Our Loss

I accidentally caught a few minutes of a great guy on C-SPAN this morning, someone people under 30 may never have heard of: George McGovern.

It’s remarkable that someone so unfairly hammered by the political mafias could retain such a kindly, bemused air. He was talking about the 30th anniversary of the Food Stamp Act, which he co-authored and promoted tirelessly, demonstrating more basic human decency than you could squeeze out of the entire crop of today’s presidential candidates if they were bound and griddled with prairie butter.

McGovern, for whom I worked as a freshman college student in Washington (there was no payment, but I did get to meet film star Veronica Lake one day at his office), was always too focused on people’s well-being to be very effective as a slash-and-burn pol, which is why he’s remembered the way Nixon’s goons painted him, as a wild-man left-winger. In fact, he was always a solid social democrat in the European mold and only looked radical because the political center here is so skewered.

But George also had something few of these bobbleheads can lay claim to today: he believed in things. He said the Vietnam war was an immoral waste, and he was proven right. Nixon slaughtered him at the polls in 1972 but two years later was himself bounced ignominiously out of the White House. I never forgot that. Sometimes it makes more political and practical sense to take a principled stand and not budge from it than to focus-group and sound-bite your party into purveyors of meaningless pap.

After he lost his Senate seat, McGovern faced personal tragedy. One of his daughters struggled with alcoholism her entire adult life before finally dying of exposure in a Minnesota snowstorm. He wrote a book about it and encouraged people to learn about the disease and treat their alcoholic family members compassionately.

George is 85 and was looking a little feeble at the podium. He’s still capable of sharp polemics, but his instinct is all uncle, all the time. He ended his remarks with an offhand suggestion to Republicans and Democrats to get working on ‘these important issues’ for our country. You don’t see much of that quiet, statemanslike spirit emerging from Washington these days.