asked a number of senior officials from the White House, 
     USAID and USDA to join the briefing. Agriculture Secretary 
     Dan Glickman and I were among those at this seminal meeting. 
     McGovern was passionate on his proposal and quickly convinced 
     the President who then turned to Secretary Glickman and me to 
     use our authorities under the Commodity Credit Corporation 
     legislation (Secretary Glickman was then Chair and I was then 
     President of CCC) to ramp up a pilot program in 2001. It was 
     extremely successful and Congress subsequently included 
     funding in each farm bill since that historic White House 
     meeting.
       McGovern's passion for improving children nutrition was 
     infectious. He never flagged on this work and here at 
     Wholesome Wave his passion and dedication is reflected in our 
     efforts to deepen his early work on food stamps and WIC with 
     our nutrition incentives for these programs in more than 300 
     farmers markets across the country. Our work benefits many of 
     the families that McGovern was so passionate to assist. He 
     will be much missed, but his legacy to assist hungry children 
     here at home and overseas is continuing.


                                Endnote

       The McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and 
     Child Nutrition Program (McGovern-Dole program) helps support 
     education, child development, and food security for some of 
     the world's poorest children. It provides for donations of 
     U.S. agricultural products, as well as financial and 
     technical assistance, for school feeding and maternal and 
     child nutrition projects in low-income, food-deficit 
     countries that are committed to universal education.The 
     McGovern-Dole program was originally authorized by the Farm 
     Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. The legislation 
     called for the use of $100 million in Commodity Credit 
     Corporation (CCC) funds to launch the program in fiscal year 
     2003, with future funding coming from Congressional 
     appropriators. The program was reauthorized in the Food, 
     Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008. That legislation 
     provides for the use of $84 million in CCC funds and allows 
     for annual Congressional appropriations, which has been 
     approximately $100 million annually in recent years. The 
     program is administered by the U.S. Department of 
     Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service and is named in 
     honor of Ambassador and former Senator George McGovern and 
     former Senator Robert Dole for their tireless efforts to 
     encourage a global commitment to school feeding and child 
     nutrition.
                                  ____


               [From the Washington Post, Oct. 21, 2012]

               George McGovern, the Man Who Never Gave Up

                             (By Bob Dole)

       When I learned that George McGovern was nearing the end of 
     his remarkable life, I couldn't help but think back to the 
     day in June 1993 when both of us attended the funeral of 
     former first lady Pat Nixon, in Yorba Linda, Calif. After the 
     service, George was asked by a reporter why he should honor 
     the wife of the man whose alleged dirty tricks had kept him 
     out of the White House. He replied, ``You can't keep on 
     campaigning forever.''
       That classy remark was typical of George, a true gentleman 
     who was one of the finest public servants I had the privilege 
     to know.
       I am sure there are some who were surprised by the long 
     friendship that George and I shared. After all, before his 
     death this weekend at age 90, he was a proud and unapologetic 
     liberal Democrat and I am a lifelong Republican. As chairman 
     of the Republican Party, I did what I could to ensure the 
     defeat of his 1972 run for the White House. When the election 
     was over, however, George and I knew that we couldn't keep on 
     campaigning forever. We also knew that what we had in common 
     was far more important than our different political 
     philosophies.
       Both of us were guided by the values we learned growing up 
     in the plains of the Midwest--he in Mitchell, S.D., and me in 
     Russell, Kan. Our lives were also transformed by the 
     experience of wearing the uniform of our country during World 
     War II.
       We would both come to understand that our most important 
     commonality--the one that would unite us during and after our 
     service on Capitol Hill--was our shared desire to eliminate 
     hunger in this country and around the world. As colleagues in 
     the 1970s on the Senate Hunger and Human Needs Committee, we 
     worked together to reform the Food Stamp Program, expand the 
     domestic school lunch program and establish the Special 
     Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children.
       More than a quarter-century later, with political ambitions 
     long behind us, we joined together again. Soon after 
     President Bill Clinton named George ambassador to the U.N. 
     Food and Agriculture Organization in 1998, he called to ask 
     for my help in strengthening global school feeding, nutrition 
     and education programs. We jointly proposed a program to 
     provide poor children with meals at schools in countries 
     throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In 
     2000, President Clinton authorized a two-year pilot program 
     based on our proposal, and in 2002, Congress passed and 
     President George W. Bush signed into law the McGovern-Dole 
     International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. 
     Since its inception, the program has provided meals to 22 
     million children in 41 countries.
       In recent years, George and I had several occasions to get 
     together and reflect on our lives, our political careers and 
     our respective presidential campaigns. No matter how many 
     times we replayed it, he never did defeat President Nixon and 
     I never did defeat Bill Clinton. We agreed, however, that the 
     greatest of life's blessings cannot be counted in electoral 
     votes.
       In 2008, George and I were humbled to be named the co-
     recipients of the World Food Prize. As we were called on 
     stage to accept the award, we once again reached across the 
     aisle, walking to the podium literally arm-in-arm. I began my 
     acceptance remarks by saying that ``The good news is that we 
     finally won something. It proves that you should never give 
     up.''
       There can be no doubt that throughout his half-century 
     career in the public arena, George McGovern never gave up on 
     his principles or in his determination to call our nation to 
     a higher plain. America and the world are for the better 
     because of him.
                                  ____


