George McGovern oral history interview 2009

After my encounter with the ghost of Nixon at the Nixon Library, I discover they have some pretty good YouTube videos there.

Like this one, Nixon Library's Oral History with George McGovern 08/26/2009 interview:

Stephen Holmes on democracy in the neoliberal era

Stephen Holmes in Goodbye future? Eurozine (German version published in Blätter 1/2014), reflects on the state of democracy in the world since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The article is adapted from a speech of 03/22/2012 at a conference on the work of Claus Offe, a political scientist and sociologist working in the Frankfurt School tradition of political theory.

Already in the 1990s, I think it is fair to say, most of us had stopped being euphoric. No sooner had Poland exited the communist bloc than Leszek Kolakowski published an article reminding us that euphoria never lasts very long. Anyone following the aftermath of the Arab Spring will appreciate what he had in mind; and democratic euphoria after 1989 was similarly short-lived. True, no one back then predicted that Hungary would lapse ominously back into single-party rule as it has today, with devastating personal consequences for many ordinary Hungarians. By the late 1990s, students of post-communism had started seeing themselves less as transitologists than as traumatologists. That was certainly true for Claus Offe, who wrote extensively about the peculiarly non-revolutionary nature of the post-communist transitions and especially about the fateful absence (with the possible exception of Poland) of an organized counter-elite that, having overthrown the old regime would therefore have had the public credibility and organizational experience to act as an agent of directional change, steering the process of post-communist development. The consequence of this lack was political drift ungoverned by any shared concept of public purpose. My point, in any case, is that already in the 1990s, students of post-communism were perfectly aware that when autocracy collapses, democracy does not arise automatically to take its place, like toast popping out of a toaster. As post-1989 euphoria wore off, the elementary lessons learned earlier by students of European decolonization reasserted themselves: the absence of obstacles is not the same as the presence of preconditions; less state does not mean more freedom; gaining influence over legislation is pointless if no one obeys the law; and, since democracy is a tiny spot in human history, it must have many complex preconditions. [my emphasis]

Holmes detects two general types of democratic discontents: discontent with the specific forms of democracy in a particular country, and "a more general dissatisfaction that seems to afflict all or most democracies in the world for more or less similar reasons."

Holmes' article deals with American claims to be promoting democracy by bombing, killing and torturing in Iraq and Afghanistan in a way that reminds us to be caution about so-called humanitarian interventions.

One of the more interesting phrases he uses is what he calls the "movement for the liberation of the rich" from the need to be responsive or accommodating to the democratic majority. He looks for a rational basis for this trend, such as a "flooding of the labour market by a low-cost Chinese
workforce" that he assumes "has also reduced the interest of the American and European capitalist class in the health and education
of American and European workers." This is a little unclear; I assume he is referring to Chinese exporting of cheap products to retail giants like WalMart more than Chinese emigration to other countries. He also suggests that reliance on professional armies rather than conscript-based is significant factor: "When volunteer armies with high-tech weapons replace citizen levies, one of the main motives for elite interest in public welfare is substantially weakened."

I think he may underestimate the raw power of greed here. Franklin Roosevelt in a 1935 speech referred to those "who are ready to put a weary, selfish or greedy hand upon the clock of progress and turn it back." (A Radio Address to the Young Democratic Clubs of America 08/24/1935) Those people we have with us always. Currently they have names like Koch, DeVos and Walton.

Holmes' discussion of how power fragmented in the post-communist societies like Russia is fascinating. This is something I don't recall seeing mentioned before:

Even more extraordinary is the radical privatization of Soviet psychiatry for utterly personal ends. In today's Russia, if you covet your elderly sister's apartment, for instance, you can make a "sensitive payment" to the same psychiatric institute that once tortured political dissidents and the now for-profit psychiatrists will seize your sister physically, lock her in a facility, and pump her full of drugs until she signs any document you put in front of her. Like many of its other forms, this cruel privatization of the shattered detritus of the Soviet collapse is wholly spontaneous and serves no possible purpose of the central government, even if it leaves that government unfazed.

That's seriously grim.

But I'm not so impressed with one of Holmes' central points, in which he suggests that Bureaucracy is a huge part of what creates a sense that people don't control their politicians and that their views and needs are not adequately represented in government. It echoes a standard conservative gripe. No modern state can function without a substantial bureaucracy, especially in advanced countries. Making Bureaucracy an abstract bogeyman lets politicians that are bought and paid for by corporations - as the leading members of Germany's current Grand Coalition government look to be - way to easy. Bureaucracy in itself is neither intrinsically good nor bad. But it is necessary. And bureaucracies private or public can be run well or run poorly, with lots of variations in between. It's no excuse for elected officials not to do their jobs responsibly.

And he does get around to making a point about the corruption of democratic politics by big money:

... electoral accountability is a feeble method for aligning the interests of rulers with the interests of the ruled. This would still be true even if the public (counterfactually) was well-informed in real time about all of the government's actions. The reason is fairly well known and can most easily be explained by contrasting the anaemic responsiveness of politicians to voters with their heartfelt responsiveness to campaign contributors. Able to open or close at will the faucet of election funding for permanently campaigning members of Congress, a skilful lobbyist has a relatively easy time evaluating the promise-keeping of the elected officials he has suborned. He wants a yes or no vote on a specific bill and can verify easily whether such a vote is cast. The voter is in a much less advantageous position, having to evaluate the performance of his or her Congressman or Senator over a number of years on a wide range of unrelated issues and controversies. A single vote delivered on a single day every few years in an extremely crude tool for producing accountability for such a complex tangle of decisions. Capture of the legislative process by organized private interests is a pervasive feature of democratic politics everywhere today – without exception, which means in post-communist democracies as well. [my emphasis]

And he makes an intriguing point in the following, although it's not entirely clear if he's approving or disapproving President Obama's decision to give senior members of the Cheney-Bush Administration a free pass on prosecution for serious crimes, including torture:

A seventh source of dissatisfaction with democracy derives from one of democracy's essential preconditions. Adam Przeworski famously defined democracy as a system in which parties lose elections. But for incumbents to step down voluntarily after they lose an election it is obviously necessary that they do not expect to lose too much. This observation was illustrated dramatically in 2010-2011 when Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo refused to leave office after his rival, Alassane Ouattara, won a disputed election, thereby plunging the country into a bloody four-month standoff. In line with this principle, Obama's Department of Justice refused to prosecute criminally any of the war crimes committed during the Bush administration. Democracy will not work, he seems to have reasoned, unless electorally ousted incumbents can be guaranteed a soft landing. The problem with this "inter-temporal bargain" between rival parties alternating in power is that it drains meaning from democratic elections. L'alternance may be the essence of democracy; but reducing the stakes in the rotation of office-holders may also produce profound dissatisfaction among voters longing for "change". The problem is exacerbated because voters are usually urged to show up at the polls after being bombarded with competitive overpromising by candidates pleading for support.

But there is a huge difference between holding elected officials accountable to an established rule of law and starting a civil war. Without accountability before the law, the incentives for politicians to behave well or even obey the law are greatly reduced, as is their incentive to serve their actual constituents.

