George McGovern

McGovern grew up the son of a Methodist minister in Avon, South Dakota, and married his college sweetheart, Eleanor Stegeberg, in October 1943 before shipping out to fly B-24 Liberators over German-occupied Europe. Based in Italy with the 455th Bombardment Group, he flew 35 combat missions against oil refineries and rail yards. On December 20, 1944, flak tore into his plane over Czechoslovakia and he put it down on the tiny Adriatic island of Vis, saving his crew and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came home a first lieutenant, finished a history degree at Dakota Wesleyan, then took a doctorate at Northwestern with a dissertation on the 1913 Colorado coal strike — miners against Rockefeller money — before returning to Dakota Wesleyan to teach.

McGovern went to Washington first as Kennedy's director of Food for Peace, then spent eighteen years in the Senate becoming its earliest and most persistent voice against the Vietnam War, a war he had actually voted to escalate in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a vote he called his most bitterly regretted. He co-sponsored an amendment to force full withdrawal by a fixed date, twice, and lost both times. His 1969 commission rewrote how Democrats picked presidential nominees, handing the choice to primary voters instead of party bosses, and he won the nomination it was built for in 1972 — then lost 49 of 50 states to Richard Nixon after his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, was forced off the ticket over concealed psychiatric treatment. He spent his last decades running the UN hunger campaigns his younger self had started.

The Eagleton affair showed McGovern at his least sure-footed: he said he backed his running mate '1,000 percent' on July 25, 1972, then asked him to leave the ticket a week later, once psychiatrists warned that his depression could recur. The landslide that followed was total — Nixon took 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17, and 60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern's 37.5 — but the cost that outlasted the election was private. His daughter Teresa had struggled with alcoholism and depression since her teens; she was admitted to a Madison, Wisconsin detox center 68 times between 1991 and 1994, then was found dead of hypothermia while intoxicated on December 13, 1994, at forty-five. McGovern wrote a memoir about her, Terry, published in 1996.

For a generation after 1972, 'McGovern Democrat' was a Republican insult aimed at any candidate who looked too liberal to win, and Democrats spent decades running from the label. What outlasted the insult was the mechanism, not the man: the McGovern-Fraser reforms that gave primary voters, not party bosses, the power to choose a presidential nominee are still how every Democratic nomination has been decided since. McGovern spent his later years running UN hunger programs, co-creating the school-meals initiative that still carries his name with former rival Bob Dole, and sharing the World Food Prize in 2008. He died on October 21, 2012, at 90, having outlived the joke his own name became.

George McGovern's life against the full span of the corpus.

• McGovern-Hatfield Amendment law
  Would have set a fixed date for full withdrawal from Vietnam; defeated twice in the Senate 1970
• McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms law
  Rewrote how the Democratic Party chooses presidential nominees, shifting power to primary voters 1972
• Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism book 1996
• McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program other
  Co-created with Bob Dole; still provides school meals to children worldwide 2000

• July 19, 1922 aged 0 Born in Avon, South Dakota
• October 31, 1943 aged 21 Marries Eleanor Stegeberg
• December 20, 1944 aged 22 Crash-lands his damaged B-24 on the island of Vis, saving his crew
• 1953 aged ~31 Completes a doctorate in history at Northwestern University
• 1962 aged ~40 Elected to the U.S. Senate from South Dakota
• 1972 aged ~50 Wins the Democratic presidential nomination; loses to Nixon in a 49-state landslide
• August 1, 1972 aged 50 Thomas Eagleton withdraws from the ticket
• December 13, 1994 aged 72 His daughter Teresa dies of hypothermia in Madison, Wisconsin
• October 21, 2012 aged 90 Dies in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. defeated by in a 49-state landslide
• Bob Dole 1923–2021
  Wounded veteran and Senate leader who helped write the Americans with Disabilities Act. shared the World Food Prize with
• Hubert Humphrey 1911–1978
  Senator and vice president whose advocacy helped make civil rights a central commitment of the Democratic Party. defeated for the 1972 nomination
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. appointed him to run Food for Peace
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. inherited his anti-war delegates after his assassination