Come Home Again, America

In 1972 at the age of 23, I packed all my belongings in a used van and drove to Mexico. In the high desert mountains of San Miguel Allende, I created an idyllic life for myself, paying $30 a month to live with other would-be artists and yoga folk, buying fresh produce every day in the mercado. But I still read the International Time Magazine and the International Tribune, and I began to learn about a little-known senator from South Dakota, who was exceeding expectations and actually winning Democratic primaries.

In addition to his pledge to begin withdrawing US troops from Vietnam on Inauguration Day, George McGovern was for universal health care, a guaranteed minimum income, and tax reform. Not only that, his grassroots campaign wasn't controlled by party bosses or professionals.

I couldn't resist. I left paradise and drove back to the States in time to work the last two primaries in California and New York and the convention in Miami. As a reward for my efforts I was given the job of running California's most conservative Democratic assembly district in southeast Los Angeles County, consisting of a few Latinos, a lot of Humphrey-loving unionists and, to the right of them, Wallace folks.

I was asked to win 37 percent of the vote. Without a university, a community college or a single affluent neighborhood in the region, and using a canvassing army of mostly high school students, that's exactly what we did. Unfortunately, that's all the campaign got nationally, losing to Richard Nixon 49 states to one. In our campaign office in Downey, we wept.

A decorated World War II bomber pilot, George McGovern ran the Food for Peace Program under John Kennedy and represented South Dakota for two terms in the House and three terms in the Senate. He's written nine books, including his most recent, Ending Hunger Now: A Challenge to Persons of Faith. The late Robert Kennedy described McGovern as the most decent man he'd ever met in politics. A documentary about the campaign, One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, is now playing in select theaters.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: How did you end up running for president?

GEORGE MCGOVERN: I was a junior senator from a little state with only three electoral votes. I would not have been compelled to get into that race for the presidency were it not for my anguish over what seemed to me to be an outrageously mistaken war in Vietnam. So that was the driving force that brought me into the race.

TM: Nixon had beaten Humphrey in 1968. Though you'd voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which you say is the decision you most regret in your life, you were an opponent of the war from the start. Was it just that as you looked around prior to 1972, you said to yourself, 'Someone's got to do it'?

GM: That's right. I felt that the case had not been made among the Democratic presidential hopefuls, and that somebody had to do so. We couldn't simply say, 'We're for the war, but we can run it better than the Republicans.' That didn't wash with me and I don't think it would have with the American people. Obviously the Vietnam issue was not the only issue, but it was the transcendent one, and it was tearing this country apart. I honestly believed that until we terminated our mistaken involvement in that war in Southeast Asia, that we weren't going to really be able to address the other problems facing the country.

TM: Your campaign and the reforms the McGovern Commission instituted in the nomination and convention process have been at least partially blamed for the failures of the Democratic party ever since. Is there any truth to that?

GM: It's a total fiction. Those reforms were mandated by the delegates to the 1968 convention. They knew that the party was in a mess -- that what was coming across on television was the picture of a party split across the middle over the war and other issues. Something had to be done to change the way we were picking presidential nominating delegates.