George McGovern has passed away at the age of ninety. One of my earliest political memories is of one of my older brothers wearing a McGovern-Shriver shirt. I learned about McGovern, initially, through the jaded and drug-addled writing of Hunter S. Thompson who was a great admirer. Nothing like a good first impression.
Maybe some of the members here who were older than three in 1972 can chime in and provide Sen. McGovern with a good eulogy.
I was 20 in 1972, in college, and not happy about the Vietnam war. I didn’t work for McGovern or anything. It was pretty obvious for most of the campaign that he was going to lose, and lose badly. The Vietnam was was quite divisive in that anyone under 30 hated it and thought that it was dreadful and all the WWII vets and older folks thought that it was patriotic to support. Of course, both generalizations had exceptions.
McGovern lost, and went home to become a sage. He lost 40 years ago. 40 years ago! Many readers were not alive then. Before Reagan, Bush 41 was still the CIA director (and still the guy with the best resume in Washington DC), Bush 43 was about my age.
I was just talking to Matt McGovern on Fri. Matt is George’s grandson, and Matt is running for Public Utilities Committee. Matt said that George was unresponsive, comatose. Personally, I’m glad he didn’t linger in that state. However, I did say that George’s last public act was the recitation of “A Lincoln Portrait” (music by Copland, words by Carl Sandburg). George wrote a biography of Lincoln, and certainly Lincoln is the greatest man ever to have occupied the office.
That is a fitting way to go out, isn’t it?
The following was never true:
Plenty of under thirty year old men that supported the war in 1968 and 1972 (a much easier position to take by that time when the draft wasn’t going to haul their asses to the battlefield).
It was 2/28/68 when Walter Cronkite told the country the way it was. After which LBJ withdrew from running for re-election. After which Nixon sold the snake oil of a “secret plan” to end the war while his co-conspirator was undermining the Peace Talks to prevent an October Surprise ending the war and likely electing HHH.
I’m about your age but think its important people know that McGovern’s life was the true embodiment of patriotism. He risked life and limb to to fly over 25 missions in World War Two. Yet later in draft life draft dodgers such as Newt McGovern would derisively describe political opponents as “McGovern liberals.”
McGovern was also a true patriot who dissented about the Vietnam war long before it was cool. The man was a true statesmen.
Betty Cracker over ar Rumproast posted this link to an amazing story about McGovern in the war. Brought tears to my eyes.
http://liverputty.blogspot.com/2008/08/george-mcgovern-as-b-24-pilot.html
Thanks for the link. What a story!
amazing and beautiful account, thanks for linking
Good on you to bring the story back over, I had just read it over there and it does bring tears, for all the right reasons.
I still have my McGovern campaign button. At the time, it felt like a clear choice between good/peace and evil/war. There was George, an obviously kind, calm, intelligent man. And there was Tricky Dick who later proved beyond doubt he was everything a peace-loving hippie should–to use Thompson’s favorite word combination–fear and loathe.
It was the first election that confronted me with American voters’ inclination to go for bluster over brains. Every attribute that made McGovern admirable was portrayed as a sign of weakness. That election overlaid on the present one makes me afraid.
Early voting has started here and I think I’ll go to the polls tomorrow. While I blacken the Democratic choices on my voting form I’m going to think:
I’m still voting for you, George McGovern, rest in peace, some of us haven’t lost our idealism and hope no matter how many times we’ve been defeated.
It’s not fair to call it “bluster over brains”. That is hindsight.
In 1972, the WWII generation was between 48-60. They were adults at the height of their strength and economic power. They remembered their own sacrifice during WWII, and could not understand why the youth like me were not enthused about the war.
It was pretty clear to me, although it was hard to make the argument that self-determination for the Vietnamese was better than externally-imposed democracy. The US had just finished the Korean debacle, and men just under WWII age did not want to lose another war. So those of us not interested in getting our butts shot off in ‘Nam were coming up with arguments, mostly hard to support, as to why the war was bad.
Into this context, we had McGovern. McGovern’s war record was beyond reproach, and no one ever criticized him for that. But he was representing the side of “weakness”.
That election and the ’68 election were the point at which socially conservative working class voters were severed from the Democratic Party. McGovern and his supporters also engineered changes in the primary process. Thus, the current system of primaries was just being instituted. That means that the previous power structure was displaced by McGovern’s younger people, plus we lost the “silent majority” voters. Between those two and the Eagleton disaster, he lost very badly, not taking SD in his bid.