He acknowledges at the end of the piece that it is a notably pessimistic view that he takes. One that I would say at least borders on encouraging cynicism, which is the problem I have with a lot of Slavoj Žižek's popular articles. He tries to cushion his seeming negativity by offering in the last paragraph, "This ability of democracy to fill society with a sense of future possibility is one of its most precious side-effects."

But if the most democracy has to offer the majority of people is a vague sense of personal optimism for the distant future, that really is a grim message!

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his severely under-appreciated book The Culture of Contentment (1992) offered a look at the state of democracy in the immediate "post-communist" era that was sobering but nevertheless conveyed a sense that the discouraging conditions described were reason for concern and outrage and a demand for change. And he closed with a nominally pessimistic final paragraph that conveyed a very different sense than what Stephen Holmes does. Galbraith:

In the past, writers, on taking pen [a writing instrument once widely used], have assume that from the power of their talented prose must proceed the remedial action. No one would be more delighted than I were there similar hope from the present offering. Alas, however, there is not. Perhaps as a slight, not wholly inconsequential service, it can be said that we have here had the chance to see and in some small measure to understand the present discontent and dissonance and the not inconsiderable likelihood of an eventual shock to the contentment that is the cause.

Of course, since 1992 we've had quite a few shocks to the seemingly prevailing culture of contentment that Galbraith the elder was writing about then. George McGovern, another forever-unreconstructed New Dealer, wrote in a book published shortly before his death, What It Means To Be A Democrat (2011) reminded his American readers of what defeatism and complacency are not valid options:

But there is far too much at stake to waste a moment hand-wringing or complaining. Right now we have 14 million men and women without jobs, millions of families in bankruptcy and foreclosure, and some 50 million people without health insurance. We have families who cannot afford to send their children to preschool and others fretting over how to pay for college. We have Americans who go without enough to eat and others for whom nutritious food is simply not within reach. We have men and women in prison for drug use who should instead be in treatment. We have soldiers fighting in distant wars who should be at home with their families. We have immigrants who have traveled under horrific conditions in search of a better; life that still eludes them in our midst. Never in modern times have so many people needed a hand so desperately.

Tags: george mcgovern, john kenneth galbraith, neoliberalism, slavoj žižek

Something I didn't know about George McGovern - he voted for Jerry Ford for President in 1976!

I didn't believe this when I saw a reference to it in the Sioux Fall Argus-Leader in a timeline about the late George McGovern's life.

But he did say to Larry King just after President Ford's death that he had voted for him for President in 1976 against winning Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter!

George McGovern at the Nixon Libarary 08/26/2009

That was a real surprise to me. Below is the complete McGovern section from CNN Larry King Live, Farewell To President Ford 01/02/2007. He also relates a conversation he had with Barry Goldwater about the pardoning of Richard Nixon. I find it easier to believe that he favored a pardon of Nixon than that he voted for Gerald Ford.

KING: We're back. Joining us now for a few moments out of Miami is George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, author of a new book "Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now." Senator McGovern, you lost your daughter Terri to alcoholism. Gerald Ford's support of his wife's anti-addiction efforts must have had a special meaning to you.

GEORGE MCGOVERN, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Absolutely. And we did have a common bond there. I served in the House with President Ford when he was a congressman. I was just a freshman. He was emerging as the Republican leader in the House. But he always treated the lowliest freshman congressman the same way he treated everybody else.

I first came to really know him on the day we ended the war in Vietnam. That was April 30th, 1975, when he invited me to a small stag dinner at the White House. I was a little puzzled by it, because I didn't know him all that well.

And I arrived there. And here was King Hussein, the late Senator Fulbright, myself and one or two others.

And I told him that night, Mr. President, this is the first time I've been invited to the White House socially in 10 years, since I first began criticizing our involvement in Vietnam. He said, George, I know that. That's why you're here tonight. I never forgot that.

KING: Was he a good president?

MCGOVERN: Yes, I think he was. There's a consensus in the country that we've heard the last few days, from Republicans and Democrats, liberals, conservatives, those in the middle -- I think he perhaps now has earned the title unifier in chief. He's probably done a better job of pulling all the various elements of American politics together than any other person I know. And he deserves high marks for that.

KING: Are you surprised -- go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

MCGOVERN: I have to tell you something I've never said before publicly. I voted for him in 1976.

KING: What?

MCGOVERN: When he -- yes, I did. And at Thanksgiving dinner that year, I never said anything about this to Eleanor or to her five children. But I told them at Thanksgiving time I had voted for President Ford, even though he lost. And I told them why, because I thought he had come in at a difficult time. I didn't know President Carter very well then. And I just felt more comfortable somehow with Gerry Ford. Whereupon my wife Eleanor said, so did I vote for him.

We went around that table -- this is hard to believe -- all five of my kids voted for him. So they get seven votes out of the McGovern family for President Ford and Senator Dole, my long-time Republican friend.

I voted for Carter again [sic] in 1980. So with my brand of political luck, I voted against Carter when he won, I voted for him when he lost. But I can justify both of those votes.

KING: What a great story. Thank you, George McGovern, on the occasion of the passing of Gerald Ford.

MCGOVERN: Could I also add one -- could I add one thing?

KING: Yes.

MCGOVERN: Larry, I supported the pardon for President Nixon. I suppose I was the person that suffered more from the cover-up of Watergate while I was running against Mr. Nixon than anyone else. But I supported that idea of a pardon even before President Ford granted it.

I called Barry Goldwater and asked him, at 6:00 one morning in the summer of '74, what would you think of you and I on a bipartisan basis calling for a pardon for President Nixon? He wasn't enthusiastic about it.

KING: I know.

MCGOVERN: I saw him after we both left the Senate many years later. And he says, George, I remember that call. This was out in Phoenix, where I was making a speech. But he said, you know, he lied to me, Nixon did. He lied to the Congress, he lied to the press, he lied to the American people. I want nothing more to do with him. I haven't spoken to him since. So that was Barry Goldwater. [my emphasis]

But in his 1977 book, Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern, he had talked about his unhappiness with Carter as the Democratic candidate and even a personal grudge that he bore him. It's easy to overlook now, but Carter was seen in 1976 within the Democratic Party as a conservative choice. He's been a much more liberal ex-President than he was a President or Presidential candidate. Here's what McGovern wrote in 1977 about Carter's Presidential run:

I tried at first to stay free of involvement in the primaries. But I was convinced that among the early contenders, candidates such as Morris Udall, Sargent Shriver and Birch Bayh had a better grasp of the nation's problems than Carter. Indeed, much of what I knew about the former Georgia governor - which was little - disturbed me. I did not like his prolonged, almost bitter-end, endorsement of America's role in Vietnam. I could not be comfortable with any candidate who had supported the Vietnam madness as late as Carter had. Nor was I reassured about his views on arms control and military spending; the promise of a cut was too vague to be believed. It seemed to me that he was hedging his stands on virtually everything. On a personal level, I recalled that he had been an active promoter of the "Anybody but McGovern" strategy of 1972.

Dissatisfaction with Carter's policy among liberal Democrats and labor persisted. Ted Kennedy mounted a serious challenge against him in the 1980 primaries, as did Jerry Brown. He even disappointed Democrats on Election Day 1980, formally conceding to Ronald Reagan before the polls closed on the West Coast, thus risking reducing Democratic turnout and endangering down-ticket candidates.

