Almost President (33 page)

One group of movement voters previously ignored by both parties, and never targeted for inclusion in politics until McGovern's campaign, were gays and lesbians. The McGovern campaign had issued a statement, courageous for the time and likely still controversial in some quarters, that said, “Sexual orientation should cease to be a criterion for employment by all public and governmental agencies, in work under federal contracts, for service in the United States armed forces, and for licensing in government-related occupations and professions.”

It is impossible to know what percentage of gay and lesbian voters supported McGovern in 1972—no one in those days would have polled such a question or even known whom to poll, even though we now know that roughly 3 percent of voters are gay or lesbian. But it was clear to many gay activists that McGovern had at least given them a voice at a time when they were expected to stay silent and in the closet. While the number of gays who voted for McGovern is unknown, polling data suggests that Obama won about 80 percent of the gay vote in 2008.

One group that proved to be a disappointment to McGovern, however, was the youth vote. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the legal voting age to eighteen, was approved in 1971. The McGovern campaign believed that millions of young voters, motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War, would flood the polls and give him a decided advantage. It was an illusion.

Young voters were no more a monolithic bloc than any other age group. Among young voters not attending college, McGovern was no more popular than Nixon or even Alabama governor George Wallace. While anti-war protesters, hippies, Yippies, and dissidents of all stripes received most of the media coverage, there was an unnoticed concurrent increase in conservative activism among other young people, as exemplified by the founding of such groups as the Young Americans for Freedom. McGovern did win the eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old age group, but with only 55 percent of their support—and that age group had the lowest voter turnout of any demographic. In what must have been a shock to McGovern and his aides, Nixon won the twenty-one- to twenty-four-year-old age group. Obama, by contrast, won 66 percent of the votes of those under age thirty. While young voters still have the lowest turnout of any age group, it is estimated that more than 50 percent of all Americans under thirty voted in 2008, accounting for nearly a third of Obama's total vote, and voters under thirty in 2008 were almost twice as likely to identify themselves as Democrats than Republicans.

While younger voters, women, activists, and minorities provided a large part of the McGovern campaign's energy and volunteer base, their involvement also caused headaches. The McGovernites learned that issue-oriented voters often cared more about their causes than the candidates. Some McGovern aides thought the movement people “were crazy,” pushing McGovern to take positions that would clearly cost him support from more traditional voters in the general election.

The cost of assembling this new coalition was McGovern's failure to receive the endorsement of that critical Democratic constituency, organized labor, most particularly the AFL-CIO, whose leadership became one of McGovern's chief nemeses. Organized labor had been in decline prior to 1972. In 1955, 33 percent of the nonagricultural labor force belonged to unions, but by 1972 that number had slipped to 27 percent. Urban Democrats, the ethnic voters who typified the New Deal coalition, were also a smaller factor. Urban Democrats had represented 21 percent of the vote in 1952, but just 14 percent in 1968.

Labor was, therefore, already feeling defensive and protective of its status within the party even before McGovern further limited labor's influence by squelching the type of backroom deal-making in which labor excelled. Then there was the growing cultural divide. Labor represented men who did not want to see women enter the workforce and compete for jobs, who did not approve of a perceived assault on traditional moral values, and who were sending a seemingly disproportionate share of their own sons to fight in a war that McGovern was proclaiming to be morally wrong.

While there were dissenters who stayed loyal to the Democratic ticket, labor attacked McGovern privately and publicly. The AFL-CIO anonymously put out anti-McGovern literature, implying he was a Communist sympathizer and questioning his alleged “Blind Trust in Moscow.” In a speech before the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO president George Meany expressed outrage that the 1972 Democratic National Convention included “the gay lib people—you know, the people who want to legalize marriage between boys and boys and legalize marriages between girls and girls.”

Labor's refusal to endorse McGovern “dramatically influenced the perception of McGovern” as a radical far outside the American mainstream, said McGovern campaign organizer Carl Wagner. McGovern's Democratic competitors, particularly Hubert Humphrey, were first to hammer home that perception, and Republicans gleefully picked up the theme in the general election.

The conservative magazine
First Monday
hyperbolically charged that McGovern was “a dedicated radical extremist who as president would unilaterally disarm the United States of America and open the White House to riotous street mobs.” The
National Review
added that though McGovern's “quiet demeanor, flat dull voice and square clothes is not like the standard caricature of the demagogue . . . when we look more closely we see that he is in the classic American demagogic tradition.”

It was a wildly distorted portrait of a man who was the son of a fundamentalist minister, who had himself been a war hero, and who enjoyed political success representing a predominantly Republican and conservative state in the Midwest. As McGovern put it, “Ordinarily, we don't send wild-eyed radicals to the United States Senate from South Dakota.”

If not a radical, McGovern was certainly a moralist. Born July 19, 1922, and growing up in Mitchell, South Dakota, McGovern was the son of a strict Wesleyan Methodist minister. “Movies were off-limits to good Wesleyan Methodists, as were dancing, card-playing, smoking or drinking,” McGovern recalled. But McGovern rebelled, sneaking off to movies at a young age, yet retaining his father's Manichean view of the world, a trait that seldom endeared him to those on the other side of an argument.

Interested, even as a young man, in the problems of hunger and world peace, McGovern read widely on the Social Gospel and briefly attended seminary before deciding a ministerial career was not for him. He instead turned to the study of history. McGovern did not subscribe to the mid-twentieth-century consensus view of American history. He saw the arc of American history as a series of conflicts and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the bloody Colorado coal strike of 1913–1914.