   Statement by Administrator Shah on the Passing of Senator George 
                                McGovern

       Senator George McGovern was a tremendous leader in the 
     global movement to end hunger and malnutrition, and his 
     partnership and friendship to the U.S. Agency for 
     International Development will be irreplaceable. Senator 
     McGovern's ties to our Agency date back to his appointment by 
     President John F. Kennedy as the first Director of Food for 
     Peace in 1961. He noted that this time at USAID was key to 
     making him a lifelong champion of combating hunger, a 
     commitment that has shaped global institutions and impacted 
     millions of people around the world.
       In his 18 years in the U.S. Senate, he sponsored numerous 
     health and nutrition programs and served as chair of the 
     Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. In 
     addition to fighting hunger in the United States, he also 
     teamed up with Senator Robert Dole to successfully pass the 
     McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child 
     Nutrition Program, which provides school meals to millions of 
     children around the world each year. He played an 
     instrumental role in helping establish the UN World Food 
     Programme and was appointed as the UN's first Global 
     Ambassador on World Hunger in 2001. He was recognized for his 
     great leadership as co-Laureate of the World Food Prize in 
     2008.
       Senator McGovern's tireless dedication to ending hunger and 
     malnutrition helped encourage a renewed focus on food 
     security around the world, including President Obama's global 
     initiative Feed the Future. Across more than six decades of 
     public service, he inspired countless others with his 
     leadership, friendship, and commitment, always taking the 
     time to mentor and coach young people.
       Senator McGovern will be greatly missed, but his legacy has 
     left us inspired and reenergized to carry his mission 
     forward.
                                  ____


                 [From the Daily Beast, Oct. 22, 2012]

     Robert Shrum on Friend George McGovern, the Prophet Politician

                           (By Robert Shrum)

       Written off today as history's greatest loser for his 1972 
     presidential drubbing, the

[[Page E1961]]