McGovern's memory of his support for Ford's pardon of Nixon may have been colored by later reflection, or perhaps his wording by the occasion of Ford's passing. An AP report at the time of the pardon (quoted here from
Reaction splits on party lines Bangor Daily News 09/09/1974):

Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee whom Nixon defeated, said: "It has seemed to me that the central lesson Watergate should be that no one stands above the rule of law. It is difficult to understand granting immunity to Mr. Nixon while committing his subordinates to prison.

"On the other hand, the Constitution clearly does give President Ford authority to grant reprieves and pardons..."

In his 1977 autobiography, he wrote:

I was not prepared for the intensity of the anger and resentment which followed President Ford's pardon of Nixon. News of the pardon reached me at the conclusion of a Sunday-morning service which I was attending at the Methodist Church in Watertown, South Dakota. When I arrived at a city park a short time later to address a Democratic picnic crowd, I found people in an uproar. Although a predictable reaction at a Democratic gathering, I discovered the same sense of outrage as I campaigned in conservative Republican areas of the state.

I suspect that this combination of events - the discrediting of Nixon and the unpopular Ford pardon - aided my [1974 Senate] re-election campaign immeasurably. Nixon had gone out of his way to promote [McGovern's Republican opponent Col Leo] Thorsness politically and had presented the colonel with the Medal of Honor at the White House. Thorsness was identified with Nixon. The President's fall depreciated the colonel.

As the main target of the skulduggery in 1972 that we now know as part of "Watergate", it's easy to imagine that had McGovern been elected President in 1972, he himself would have pardoned the Watergate burglars as an act of generosity. (In fact, I recall a post-election article by his campaign biographer Robert Sam Anson speculating just that, but I haven't located the reference as of this writing.) However, the criminal actions continued well into 1973 and 1974 during the coverup.

Tags: george mcgovern, jerry ford, richard nixon

McGovern, Nixon and the peace issue in 1972

The 1972 Presidential election turned out to be a watershed for the Democratic Party, with corporate Democrats still using it as a cautionary tale against the perils of "the left," no matter how popular the positions of the the Democratic Party "left" on major issues may be.

So it's worth considering a more real-time evaluation of the 1972 election from Daniel Yankelovich for The New York Times/Yankelovich Election Survey, published in the New York Review of Books 11/30/1972 issue:

It was not what happened during the Presidential campaign itself that won the election for Richard Nixon. Throughout the campaign the press and television concentrated on Eagleton, Watergate, Mr. McGovern’s “radical” image, his campaign style, and the “he-can't-win” psychology purportedly generated by the opinion polls. These events affected Mr. McGovern’s standings in the polls during the campaign but had little bearing on why Mr. Nixon won the election. As the polls taken by my own organization, as well as others, showed, Nixon had a majority of three to two from the very start—a majority that never wavered throughout that long campaign. In a sense, the campaign proved to be irrelevant. [my emphasis]

What Yankelovich explains is that foreign policy took a central role in the campaign: the Vietnam War, detente with the USSR, the diplomatic opening with China.

The Democrats and antiwar activists rightly saw a very sharp difference between McGovern's and Nixon's positions on the war. And they were also right in their intense distrust of Nixon's intentions and his level of lying, which in the days before the Cheney-Bush seemed staggering.

But the general public perception was different. "Only Nixon could go to China" and "Nixon goes to China" have become standard figures of speech - even on the planet Vulcan! - meaning a leader having credibility on reversing a long-held position that would be lacking in one that had always held the position.

The concept is a little squishy, when you think about it. It's a bit like the professional anti-Communists of the 1940s and 1950s. Bernard DeVoto, in some essay I have been able to find recently, characterized their position something like this: Let me see, you tell me that as a Communist, you were willing to betray your country, lie, cheat, steal, break the law, even kill people if required. Now you've repented and you tell me that I should trust what you say about Communists now more than I trust people who were always against Communism.

Because entrepreneurial self-promoting ex-Communists like Whittaker Chambers were prone to make the most lurid, sweeping, exaggerated claims about the supposed threat from Communism, not unlike the self-promoting ex-Islamists that are today so popular on the Christian Right speaking circuit. (The more things change, the more they stay the same, etc., etc.)

Nixon had been considered a hardliner on China and the Soviet Union, too, from the beginning of his dubious and generally destructive political career. But in 1971-2, he broke with the position that was especially strong in the Republican Party that there should be no formal US relations with "Communist China" or "Red China" (red was the color for Communists in those days, not Republicans). And his arms-control negotiations with the USSR and normalizing relations with China were generally perceived - including by Democrats and McGovern himself - as leading to a more peaceful world.

Yankelovich refers to an incident that was a harrying moment in US-Soviet relations. He had mined the harbors of Haiphong, North Vietnam (DRV), which carried a serious risk that Russian ships providing supplies to the DRV would be damaged:

The Vietnam issue was generally conceded to be McGovern’s main source of strength.

Then the mining of Haiphong happened. We must remember that the decision to mine Haiphong harbor was made at a time when the military situation in Vietnam was deteriorating badly. Our interviews shortly afterward showed that people expected the worst. In the past, most decisions on Vietnam made in times of crisis—such as the Cambodian "incursion" — had proved disastrous. This time Mr. Nixon confronted the communists with a challenge that even Lyndon Johnson at his most combative had not dared to make.

The days that followed reminded voters of the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were anxious: “How would the Russians react?” “Would they cancel the Summit?” “Would they try to break the blockade by force?” even “Would there be a nuclear confrontation?” When the Russians announced that the Summit would go on as planned, the public, as our surveys later showed, was vastly relieved. With mounting confidence, they watched the drama unfold on television: Mr. Nixon being greeted coolly but correctly at the Moscow airport; meeting in a somewhat more cordial atmosphere with Brezhnev; being toasted at Soviet banquets; addressing the Russian people; laying a wreath at the grave of a little Russian girl orphaned by the war; signing documents and treaties of historic importance with the head of the Soviet state.

Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization" of the war, which is similar to what we did in Iraq and are doing now in Afghanistan, going through the motions of transferring responsibility for the war to the locals on Our Side in South Vietnam was highly controversial. But by the 1972 election, the number of American troops in Vietnam was drastically reduced from what it had been when he took office in 1969. Even though more Americans would be killed in Vietnam during Nixon's Presidency than during Lyndon Johnson's, and even though the war became progressively less popular even as US troops were being withdrawn, a large portion of the public perceived that Nixon's policies were ending the Vietnam War and doing it "with honor," as he continually said:

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the message got through to the American public: Nixon had faced the Russians down, and the danger to the US from the war—the danger of a big power confrontation—had been defused. The war in Vietnam would now soon be over. Or, even if it did not end right away, it would no longer be seen as a military threat to Americans. Soviet/Chinese acquiescence in the Haiphong mining had handed Mr. Nixon an overwhelming diplomatic victory, containing the seeds of his subsequent political victory at home. Vietnam, we found, is the issue of greatest concern to the American public, and in the public mind it was almost as if the war had ended at the Moscow Summit.

