Mcgovern, George (1922–)

American progressive political leader, Democratic senator and presidential nominee, McGovern was born in 1922 to a Methodist minister and raised in rural South Dakota. He obtained a degree from Dakota Wesleyan University, a Methodist liberal arts college. During World War II he flew 35 missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Italy, receiving a Distinguished Flying Cross medal. After the war, he obtained a Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University and returned to Dakota Wesleyan to teach.

In 1956 and 1958, he was elected to the House of Representatives, and then he lost a bid for the Senate in 1960. President John F. Kennedy named him to head the Food for Peace program, a post he held until South Dakota elected him to the Senate in 1962.

By the late 1960s McGovern was one of the leaders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and one of the most outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, McGovern announced his candidacy for president and attempted to rally the anti-war Democrats. [Page 922]He was unsuccessful, with the nomination going to Hubert Humphrey, but his role in the campaign led the party to appoint him chair of a commission charged with reforming the party's nomination and platform drafting processes. Under his leadership, the Democratic Party emphasized primaries over closed caucuses of party bosses and mandated the selection of women and minorities as convention delegates.

In 1971, McGovern announced his candidacy for president again, emphasizing his commitment to get out of Vietnam. He easily won enough delegates for the nomination, but the liberalized rules meant his people could not control the convention. Numerous floor fights and a vice presidential balloting process that spiraled out of control—over 70 people received votes—were all televised live. Even his acceptance speech, delivered at 3:00 A.M., after the vice presidential balloting was finally completed, was overshadowed by continuing chaos on the convention floor.

McGovern's campaign was doomed from the beginning. When his first vice presidential nominee, Thomas Eagleton, turned out to have received electroshock therapy for depression, McGovern first supported him and then asked him to resign. After a well-publicized search, in which several leading Democrats refused the position, his second choice was R. Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy in-law who had never held elective office.

His main campaign theme was to end the war in Vietnam; this was undercut by highly publicized peace initiatives by President Richard Nixon in the months before the election. The Republicans painted McGovern as a radical leftist, and the convention disaster had led to his portrayal in the media as incompetent. Low-level Republican sabotage efforts against McGovern's campaign may have contributed to his loss (though they did lead to Nixon being forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate scandal), but in truth, the Republicans needed to do little more than allow the McGovern campaign to collapse on its own. On Election Day, Nixon beat McGovern with 60% of the vote, compared to McGovern's 38%, which was, at the time, the second-biggest landslide in history.

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