It was ten years ago this week that former American senator and Ppresidential candidate George McGovern died. McGovern hailed from South Dakota, where his father was a Methodist minister and experienced all the trials and tribulations – from the dust bowl to the Great Depression – that afflicted the American midwest during his childhood.
During World War II he was an air force bomber pilot stationed in Italy and flew a remarkable 35 missions as part of the strategic bombing campaign over enemy territory. Unlike the litany of fake ‘war heroes’ the American left like to trot out (JFK, John Kerry, Harry Truman, Tammy Duckworth etc), George McGovern was a real one.
After the war, he became a history professor and followed his interest in politics by eventually being elected to the US House of Representatives in 1956. His time in the House was as a fairly mainstream liberal Democrat of the time, and a great advocate for farming interests in his state.
After losing a US Senate election in 1960 he was appointed by President Kennedy as “Food for Peace” director in the White House, a job which involved overseeing the distribution of America’s surplus grain and other commodities to various Third World countries as a way of winning hearts and minds.
In 1962 he was elected to the US Senate from South Dakota and began his ‘descent into madness’, becoming increasingly left-wing in his outlook and political ideology. He strongly opposed the Vietnam War (the usual lefty virtue signal) and supported expanding unnecessary welfare programs, with his major focus being throwing money at various ways to reduce hunger.
In 1971 he launched a presidential campaign which nobody took seriously. His policies included an immediate end to the Vietnam war, huge cuts in defence spending, and an oddball idea to give each person in America $1000 from the Treasury. McGovern also, foolishly, began to embrace every left-wing nutter cause and organisation hoping to assist his campaign; it did, but at a huge cost of turning off millions of blue-collar, regular Democrats across the country.
Although he was, of course, the Democrat party candidate against President Nixon in 1972, his extremist agenda, strange policies, and air of incompetence meant he lost by what is still the record popular vote margin of 18 million votes; winning just a single state: Massachusetts. In typical American liberal fashion George McGovern never got over his defeat (implying he seriously expected to win!), and basically blamed the people for making the wrong decision (in his opinion).
In 1980 he lost his US Senate seat, and went on to make a fortune on the “Guest Speaker” circuit before buying a hotel in Connecticut. Within a couple of years, he went bust, losing the fortune he’d made from speaking fees. It was at this point McGovern saw the light. The latent capitalist within him was marvellously decocted when he was actually running a middle-sized business. He famously denounced government intrusion into business matters in a Wall Street Journal article in 1992 – to the delight and amusement of conservatives everywhere.
By all accounts, he was a sincere, well-meaning, nice guy and quite likeable in person. I can only find a single political figure of that period who personally disliked George McGovern.
He was a liberal but not to quite the patronisingly odious extent of most others, and unlike most American liberals McGovern has been genuinely “missed” since his death. Hard to believe it’s been an entire decade.