The results of the Soviet trip were dramatically reflected in the opinion polls. By early July, Mr. Nixon had rebuilt public confidence in his handling of the Vietnam war by an almost two to one margin. Simultaneously, he had undermined McGovern’s major source of public support by converting what had been McGovern’s issue into his own principal source of strength among the voters. During the campaign, an unwavering 62 percent of the voters said, “Mr. Nixon is doing everything he can to end the war.” They voted for him largely, if not exclusively, for this reason. (Domestic issues also played a part but we found they were not nearly so important.) [my emphasis]

Now, Nixon's intentions as expressed in the elections were deceptive. He still expected to be able to use air power to pummel North Vietnam into submission. His Christmas Bombing campaign of 1972 was hugely controversial at home and a flat-out failure as a way to force the DRV to accept less favorable peace terms. When the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed soon after the turn of the year, they were the same basic terms to which the DRV had already been willing to accept before the Christmas Bombing.

The duplicity and bad faith Nixon showed in the remainder of his term before his resignation in 1974 was been chronicled extensively. To give just a few examples: Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied : The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement (1975); George Harrington, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 4th edition (2001); John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009). McGovern was unable to convince enough people to distrust Nixon's war policy, though he tried, e.g., George McGovern Commercial 1972 ElectionWallDotOrg.flv:

Campaigns do matter. And McGovern's missteps, especially the selection of Thomas Eagleton as his Vice Presidential candidate, increased the already serious challenges he faced in that election. He tried hard to make the complex of corruption now known as "Watergate" an issue, but the revelations that eventually pushed Nixon into resigning didn't come until after the 1972 election. See this campaign ad, 1972 George McGovern Presidential Election Ad:

Yankelovich's findings in 1972 don't in themselves constitute a decisive judgment on the outcome of that election. But they are an important reminder that hating on the hippies was not what was decisive in that election. Nixon had taken substantial action in the real world to build an image of himself as the man to produce an optimal peace in Vietnam and the wider world. The fact that he had to scam the public and the media on what his real intentions were in Vietnam to achieve that image is itself a sign of a how shady the product (himself) that he was marketing in that election really was.

Tags: george mcgovern, richard nixon, vietnam war

More McGovern

The PBS Newshour did an obituary piece, Remembering McGovern, WWII Hero, Politician 10/22/2012:

Ben Alpers in McGovern and American History U.S. Intellectual History 10/22/2012 reflects on how McGovern, a believer in the New Deal and the Great Society who thought that wars were something to be prevented rather than sought out and bragged about, is regarded among the political and media elites as an extremist of sorts among Democrats, certainly one whose ideas were and are far outside the mainstream:

In this regard, it's worth contrasting McGovern's legacy with that of Barry Goldwater, another candidate from his party's "extreme" wing who got crushed in a landslide victory by an incumbent president of the other party. Goldwater's campaign is today remembered by Republicans as the vanguard of modern conservatism. Goldwater is seen as having helped paved the way for conservative success, first within the GOP and then in the country at large. Even Democrats came to see Goldwater as representing an older, somehow better, conservatism. When Goldwater died in 1998, President Clinton ordered that all flags on federal property fly at half mast on the day of his funeral.

I hope that George McGovern's death will spur us to think more concretely about the differences McGovern made in American politics. He played a crucial, and complicated, role in the transformations that the Democratic Party went through between 1968 and 1992. Though McGovern's vision lost out to a much more centrist and militarist one, McGovern represents more than simply a path not taken. [my emphasis]

I didn't know until now that Johnny Rivers had done a campaign song for McGovern in 1972 using his campaign theme "Come Home America", Johnny Rivers - Come Home America YouTube date 06/04/2011:

Corey Robin justifiably gripes about Obama's meager initial statement on McGovern's passing in Things Obama Says When Famous People Die 10/21/2012.

Congressman Jim McGovern, who wasn't a relative of George's but admired him and his political outlook, writes about him in George McGovern, the 'Atticus Finch' of American Politics The Nation 10/22/2012:

To me, George McGovern was the “Atticus Finch” of American politics. Like the main character in Harper Lee’s brilliant novel To Kill A Mockingbird George McGovern spoke the truth even when—especially when—it was uncomfortable.

He spoke the truth about the folly of Vietnam and our excessive military budget. He spoke the truth about corruption in the Nixon White House. And he spoke the truth about the tragedy of hunger in the United States and around the world. He paid a heavy political price for his candor and honesty. But as he always said, “there are worse things than losing an election.” George McGovern never lost his soul and he never betrayed his conscience.

And he observes:

George McGovern was perhaps the most courageous man I’ve ever known. And it was not just because he was a bomber pilot in World War II, fighting against Hitler and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service. I admired him for his guts, in being who he was, in conservative South Dakota. To oppose the war in Vietnam was not easy in the early 1960s. Yet, George McGovern’s valiant and sincere position was right, and the voters of his home state sent him to the United States Senate three times.

He came across as a gentle man but he had a spine of steel. He was decent and kind. He wasn’t afraid of the political consequences of his liberalism and never trimmed his sails for the convenience of the moment. His steadfastness used to drive his staff crazy. But every one of them knew they were working for a great man.

David Shribman provides his take in George McGovern: a portrait of character The Globe and Mail 10/23/2012.

John Miller, Unpacking George McGovern: A historian’s view Pierre (SD) Capitol Journal 10/21/2012 writes of McGovern's political inspirations:

In two interviews I did with McGovern in August and September, we talked about the original sources for his political beliefs and aspirations as a student and young man, and I had anticipated returning from the archives to follow up with more questions about his activities in Washington. Alas, that will not happen.

When I asked George what had been the driving force in formulating his earliest political attitudes as a college student and graduate student, he said it had been the principles contained in the "social gospel," a major movement within Christianity during the early 1900s which argued for the direct application of Jesus teachings – especially the Sermon on the Mount – to the social and economic problems of the day. He recalled listening with his father to the sermons of Harry Emerson Fosdick on the radio and later reading books by Walter Rauschenbusch, the outstanding articulator of social gospel teachings.

Additionally he was inspired by early twentieth-century progressive politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, George Norris, and Robert La Follette. He readily assented to the suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal had been important to his way of thinking, but his first inclination had been to mention the progressive social gospelers rather than the New Dealers.

Tags: george mcgovern

McGovern obituaries

This is a video of the late George McGovern's most famous speech, McGovern's 1972 Democratic Convention Acceptance Speech:

And an interview with Charlie Rose from 01/06/2012 (that the date of the video publication, the actual date of the interview isn't given but it was clearly sometime close):

Chuck Raasch and Jonathan Ellis provide an obituary, A man of peace: George McGovern influenced a generation of Americans Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls SD) 10/21/2012:

Though routed by Richard Nixon, McGovern's 1972 campaign influenced the Democratic Party in the decades that followed and greatly changed the party's rules over how future presidential candidates and party leaders were chosen. He devoted much of his last three decades to anti-hunger issues, teaming with former senator Bob Dole, a Republican and one-time adversary in the Senate, to establish school-lunch programs in some of the world's poorest nations.

"In the storied history of American politics, I believe no other presidential candidate ever had such an enduring impact in defeat," former president Bill Clinton said while was speaking in 2006 at the opening of the McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell.

