Nate Schweber Writes Home

George McGovern: He Was Right

By Nate Schweber, 6-30-05

I watched Bush say Iraq is “worth the sacrifices� from an emergency room where I was treated for whiplash after my two-door Chevy Cavalier was buggered by a semi truck on the New Jersey Turnpike. I don’t agree. Neither does my bandmate Eric. We were in a Manhattan recording studio last November when Eric got a cell phone call that his best friend had just been blown up near Tikrit.

I’m proud to hail from the state led by a man with the most clever anti-war argument yet. Having made national headlines demanding that Montana’s National Guard be brought home from Iraq to fight forest fires, Brian Schweitzer was in the Missoulian again this week calling for Montana’s Black Hawk helicopters back to battle pine infernos. No Iraqi ever destroyed a house in Montana, can’t say the same thing about forest fires. Which do you think is a bigger threat to our homeland security?

In a stiff-necked daze of ibuprofin and insurance claims, my mind drifted to Sen. John Kerry, who went on CNN to rebuke Bush’s speech in such mealy-mouthed fashion that I finally UNDERSTOOD why he lost the election. Then I drifted to Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat,� who once helped a couple of young buck reporters take down Nixon. (And why doesn’t any major American news outlet think the Downing Street Memo is worthy enough to take down Bush? I’m sorry, was New West the last bastion of blogs not freaking out about the Downing Street Memo? Not anymore).

My brain, firing rapidly, seized on the fact that this weekend is the 4th of July. I saw Abe Lincoln on the cover of the new Time Magazine. Then I felt the hot white rush of synergy: Bush, Kerry, Schweitzer, Deep Throat, Nixon, Independence Day, Lincoln…they all relate somehow to the greatest politician inside Montana’s borders.

George McGovern.

The 82-year-old former senator from South Dakota, who ran for president on the Democratic ticket in 1972, has a home in Stevensville.

Unfairly, McGovern is most famous for losing to Nixon in a mudslide. What he should be (and in good circles is) famous for is his commitment to peace and feeding the world. In 1960 Kennedy appointed McGovern director of the Food For Peace Program. In 1997 Clinton appointed him to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization where he set out a plan to give food to 500 million malnourished people. In 1999 he proposed that the United Nations provide a school lunch to every hungry child on earth. In 2001 he was appointed the UN’s global ambassador on hunger.

A decorated WWII hero (McGovern is the central character in the Stephen Ambrose book "The Wild Blue"), McGovern ran for president vowing to stop the Vietnam War. His slogan was “Come Home, America.� He favored amnesty for draft dodgers, military cuts, an overhaul of the tax system which he said favored the rich and a family assistance program that would guarantee a thousand bucks a year for every American adult and child. He was pro-women’s rights, pro-marijuana decriminalization and wanted a job guarantee program at home.

Nixon pioneered the slanderous rhetoric against McGovern that Bush copied 32 years later to thump Kerry. Nixon said McGovern was weak on defense and would allow America’s enemies to proliferate. Sound familiar? Nixon said McGovern’s economic policies would lead to America’s decline and dishonor. He turned the word “liberal� into a pejorative. Déjà vu anyone? Nixon even said McGovern was a flip-flopper. Ring-a-ding-ding!

Imagine the world if McGovern hadn’t been felled by Nixon’s lowballing and his own ill-fated choice of running mate Tom Eagleton -- a concession to centrist Democrats who screwed McGovern by not being forthright about his electroshock therapy. Imagine if it was McGovern, not Deep Throat, who took Nixon down. How many tens of thousands of American men might still be alive? Maybe instead of a nuclear arms race ushered in by Nixon-era neocons like Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney, we would’ve had a world-hunger race as ushered in by McGovern. Certainly if McGovern had been president the U.S. wouldn’t contribute less than 1 percent of its GNP to developing nations. Maybe the tax system would be more fair. Maybe the middle class wouldn’t be shrinking. Maybe the word “liberal� wouldn’t be synonymous with “unpatriotic.� Hell, maybe we wouldn’t have trained Osama Bin Laden to kill because he was our ally against the Soviet Union, which was rotting from the inside trying to keep up with U.S. nuclear proliferation.

How might a McGovern presidency affected Montana? We’re getting way into speculation here, but consider these facts: between 1996 and 2001 Montana ranked 38th in children living in poverty according to the Bureau of Business and Economic Research. Today one in eight households in Montana is uncertain about having enough food, or unable to afford enough food. Would a McGovern presidency in the early 1970s affected that? It would’ve made the country more conscious of the problem and its solutions. There were 268 Montanans killed in Vietnam. McGovern could definitely have affected that. (For the record, six Montanans have died in Iraq).

Hunter S. Thompson put it best in his book "Fear And Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72." He writes, “George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about ‘new politics’ and ‘honesty in government’ is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best intentions of the human race this country might have been, if we could’ve kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.�

In May I drove down the Bitterroot, past the new subdivisions and highway-widening construction, past the navy-blue-under-white mountains to the west and the lime-and-milk aspen trees lining the river to my left. I followed that river all the way to Stevensville. I was going to visit -- or should I say make a pilgrimage to -- McGovern’s bookstore, which he opened a few years ago, after I had moved away.

The bookstore was closed down, though there’s still an advertisement for it on Highway 93. The shell of the bookstore now holds a shop that sells schmaltzy cards with grizzly bear paintings, huckleberry preserves, things carved from wood that say “Montana,� and other such tchotchkes. It baffles me how the Missoula region can support two battleship-sized Wal-Marts, but not an independent bookstore owned by a man who could’ve been president.

I slinked into a stool at the milkshake bar at Valley Drug and Pharmacy a few doors down from McGovern’s old shop and ordered up a thick, violet-colored, huckleberry shake. I told my tale to the shake lady. She said she’d seen McGovern that day and had made him a chocolate shake. Her advice to me was to “just call him up.�

So I did (I’ll respect the man’s privacy a little bit and not reveal how I got the number).

McGovern answered the phone himself and when I told him who I was -- a mid 20’s American concerned about the direction of the country -- he took a few minutes to talk to me.

I said that from what I’ve read about his work in politics, his ideals are closest to where I think this country should be headed and I asked what I could do to lend myself those ideals: feeding the hungry, helping the poor not the rich, peace.

McGovern’s advice was that I support Montana’s governor, Schweitzer. “You’ve got a good one,� he said. When I told him I now live in New York, he advised that I volunteer for Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Charles Schumer’s re-election bids.

I offered to buy him another chocolate shake, if he cared to come back to Valley Drug and Pharmacy, but he politely declined, saying that he was flying to DC the next day (Memorial Day) for a ceremony at the WWII memorial.

He said that we could shake hands if I was around for the 4th of July parade in Stevensville. The high school band would perform, and he’d dress up as Abe Lincoln.

Abe Lincoln indeed. If there’s any role McGovern can play, it’s of an honest statesman who didn’t get a fair shake in politics, but whose vision still inspires people to this day.

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