McGovern, George

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George McGovern

Born July 19, 1922
Avon, South Dakota

U.S. senator from South Dakota, 1962–1980;
Democratic presidential nominee in 1972

South Dakota Democratic Senator George McGovern was one of the earliest and harshest critics of American military involvement in South Vietnam. His censure of U.S. policy in Vietnam began in early 1965 and remained strong throughout the war. In 1972 McGovern won the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidency. Over the next several months, he vowed to immediately pull out of Vietnam if he defeated President Richard Nixon (see entry) in the general election. But Nixon soundly thrashed his challenger in the November election, winning forty-nine states.

Political beliefs shaped by religion and war

George Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922, in the small farming community of Avon, South Dakota. His parents were Joseph McGovern, a Methodist minister, and Frances (McLean) McGovern; he had three siblings. When he was six years old, George and his family moved to Mitchell, South Dakota, where he spent the remainder of his youth.

McGovern was a shy and studious boy who was deeply influenced by his family's religious convictions. During high school, however, he conquered his shyness and became a leading member of the school debate team. In 1940 he graduated from high school and enrolled in Dakota Wesleyan College, which was located in Mitchell.

In 1943 McGovern married Eleanore Stegeberg, with whom he had five children. A short time later, McGovern received his induction notice to make himself available for military duty. He joined the Army Air Corps, and in February 1944 he was sent to Europe to fight in World War II. Over the next several months he flew thirty-five bombing missions over the war-torn continent. He was an excellent pilot and earned several medals for his performance, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. But McGovern's exposure to the war's terrible violence and destruction had a huge impact on him emotionally. By the time the war ended in 1945, he had developed a deep hatred for war and an interest in political leaders who emphasized messages of peace.

In 1946 McGovern returned to Dakota Wesleyan and earned his bachelor's degree. He then enrolled in Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, in order to pursue a career as a minister. His religious faith remained strong during this time, but he eventually decided that the ministry was not for him. In 1947 he enrolled at Northwestern University, also in Evanston, where he became increasingly involved in liberal politics. He graduated two years later with a master's degree.

Growing interest in politics

In 1949 McGovern returned to Mitchell and joined the faculty of Dakota Wesleyan as a professor of history and political science. During this time, he began to consider a possible career in politics. His liberal political beliefs made the Republican Party unattractive to him, so he allied himself with South Dakota's Democratic Party.

When McGovern first joined the Democrats, the state organization was in terrible shape. Disorganized and ignored by South Dakota's largely conservative population, the party had practically disappeared from public view. But McGovern single-handledly revived the state party over the next few years, and in 1956 he defeated a Republican to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. McGovern's victory made him the first Democrat to represent South Dakota in Congress in twenty years.

After winning reelection in 1958, McGovern set his sights on winning one of South Dakota's U.S. Senate seats. He lost in 1960, but he benefited from the election of John F. Kennedy (see entry) to the presidency that year. McGovern was a close friend and political ally of both the new president and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy (see entry). After assuming office, President Kennedy put McGovern in charge of his administration's Food for Peace Program. McGovern received high praise for his directorship of the program, which worked to provide aid to nations around the world suffering from starvation and malnutrition.

Wins place in the Senate

In 1962 McGovern left Food for Peace to run for the U.S. Senate again. McGovern's political beliefs were more liberal than those of the average South Dakota voter, but his reputation for integrity and hard work lifted him to victory. He defeated Republican nominee Joe Bottum in the fall election, becoming the first Democratic senator from South Dakota since 1936.

McGovern served in the U.S. Senate for the next eighteen years, winning reelection four times. During that time, he came to be regarded as one of the Senate's most liberal members. This reputation developed quite rapidly, mostly because of his early criticism of growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Once a colony of France, Vietnam had won its freedom in 1954 after an eight-year war with the French. But the country had been divided into two sections by the 1954 Geneva peace agreement. North Vietnam was headed by a Communist government under revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh (see entry). South Vietnam, meanwhile, was led by a U.S.-supported government under President Ngo Dinh Diem (see entry).

The Geneva agreement provided for nationwide free elections to be held in 1956 so that the two sections of Vietnam could be united under one government. But U.S. and South Vietnamese officials refused to hold the elections because they believed that the results would give the Communists control over the entire country. When the South refused to hold elections, Communist guerrillas known as Viet Cong took up arms against Diem's government. The United States responded by sending money, weapons, and advisors to aid in South Vietnam's defense. By 1963, when McGovern assumed his Senate seat, this assistance was expanding at a very rapid rate.