On his wartime service:

During World War II, McGovern flew a B-24 bomber in the European Theater, completing 35 combat missions and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for completing harrowing missions in which he nursed his wounded bomber to emergency landings, including one off the Yugoslav coast. On his final mission, with a gunner seriously wounded, McGovern managed to land his badly damaged bomber back at his home airfield in Italy.

After his combat missions were over, McGovern spent his final months as a military pilot flying food into cities of war-ravaged Europe. He would later say he vividly saw the effects of hunger.

On his early political inclinations:

As a veteran who had fought in war, McGovern said he was attracted to Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace, who opposed the military buildup of the Cold War.

"The Russians had 27 million people killed in World War II; the whole country was laid to waste – I mean the physical country as well as the people," he said in a 2011 interview. "And, it seemed to me they would probably be the last country in the world that wanted to start World War III. And so, when Henry Wallace, who had been secretary of Agriculture, and later vice president, when he started saying what I thought, I swung over to him. And there were probably some radicals in the party way out in left field, but it didn't include me. I was that ex-Republican who was looking for somebody who would lift the banner of peace."

On the Vietnam War:

Besides his work on hunger issues, McGovern will best be remembered for his opposition to the Vietnam War, and to other wars.

"I don't know anybody alive today that thinks the war in Vietnam was a good investment for the United States," he said in November, 2011. "It weakened us militarily. It weakened us economically. It weakened us politically, and it weakened us morally. I'm not a moralist in the sense of wanting to always claim that I represent the moral position, but I do think we were going against fundamental American principles of morality when we were carpet-bombing a primitive little country like Vietnam."

Below are links to a set of articles remembering McGovern.

Will Bunch, American patriot: George McGovern, 1922-2012 Attytood 10/21/2012

Bob Dole, George McGovern, the man who never gave up Washington Post 10/21/2012

Kristi Eaton and Walter Mears, George McGovern dies at age 90 AP/Salon 10/21/2012

Jonathan Ellis, George McGovern: South Dakota's 'national treasure' (with videos) Sioux Falls Business Journal 11/27/2011

Conor Friedersdorf, On War and Peace, George McGovern Will Die Vindicated The Atlantic Online 10/19/2012

Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Reason.com, a libertarian source along the Ron Paul/Ayn Rand lines, gets creative and redefines McGovern as a liberatarian in George McGovern, Libertarian Hero Bloomberg View 10/21/2012. Maybe he was trying to find something nice to say from an economic-"laissez faire" point of view. But it's a bad joke. McGovern never proposed letting banksters and energy barons run wild. He builds his straw man out of a piece McGovern wrote about his experience as a small businessperson and some pragmatic suggestions he made about business regulations as a result. And the only place he "scandalized liberals" with those thoughts is in Gillespie's imagination.

Todd Gitlin, A Real American Hero: Remembering George McGovern Foreign Policy 10/21/2012. Gitlin's article is a reminder of how much the field of acceptable debate about military and foreign policy has shrunk among the political and media elite since the early 1970s.

Raymond Haberski, Jr., "This Chamber Reeks of Blood" U.S. Intellectual History 10/21/2012. Haberski's piece is also a jarring reminder of the narrowness of our present-day political discussions about war and the military. One would have hoped that the fall of the Soviet Union would have widened the margins of such discussion. But that's not what happened.

Richard Meyer, George McGovern, liberal standard-bearer against Nixon in '72, dies Los Angeles Times 10/21/2012

John Nichols, George McGovern: Touchstone of Liberalism The Nation 10/21/2012

Rick Perlstein, The Myths of McGovern Democracy Journal 7/Winter 2008

Charlie Pierce, The Forgotten Legacy of George McGovern Esquire Politics Blog 10/16/2012

Katrina vanden Heuvel, George McGovern: American Patriot and Truth-Teller The Nation 10/22/2012

Joan Walsh, George McGovern: He deserved better Salon 10/21/2012

The CNN obituary notes, "In lieu of flowers, the family is requesting donations to Feeding South Dakota."

Tags: george mcgovern

George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush (from 2008)

In honor of George McGovern's passing, I'm reposting in full a post from 01/06/2008 which is one illustration of why I respected the man so much.

************************************************

Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".


And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined of a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public goods when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.

Tags: bush administration, bush gulag, george mcgovern, impeachment, iraq war

Charlie Pierce on George McGovern's 90th birthday

Charlie Pierce has a great tribute to George McGovern, Happy Birthday, George McGovern Esquire Politics Blog 07/19/2012:

The man whom Bobby Kennedy called "the most decent man in the Senate" turns 90 today.

The worst thing that ever happened to the Democratic party in this country is that, when McGovern lost so big to history's yard waste in 1972, the rest of the party was complicit in turning him — and the politics he represented — into a punchline for the next 20 years. He was the template. He was the first war-hero Democrat — you don't fly 35 missions in a B-24 and come away with a DFC without a big clanging pair of brass ones, kids — who was accused of being a wimp by a flock of chickenhawks. (Ronald Reagan? Who kept the bar at the Brown Derby safe from Nazi occupation? Please to be giving me a break.) He was the first liberal Democrat against whom other opportunistic Democrats bragged about running. He was turned into a synonym for something he was not. He was the vehicle through which Democrats taught other Democrats to be terrified of all their best instincts and all their best policies. Through it all, he remained exactly what Bobby Kennedy said he was, and more.

Tags: george+mcgovern

What George McGovern says

Tags: afpak war, afghanistan war, george mcgovern

Obama's Iraq War exit plan

When will peace come to Iraq? (The photo is of a destroyed French village in the First World War)

Juan Cole, who has consistently been one of the best commentators on the Iraq War - he's an expert on Shi'a Islam and actually know Arabic and Persian - writes about Obama's exit plan announced last week in We're really leaving Iraq Salon 03/03/09.

He's basically pretty positive about Obama's exit plan:

Obama cannot afford to make his calculations about Iraq solely with an eye to domestic American politics. He extended his original proposal of a 16-month withdrawal of active combat brigades to 18 months so as to leave more troops in place to help with the next Iraqi parliamentary elections, scheduled for December 2009. It is ... the case that Iraqi elections can still only go forward if the country is locked down and vehicular traffic forbidden, preventing car-bombings and coordinated guerrilla strikes. It might be possible for the Iraqi military to provide security for national elections in 2013 should the country's future ruler or rulers deign to hold them, but the Iraqi military cannot hope to do so this year.

Just to be clear, I would have preferred a rapid drawdown on something like a one-year schedule. The presence of American troops is in itself a major risk of the fighting escalating.

I'm not trashing Obama's plan at the moment. But I'm still going to take a very skeptical view of that situation. For one thing - a major thing - it's to some extent a rhetorical trick to call the 50,000 troops he plans to have there after August 2010 "non-combat" troops. All the troops there are in a real practical sense potential combat troops.

But the momentum is in the right direction. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) requires that all US ground troops by out by 2011. And Obama specifically reaffirmed that he intended to abide by that commitment. Prime Minister al-Maliki achieved new popularity with the SOFA because it gets the US troops out. There is still a national referendum coming on the SOFA, which will create even more political pressure in Iraq for the US to exist completely. With the prospect of a less hostile relationship to the US, Iran also has incentive for the moment to discourage any escalation in violence in Iraq against the US and to see the SOFA withdrawal schedule observed.

