..... admiration for - and unabashed copycatting of - this post by pnwmom:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2718424)
Clearly we both have nothing but deep respect and affection for Mr. McGovern.
Always considered a liberal, and maybe even a far left, uberliberal, this article shows that he was far more mainstream than he was ever given credit for - or allowed himself to take credit for - than most people know. Indeed, had America known then what the real George McGovern was and is, we could well have had a very different history for the late 20th century and nascent 21st century.
You see, George McGovern's public image was a charicature of the man that was painted by his political opponents, both within and without the Democratic Party.
Surely everyone remembers good ol' Scoop Jackson. Were ol' Scoop still about, he'd be right there with the other former Democrats who are now the heart and soul(less) of the neocon movement.
From "The American Conservative" of January, 2006, I give you this truly wonderful read:
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_01_30/article.htmlsnip
But perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of Scoop Jackson and those neoconservative publicists who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign. What if we refocus the image and see the George McGovern who doesn’t fit the cartoon? Son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who had played second base in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system, this other George McGovern revered Charles Lindbergh as “our greatest American” and counted among his happiest memories those “joyous experiences with my dad” hunting pheasants. He was voted “The Most Representative Senior Boy” in his high school and went to the college down the street, walking a mile each morning to Dakota Wesleyan and then coming home for lunch.
This other George McGovern was a bomber pilot who flew 35 B-24 missions in the Dakota Queen, named after his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg of Woonsocket, South Dakota, whom he had courted at the Mitchell Roller Rink. He grew up in and remains a congregant of the First United Methodist Church of Mitchell; he knows by heart the “old hymns” and sings them aloud “with the gusto of those devout congregations that shaped my life so many years ago.” This other George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, “There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn’t guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community. You’re closer to nature and you see the changing seasons.”
This George McGovern, dyed deeply in the American grain, is a hell of a lot more interesting than the burlesque that was framed by his neocon critics.
snip
With the Oregon Republican and neo-Taftie Mark Hatfield, McGovern sponsored the 1970 McGovern-Hatfield “Amendment to End the War,” which called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and “an end to all U.S. military operations in or over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos no later than December 31, 1971.”
Impatient with the chronically cautious, with the kind of eunuchs who tell you behind closed doors that they’re against a war but don’t want to risk their position by taking a public stand, McGovern told his colleagues, “Every Senator in this Chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This Chamber reeks of blood.”
It still does, senator. It still does.
I read that to McGovern. Was there a “conservative” side to him that somehow people missed?
“Absolutely,” he replies. “I remember that observation. I’m a confirmed liberal, but I think there’s a conservative aspect to liberalism at its best”: an awareness of limits, a respect for tradition, a love of the familiar. For instance, McGovern writes in his autobiography, “I prefer old houses or churches or public buildings that are built for the ages rather than modern-style structures that quickly deteriorate. I am uncomfortable with any translation of the Bible other than the magnificent King James version.” He traces this “sense of stability and permanence” to his thrifty family of Dakota Methodists.
snip
For sharing his father’s skepticism about military crusades, McGovern, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross, was mocked for being “weak on defense.” Stephen Ambrose, who wrote up McGovern’s military career in The Wild Blue, thought that he ought to have used his bomber pilot experience “to more effect in his 1972 presidential campaign.”
“I think it was a political error,” McGovern tells me, “but I always felt kind of foolish talking about my war record—what a hero I was. How do you do that?”
Well, you don’t if you’re a polite, decent fellow from Mitchell, South Dakota—even when you’re being pilloried as a Nervous Nellie by think-tank commanders who wouldn’t know an M-1 Garand from a grenade. LBJ had urged McGovern to sell himself as an avenging angel of the air, but McGovern demurred, saying that “it was not in my nature to turn the campaign into a constant exercise in self-congratulatory autobiography.”
McGovern lost not only because the bomber pilot was transmogrified into a cringing apostle of appeasement. His disastrous selection of the dishonest mental patient Thomas Eagleton as his first running mate derailed the campaign coming out of the convention. (Hunter S. Thompson is brilliantly savage on the phony martyr Eagleton in his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, the best book on the election.) The shooting and crippling of George Wallace prevented a probable third-party bid by Wallace that might have attracted 15-20 percent of the general election vote and tipped a number of states McGovernward.
snip
He quotes Dwight Eisenhower at greater length than any another political figure in The Essential America. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex is virtual samizdat in the age of Homeland Security; while McGovern remains fond of Adlai Stevenson, he admits that in the postwar era, Ike “was the best president at recognizing the dangers of excessive military outlays. And he showed great courage in stopping the Israeli move against Egypt over the Suez Canal.”
He calls the Patriot Act “completely unnecessary … a contradiction of the Bill of Rights” and counsels resistance if and when the federal police come for our library cards: “I’ll go to jail rather than accept such an invasion of my freedom as an American.”
At 83, George McGovern remains a voice for peace and freedom in a party that looks ready to nominate the militaristic schoolmarm Hillary Clinton as its next standard-bearer. Oh, how the Democrats could use a bracing shot of McGovernism.
Read that last paragraph and chew on it a bit. Geroge McGovern was right then .... and he remains right today in his current view of things.
God Bless this great American patriot and hero. We mkissed a treasure, America, by voting the wrong way in 1972. Let's not make the same mistake in 2008.
Mods, please check the link to the article. It invites free copying and redistribution. If I am mistaken in this, please feel free to delete this thread.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
