George McGovern and Iraq

If you read through McGovern's speeches during the Vietnam era and

substitute "Iraq" for "Vietnam," you have a pretty clear critique of
what's wrong with current policy: the lack of popular support, both
here at home and in Iraq; the failure to appreciate the long history of
internal divisions within the country; and the ruinous costs, reckoned
in terms both of fiscal irresponsibility and squandered moral capital.

During a lecture tour in South Dakota last week, I had the opportunity
finally to meet one of my long-time heroes, Senator George S. McGovern,
the 1972 Democratic nominee for president. In preparation for the
meeting, I reread his 1977 autobiography, "Grassroots," the story of
his childhood in a Wesleyan Methodist parsonage, his education at
Dakota Wesleyan University, Garrett Theological Seminary and
Northwestern University, and then his plunge into South Dakota politics
as executive secretary of the then-forlorn Democratic Party. McGovern
crisscrossed the state tirelessly organizing Democrats and building a
mailing list by means of handwritten 3×5 index cards.

McGovern then launched a political career of his own: election to
Congress in 1956 and then, after a failed bid for the Senate in 1960,
head of President Kennedy's Food for Peace program. He won election to
the Senate in 1962 and was reelected twice, before his defeat in the
Reagan landslide of 1980.

As I read through "Grassroots," I was struck about how right McGovern
was about Richard Nixon's perfidiousness but also by how prophetic he
was about the war in Vietnam. As one of the early opponents of the war,
McGovern in 1970 introduced (with Republican Senator Mark O. Hatfield
of Oregon, an evangelical) the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to End the
War in Vietnam. The measure won 39 votes in the Senate, a harbinger of
growing discontent over the war.

The parallels with Iraq are uncanny – and frightening. If you read
through McGovern's speeches during the Vietnam era and substitute
"Iraq" for "Vietnam," you have a pretty clear critique of what's wrong
with current policy: the lack of popular support, both here at home and
in Iraq; the failure to appreciate the long history of internal
divisions within the country; and the ruinous costs, reckoned in terms
both of fiscal irresponsibility ($267 million a day) and squandered moral capital.

At dinner on Thursday night, I remarked that, bad as Nixon was, his
antics paled in comparison with the pathological misrepresentations of
the current administrations and its persistent attempts to subvert the
Constitution. McGovern nodded in agreement. I also noted that I
considered him, together with Jane Addams and Herbert Hoover, one of
the three great American humanitarians of the twentieth century.

McGovern seemed pleased with the observation but, with characteristic
modesty, deflected attention from himself. Hoover, he remarked, was not
nearly so bad a president "as we Democrats made him out to be."