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What George McGovern won...
by Hendrik Hertzberg: What McGovern Won
George McGovern, who died Saturday at the age of ninety, was a combat hero of the Second World War. As the twenty-two-year-old pilot of a B-24 Liberator, Lieutenant McGovern flew thirty-four missions over Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, guiding his plane—which he had named the Dakota Queen, in honor of his brand-new bride, Eleanor—through lethal bursts of flak. The B-24 was not just the American fleet’s biggest bomber, it was the hardest and most dangerous to fly. The young pilot’s courage and skill earned him two of military aviation’s highest decorations, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. (Also, he learned to fly at a Kansas training base called—true fact—Liberal Army Airfield.)
That vast numbers of McGovern’s fervent supporters in his 1972 Presidential campaign were unaware of most or all of this—and that ordinary voters, on the whole, knew nothing of any of it—says a lot about the naïveté and the nobility of the man and his campaign. War—the war in Vietnam—was the paramount issue, and McGovern was the candidate of peace and the peace movement. CREEP—the Committee to Re-elect the President, the President being Richard M. Nixon—did everything it could, legal and illegal, to paint him as a weakling, a coward, an enemy of America and Americanism.
In retrospect, the obvious strategy for McGovern ought to have been the one adopted thirty-two years later by another combat-veteran senator running against another devious Commander-in-Chief in the midst of another unpopular and unnecessary war: buckle on his armor. Deploy a record of gallantry as a shield against intimations of unmanliness and disloyalty. Lay claim to a warrior’s authority in a political struggle for peace. Make it plain that, in him, abhorrence of the war of the moment is as true an expression of devotion to patriotic duty as heroism in uniform.
McGovern, who was incapable of boasting, made a different choice. His eloquent acceptance address to the 1972 Democratic convention contains not a single word about his military service—not even a veiled allusion to it. His stump speeches and campaign advertisements were likewise reticent. Though there was no shortage of reasons why he lost the election so lopsidedly—he took just seventeen electoral votes to Nixon’s five hundred and twenty, and he suffered a twenty-three-point deficit in the popular tally—that was surely one of them.
That vast numbers of McGovern’s fervent supporters in his 1972 Presidential campaign were unaware of most or all of this—and that ordinary voters, on the whole, knew nothing of any of it—says a lot about the naïveté and the nobility of the man and his campaign. War—the war in Vietnam—was the paramount issue, and McGovern was the candidate of peace and the peace movement. CREEP—the Committee to Re-elect the President, the President being Richard M. Nixon—did everything it could, legal and illegal, to paint him as a weakling, a coward, an enemy of America and Americanism.
In retrospect, the obvious strategy for McGovern ought to have been the one adopted thirty-two years later by another combat-veteran senator running against another devious Commander-in-Chief in the midst of another unpopular and unnecessary war: buckle on his armor. Deploy a record of gallantry as a shield against intimations of unmanliness and disloyalty. Lay claim to a warrior’s authority in a political struggle for peace. Make it plain that, in him, abhorrence of the war of the moment is as true an expression of devotion to patriotic duty as heroism in uniform.
McGovern, who was incapable of boasting, made a different choice. His eloquent acceptance address to the 1972 Democratic convention contains not a single word about his military service—not even a veiled allusion to it. His stump speeches and campaign advertisements were likewise reticent. Though there was no shortage of reasons why he lost the election so lopsidedly—he took just seventeen electoral votes to Nixon’s five hundred and twenty, and he suffered a twenty-three-point deficit in the popular tally—that was surely one of them.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2012/10/mcgovern.html#ixzz2A5dAzSiw