George McGovern, the three-term senator from South Dakota who carried the Democratic Party’s liberal banner in the Vietnam War era, launched a star-crossed bid for the presidency in 1972, and energized many of the leading Democrats of the past generation, died yesterday at a hospice in Sioux Falls, SD. He was 90.
In a public career spanning more than five decades, McGovern may be best remembered as a presidential candidate of near-epic futility, having lost 49 of 50 states. The senator’s liberal agenda — supporting civil-rights and anti-poverty programs and strongly denouncing the Vietnam War — were critical to his landslide defeat to President Richard Nixon.
But those views also helped define the future vision of the Democratic Party.
“In many ways, he revolutionized the Democratic Party,” said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers political-science professor. “His followers drove out the old guard. Some would say it was the end of the old Democrats, but others would say, no, it opened up the party to women and others.”
McGovern, a minister’s son, was raised in a South Dakota farm community during the Depression and was a decorated bomber pilot in World War II.
After winning his Senate seat in 1962, he spent much of his public life working on the expansion of food-stamp and school-lunch programs and championing civil rights and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the Senate.
McGovern voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, giving President Lyndon Johnson almost blank-check authority to escalate the war. By the next year, McGovern had joined a small group of senators who called US involvement in Vietnam a mistake.
“Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave,” he scolded his colleagues in 1970. “This chamber reeks of blood.”
McGovern was often asked to reflect on the significance of his ill-fated 1972 race. He said it was notable for motivating and training a generation of young Democrats who became the party’s future leaders.