Former President George McGovern died Sunday morning at the age of ninety, at his home in Sioux Falls, S.D. A two-term senator from South Dakota, McGovern served as vice-president under Robert Kennedy from 1969 to 1977. After a contentious primary battle, McGovern narrowly lost the presidential election of 1976 to the Republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. He was elected President in 1980, and re-elected in 1984. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, and the American Society of Historians ranked President McGovern ninth in their list of Ten Greatest Presidents in 2004.
McGovern, a war hero who flew 35 missions against Nazi Germany and had won the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II, was severely critical of Reagan’s policies after the 1976 election. The Reagan administration was rocked by controversy, including the resignation and subsequent conviction of Vice-President Richard Nixon for tax fraud and perjury in 1978, and Reagan’s disastrous handling of the Iranian Crisis of 1979. McGovern ran again in 1980, and against all odds was renominated. He chose Idaho Senator Frank Church, a foreign policy expert who was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as his running mate. At the contentious GOP convention, President Reagan chose former congressman George Bush as his running mate. The McGovern-Church ticket defeated Reagan-Bush in a landslide. The American Society of Historians ranked Ronald Reagan as Worst President in History in 2005, narrowly beating out Herbert Hoover. Bob Woodward’s book on McGovern’s 1980 campaign, Comeback, won a Pulitzer prize in 1983.
“He was a giant,” said Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor who served as Secretary of Agriculture in the first McGovern administration. “We will not see his like again.” Toby Zeigler, curator of the George McGovern Presidential Library in Sioux Falls, and Sarah Walker, dean of the George McGovern School of Government at Northwestern University, echoed Carter’s sentiment. “He was
decent man who became a great president,” said an emotional Zeigler. “America was in a dark place during the Reagan years,” Walker noted. “President McGovern made America hopeful again.” Actor Ed Harris, who won an Academy Award for best actor for his portrayal of McGovern in Roland Joffee’s 1989 film adaptation of Comeback, spent several weeks with the former president, researching his role. “It’s hard to play historical figures as people rather than caricatures, but President McGovern had a sort of quiet humanity that made him more approachable. I was honored to be his friend,” the actor stated.
In his later years, the former president remained active with various charities and activist causes, including combating hunger and prison reform. His moving letter in support of parole for his one-time political enemy, Richard Nixon was considered instrumental in Nixon’s early release from prison. McGovern believed that Nixon unfairly bore took the blame for many of the alleged crimes of the Reagan administration. Reagan himself was indicted in 1982, and fled to Argentina, where he died in 1997. According to Bob Woodward’s book, Strange Bedfellows, McGovern secretly helped support Nixon in his later years, as the troubled former politician battled addiction and went in and out of rehab. McGovern even reportedly paid for Nixon’s funeral when the impoverished former vice-president was found dead in a homeless shelter in Santa Monica in 1995.
“Of all my colleagues,” President Robert Kennedy once remarked, “the person who has the most feeling and does things in the most genuine way is George McGovern.”
