[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 17215-17217]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                HONORING FORMER SENATOR GEORGE McGOVERN

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES P. McGOVERN

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, December 17, 2012

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, my dear friend, Senator George McGovern, 
passed away last October at the age of 90. He represented the best of 
the Democratic Party and the best of American politics. His voice and 
decency will be missed.
  I submit two articles that pay tribute to this remarkable man.

                    [From the Nation, Oct. 22, 2012]

      George McGovern, the ``Atticus Finch'' of American Politics

                           (By Jim McGovern)

       George McGovern lived to be 90. By any measure, he had a 
     long and productive life. Yet I can't help but feeling sad--
     not just because I lost my most treasured friend--but because 
     the world lost a consistently steady and refreshingly liberal 
     voice of sanity and common sense.
       To me, George McGovern was the ``Atticus Finch'' of 
     American politics. Like the main character in Harper Lee's 
     brilliant novel To Kill A Mockingbird George McGovern spoke 
     the truth even when--especially when--it was uncomfortable.
       He spoke the truth about the folly of Vietnam and our 
     excessive military budget. He spoke the truth about 
     corruption in the Nixon White House. And he spoke the truth 
     about the tragedy of hunger in the United States and around 
     the world. He paid a heavy political price for his candor and 
     honesty. But as he always said, ``there are worse things than 
     losing an election.'' George McGovern never lost his soul and 
     he never betrayed his conscience.
       In 1997, when I was being sworn-in as a freshman member of 
     the United States House of Representatives, I asked him to 
     stand by my side as I took the oath of office. During a 
     rather long ceremony leading up to the big moment, I asked 
     him if he had any advice. He gave me the same advice he 
     received when he started out: ``If you want to be a good 
     member of Congress you have to get over the fear of losing an 
     election.''
       Having just won a close, hard-fought election, I was 
     expecting him to say: ``keep your head low'' or ``don't make 
     any waves.'' But George McGovern believed that serving in 
     Congress was a rare privilege, that it was an opportunity to 
     move the country forward instead of a constant struggle to 
     get oneself re-elected.
       I have tried to heed that sage advice as much as possible--
     although, to be perfectly honest, I haven't yet completely 
     gotten over the fear of losing an election!
       My first encounter with Senator McGovern was from a great 
     distance in 1972. As a 7th grader in Worcester, 
     Massachusetts, I tried mightily to get him elected President 
     of the United States. While he lost 49 states, he did carry 
     Massachusetts.
       During my college years, I interned in his Senate office, 
     and then in 1984, I ran his Massachusetts campaign when he 
     tried again for the presidency. I will never forget his 
     powerful appeal to voters to stay true to their own 
     principles and values when he declared, ``Don't throw away 
     your conscience.''
       George McGovern was perhaps the most courageous man I've 
     ever known. And it was not just because he was a bomber pilot 
     in World War II, fighting against Hitler and winning the 
     Distinguished Flying Cross for his service. I admired him for 
     his guts, in being who he was, in conservative South Dakota. 
     To oppose the war in Vietnam was not easy in the early 1960s. 
     Yet, George McGovern's valiant and sincere position was 
     right, and the voters of his home state sent him to the 
     United States Senate three times.
       He came across as a gentle man but he had a spine of steel. 
     He was decent and kind. He wasn't afraid of the political 
     consequences of his liberalism and never trimmed his sails 
     for the convenience of the moment. His steadfastness used to 
     drive his staff crazy. But every one of them knew they were 
     working for a great man.
       Senator McGovern was obsessed with the issue of hunger. He 
     was ashamed that in the richest, most powerful nation on the 
     planet, millions of our fellow citizens don't have enough to 
     eat. He led the efforts in the Senate--along with Senator Bob 
     Dole--to expand food and nutrition programs.
       He also couldn't tolerate the hundreds of millions of 
     people all around the world who were hungry. I will never 
     forget attending a meeting with the Senator and President 
     Clinton in 2000, when George McGovern proposed an 
     international program aimed at guaranteeing every child at 
     least one nutritious meal a day in a school setting. Bill 
     Clinton listened intently and then said, ``Let's do it.'' 
     That was the magic of George McGovern; he could get you to 
     believe that anything was possible. And today, the McGovern-
     Dole Food for Education Program is feeding millions of kids 
     and helping them get an education.
       At a recent celebration of his 90th birthday, he told me he 
     wanted to live another 10

[[Page 17216]]

     years to ensure that hunger on this planet is no more. He had 
     a lot more work to do.
       Like Atticus Finch, George McGovern never gave up. He loved 
     his country and dedicated his life fighting for what is 
     ``just and noble in human affairs.'' The world is going to 
     miss George McGovern. I already do.
                                  ____


             [Center for American Progress, Oct. 25, 2012]