Unfair to whom? I am not applying hindsight. I think you are confusing the issues in ’68 with those in ’72. By ’72, even Nixon was promising to end the war but he LIED when he said he could do it victoriously. Bluster was rampant. Democrats were “crybabies” (Muskie), “crazy” (Eagleton)and the ever-popular “un-American pinko commies”. We were soft-spoken and “weak” and the shouting demagogue was “strong”.
The majority didn’t listen to fully-supported arguments. The truth about Vietnam was a reality on the ground upheld by the historical facts in Korea. No, voters fell for the vain promise of victory and American supremacy.
It’s absolutely fair, and it’s far from hindsight. “Bluster” (using ad hominem attacks, dog-whistle rhetoric, fear-mongering, distortions, and outright lies, etc.) in lieu of “brains” (or what we might call intelligent and reasoned debate and discourse) isn’t some shiny new object that Rove and the right-wing discovered and used in the most recent presidential elections. Having been active in the anti-Vietnam war, civil rights, and environmental movements since I was in high-school (and having campaigned for RFK and McGovern), I’m more than familiar with the quantity and quality of “bluster” that has been hurled in the direction of liberals in general and me in particular.
Amen.
Looking back, it was a strange time. We would do “duck and cover” drills occasionally, and sang “The Ballad of the Green Beret” in choir class. It seemed natural then – the choices were obvious.
My first major exposure to politics came in the ’72 campaign. Not really knowing much of anything in detail, I had the impression that I should support Nixon, but the Viet Nam (as it was often spelled then) War filled me with dread. Every night it was on the news, and it was horrible, but there seemed to be no end in sight. Why couldn’t we win? Why was it taking so long? Was it going to drag on another 10 years? Was I going to be drafted too? Was it going to expand into a world war as the “dominoes” fell one by one?
In the early fall of ’72 in my social studies class, the teacher asked some of us which candidates we supported. She divided us into two debate teams and we worked a week or so to come up with arguments as if our job was to win for the other candidate. That is, Nixon supporters were to argue that McGovern was the better candidate and vice-versa.
It was a learning experience for all of us. It taught me the importance of not blindly accepting the reporting on politics, the need to read and study the issues on my own, and the need to be willing to take “unpopular” positions.
George was a good man. RIP.
Cheers,
Scott.
My strongest memory of McGovern is watching the 72 convention and seeing him come out and talk to the antiwar protesters on the street. He was a good and generous man.
Actually in 1972 a lot of the antiwar protesters were inside the convention hall — as official state delegates for McGovern. The dove wing held a majority at that convention.
I’m pretty sure though that in 1968 at Chicago McG went outside to speak to protesters. Not sure that Gene McCarthy did, but McG very likely. He had entered the nomination race late, mostly to pick up the fallen banner of RFK, the candidate who like McG stood for both peace and economic justice.
1968 was RFK, McCarthy and Humphrey, Chicago Convention; McGovern running in 1972 against Nixon as incumbent
RFK was killed in June, 2.5 months before the Chicago convo. McGovern agreed to step up and represent the disaffected Kennedy forces. So it was Humphrey, McCarthy and then McGovern vying for the nom, though for sure McG’s modest campaign was very last minute and had no illusions about winning that year.
Didn’t realize that. Very interesting hearing your account on both conventions.
RFK was assassinated before the 1968 Chicago convention. McGovern DID belatedly (less than two weeks before the convention) toss his hat into the ring for the 1968 Democratic nomination, and a portion of former RFK delegates threw their support to him in lieu of Humphrey, as McGovern’s personal antipathy to the Vietnam war was much more in line with RFK. However, the party power-brokers were overwhelmingly in favor of Humphrey, and neither McCarthy (who came in second on the delegate count) nor McGovern stood a chance.
sorry, I see you meant at 1968; I misread your comment – still early morning for me.
It was 1972 in Miami. I realize the party realignment had occurred, and a lot had changed inside the convention hall, nonetheless there were disaffected antiwar protesters outside and McGovern came out and spoke to them.