     senator should be remembered for moving America forward on 
     innumerable issues, from Vietnam to gay rights, says friend 
     and former speechwriter Robert Shrum.
       When I was first called and told that George McGovern was 
     in hospice care, I was overwhelmed with sadness. Yes, at 90, 
     he had lived a long and extraordinary life, but when I talked 
     with him in recent years, he was tirelessly immersed in 
     public events, acutely insightful, a political leader retired 
     from office though never from caring or speaking out. He had 
     an undiminished sense of the possible, and how to push the 
     boundaries. In him, that combination was not always seen or 
     credited--in part because he was so genuinely principled, and 
     of course because he so decisively lost in 1972.
       So I think of him, and will write of him here, as a great 
     undaunted man, often intentionally misunderstood, caricatured 
     by opponents on the right and inside his own party, but who 
     nonetheless lifted the vision of the nation--and in his 
     friend Robert Kennedy's phrase, ``made better the life of the 
     world.''
       I am not an objective observer. He was a shining and 
     shaping force in my life. He trusted me to help with his 
     acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination 
     when I was still in my 20s and had come to his campaign only 
     weeks before the convention. He taught me about foreign 
     policy and farm policy, and how to sip a vodka martini. When 
     I worked for him in the Senate, he and his wife, Eleanor, one 
     of the sharpest and sweetest people I ever met, took me on my 
     first European trip, and then again to Asia. It's a journey 
     that has never ended and without them might never have 
     started.
       In his last gift of public service, as the American 
     ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture 
     Organization in Rome under President Clinton, and for a while 
     even under President George W. Bush, George and Eleanor 
     happily let me guide them around museums and churches--and 
     restaurants--I'm certain they had been to before. It was a 
     reprise of my days there more than two decades earlier, when 
     we were on our way home from India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, 
     and they changed our stopover from London to the Eternal City 
     because I so yearned to see it. My wife, Marylouise, who 
     loved to cook risotto for George as much as he loved to eat 
     it, more than once said he was a second father to me. In 
     that, I was not alone.
       In the mid-1970s, when George had many years ahead of him, 
     and fir more to give, I decided to write a book called Losers 
     about presidential candidates who, despite defeat and the 
     blame that inevitably follows, had moved America forward in 
     transformational ways. George would have been the concluding 
     chapter. I sat down with one of the leading publishers in New 
     York who dismissed the idea. Nobody, he said, wants to read 
     about losers. Then he wondered if I'd be interested in 
     ghostwriting a book for Nixon attorney general and Watergate 
     criminal John Mitchell. I wasn't and I doubt Mitchell would 
     have been interested in me.
       When I told George, he laughed. Maybe I could refute 
     ``our'' speeches on the Watergate cover-up during the '72 
     election. The irony was that George had been entirely right 
     then, and his criticisms had been largely dismissed. 
     President Nixon might have been impeached, but George was 
     still written off as history's biggest loser.
       History itself has bigger claims and a longer view. George, 
     who bridled at being labeled an isolationist or an 
     extremist--he was neither, but he was only human--also had a 
     certain equanimity about the stereotype, a belief that what 
     he had cared for, stood for, and accomplished mattered more 
     than what was said about him. But in death if not in life, he 
     deserves a fair accounting of who he truly was, and the 
     differences he made.
       George would reject similar counsel of caution to address 
     an openly gay political organization in Los Angeles. He was 
     the first United States senator ever to do so.
       For example, his famous 1972 call to ``Come Home, 
     America,'' smeared then by Nixon's henchmen and since then by 
     the neocons as a slogan of weakness, a policy of withdrawal 
     from the world, was in reality a summons to honor defining 
     American values and national interest. It surely was a demand 
     to end the Vietnam War but also to pursue a ``just and 
     decent'' activism abroad that in the end would strengthen our 
     national security--and our claim to be the ``last, best hope 
     of earth.'' For this, the decorated bomber pilot of World War 
     II was reviled by the campaign of someone who had spent those 
     dangerous years playing poker in the South Pacific. But the 
     standard George raised has a lasting and fateful relevance. 
     How much better off we would be now if his warning to refuse 
     the wrong war and instead rebuild our own country had been 
     heeded as the Bush administration plotted to plunge into 
     Iraq.
       George was as right about Vietnam as he was about 
     Watergate. And another caricature hurled at him in 1972--that 
     he favored ``acid, amnesty, and abortion''--is in retrospect 
     a partial libel, but in the main a tribute. He never favored 
     the legalization of hard drugs. But amnesty for those who in 
     conscience could not serve in Vietnam, which he saw as an 
     essential part of healing the wounds of war, was granted 
     within four years by President Carter. And a woman's right to 
     choose was secured by the Supreme Court just months after 
     George lost 49 states.
       He also changed forever the way we nominate presidential 
     candidates. The McGovern Commission he led reformed the 