   Think Again: George McGovern--A Lifetime of Conscience and Courage

                           (By Eric Alterman)

       George McGovern's passing on Sunday at the age of 90 
     provides further evidence, as if any were needed, that if you 
     live long enough, even your adversaries will end up singing 
     your praises. Consider first these attacks on the late 
     senator and presidential candidate in the 1972 election.
       Writing a few years ago in the journal Democracy, American 
     historian and journalist Rick Perlstein quoted the following 
     attacks on Democratic candidates by various Democrats and 
     liberals:
       In 2003, Al From and Bruce Reed with the Democratic 
     Leadership Council wrote, ``What activists like [Howard] Dean 
     call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is an 
     aberration: the McGovern-Mondale wing, defined principally by 
     weakness abroad and elitist, interest-group liberalism at 
     home.''
       The very next year, a Democrat worrying that Sen. John 
     Kerry (D-MA) was veering left on Iraq during his run for the 
     presidency was quoted in The New York Times saying the 2004 
     presidential nominee was ``[c]oming off like George 
     McGovern.''
       When Ned Lamont won the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary 
     for the U.S. Senate but lost in the general election to Sen. 
     Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who ran as an independent, political 
     journalist Jacob Weisberg recalled in the Financial Times how 
     McGovern lost 49 states in his presidential run because of 
     ``his tendency toward isolationism and ambivalence about the 
     use of American power in general.''
       Then there's Martin Peretz, the former owner and publisher 
     of The New Republic, America's alleged flagship liberal 
     publication for 37 years, who explained, ``I bought The New 
     Republic to take back the Democratic Party from the 
     McGovernites.''
       This cliched version of McGovern's politics was never 
     accurate, but it became a stick with which hawkish 
     journalists and politicians tried to beat back dovish ones. 
     In fact, no Democrat, and perhaps no modern politician at 
     all, can be said to have shown more courage, more grit, and 
     more determination than George Stanley McGovern.
       Yes, folks, the ``elitist'' liberal was born in the 600-
     person farming community of Avon, South Dakota, and grew up 
     nearby in the equally small town of Mitchell. A bashful son 
     of a Methodist minister, McGovern grew wary of ``the 
     excessive emotionalism of some evangelists'' as he came of 
     age in an America where his father was occasionally 
     compensated not in cash but in cabbage.[1]
       As his Wikipedia entry explains:
       [McGovern] volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Forces upon 
     the country's entry into World War II and as a B-24 Liberator 
     pilot flew 35 missions over German-occupied Europe. Among the 
     medals bestowed upon him was a Distinguished Flying Cross for 
     making a hazardous emergency landing of his damaged plane and 
     saving his crew.
       Upon returning and earning a bachelor's degree from tiny 
     Dakota Wesleyan University, the young veteran did a brief 
     stint at Garrett Seminary in Chicago before enrolling in the 
     graduate history program at Northwestern University, 
     eventually earning his doctorate. There, McGovern would both 
     anticipate and then echo revisionist Cold War historians, 
     among them William Appleman Williams and Fred Harvey 
     Harrington, who held that Harry Truman and company, rather 
     than Stalin's Soviet Union, were largely responsible for 
     causing the Cold War. McGovern explained that ``we not only 
     overreacted'' to the Soviet Union but ``indeed helped 
     trigger'' the Cold War ``by our own post-World War II 
     fears.''[2] He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the 1913 
     Colorado coal strike, and his research would later lead him 
     to demonstrate much greater sympathy for unionized workers 
     than pretty much any other Farm Belt politician.
       McGovern taught briefly at Dakota Wesleyan College before 
     returning home to South Dakota to undertake yet another 
     unlikely and quite daring adventure--to almost single-
     handedly build the state Democratic Party organization. He 
     had to scrounge to stay afloat, sleeping on friendly couches 
     or in his car as he crisscrossed the state, personally 
     recruiting 35,000 new Democrats.[3]
       He then deployed the organization to run for Congress in 
     1956 and later for the U.S. Senate. He lost his 1960 Senate 
     bid (and lost his House seat in the process) but succeeded 
     two years later--serving as the head of the Kennedy 
     administration's Food for Peace program in-between, marking a 
     lifelong commitment to feeding the hungry worldwide, and 
     making valuable friends inside the administration.
       McGovern first came to national prominence toward the end 
     of the 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for the 
     presidency. Following the June 6 assassination of 
     presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, his 
     devastated supporters first tried to convince his younger 
     brother Ted Kennedy to assume the mantle of RFK's peace-and-
     civil-rights-themed campaign. But Ted was in no shape, 
     physically or emotionally, to do so. In one of history's 
