George McGovern.

• Author: Zunes, Stephen
• Position: Interview

An old friend who long ago gave up on the Democratic Party in favor of politics on the left fringe greatly enjoys bashing prominent liberals. He finds that the opportunism, the compromises, and the double-standards of leading liberal Democrats provide easy targets. Yet of former South Dakota Senator and 1972 Presidential nominee George McGovern, my friend once opined, "If all liberals were like McGovern, I'd still be a liberal."

A full thirteen years after the stunning loss of his Senate seat to a right-wing Republican in the 1980 Reagan landslide, McGovern still displays, at seventy-one, the idealism and integrity that marked his political career. His faith in traditional American principles and his unabashed liberalism remain unshaken despite the rightward drift of electoral politics in recent years.

McGovern was raised the son of a Methodist clergyman, and served as a highly decorated bomber pilot in World War II. He earned a Ph.D. in history and government at Northwestern University, and returned to his native South Dakota to teach at Dakota Wesleyan. In 1956, he was elected to the House of Representatives and served two terms before being tapped by President John F. Kennedy to head the new Food for Peace Program. First elected to the Senate in 1962, he briefly entered the 1968 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination in a last-ditch effort to rally supporters of slain New York Senator Robert Kennedy and dissuade party leaders from throwing the nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Following his successful leadership of attempts to reform the Democratic Party rules, McGovern received the Presidential nomination in 1972. He lost to Richard Nixon in an electoral landslide.

He launched another run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1984, and considered joining the 1992 Presidential race.

Since 1991, McGovern has headed the Middle East Policy Council, an organization dedicated to better public understanding of the region. He has made several major trips to the Middle East, meeting with prime ministers, presidents, royalty, scholars, journalists, and opposition figures. I caught up with him for this interview on one of these sojourns, in his suite at the Sheraton Hotel in Damascus, Syria.

Q: What's your assessment of the direction of the Democratic Party in the twenty years since your Presidential race?

George McGovern: It's quite clear that since 1972 we have not had a campaign based on as much authentic liberalism as we saw then. I don't say that boastfully, but historically the Democratic Party has simply not had as clear a liberal vision in either foreign or domestic policy. The 1972 campaign wasn't simply against our Vietnam policy, but a fundamental challenge to the Cold War and the whole apparatus that supported it, including excessive military spending and the militarization of our economy and society. We haven't had that kind of challenge since.

I think it's fair to say that Jimmy Carter saw himself as a moderate to conservative governor and a moderate to conservative President. With the exception of a few initiatives, such as those dealing with human rights, he departed considerably from the emphasis we had made in 1972.

The same thing is going on now. Bill Clinton was coordinator of our 1972 campaign in Texas, I expect in considerable part because of my opposition to the Vietnam war. For at least the last decade, however, he has been identified with the wing of the Democratic Party that is said to want to move the party to the center or the right.

Having said that, I think the end of the Cold War may have made it a little easier for liberals to breathe free again.

Q: If you look at public-opinion polls, with the exception of certain law-and-order issues like the death penalty and drugs, Americans are at least as liberal as they were in 1972. Yet the idea of someone with your kind of politics getting the Democratic Party nomination seems rather remote at this point. Why do you suppose this is?

McGovern: I agree that rank-and-file Americans are more liberal than the Establishment sometimes asserts. I think there is a rather determined and influential element among media pundits who have dedicated themselves to the idea that the way to the White House is to move to the right. There may be some minor grain...