     process, breaking the grip of party bosses and ceding the 
     power to voters in primaries and caucuses. He secured fair 
     representation for women and racial and ethnic minorities 
     that now encompasses LGBT Americans too. He put the people 
     back in the party, and he's the reason the Democratic Party 
     looks like America. The McGovern model has been tweaked, but 
     it remains fundamentally the same, and it's been adopted by 
     Republicans as well as Democrats.
       George could achieve this, and more that I will honor him 
     for here, because of perhaps the least noticed truth about 
     him. He was a great politician. He was a college professor 
     first elected to Congress in conservative South Dakota in the 
     Eisenhower sweep of 1956. But there were lines he wouldn't 
     cross even if it was politically prudent. He lost his first 
     bid for the Senate in 1960 because he spurned the advice to 
     avoid a campaign stop with John F. Kennedy, who was deeply 
     unpopular in the state. (Eighteen years on, facing a tough 
     re-election campaign, the one he would finally lose, George 
     would reject similar counsel of caution to address an openly 
     gay political organization in Los Angeles. He was the first 
     United States senator ever to do so.)
       After the 1960 election, the president-elect called him and 
     said: ``Hi, George. This is Jack. I'm terribly sorry I cost 
     you that Senate seat.'' Kennedy then appointed him director 
     of the new White House Office of Food for Peace.
       The episode forged his friendship with Bobby Kennedy, and 
     soon after Teddy, and it left him with a lifelong passion to 
     end the plague of hunger in the world and the shame of hunger 
     in America. He took that passion with him when he won a 
     Senate seat two years later by a mere 597 votes. He would be 
     elected three times in all, a remarkable record in a state 
     that usually disagreed with him but respected his 
     authenticity and the steadfastness of his beliefs. He turned 
     his vulnerability into an asset
       As he declared for president in 1972 against one of the 
     strongest primary fields in the modern era, he seemed to have 
     few assets. Starting out far behind, in single digits, he 
     triumphed as the anti-war candidate; he also maneuvered 
     adroitly in states like Wisconsin, where he appealed to blue-
     collar voters with a proposal for property tax reform. He had 
     a masterful strategy, and he assembled a masterful 
     organization of the young and the talented.
       George was unlucky too--and in politics, genius is often 
     luck. He wasn't going to beat Nixon, but the contest could 
     have been much closer. And he might have survived to run the 
     next time. Then he selected his running mate, Missouri Sen. 
     Tom Eagleton, in the way it was customarily done then--with a 
     few questions and no formal vetting. The choice blew up when 
     the press reported that Eagleton, who had offered the 
     reassurance that there was nothing embarrassing in his 
     background, had undergone a series of shock treatments for 
     depression. Eagleton was replaced; George fell 20 points 
     behind and stayed there. The collateral result was the 
     elaborate process for picking a vice-presidential nominee 
     that has prevailed ever since. It's one legacy George would 
     have preferred not to create.
       It's telling that in the 2012 campaign, the stronger 
     position on abortion and women's issues is the one he had 40 
     years ago. He was ahead of his time, and he was a reshaping 
     influence on our times.
       He not only opposed the Vietnam War but afterward proposed 
     the reconciliation that was delayed until the 1990s. Gerald 
     Ford might have gone for it--he discussed it with George--but 
     flatly ruled it out 10 days after Ronald Reagan announced a 
     challenge to Ford's renomination.
       George advocated normalization of relations with China in a 
     series of lectures in 1951, at the height of the Korean War. 
     He did it again to far more attention--the lectures had 
     provoked only a venomous response in the local newspaper--on 
     the Senate floor in 1966, during the escalation of the 
     Vietnam War. He called for an end to the embargo on Cuba a 
     decade later and twice visited the island to meet Fidel 
     Castro.
       Review what I have recounted so far: events have proved him 
     correct, as they will on Cuba. He was to a very real degree 
     the politician as prophet. He had no meanness, but there was 
     steel in his convictions. His Senate colleagues squirmed in 
     1970 as he reproved them before a vote on setting a deadline 
     to withdraw from Vietnam: ``Every senator here is partly 
     responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and 
     Bethesda Naval, and all across our land--young men without 
     legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes.''
       Yet he could work with those on the other side, including 
     the usually intractable right-wing senator from North 
     Carolina, Jesse Helms. George made peace with Nixon, who had 
     plotted to blame him for the shooting of George Wallace, and 
     visited Nixon's home in New Jersey. George McGovern never 
     yielded in his beliefs, but he never hated either. Indeed he 
     treasured his relationship with the conservative icon Bill 
     Buckley, whom he debated repeatedly on Firing Line. For one 
     taping of the show in 1984, the team of McGovern and Shrum 
     bested Buckley and George Will, persuading an audience at the 
     Yale Political Union to vote for Walter Mondale over Ronald 
     Reagan. After the election, Buckley said the same thing both 
     to George and me: ``As Yale goes, so goes Minnesota.'' George 
     joyfully repeated the line.
       It was his inner core that made him a torchbearer of 
     ideals. But it was his temperament, his respect for others, 
     that let him collaborate with Bob Dole to save and