I was of voting age in 72 and living in Massachusetts, and was always proud to have been among the dissenters who didn’t buy Nixon’s snake oil. Those years from 68 to 74 were politically eye-opening, in both good and bad ways. Though it was satisfying to finally see Nixon get his comeuppance with Watergate, and to have an affirmation that our system might work as planned, it was deeply disheartening to see the willingness of the country to believe one empty promise after another (secret plan to win the war? gimme a break), and also to see the basic bloodthirstiness of the country. The older generation’s support of the war stemmed not just from a certain notion of patriotism combined with intense anti-communism, there was also this widespread fallacy of sunk costs — that because we’d thrown away so many lives in Vietnam we had to continue to do so in order to “justify” those deaths. It was like Carthaginians sacrificing their young to propitiate their gods. It was rather chilling to be a young person in those days.
I was also in Massachusetts in 1972, stationed at Fort Devens. I had been #1 in Nixon’s draft lottery. It was strange, being one of the few McGovern supporters there. I was an island in an island of Nixon supporters in a state that voted for McGovern, another island.
After 1968 I was so proud that the Dems nominated McGovern. And while history has vindicated him, nevertheless, in 1972 it was a bitter pill to swallow.
I was born after McGovern’s run for President, so I don’t have any gauzy memories of him from the good old days.
The only thing George McGovern did in national politics in my life was to go to work with an anti-labor group to kill the Employee Free Choice Act.
That group bought air time during the 2008 presidential debates for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afjp4Cx-3W0
1972 was my first vote, the law having changed thx to people like Sen Birch Bayh the year before, and voting McGovern was a no brainer vs the still Tricky Dick Nixon. His was also the first campaign I worked for.
So many of us young idealists then convinced ourselves that surely McG’s appeal to decency and what was morally right would resonate with the public — certainly after 7 years of war and as against the very unappealing figure of the dark Nixon.
And when we heard the media accounts of the large crowds McG was drawing for his stump speeches across the country, we thought Well it took some time but people are finally coming to their senses and the polls are just wrong.
Wow were we wrong, young, naive and wrong.
He wasn’t a saint and he made his share of political mistakes–blunders really in the general election of 72. He should have joined Sens Gruening and Morse in voting No on Lyndon’s blank check TonkinGulf resolution in 1964. He should have courageously offered to read from the senate floort he Pentagon Papers that Dan Ellsberg showed him privately in 1971. He probably should have stood by Eagleton and made a defense of his VP a cause celebre while challenging Nixon to reveal his own psychiatric record and perhaps his heavy drinking habits.
Though all that probably wouldn’t have been enough. The Dems were divided between the dove wing and the hawks, the old LBJ followers like John Connally and Lyndon himself who gave George only the most tepid endorsement possible, refusing to appear publicly with him when McG went calling at the Ranch.
Big Labor union leaders were either hawks on the war or were turned off by McG’s social policies. Mayor Daley, a dove on the war actually, didn’t care for the way the McG convention rules took away his clout with his state’s delegation.
Prominent RW Ds started up a well funded and pubbed group called Democrats for Nixon. Longtime Dem entertainer Sammy Davis Jr made a famous and famously awkward appearance on stage with Nixon. Sinatra also went Nixon.
Nixon was determined not to lose, pulling out all the stops including the ones involving illegal campaign activity. McGovern was determined to be right, to make the war the primary basis for his campaign.
No contest. Even without the several major Dem blunders at their convention Nixon was going to prevail that year against that opponent.
Only probably Ed Muskie stood a chance of winning. The Muskie from 1968 that is, not the one in 72 who ran a rather stodgy, uninspiring campaign that got sabotaged by Nixon operatives.
Important not to forget that establishment factions of the Democratic Party were instrumental in Nixon’s landslide. And they’ve been kicking the liberal/progressive wing of the party under the bus ever since.
I was in the Marines.
I registered Republican so I could vote in the primaries for Pete McClosky. It was the one and only time I voted for a Republican.
I re-registered Democrat and voted for McGovern. I took more than a little flack in the barracks for that. I remember him as someone who wanted to do good. So did I.
May we have their patience and trust. We must carry on with the same energy to continue life’s hard work toward the ideas and ideals of true Democracy as our elder Progressives. The greatest generation must not be the last American patriots.
It was the so-called “greatest generation” along with their children born during the depression and WWII that elected Nixon.