The Cheney-Bush administration never built up more than a rudimentary Iraqi air force. So building up a minimal air force for normal national defense creates a dependence and need for US assistance in that regard. Cole writes:

Iraq's military also continues to need logistical support from U.S. forces. ...

Although Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has had military successes during the past year, in the southern port of Basra and in Sadr City (east Baghdad), against the Mahdi Army militia, these campaigns depended heavily on U.S. close air support. Iraq lacks an air force and it will take years to create one. One caveat about Obama's pledge to remove troops by the end of 2011 is that he cannot possibly be including the U.S. Air Force, which is almost certainly in for a longer mission, but can operate from bases outside Iraq. Without a navy, moreover, Iraq cannot prevent petroleum smuggling via the Persian Gulf, which drains billions from government coffers annually and strengthens militias against the state, and this sort of patrol will fall to the U.S. Navy for some time to come.

All of this reflects the fact that Cheney and Bush intended for Iraq to be a permanent US military base.

But it also repeats in a significant way the situation in Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973. The US had trained a massive South Vietnamese Army. But it trained them on American conventional-war approaches, which relied heavily on close-air support, which they proved not capable of providing on their own to anything like the level needed. I haven't encountered much if any commentary on that similarity. But it's there.

I hope Cole's optimism in his conclusion turns out to be justified:

It would be wrong to overlook these simple words: "And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011." Though the word "troops" referred to the Army and the Marines, not to the Air Force and Navy, what Obama said on Friday was a firm pledge to leave. And by binding himself to a security agreement formally passed by the Iraqi parliament, Obama was eschewing unilateralism and the patronizing hubris that marked Bush's discourse on Iraq. The Iraqi and Arab press understood this point immediately, and led their accounts of Obama's speech with that sentence abour [sic] removing troops. Obama was not signaling any diffidence about ending the Iraq War before the end of his [first] term. He was attempting to provide for an orderly withdrawal that will ensure that U.S. troops are not drawn back in by a subsequent security collapse. [my emphasis]

For other views on Obama's withdrawal plan, see also:

Partial Peace, Looming War by Tom Hayden The Nation Online 03/01/09. Hayden points out how off-base New York Times reporter Tom Ricks was in his prediction that Obama would plan to hold some kind of permanent residual force in Iraq. Like Juan Cole, Hayden focuses on Obama's commitment to observe the SOFA deadline:

When there was a choice [in 2008] between supporting Barack Obama and attending rallies organized by various Maoists, Trotskyists and neo-anarchists opposed to Obama and electoral politics, the grassroots peace movement headed for the precincts by the thousands. What appeared to Ricks to be a failed antiwar rally in Washington was only evidence that the movement was moving on, becoming a voting force in and around the Obama campaign.

That turned out to be the right strategy for the peace movement when John McCain was defeated in November, but many continued to wonder--with good reason--whether Obama was promising nothing more than partial peace under a new form of military occupation. Now it is clear that somewhere along the way Obama became persuaded that it made little sense to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq when the Pentagon couldn't win with 150,000, the American economy was collapsing and his hands were full in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [my emphasis]

Unlike the Pod Pundits, who see Obama's withdrawal plan as a sign of his standing up against "the left", Hayden - who is generally considered a figure of "the left" - writes, "The greater danger from Iraq for Obama may lie at home politically if Republicans and the generals, echoed by the mainstream media, protest Obama's withdrawal plan as naïve or worse."

War critic Bob Dreyfuss, writing also at The Nation Online, takes a more dour view in Obama's Iraq Plan Ain't It 02/27/09.

The invaluable Gareth Porter reports on Obama's plan in Drawdown Plan May Leave Combat Brigades in Iraq Inter Press Service 02/27/09:

Obama's claim that the U.S. combat mission will end in August 2010 raises the question whether he will call a halt to combat patrols by U.S. personnel embedded with Iraqi units. The sweeping concession made to CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq commander Gen. Odierno on the residual force suggests that he will not demand the end of such operations by U.S. troops.

The freedom granted to Odierno and Petraeus on the residual force overshadows his concession to the generals and Gates in accepting the recommendation for 19-month timetable for withdrawing combat brigades.

Former Sen. George McGovern favors a faster withdrawal, as reported in McGovern: Troops Should Come Home This Year Keloland.com 02/27/09:

"I give the President credit for setting a date certain, that's something the previous administration would not do," McGovern said.

But McGovern says waiting 18 months to pull thousands of troops out of Iraq isn't something this country can afford.

"I think we ought to recognize this is a mistake and then cut our losses. I don't mean just race for the border. I mean we should be out of there by September this year not September next year," McGovern said.

And the former Senator doesn't think 50 thousand troops should be left behind to train the Iraqi forces.

"We can't control events in the troubled Middle East. Everybody that's tried to do that has ended up with blood on their hands, blood on the receiving country's hands, and without a clear cut victory," McGovern said.

Tags:

gareth porter, george mcgovern, iraq war, juan cole

George McGovern on impeaching Cheney and Bush

Former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern has an op-ed in the Washington Post today on impeachment, Why I Believe Bush Must Go 01/06/08. I'm pleased to see that he gives a reasonable description of the current partisan atmosphere:

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising. (my emphasis)

And the following is straightforwardly true:

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

McGovern also has an appropriate description of the Bush Gulag, calling it a "shocking perversion".


And he doesn't forget about the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, which Cheney, Bush and Karl Rove decided to embrace as ethnic cleansing by natural disaster:

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot. (my emphasis)

McGovern, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, hasn't forgotten that patriotism is about more than listening to Rush Limbaugh and cheering about killin' foreigners. It also involves commitment to the notion that Andrew Jackson defined of a democratic nation that respects the Constitution.

McGovern, whose wife Eleanor just recently past away, ends on a poignant note:

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

We could all aspire to be as lucid, engaged and committed to the public goods when we become octogenarians as George McGovern is.

Tags: bush administration, bush gulag, george mcgovern, impeachment, iraq war

The politics of the Vietnam War in 1967

Vice President Hubert Humphrey with President Lyndon Johnson

I'm always leery of historical analogies applied to present policies. That doesn't mean they're all bad. Just that most of them are.

Analogy or not, people inevitably are comparing the Iraq War to the Vietnam War. This is complicated by the fact that our Republican "culture warriors" have an image of their domestic political Enemy (the liberals, the dirty hippies, scary black people, etc.) that derives heavily from rightwing mythology about the 1960s, including about the antiwar movement and the Vietnam War itself.

The print edition of the New York Review of Books for 10/11/07 has some excerpts from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, diaries for the year 1967 under the title "The Turning Point", focusing on the Vietnam War. During that period, the military brass were sure of "victory" in Vietnam. The antiwar movement in 1967 was growing among the public and Senators like William Fulbright, Robert Kennedy and George McGovern were expressing their skepticism about Lyndon Johnson policy in the war. The practice at that time, to summarize very briefly, was to escalate the number of troops and call periodic bombing pauses to make a show of "peaceful intentions" but actually not believing any serious willingness to negotiate with the enemy was necessary.

