Were it not for my father, I don’t suppose I would know much about George McGovern. As a child born in the late ‘70s, McGovern was, I suppose, little more than a civics footnote to most people by the time my peers and I were studying much in the way of American history.
But my father loved George McGovern. On Sunday, when I learned he had died, I sent my father a text, because I figured he would want to know. When he called me a few minutes later, I could hear emotion in his voice, however well contained.
I loved George McGovern because he was a patriot in the same vein I am, someone who loved his country as much because of its flaws as in spite of them. Someone who refused to give up on who we are called to be. When Robert Kennedy was once asked to name the most decent man in the United States Senate, he responded that McGovern was the only decent man in the body.
“I’m tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight,” he famously said, a sentiment that is as true today as it was then.
“We reject the view of those who say, ‘America, love it or leave it,’” he said. “We reply, ‘Let us change it so we can love it more.’”
Laura Blumenfeld wrote a devastatingly sad piece for The Washington Post back in 1995, after his daughter Teresa died, in which she said of him:
“All his life, George McGovern has been a textbook liberal, either an idealist or a sap, depending on your politics. He believes that human beings are improvable, that good intentions translate into good policy. He believes it is possible to intervene to solve people’s problems. He does not believe, did not believe, that at some level life is just a cold, lonely fight.”
He was a man that knew tragedy, knew how addiction and mental illness could tear away at someone until all that was left was their bones, and then take away even that. And still, even after he lost two children to those struggles, he soldiered on, his life’s work trying to help America live up to all her promise.
I studied George McGovern because my father loved him. I loved him because he never apologized for what he believed, because though his shoulders were heavy he never stopped calling to our better angels. Defeated and rejected, resoundingly, still he pressed on, and asked us to try for more.
If you’ve never read his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1972, you should. Forty years later, his call still goes unanswered.
“Together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. 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.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.
Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.”
Come home, America. Godspeed, Senator McGovern.