     forgotten footnotes, McGovern took up the cause.
       Announcing his candidacy in the Senate caucus room in 
     August 1968, McGovern explained what prompted his decision:
       Vietnam--the most disastrous political and military blunder 
     in our national experience. That war must be ended now--not 
     next year or the year following, but right now. Beyond this, 
     we need to harness the full spiritual and political resources 
     of this nation to put an end to the shameful remnants of 
     racism and poverty that still afflict our land.[4]
       McGovern's goal was to try to reanimate the antiwar passion 
     of the Kennedy crusade with his own brand of simple 
     Midwestern morality. ``I wear no claim to the Kennedy mantle, 
     but I believe deeply in the twin goals for which Robert 
     Kennedy gave his life--an end to the war in Vietnam and a 
     passionate commitment to heal the division in our own 
     society.''[51] Though he was not well known, Robert Kennedy 
     had judged McGovern to be ``the most decent man in the 
     Senate,'' and he was hardly alone in this view.[6]
       Following the disastrous 1968 presidential contest, which 
     saw Richard Nixon elected (beating then-Vice President Hubert 
     Humphrey), McGovern returned to the Senate and became its 
     leading voice on Vietnam. He co-sponsored an amendment with 
     liberal Republican Sen. Mark Hatfield of Oregon to cut off 
     funding for the war by the end of December 1970. McGovern was 
     so committed to the cause that he refinanced his house to pay 
     for airtime on behalf of his bill.
       Taking to the floor of the Senate, McGovern broke all 
     previous protocol and accused ``every senator in this 
     chamber'' of being ``partly responsible for sending 50,000 
     young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of 
     blood,'' he said.[7] It was only his colleagues' fondness for 
     him and their appreciation for his sincere anguish over the 
     war, which inspired this unprecedented attack, that allowed 
     his relationships in the body to survive this serious break 
     with the Senate's tradition of comity and collegiality.
       After failing to move his Senate colleagues, however, 
     McGovern took his arguments to America's universities where 
     antiwar fervor was high among both students and faculty.[8] 
     His traveling and his remaking of the Democratic Party went 
     hand in hand as students and peace activists flocked to his 
     cause. McGovern announced his presidential candidacy in 
     January 1971.
       McGovern's young staff worked until exhaustion pushing 
     their candidate to frontrunner status in the Democratic 
     primaries and eventually to winning the party's 1972 
     presidential nomination. But it was in many respects a 
     pyrrhic victory, as the Democratic party was broken in half, 
     with its more conservative and establishment-oriented members 
     sticking firmly to the ``Anybody but McGovern'' stance--a 
     strategy that had failed to slow the McGovern juggernaut on 
     its way to the Miami convention.
       McGovern's organization, together with the party's new 
     rules that he had helped to draft, changed the nature of the 
     nominating process and were key to his convention victory. 
     While women at the 1968 Democratic National Convention 
     constituted just 13 percent of delegates, they comprised 40 
     percent in 1972.[9] Just as important, old-style political 
     bosses and their minions were successfully kept away. The 
     delegation from Illinois, led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. 
     Daley, was rejected for its dearth of women and younger 
     members and replaced by one led by the Rev. Jesse 
     Jackson.(10) And of the New York delegation, AFL-CIO 
     president George Meany reportedly complained, ``They've got 
     six open fags and only three AFL-CIO representatives!''[11]
       As liberal a candidate as any major party had ever 
     nominated, McGovern gave a magnificent acceptance speech at 
     the 1972 Democratic National Convention, but almost nobody 
     saw it as the chaotic convention could not be brought to 
     order for it to be delivered before 2:45 a.m., long after its 
     television audience had gone to bed. Almost all that was 
     remembered of his speech were the words ``Come home, 
     America,'' which even in the age of declining support for the 
     disastrous Vietnam War would prove a decidedly double-edged 
     sword. The slogan was manipulated by his opponents to imply 
     the unfair ``isolationism'' charge, rather than McGovern's 
     clear intent, which was to prioritize America's problems at 
     home, rather than abroad. [12]
       In a 2004 interview McGovern said he thought ``if the 
     country had heard me for 45 minutes in prime time, it might 
     have changed the outcome of the election. . . . it doesn't 
     mean we would have won, but the first impression would have 
     been a very favorable one.''
       The press, however, was never enamored with McGovern nor 
     the changes his supporters sought to bring to American 
     politics--this despite the widespread belief that Nixon and 
     company were up to no good, especially with regard to that 
     odd break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate 
     complex. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak quoted an 
     anonymous Democratic colleague--later revealed, amazingly,