Despite the later public impression that no one knew what we were fighting for in Vietnam - an understandable notion in light of the changing official justifications for the war - there was a defined goal in the war: to preserve an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam. As Schlesinger put it in a diary entry of March 11, the generals at that time were persuaded that they could "force a retreat of the regular Hanoi forces back over the 17th parallel and a dissolution of the Viet Cong". (In historical writing now, the Vietcong is often referred to by its official name, the National Liberation Front [NLF], though Vietcong is also still used because that was the term so commonly used by Americans during the war.)

In light of recent Congressional concern over the blaspheming of the divine presence of our Saviour-General David Petraeus, that diary entry is worth quoting at greater length:

The effect of [Bobby Kennedy's] intervention [by publicly encouraging meaningful peace talks], I think, was to make the administration think concretely about the meaning of negotiation - and, having thought about it, they did not like it. Or, to put it more exactly, having thought about it in the context of the military optimism now sweeping Washington, they feel it would be a great mistake. One has the impression that very little would embarrass the administration now more than a peace overture from Hanoi. The military have the bit between their teeth and are confident that they can "win" the war - i.e., that they can force a retreat of the regular Hanoi forces back over the 17th parallel and a dissolution of the Viet Cong. If they are right, LBJ may still pull himself out of this. But if they are wrong - and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are almost always wrong in their military predictions - then we are committed to a steady enlargement of the war; for, if one thing does not break the resistance, the pressure will increase to do something more - to bomb large population centers, harbors, the industrial complex, to strike along the Chinese border, until we force China into the war. (my emphasis)

Shocking, shocking that a supposedly responsible American and leading historian would suggest even in private that our glorious military leaders might be "wrong" about "their military predictions", and this in a time of war!

Of course, they were wrong about their optimistic predictions on the Vietnam War. And some of the generals finding themselves in that position found it convenient to hide behind conservative idolatry of the military and a dishonest stab-in-the-back theory about the war's outcome.

Sadly, the idea of attacking critics of the war generally as unpatriotic hasn't entirely a Republican habit, as Schlesinger observed in his entry for April 27:

We are reaching some sort of crisis on Vietnam. LBJ has evidently decided on a quick and brutal escalation of the war. It was clear in February that he did not wish negotiation until the existing military balance could be turned considerably in our favor; and his clear intention now is to bomb North Vietnam until Hanoi is prepared to sue for peace on terms which will meet Rusk's idea of a satisfactory settlement. More than that, the administration is apparently determined to advance the proposition that dissent is unpatriotic, and has brought General Westmoreland back for this purpose.

He continued in that same entry with an observation about the practical power the American President has to continue a war, even in the face of major Congressional opposition:

The irony is that all of us for years have been defending the presidential prerogative and regarding the Congress as a drag on policy. It is evident now that this delight in a strong presidency was based on the fact that, up to now, all strong presidents in American history have pursued policies of which one has approved. We are now confronted by the anomaly of a strong president using these arguments to pursue a course which, so far as I can see, can lead only to disaster. It is not hard to assert a congressional role; but, given the structure of the American system, it is very hard to see how the Congress can restrain the presidential drive toward the enlargement of the war. Voting against military appropriations is both humanly and politically self-defeating. The only hope is to organize a broad political movement; and even this cannot take effect until, at the very earliest, the 1968 primaries, which may be too late.

I don't read this as a statement of hopelessness on his part. He was just saying that bringing Congress to the point of forcing a change in Vietnam War policy onto the President would require very significant public political pressure.

Here is one case in which I think we need to be careful not to assume a parallel between then and now. The Vietnam War was intensely unpopular among a significant minority in 1967, but it would still be years before that became a distinct majority sentiment. A majority of the public have been opposed to the Iraq War for quite some time now. The fact that the much-publicized appearance of our Saviour-General Petraeus in Washington, blessing us with his personal divine presence, caused hardly a ripple in public opinion on the war is a sign of the level of opposition to this current war. The situation Schlesinger describes in 1967 is not a parallel in that regard.

His observation about the fact that Congress can only be moved to do their job in restraining a President on a destructive course in the war by continued strong public pressure is, unfortunately, all too relevant today.

The numbing effects of war on people's thinking comes out in his April 18 entry describing a meeting of the previous day with Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey later came to be regarded as what was then called a "Cold War liberal" (at least by critics who wanted to move beyond the Cold War). But up until 1967 or so, Humphrey had been regarded as more of an aggressive, activist liberal, particularly on the civil rights issue. In that entry, Schlesinger writes:

I think I was depressed most of all by the lack of the sense of the concrete human dimension of problems which characterized the old Hubert. Not once in his long discourse on Vietnam did he express any dismay over the human wreckage wrought by the American policy.... This trailing off of humanity is accompanied by an obvious delight in hobnobbing with statesmen - many mentions of the Pope, de Gaulle, [Sarvepalli] Radhakrishnan, etc., etc., etc. (my emphasis)

The courtier is an ever-present feature around the seats of power. Walt Rostow was one of the key advisers on the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administration and is widely regarded as a hack. In his diary entry of July 28, he described Rostow's then-resurgent influence on LBJ:

Walt Rostow has suddenly emerged from a long eclipse and is now established as the Pangloss of the White House, telling the President with great authoritativeness all the things the President wants to hear. Everything, according to Walt, is getting better and better; and I can see him when the bombs begin to fall on Washington, assuring LBJ that the deep-running historic tendencies are on our side, that we are turning the corner in Zambia and Tasmania, and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I last saw him at dinner at Jane McBaine's in Washington on June 14. He exuded self-satisfaction with his resurrection and set forth a tedious and misconceived analogy between LBJ and Lincoln, casting the opposition to the war in the role of the Copperheads [pro-Southern Northern Democrats] and saying that, if LBJ only kept up the military momentum, he would be in the clear in another few months. (my emphasis)

As tempting as it is to see this as a parallel to the neocons and their "cakewalk" fantasies, the similarities probably have more to do with the persistence of hackery and flattering the king than anything else.

But also in light of the present-day polemics over the war-loving Trotskyist neoconservatives and "chickenhawks", these two passages from that same diary entry are striking:

The big issue, of course, has been Vietnam. I would say that this period has marked, if not a change in Lyndon Johnson, at least a change in my own perception of him. I had thought until rather recently that the tendency toward a widening of the war represented a triumph of his advisers over his instincts - that the last thing he wanted was American involvement in a ground war in Asia, or, even less, a war with China, and that his dearest hope was a negotiated solution making possible American withdrawal. If this was once his mood, I fear it is so no longer. He would seem to have turned a corner toward the systematic enlargement of the war. Why? I cannot resist the feeling that domestic politics - his precipitous decline in the public opinion polls - constitute a major factor. He once told Dick Goodwin that there was far more chauvinism in the United States than easterners understood, and it now looks as if a course of playing the war to the hilt has recommended itself to him as the best way of reversing the polls and bringing about Democratic gains in November. There may be other, deeper pressures working on him. Dick has hinted that he may have a streak of personal cowardice (as demonstrated in his panic after the murder in Dallas), which may force him into public virility in order to prove something about himself (in the sense that a war hero, like JFK, felt no need to prove himself by invading Cuba after the Bay of Pigs or the missile crisis). ...