Growing up in Washington, DC, I protested the Vietnam war outside the Pentagon and the Justice Department as a young teen and then, at 18, volunteered for McGovern at the national campaign headquarters. He was a very, very fine man, if no match as a politician for the ruthless Richard Nixon.
As a college freshman in the weeks before the election in November, I did a documentary on McGovern’s doomed campaign entitled “What went wrong?”. Working with a fellow student who was also a Washington native, we managed to interview an array of interesting people, including among others the campaign managers Frank Manckiewicz and Gary Hart, the Washington Post cartoonist Herblock, Ben Bradlee, the Post’s managing editor, and the satirist Art Buchwald. A main focus was why wasn’t Watergate more of an issue, given that by then it was obvious what a shocking abuse of power it was? I’d like to think we’ve learned something as a country since then, but given the disgraceful and aggressively vapid campaign Mitt Romney and Karl Rove are running this time, with the un-American values Romney so clearly stands for, and an election that may end up being close enough to steal, we are perhaps in an even more dangerous place.
Nixon wasn’t a better politician. He was simply a crook and liar. Crooks and liars are hard to pin down in a population as large as the US. Especially when the prevailing political moods are running with the liars.
Remember, the “center” of the country was consumed with negative interest in hippies, bra-burning, draft-card burning. The manufacturing sector was scared of losing the union jobs that went with the war production. Timber interests were becoming uncomfortable with the Sierra League and environmental activisim was just beginning … and being laughed at.
We were in the throes of losing a war. The backlash was beginning. Walter Chronkite had already declared the end and the war mongers were circling the wagons.
Nixon didn’t beat McGovern. The American War Establishment beat McGovern.
A crook and a liar is a “better politician” than an honest man, DerFarm. That is what politics is really about. And a talented crook and liar is a better politician than a less talented one. Add to that set of ideas the following-a large group of crooks and liars that has more money than another large group of crooks and liars can often win a political campaign no matter whether their frontman crook and liar is not as talented as the the other party’s frontman crook and liar. Caveat Obama.
You also write:
The American War Establishment…the system that I call the PermaGov, the massive corporate interests of all stripes…owns the media, and Nixon was perhaps the first successful media-fixed American politician. (Helped of course by a previous series of assassinations.) It was just that media-produced “negative interest” that ended the youth-propelled change at that time, and later on the same media took Nixon down when he began to displease the corporations. They feared China’s eventual industrial rise…rightfully so, as it appears now…and Nixon opened up the floodgates with his attempts at rapprochement.
McGovern? A good, honest man. Luckily for him he never had much in the way of charisma or he never would have made it to 90.
Later…
AG
Re Watergate’s lack of influence, it was only a few major media outlets/papers covering it. Their stories weren’t often picked up or prominently run in smaller papers in the noncoastal areas. And the stories themselves often weren’t reported in ways that the average voter could understand.
Political/Nixon admin pressure: I think it was Chuck Colson, Nixon’s reliable and ruthless nutcutter, who phoned CBS CEO Bill Paley to get the network to downplay its Watergate coverage. Cronkite had just done a major 15-min piece on his nightly newscast on the scandal in October, and was planning a follow up of the same length. But Bill Salant, president of the news division, intervened and chopped down the next installment to a very brief and ineffective 6 min. And that was pretty much the way it went, not enough coverage in enough places with enough explanation of what it all meant.
They wanted Nixon out, but they wanted McGovern out even more.
AG
The insistent patriotism for America that keep us in that doomed war of Viet Nam blinded people to the fact that an American President and his minions could be corrupt for self-serving reasons. As with the Romneys of our culture, laws can be broken but not for citizens in the civil disobedience of the indigenous civi rights and anti-war movements.
Patriotism must not fall into ethnocentrism and people of any county must understand their patriotism is for the goodness of a culture not its selfish exceptionalism.
If Americans were truly exceptional, McGovern would have won in a landslide. We would have moved beyond those that sow the seeds of divisiveness through the various forms of bigotry for their personal gain and moved towards completing the promise of the New Deal social/economic compact.
Instead the battles from 1932–1974 are waged over and over again. With each battle the good loses more to the evil. 2012 and women are back to fighting for funding for access to contraception and abortion. (Moderate Republicans of yore, supported both — not out of empathy for women but as a purely practical economic issue.) War is now so permanent that there are few alive that can remember a time when the country wasn’t engaged in hot and/or cold ones, and every four years we get two guys trading arguments as to which would be the better steward of the US war machine.
