 photo from Dakota Wesleyan University’s McGovern Center |
George S. McGovern, a World War II bomber pilot, history and political science professor, political activist, U.S. Representative and Senator from South Dakota, John F. Kennedy’s Food for Peace director, and 1972 Democratic nominee for President of the United States turns 85 today.
From 1965 on, McGovern was one of the earliest and most consistent voices in government advocating an end to the Vietnam War, opposing not only the policy of Republican Richard Nixon but also Democrat Lyndon Johnson. He advocated opening talks with Communist China years before Nixon was lavishly praised for doing so. McGovern’s first speech on the Senate floor, in March 1963 was titled “Our Castro Fixation versus the Alliance for Progress” which addressed how — as he puts it in his biography Grassroots:
…the [Kennedy] Administration and the Congress were so absorbed in their fears of Fidel Castro that they were overlooking the real challenge to the United States in Latin America — “the economic, political and social ills” of the nations to the south if us. I described the misery and political instability of Latin America as “a smoldering blockbuster on our doorstep … a continent cursed by a social system that concentrates enormous wealth in the hands of a few and consigns the many to lives of desperate poverty.”
That was a newly-minted US Senator from South Dakota, on the floor of the Senate, just five months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 44 years ago. Know anybody there now who could do the same?