[[Page E1962]]

     expand the Food Stamp Program. Millions of people in America 
     who may not remember his name will not go hungry today 
     because of George--and others half a world away are alive and 
     whose children are alive because of his service from Food for 
     Peace from 1961 to 2001, when he resigned as ambassador to 
     the U.N. food agency.
       His is a dual legacy, of ideas and of so many individuals 
     he brought into politics who stayed to make their own mark.
       There was his proposal for tax simplification--lowering 
     rates and closing loopholes--which predated the reform Reagan 
     negotiated with the Democrats by 14 years. The notion is 
     still at the center of campaign conversation today, in the 
     bastardized form Mitt Romney exploits to conceal his 
     giveaways to the wealthy. George would be the first to 
     denounce it; as he once said: ``Money made by money should be 
     taxed at the same rate as money made by men''
       Those who enlisted with George in 1972 constitute a legion 
     of significance in our national life, foremost among them the 
     young Yale Law student who was our co-campaign manager in 
     Texas, BM Clinton, along with friend Hillary Rodham. As 
     president, Clinton would cast himself as a centrist Democrat, 
     and George sometimes thought he was wrong, for example, on 
     gay rights and the Defense of Marriage Act. (Clinton now 
     thinks he was wrong too.) But George was also fiercely loyal 
     to Clinton and quietly proud that he had started out in the 
     McGovern campaign, in one of the toughest and most hopeless 
     states.
       I have been fortunate. Two leaders were at the center of my 
     life in politics. I was graced by their friendship and the 
     privilege of a place in their campaigns and their causes. Ted 
     Kennedy was the greatest senator in a century, and maybe 
     ever. George McGovern served in the Senate for a little more 
     than a third as long, but he too had a singular greatness. He 
     too changed America--and brought us close to the best 
     America.
       I will never forget what happened as the 1972 landslide 
     poured in on us. I walked into the candidate's suite where he 
     was standing over the sink, shaving. His assistant Jeff 
     Smith, who ran the traveling party, was crying. George put 
     down his razor and said: ``Jeff, it's OK. It's OK. We'll wake 
     up in the morning and our lives will go on.'' Jeff choked 
     back his tears and replied: ``That's easy for you to say.''
       It wasn't, of course. And things weren't always easy for 
     him, in politics or in a life where he lost two adult 
     children, his daughter Terry and son Steve. He spent his last 
     years without his Eleanor. But he got up in the morning, and 
     for him life didn't just go on. He made it count, in his 
     youth and his age, in office and out, in victory and defeat.
       People close to George admired him because he held himself 
     to a higher standard. We loved him for the person he was.
       It has been used as a term of derision, but I will always 
     be proud to be a McGovernite.

                          ____________________