1972 — my first national election. My first (and only) opportunity to vote both FOR good and AGAINST evil. What the hell is so “idealistic” about for good and against evil?
Like 1932, the 1972 election was important. Would be defining for decades. Apparently the national voting IQ dropped forty points in those forty years.
From Karl Grossman in McGovern Was Prescient About America:
And there wouldn’t have been a that terrible 9/11/93 in Chile with the US assistance to protect ITT.
You have an astonishingly unclear understanding of actual politics.
Who doesn’t?
Interesting that you chose to attack me personally instead of challenging what I stated.
I cannot challenge your statements. There is so much of confusion there that it’s impossible to actually even start.
You ever run for any office?
You ask for a discussion of issues.
You compare 1932 and 1972. There is nothing comparable about them. The two elections were as alike as feathers and hippo sperm. 1932: in the depths of a depression before WWII. 1972: after WWII, Korea, during Vietnam, in a period of pretty good economics.
What is comparable about them? I cannot see a single thing. And furthermore, 1932 FDR was not running as a progressive champion. SS, court packing, NRA, every thing was in front of him. Abortion was not an issue, nor was contraception. 5% of women worked outside the house, maybe. Not a single issue in 1972 came up in 1932 that I can think of. 1924, 1928, 1932 – those are of a piece socially. 1932, 1936 – social and cultural similarities.
In ’72 I was still living in Canada and had a Canadian’s sensibility: we hated Nixon and Kissenger and we wanted the war over. So we were hoping against all odds for a McGovern victory.Thanks to the ratfuckers, the southern strategy and all the other lovely tricks in tricky dick’s bag it didn’t work out. That’s when I started getting cynical about American politics I think.
I worked long and hard for the McGovern presidential campaign in 1971 and 1972, and one of my prized possessions is a letter from then Senator McGovern thanking me for becoming part of his campaign. He was a good and great man, and I’ve never regretted all the time and effort I spent on his campaign.
I’m the youngest poster here I think, so I wasn’t even born until the last year of the Reagan presidency. So I obviously don’t have any memories of George McGovern. This is all I’ve really got:
Great thread, all. Thanks for the memories. Poignant that the last unabashedly liberal Democratic presidential nominee should pass in the final moments of a heated presidential campaign, in which American liberalism hang in the balance. History can be amazingly serendiptous like that.
1972 was my first election and I volunteered for the McGovern campaign while a college student at a southern university. The Nixon student campaigners would frequenly come over to our table and laugh about the fact that very few students were congregating at our table, as opposed to their table. Does this bad behavior look familiar? McGovern lost badly and I was somewhat devastated. Since then, there have been many presidental Democratic losses; however, I have never given up hope that progressivism will return to our country. It will just look somewhat different from what I envisioned in l972.
My husband’s first memory of McGovern is from when he was about 6. I was fortunate to meet him a few years ago. Here is what my husband wrote today:
http://fbihistorian.org/
Remembering George McGovern
I was probably six or seven years old. It was a bright, warm fall day and the men around me were all dressed similarly in dark suits with white shirts and loosened ties. I recall wandering around aimlessly that day in the backyard of the SDSU president’s house on Medary Avenue in Brookings as the dignitaries mingled. I must have wandered a little too far because I remember hearing my Dad calling me to come back. I turned and ran in his direction and hugged my dad’s leg. I heard laughter and looked up. Wrong guy. I had latched myself to the leg of South Dakota Gov. Richard Kneip. I looked up and saw Gov. Kneip laughing. I quickly let go and ran over to grasp the next set of legs. Wrong guy, again. This time I looked up and looking down at me was a man I had seen in television, Sen. George McGovern. McGovern reached down and I recall him saying something like, “Hello, young man,” and shaking my hand before I escaped and found my Dad.
I was lucky enough to get to know Sen. McGovern a little over the years. I found it remarkable that every time I spoke to him, he remembered me. Later, I interviewed him several times as a journalist. One of those times, I reminded him of how we first met two decades earlier. He laughed and said while he didn’t recall the meeting, it was certainly a good story. He also said he admired my Dad. That was something he repeated every single time I spoke to him.