[[Page 17217]]

     to be the man who ended up (briefly) as McGovern's running 
     mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton--saying McGovern was the candidate 
     of ``acid, amnesty and abortion.''
       That label was repeated endlessly, to the point where 
     America's most influential pundit, The New York Times's James 
     Reston, in his column the Sunday before Election Day, said 
     ``the thought that the American people are going to give Mr. 
     Nixon and his policies and anonymous hucksters and twisters 
     in the White House a landslide popular victory . . . is a 
     little hard to imagine.'' And yet of the 1,054 dailies 
     surveyed by Editor and Publisher, 753, or 71.4 percent, 
     endorsed Nixon; only 56 papers backed McGovern.[13]
       Of course the view of McGovern that permeated the media for 
     decades was exactly wrong. Not only was he no elitist, 
     pacifist isolationist, or hippie, but he was actually more 
     willing to use military force than most of his Senate 
     colleagues, whether Republican or Democrat, under the proper 
     circumstances. In 1978, for example, he called for an 
     international military force to oust the genocidal dictator, 
     Pol Pot, from Cambodia--a move that, had it happened, might 
     have saved millions of innocent lives.
       Clearly, McGovern had the kind of courage that led him to 
     say and do whatever he thought was right, regardless of what 
     it led others to say about him. When he felt that his party 
     was moving too far right in 1984, he risked ridicule again by 
     challenging his party's presidential candidates in the 
     primary season, even suggesting that one of his opponents and 
     the party's eventual nominee Walter Mondale's calls for 
     higher taxes to pay for essentially Republican goals was not 
     the best direction for the Democratic Party to take. His key 
     phrase, ``Don't throw away your conscience,'' was a decidedly 
     politics-free declaration at the time (and ours).
       McGovern was mocked and attacked for this by most pundits, 
     including the ``dean'' of the national press corps, The 
     Washington Post's David Broder. Still McGovern campaigned on 
     distinguishing himself by forcing the rest of the Democratic 
     candidates to direct themselves to a panoply of issues they 
     would have preferred to ignore. By the time he bowed out of 
     the primary race, Broder issued an apology in his syndicated 
     column, which McGovern framed and hung on the wall of his 
     dingy Washington, D.C., campaign office above a Dupont Circle 
     Greek deli.
       McGovern spent the balance of his post-political career 
     working to reduce world hunger. As writer and blogger Rich 
     Yeselson writes in The American Prospect, with ``Robert Dole, 
     a Prairie politician of a different, but also recognizable 
     ideological lineage--he rationalized the Depression era food 
     stamp program, and it became one of the most important low-
     income stabilizers of the American social insurance state.''
       In McGovern's final book, What It Means to Be a Democrat, 
     released in November 2011, he worries about what he calls the 
     ``insidious'' political air of Washington, driven in part by 
     liberals'' inability to expose and defeat the ``extremism'' 
     of the new conservative movement. ``We are the party that 
     believes we can't let the strong kick aside the weak,'' he 
     writes. ``Our party believes that poor children should be as 
     well educated as those from wealthy families. We believe that 
     everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and that 
     everyone should have access to health care.''
       Such unapologetic open-heartedness might not appeal to many 
     pundits but it took more courage, toughness, and patriotism 
     to keep fighting for them for more than seven decades without 
     rest despite the mockery and derision of those deemed to be 
     the ``responsible'' ones.
       I had dinner with McGovern during the 2008 presidential 
     campaign. We discussed our hopes for that election, and he 
     told me that at no time during those years did not he feel 
     himself to be fighting for causes that were, in most 
     politicians' minds, marginal. And neither, I can tell you, 
     did McGovern ever consider dropping those issues and causes 
     and allowing himself a more pleasant and less demanding life.
       A final footnote: The only staffer working in that dingy 
     Greek deli in 1984 was a youngster also named James McGovern 
     (no relation). Thirteen years later, George McGovern stood by 
     a still-pretty-young James as he took the oath as a freshman 
     member of the 105th Congress, representing the 3rd 
     Congressional District in Massachusetts, where he remains 
     today as one of America's most far-sighted, idealistic, and 
     simultaneously, tough-minded representatives--in other words, 
     a genuine ``McGovernite.''


                                Endnotes

       [1] George McGovern, Grassroots: The Autobiography of 
     George McGovern (New York: Random House, 1977), 5.
       [2] Ibid., 41.
       [3] Bruce Miroff, The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern 
     Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party 
     (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 33.
       [4] Quoted in: Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday 
     Rebellions (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), 87-
     88.
       [5] McGovern, Grassroots, 121.
       [6] Quoted in: Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On 
     the Campaign Trail '72 (New York: Warner, 1973), 127.
       [7] Miroff, The Liberals' Moment, 38.
       [8] Ibid., 43.
       [9] Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in 
     American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: DaCapo, 
     2001), 166.
       [10] Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a 
     Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 84.
       [11] Meany is quoted in: Philip A. Klinkner, The Losing 
     Parties: Out-Party National Committees, 1956-1993 (New Haven: 
     Yale University Press, 1994), 106.
       [12] Theodore White, The Making of the President, 1972 (New 
     York: Atheneum, 1973), 196-197.
       [13] James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: 
     Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since 
     1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 177.

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