Leading Senate critic of the Vietnam War

In 1964 McGovern reluctantly voted in support of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave President Lyndon Johnson (see entry) broad freedom to increase American military involvement in Vietnam. But in 1965, when Johnson began sending U.S. ground troops to fight in the conflict, McGovern emerged as a vocal critic of the administration's Vietnam policies.

The South Dakota senator charged that the United States should not be helping South Vietnam's government because of its history of repression (the denial of basic rights) and violence toward its own people. McGovern also argued that the conflict in Vietnam was a civil war that should be settled by its own people. Finally, he warned that U.S. involvement in the conflict would cost billions of dollars and thousands of American lives, with no guarantee of victory. "We are being pulled step by step into a jungle quicksand that may claim our sons and that may claim sons of Asia for years to come," McGovern declared in an April 1967 Senate speech. "Freedom is worth fighting for, but it cannot be achieved through an alliance with unpopular forces abroad that deny freedom."

In 1968 McGovern entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after the leading candidate—and his good friend—Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California. Democratic voters ignored his late entry into the race, turning instead to Hubert Humphrey, who had been vice president in the Johnson administration. But Humphrey was handily beaten by Republican nominee Richard Nixon, who told voters he had a secret plan to get American out of Vietnam with its pride intact.

McGovern's and Nixon's Vietnam policies

After assuming office in January 1969, Nixon launched a gradual withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. But he also expanded U.S. military operations into the neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos and ordered heavy bombing of North Vietnam. The president's policies infuriated McGovern, who called the war "a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation."

In 1970 McGovern and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon introduced a Senate bill calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from South Vietnam by the end of the year. McGovern argued passionately for the bill. "Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave, and in one sense this chamber literally reeks of blood," he said in a September 1 speech in the Senate chambers. "Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed [military hospital] and all across the land—young boys without legs, without arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes. If we don't end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the executive [president] carry the burden that the constitution places on us." But the bill went down in defeat.

In 1972 McGovern won the Democratic nomination for the presidency. The candidate took liberal positions on a wide range of social and economic issues. But his major emphasis was on ending the war in Vietnam. "In 1968, Americans voted to bring our sons home from Vietnam in peace—and since then, 20,000 have come home in coffins," McGovern stated in accepting his party's nomination. "I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. As one whose heart has ached for ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt the senseless bombing of Indochina on Inauguration Day [the day that the president is sworn into office] . . . . Within ninety days of my inauguration every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and back home in America where they belong."

Nixon defeats McGovern for the presidency

McGovern hoped that the American public's great weariness with the Vietnam War would help lift him to victory over President Nixon in the fall 1972 elections. But McGovern's campaign encountered numerous problems. He was forced to replace vice-presidential nominee Tom Eagleton with Sargent Shriver after reporters learned that Eagleton had a history of mental depression. Several of McGovern's economic proposals were widely ridiculed, and his liberal reputation turned off large groups of voters. And most importantly, a majority of Americans decided that Nixon was keeping his promise to gradually get America out of Vietnam. This belief doomed McGovern, who based much of his campaign on the war.

Nixon ended up defeating McGovern by one of the largest margins in American history. Nixon won forty-nine states (including McGovern's home state of South Dakota) and 61 percent of the popular vote. McGovern won only 38 percent of the vote and carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

After his defeat, McGovern returned to the U.S. Senate. In 1974 he managed to turn back a challenge from Republican candidate Leo Thorsness—a former prisoner of war in Vietnam—and keep his seat. He spent the next six years championing a variety of liberal causes, including programs to combat poverty and hunger in America and elsewhere. In 1980, though, South Dakota's conservative population finally voted McGovern out of office, replacing him with Republican Jim Abdnor.

Fighter for social causes

In 1984 McGovern made a final bid for the presidency. But he failed to generate any meaningful support for his campaign, and he withdrew from the race in March. McGovern remained retired from political office after that, but he continued to work on behalf of social causes in which he believed.

In 1994 McGovern's daughter Terry lost a long battle with alcoholism. She froze to death one winter night after drinking herself into unconsciousness. This tragedy devastated McGovern and his family, who had spent years trying to help Terry triumph over her dependency. The family responded to her death by establishing the McGovern Family Foundation, an organization dedicated to helping people with alcoholism. In 1996 McGovern published a critically acclaimed memoir called Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism.

McGovern also maintained his lifelong activism on behalf of poor and hungry people worldwide during the 1990s. In 1998 he was named the United States' Permanent Representative to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), a United Nations organization that works to combat world poverty and hunger.