[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 4 (Tuesday, January 15, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E29]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           McGOVERN WAS A POLITICIAN WHO NEVER LOST HIS SOUL

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 15, 2013

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, after Senator George McGovern's passing 
last October, Colman McCarthy wrote a wonderful tribute about this man 
of peace.
  I would like to submit his article. I urge all my colleagues to 
continue to work for the causes so dear to Senator McGovern's heart.

   [From the National Catholic Reporter, Dec. 21, 2012-Jan. 3, 2013]

           McGovern Was a Politician Who Never Lost His Soul

                          (By Colman McCarthy)

       On the Wednesday afternoon in early November 1972 after his 
     defeat the day before by Richard Nixon for the presidency, 
     George McGovern and his wife, Eleanor, arrived at 
     Washington's National Airport. The loss had been nearly 
     total, with McGovern, a liberal populist Democrat from South 
     Dakota, winning only Massachusetts and the District of 
     Columbia.
       By chance, his running mate, Sargent Shriver, was arriving 
     at the same time from another plane. They came upon each 
     other in the main concourse. Seeing a dejected McGovern, with 
     his wife in tears about losing even their home state, Shriver 
     offered a powerful consoling line: ``George, we may have lost 
     the election but we certainly didn't lose our soul.''
       Within three years, Nixon, a scheming and deceitful 
     politician who spared nothing in his depiction of McGovern as 
     an unpatriotic ultraliberal, would resign in disgrace over 
     the Watergate scandal.
       At his death in late October 2012, McGovern remained in 
     full possession of the soul-force that marked a political 
     career that began in the House of Representatives in 1956 and 
     ended in the Senate in 1980. I recall a conversation once 
     when he laughed about Republicans' portrait of him as a wild 
     leftist, wondering how he managed to win House and Senate 
     races in South Dakota, one of the country's most conservative 
     states. His liberalism knew a boundary or two. He had little 
     regard for the showmen of the 1960s anti-war movement--from 
     Abbie Hoffman to Jerry Rubin--and saw them as ineffectual 
     clowns.
       McGovern's passions ranged from opposition to the Vietnam 
     War to advocating for nutrition programs for the hungry in 
     this country and abroad. He advocated for small farmers as 
     they saw their lands swallowed by corporate agribusiness. He 
     stood with the tribal nations, a stance so firm that the 
     Oglala Sioux of South Dakota called him ``the Great White 
     Eagle.''
       McGovern first visited South Vietnam in late 1965, a visit 
     that confirmed his hunch that the war was doomed. The year 
     before, he voted in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, 
     which gave a pass to President Lyndon Johnson to escalate the 
     war after an attack by North Vietnam on an American patrol 
     boat--an attack that never happened. It was a vote McGovern 
     would eventually be ashamed of missing the chance to join 
     Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening as the only two members of 
     the Senate to say no.
       Perhaps to compensate for the lapse, McGovern became the 
     strongest antiwar voice in the Senate. His military record of 
     personal bravery--he flew more than 30 high-risk bombing 
     missions in the Second World War--gave him credibility. In a 
     Sept. 1, 1970, floor debate on his amendment, co-sponsored 
     with Mark Hatfield, to end the war, McGovern said:
       Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for 
     sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This 
     chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly 
     responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and 
     Bethesda Naval [hospitals] and all across our land--young men 
     without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes. There 
     are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think 
     this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about 
     bugging out, or national honor, or courage. It does not take 
     any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a 
     president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying 
     in--Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. 
     But we are responsible for those young men and their lives 
     and their hopes.
       The grandson of Irish immigrants and the son of a Methodist 
     pastor, McGovern suffered tragedy in his personal life. The 
     story is told in Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle 
     With Alcoholism, Published in 1996, two years after Teresa 
     McGovern, 45, froze to death in a snowbank in Madison, Wis., 
     after a night of drinking, it is the most soulful of his 
     half-dozen books: a lovingly written work blended with self-
     therapy and spirituality.
       My last visit with McGovern came a few years ago when he 
     spoke on a Sunday afternoon to a small gathering at a civic 
     center in the Friendship Heights neighborhood of Chevy Chase, 
     Md. I brought Shriver to the talk. It was a touching reunion 
     of the two former running mates. Shriver, sinking slowly into 
     Alzheimer's disease, had no memory of McGovern, much less of 
     their campaigning decades ago. But the two, both giants of 
     service and goodness, embraced each other with deep 
     affection, leaving me and other onlookers to wonder what kind 
     of country we might have become if the election of 1972 had 
     gone the other way. A more humane country? A country at peace 
     with the world? A country loved globally for its generosity, 
     not hated or feared for its belligerence?
       Little time was needed for wondering about the obvious 
     answers to those questions.

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