I last saw Sen. McGovern a few years ago at an event honoring my journalism mentor, retiring Argus Leader reporter and editor David Kranz. At that event I was able to introduce McGovern to my wife, a meeting she now treasures. It had been more than a decade since I had seen him, but McGovern, then in his late 80s, still remembered me and asked about my Dad.
It is hard to imagine now that anyone as gracious and caring as George McGovern could ever rise to the pinnacle of national politics. He was truly a gentleman and a statesman. His passing this morning has made me think about the debased state of U.S. politics. McGovern was that rare politician tough enough to accrue power while maintaining his identity and acting upon his core beliefs rather than in his own political interest. He would never be taken seriously by today’s national media which mistakes acrimony for seriousness.
I am glad I had a chance to meet George McGovern four decades ago, and I consider myself very lucky to have had a chance over the years to spend a little time with him. He was a great man and a true gentleman.
Most 6-7 YOs do not grab legs. That is more 3 or so.
This memory thing is what distinguishes a great politician. Last sat, I was at the SD Symphony to listen to George do “A Lincoln Portrait”. I saw Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, and she said that she read my email to her some 8 months back (I told her that if she wanted to run for House from SD, she needed to embrace Obamacare).
Not sure if you are trying to say that he couldn’t have been that age, but Kneip was governor from 71 – 78 and my husband was 6/7 in 1971, so there you go. Kind of an odd thing to comment on, actually.
I checked with my Dad and it could have been a year or two earlier, when Kneip was a legislator, before he was governor.
Of course “I was a clingy 6-year-old” is a pretty marginal point here.
Sen. McGovern was gracious and kind to me from the first moment I met him until 40-some years later when he met my wife (conglomernation). The quality of the man came through, particularly in a small state like South Dakota where we used to have the opportunity to actually meet and get to know our political leaders. The reason so many lifelong South Dakotans are so personally moved by Sen. McGovern’s death is that we felt like we knew him personally. He was like a member of the family in that you might not see him for 20 years, but he made you comfortable enough to pick things up right where you left them.
This was a special man and whether my first meeting was at age five or seven, I’m very glad I had the chance to know him a little bit.
Where in SD are you at, Matthew?
In 1972 I was 12 and went to a McGovern rally in Princeton at a massive estate that at the time was vacant because it was too big to sell. In Reagan’s America it became the home of the the head of Godiva Chocolate. In 1972 it was the perfect place for a rally of several hundred people.
I, and a lot of people brought white T shirts which we silk screened with the McGovern “peace dove” logo. I proudly wore mine for years until it disintergrated. It was my anti Nixon statement through the Watergate years and beyond.
Vietnam had been going on my whole life. I expected that my older brother and then I would have to deal soon with the draft thing. My family had been for McCarthy and against the war in ’68. McGovern seemed like a critical and perhaps last chance to end the war, at least in my mind.
My older brother played stand up bass in a bluegrass band for that rally. Abandoned mansions, homemade campaign shirts and high school blue grass bands… Politics have changed.
Wow. Things really have changed. Now campaigns go on for years and spend enormous amounts of the Billionaires’ money. Fortunes are made in the industries of fundraising, ad-buying, broadcasting, public relations and campaign consulting. Not to mention all the money spent on campaign swag.
I wonder if it would affect GDP growth significantly if we were to somehow enact meaningful fund raising and spending controls on political campaigns or even limit their duration. It has become a cycle in the economy that we expect to increase and lengthen each time.
When cigarette advertising was banned from television, some wondered if there would be another industry able to make up for the lost advertising revenue to the television industry. Would TV suck if they lost all the tobacco money?
Could be an interesting study.
I had just graduated from high school in June of 72, registered to vote in the spring as soon as I had turned 18. I was carrying my draft card when I went to the poles to vote McGovern. I still remember that Kent State, RFK, riots in the cities and the conventions of 68 and 72 were fresh memories. McGovern had made an appearance at a local shopping center (outdoors, this was before indoor malls were the rage) before the elections and I remember standing in the crowd on a hot autumn day to see him speak. How different would this nation be if he had defeated Nixon that year. RIP George, you were truly a good man.
I will not pretend to be eloquent enough to write a eulogy for Sen. McGovern, but I am proud to say that the ’72 election was the first in which I was eligible to vote, and I eagerly pulled the lever for Sen. McGovern. Had he prevailed, I believe we would find ourselves and the world in a much better and more equitable place.