The conversation was resumed over the weekend of July 24, which I spent at Ken Galbraith's in Newfane, Vermont, with George McGovern and Seymour Harris. But now I had begun to think for the first time of the possibility of RFK's going for the nomination in 1968. Of course, this is a long time away - and two years would give LBJ plenty of opportunity for all the escalation he seeks and needs. But, assuming he follows the present course without getting into a nuclear war with China, there might be just the possibility of reversing all historical precedent and rejecting the nomination of an incumbent president.

George said that he would be all for it; adding that he thought that LBJ had a "great yellow streak" and might conceivably be bluffed out of trying for renomination, citing his health and the 22nd Amendment as reasons for not running again. This is all remote and unlikely, but a month ago none of us would have thought it worth a moment's consideration. (my emphasis)

Aside from the psychological speculations, it could certainly be argued that Johnson's withdrawal from the 1968 Presidential race is at least partly a confirmation of McGovern's thought that Johnson could be "bluffed" out of the race. Because at the time of his withdrawal, it was by no means a done deal that Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy could have captured the nomination.

In fairness to Johnson, I would also say that he had a genuine concern for the well-being of the country and a real feeling of responsibility about the Vietnam War (however misguided or reprehensible his policies were) that is difficult to even imagine in men like Dick Cheney, George Bush or Rummy.

On biographical matters, I also found this to be a valuable observation about Hubert Humphrey from a March 11 entry:

... Hubert [Humphrey] went on the air on Issues and Answers. We all watched it before lunch at Hickory Hill (except Bobby [Kennedy], who was so irritated and upset by Hubert's performance that, after a few minutes, he went silently away). It was a new and different Hubert - hard-faced, except for some unctuous smiles, and uncharacteristically coarse in his language. His trouble, I fear, is that he cannot say something publicly without deeply believing it privately; and when, as now, he has no choice in his public utterances, he whips up a fervency of private belief. I fear also that Max Kampelman or someone has persuaded him that this is the issue on which he can knock out RFK. His sense of splitting with the liberal community, a probable feeling of guilt over the positions he is taking - all this has made him self-righteous and irascible. (my emphasis)

The trait of being unable to "say something publicly without deeply believing it privately" would be quite a handicap for most politicians!

Tags: arthur schlesinger, george mcgovern, lyndon johnson, robert kennedy, vietnam war

Cheney's attempt to shoot McGovern in the face (metaphorically speaking)

The Dark Lord speaking to the rightwing Heritage Foundation 04/13/07

If you want to check out Cheney's comments to which George McGovern was responding in the op-ed I quoted in my last post, here's a news story on it: Cheney Berates Democrats on War by Peter Baker Washington Post 04/14/07.

The full text is available at the White House Web site: Vice President's Remarks to the Heritage Foundation 04/13/07.

Although anything that comes out of Cheney's mouth reminds me of what Harry Truman said once when a reporter asked him about one of Joe McCarthy's whoppers. Truman said he hadn't heard it, and added (quoting from memory), "But if that fellow McCarthy said it, it's a damn lie, you can be sure about that."

Tags: dick cheney, george mcgovern, iraq war

George McGovern to Dark Lord Cheney: Go [Cheney] yourself!

"The Old Man and the Sea", Edmund Valtman cartoon, published in The Hartford Times 10/31/72 - shows McGovern keeping on fighting to end the Vietnam War

George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee for President, responded to one of Dick Cheney's slams at him in Cheney is wrong about me, wrong about war Los Angeles Times 04/24/07. McGovern writes:

The city where the vice president spoke, Chicago, is sometimes dubbed "the Windy City." Cheney converted the chilly wind of Chicago into hot air. ...

He ... said that the McGovern way is to surrender in Iraq and leave the U.S. exposed to new dangers. The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

In the war of my youth, World War II, I volunteered for military service at the age of 19 and flew 35 combat missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. By contrast, in the war of his youth, the Vietnam War, Cheney got five deferments and has never seen a day of combat - a record matched by President Bush.

If Cheney actually had a conscience, that would have to sting a bit. But the Dark Lord shows no evidence of being burdened by anything so "quaint" as a conscience.

Cheney and Bush blew the effort to trap Bin Laden in Afghanistan by their sluggish and inept response after the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, indeed they did. That's also normally the order in which I refer to them on foreign policy matters, Cheney and Bush.

On one point I do agree with Cheney: Today's Democrats are taking positions on the Iraq war similar to the views I held toward the Vietnam War. But that is all to the good.

The war in Iraq has greatly increased the terrorist danger. There was little or no terrorism, insurgency or civil war in Iraq before Bush and Cheney took us into war there five years ago. Now Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism, a bloody insurgency against our troops and a civil war.

Beyond the deaths of more than 3,100 young Americans and an estimated 600,000 Iraqis, we have spent nearly $500 billion on the war, which has dragged on longer than World War II.

The Democrats are right. Let's bring our troops home from this hopeless war.

Sounds right to me.

Who was the real loser of '72?

The vice president spoke with contempt of my '72 campaign, but he might do well to recall that I began that effort with these words: "I make one pledge above all others - to seek and speak the truth." We made some costly tactical errors after winning the nomination, but I never broke my pledge to speak the truth. That is why I have never felt like a loser since 1972. In contrast, Cheney and Bush have repeatedly lied to the American people.

McGovern was one of the subjects in a book I read years ago about people who had dealt with major failures, i.e., serious career setbacks in their lives. McGovern not only has good politics, he's a decent guy with his feet on the ground. He is also clear-headed about what the Iraq War means, while Dick Cheney has his head up his [expletive deleted].

Let's hope that this expectation of McGovern's is fulfilled:

It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972. Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over. (my emphasis)

McGovern has more dignity as well as decency than the Dark Lord. But he does make it clear that he holds a low opinion of Deadeye Dick:

Aside from a growing list of impeachable offenses, the vice president has demonstrated his ignorance of foreign policy by attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria. Apparently he thinks it is wrong to visit important Middle East states that sometimes disagree with us. Isn't it generally agreed that Nixon's greatest achievement was talking to the Chinese Communist leaders, which opened the door to that nation? And wasn't President Reagan's greatest achievement talking with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev until the two men worked out an end to the Cold War? Does Cheney believe that it's better to go to war rather than talk with countries with which we have differences? [The straightforward answer is yes - Bruce]

We, of course, already know that when Cheney endorses a war, he exempts himself from participation. On second thought, maybe it's wise to keep Cheney off the battlefield — he might end up shooting his comrades rather than the enemy. (my emphasis)

And speaking of conscience, McGovern closes with a quote from the English conservative Edmund Burke, "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood."

Which reminds me of one of the really true things the Dark Lord ever said, "Men without conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine."

On that topic, he speaks as an expert.

Another note on McGovern: his wife Eleanor passed away in January of this year at age 85. There is a McGovern Legacy Museum at Dakota Wesleyan University. Fortunately for us, McGovern is still creating his legacy.

Unfortunately for us, so is Dick Cheney.

Tags: dick cheney, george mcgovern, iraq war