George McGovern's father was a miner turned Methodist minister, and the future senator grew up poor. No matter, perhaps: There are children of ministers who grew up poor in once-populist strongholds during the Great Depression and then devote their lives to forgetting where they came from or priding themselves on having pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and left the losers trailing in the dust.
There were no doubt other 19-year-olds beside George McGovern, who, on hearing the news from Pearl Harbor, rushed off to enlist in the Army Air Forces. There may even have been one or two others who decided, in the course of 35 bombing missions over wartime Europe, that the appropriate sequel to the fear and trembling of wartime was to finish his college degree (on the same GI Bill that many today consider a contemptible element of the nanny state) and then become a professor of history.
He rarely spoke about his war service, even during the presidential campaign when he was savaged for insufficient respect for the divinity of an American war cause.
MGovern was a liberal, not a radical, and he trusted in liberal leadership. In August 1964, against his better judgment, at the behest of the usually astute Sen. J. William Fulbright, he voted for President Lyndon B. Johnson's Tonkin Gulf resolution, and quickly regretted it.
What made him an old-fashioned sort of liberal was his moral directness. When, in the Senate of 1970, he rose in favor of the McGovern-Hatfield bill, which would have cut off American military operations in Vietnam and withdrawn all the troops, he said this:
"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land — young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.
"And if we do not end this damnable war, those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us."
These were not the words of a communist, but a moralist.
The bill went down, 55-39. Many more thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians went down before President Richard M. Nixon had the grace to resign, and even then, the bill of impeachment failed to cite Nixon's secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia.
Many thousands of tons more napalm and Agent Orange — among other incendiary and poisonous weapons — rained down on Southeast Asia because, as McGovern would put it in his ringing acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention of 1972, "during four administrations of both parties, a terrible war has been chartered behind closed doors."
That notorious speech became, to the neoconservatives, emblematic of American gutlessness. What freaked them out was three words:
"Come home, America."
The refrain was embedded like this:
"From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America.
"From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.
"From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick — come home, America."
"Isolationist," they called him, shuddering at the South Dakotan who devoted much of his life to shipping American food around the world. To people exhausted by years of wretched, indefensible war, these words were so, so long overdue. In many ways, they still are.
The real George McGovern, crushed by Nixon in 1972, must be remembered as the man who stood up to recover America's honor. RIP.
Todd Gitlin teaches at Columbia University. He wrote this for Foreign Policy magazine.