He earned a PhD at Northwestern University where his faculty advisor was Arthur Link, one of the nation's foremost scholars on Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was also a historian (and a moralist), and he and McGovern remain the only two presidential nominees to have earned a PhD. Foreshadowing his approach to the Vietnam War, McGovern deeply admired Wilson's attempts to apply moral principles to foreign policy.

World War II interrupted McGovern's undergraduate studies at Dakota Wesleyan University. Even though he had a fear of flying, McGovern had taken flying lessons while a student, and when war broke out, he volunteered to be a bomber pilot. Nixon, who never saw combat himself during the war, later directed his presidential campaign to try to portray McGovern as a coward, making the claim that McGovern had refused to fly his final mission. This was a lie. McGovern flew thirty-five missions in his B-24 in the Italian campaign, the number required before a pilot earned a ticket home, and he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. McGovern's heroism and that of his colleagues is chronicled in the Stephen Ambrose book
The Wild Blue
.

McGovern, despite his opposition to the Vietnam War, was no pacifist. He never regretted his role in the fight against fascism, and later in life he would support President Clinton's decision to use force to stop genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet, he seldom used his war record to full political effect, making no mention of it in his nomination acceptance speech. It was 1972, and his young campaign advisors convinced him it was incongruous, even hypocritical, for the anti-war candidate to boast of his military record, so many Americans remained unaware that the anti-war candidate was a war hero.

McGovern's willingness to fight for causes he believed in is what drew him into politics. Inspired by Adlai Stevenson's 1952 presidential campaign and determined to battle the followers of Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, McGovern abandoned his teaching career and became the executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party, a job with extraordinary challenges. In 1953, Democrats held only two of South Dakota's 110 legislative seats. After two years of McGovern's fundraising, speechwriting, candidate recruiting, organizing, and strategizing, Democrats in 1954 picked up an additional twenty-two state legislative seats. Two years later, in 1956, McGovern used the party organization he had built to defeat a three-term incumbent congressman by a comfortable margin, and he won re-election in 1958 by an even wider margin. South Dakota voters forgave McGovern his unconventional foreign policy views as long as he fought in Congress for farm subsidies and policies that promoted high crop prices.

In 1960, McGovern ran for the U.S. Senate but lost to longtime Republican senator Karl Mundt by a single percentage point in a year when Nixon walloped John F. Kennedy in South Dakota's presidential voting. As consolation, Kennedy made McGovern his special assistant in charge of an upgraded Food for Peace program. McGovern gained national attention by expanding the program's Third World development program six-fold and developing a humanitarian school lunch program that fed thirty-five million children around the world.

In 1962, McGovern ran for the Senate again, this time winning by just 597 votes out of a quarter million ballots cast. He would always be wary of his precarious position in heavily Republican South Dakota and, belying his image as a radical, carefully avoided taking positions that ran counter to his constituents' interests. Always looking out for South Dakota's agricultural interests, he persuaded the Senate to establish a Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. Co-chaired by Kansas senator and future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, the committee greatly expanded the school lunch program, making it free to low-income students, added a federally funded school breakfast program, and expanded and improved the food stamp program, all humanitarian programs that also benefited Midwestern farmers.

Taking care of his farming constituents allowed McGovern to stake out risky foreign policy positions without too much fear of ballot box retribution. McGovern, along with Oregon senator Wayne Morse, became an early critic of President Kennedy's policies in Southeast Asia, and he heightened that criticism as President Lyndon Johnson escalated American military involvement in Vietnam. In March 1965, McGovern predicted in an interview on
CBS News,
“I think there will be a staggering loss of human life out of all proportion to the stakes involved, and I see no guarantee that once we go through that kind of a murderous and destructive kind of military effort that the situation out there will be any better. In fact, I think it will be a lot worse.” Later that year, McGovern made his first trip to Vietnam, and said that after visiting military and civilian hospitals filled with amputees and overworked staffs, he “left . . . determined to redouble my efforts against the war . . . to do whatever might persuade Congress and the American people to stop the horror.”

What set McGovern apart from other politicians opposed to the war was his visceral anger; his belief that war was corrupting the soul of America; and his equal anguish at American casualties and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians, “like us, children of God.” The certainty that he was right, and the moralistic streak he inherited from his father, made him a modern-day Jeremiah whose uncompromising rhetoric unsettled many Americans, including his fellow senators. Failing to persuade the Senate to cut off funding for the war, McGovern gave a remarkable speech before a packed Senate chamber on September 1, 1970, that offended a good many of his colleagues and their constituents:

Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval (hospitals) and all across our land—young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor, or courage. It does not take courage for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war, those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

McGovern's deep hatred of the war led anti-war activists to first approach him about running for president in 1968. He initially deferred to the candidacy of another war opponent, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. But after Robert Kennedy had entered the race and was then assassinated, McGovern was prevailed upon to become a candidate in order to be a rallying point for Kennedy delegates, who were reluctant to switch their support to McCarthy.

McGovern's token candidacy was quickly forgotten in the turmoil of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Riots by anti-war protesters and what was later described in an official report as a riot by the police against the anti-war protesters split the party in two and so damaged its prospects that a Nixon win in the fall seemed inevitable.