New York Times: The Moral Clarity of George McGovern

George McGovern

All Progress In Human History Is Due To Liberalism

http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/mcgovern.htm

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Wikipedia's entry on this World War II bomber pilot.

"McGovern grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota, where he was a renowned debater. He 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 awarded him was a Distinguished Flying Cross for making a hazardous emergency landing of his damaged plane and saving his crew."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_mcgovern 

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The Moral Clarity of George McGovern

By BRUCE MIROFF

Published: October 21, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/opinion/the-moral-clarity-of-george-mcgovern.html?_r=0

RelatedEVERYBODY noticed George S. McGovern’s decency. Robert F. Kennedy called him “the most decent man in the Senate.” But during the 1972 presidential campaign, political pundits assumed that a man who was that nice could not possibly be the strong leader Americans required. Few predicted that he would still be standing after the early primaries.

• George McGovern | 1922-2012: Dashed Presidential Hopes, but a Life Devoted to Liberalism(October 22, 2012)

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• Op-Classic: George McGovern, Opinionated (October 22, 2012)

Mr. McGovern, who died early Sunday at the age of 90, was a decent man, but beneath a mild exterior he was ambitious, tough and brave. Throughout his life he repeatedly defied long odds.

Conquering a fear of flying, Mr. McGovern piloted 35 bombing missions over German targets during World War II, narrowly escaping death several times. Rebuilding a moribund Democratic Party in conservative, deeply Republican South Dakota, he single-handedly organized a political base that propelled him to two terms in the House and three in the Senate. Challenging a president he admired, one who had appointed him to direct the Food for Peace program, he was among the first in the Senate to criticize John F. Kennedy’s policies toward Vietnam and Cuba.

Pegged by oddsmakers at the opening of the 1972 campaign season as a 200-to-1 underdog in the Democratic presidential contest, he headed an extraordinary insurgency that rolled past establishment figures like Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to seize the party’s nomination. His string ran out — and his campaign crashed — only when he faced a more masterly and ruthless adversary in President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. McGovern’s 1972 campaign is indelibly associated with the mass movements of the late 1960s — the antiwar movement above all, but also feminism and the nascent movement for gay liberation. As a son of a Methodist minister, growing up in small prairie towns during the Depression, he was an unlikely spokesman for the political and cultural aspirations of an emerging “counterculture.” Yet its activists felt an affinity for this “square” South Dakotan. Mr. McGovern’s experience in World War II left him with an enduring horror of war — and outrage at the armchair warriors who’d sent the young to die in it. His sense of fairness and tolerance made him open to new cultural forces alien to his upbringing, even when some of their issues — especially abortion — left him uncomfortable.

But like other presidential candidates, then and now, Mr. McGovern was willing to compromise several of his positions once his campaign ran into difficulties. He was willing to court power brokers, like Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, whom his supporters detested.

Yet unlike most presidential candidates since 1972, Mr. McGovern had a moral streak that he refused to suppress regardless of the cost to his ambition. During a remarkable campaign speech at fundamentalist Wheaton College in Illinois, Mr. McGovern called upon his audience to grieve not only for American casualties in Vietnam but also for the Vietnamese lives lost from American military actions. Indifference to Vietnamese deaths troubled him, so he insisted that Americans confront their own responsibility for the consequences of war and “change those things in our character which turned us astray, away from the truth that the people of Vietnam are, like us, children of God.” Words like these led critics to castigate Mr. McGovern as a moralistic scold who was angry at his own country.

Mr. McGovern’s moral vision was undeniably impolitic in 1972, contributing to the magnitude of his landslide defeat at Nixon’s hands. He remained saddened in later years that so many Americans could neither recognize a pained American conscience nor accept a summons to live by their nation’s ancestral ideals. His 1972 campaign speeches, he told me in an interview, did not express anger toward America; on the contrary, he said, “I was trying to underscore my love for the country.”

Losers in landslides seldom capture the imagination of later generations. Such was not Mr. McGovern’s fate: conservatives continued to use him as a symbol for the follies of liberalism, while to liberals he was a living reminder of the aspirations for peace and social justice forged in the ’60s. Especially in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the chief legacy of the McGovern campaign was a new sensibility toward America’s role in the world, reflected in the nuclear freeze movement and opposition to American interventions in Central America in the 1980s and Iraq in 1991 and in the years before and after the 2003 invasion.

In the four decades after his defeat, Mr. McGovern continued to campaign for a less aggressive American foreign policy while devoting many of his efforts to the cause of combating world hunger, a passion of his that was first inspired at Food for Peace, part of the United States Agency for International Development.

The wounds of 1972 never fully healed, but they were soothed by the admiring letters from former supporters that never stopped coming. What supporters most remembered about him was the moral clarity of his character and vision. This clarity may have cost him in the 1972 election, but it was a principal source of the abiding affection that so many Americans — not all of them liberals — feel for George McGovern.

Bruce Miroff, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany, is the author of “The Liberals’ Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party.”