<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body dir="auto"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><dt><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"For of all sad words of tongue or pen,</span></dt><dt><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"</span></dt><dt><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></dt><dt><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">- From "Maud Muller" by John Greenleaf Whittier</span></dt></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times at:</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: nowrap; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; "><a href="http://tinyurl.com/9c9arhy">http://tinyurl.com/9c9arhy</a></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; white-space: nowrap; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; "> </span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">------------------------------------</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; float: right; text-align: center; padding-bottom: 3px; "><table class="cubeAd" style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><tbody><tr><td class="adLabel"></td></tr><tr><td valign="middle" align="center"><div class="miscAd cube"><br></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div><p></p><h1 style="text-align: -webkit-auto; margin: 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; font-weight: normal; position: relative; "><font size="3"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">George McGovern, liberal standard-bearer against Nixon in '72, dies</span></font></h1><div><font size="3"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></font></div><h2 style="text-align: -webkit-auto; margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; font-weight: normal; "><font size="3"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Democrat George S. McGovern, a war hero who opposed the Vietnam War, was crushed by President Richard Nixon's Watergate-tainted campaign. A die-hard idealist, McGovern inspired scores of budding politicians.</span></font></h2><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">George S. McGovern, an icon of American liberalism who campaigned for the White House with moral fervor against President Richard M. Nixon and the Vietnam War but lost in a thundering landslide, has died. He was 90.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">A spokesman for McGovern's family, Steve Hildebrand, told The Associated Press by telephone that McGovern died at 5:15 a.m. Sunday at a hospice in Sioux Falls, surrounded by family and lifelong friends.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">A three-term U.S. senator from South Dakota, McGovern won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. His hard-fought campaign against Nixon and the war in Southeast Asia attracted millions of angry, anti-Establishment voters, including women and minorities, long-haired students and buttoned-down idealists.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He chose Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri to be his vice presidential running mate without knowing that Eagleton had a history of depression. When the revelation caused criticism, McGovern dumped him, only to end up looking fickle. He also fell victim to some of the transgressions of Watergate, the scandal that ultimately forced Nixon to resign. But public outrage came too late, and McGovern suffered one of the biggest defeats in U.S. history.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-george-mcgovern-obit-pictures,0,1894173.photogallery"><strong style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><font color="#000000">Photos: George McGovern | 1922-2012</font></strong></a></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">His campaign left a significant legacy, including his proposals, since fulfilled, that women be appointed to the Supreme Court and nominated for the vice presidency. He inspired scores of budding politicians: Bill Clinton was his Texas coordinator before becoming governor of Arkansas, then president. Gary Hart was his campaign manager before becoming a senator from Colorado, then a candidate for the White House.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">McGovern was a die-hard idealist. His electoral loss embittered him, but not for long. He never abandoned his optimism or his faith in humanity. Neither did he give up his devotion to liberalism or what colleagues called his extraordinary sense of decency.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">George McGovern was born July 19, 1922, in a parsonage in Avon, S.D., and grew up in Mitchell. His father was a fundamentalist Methodist minister and a political conservative.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">McGovern enrolled at Dakota Wesleyan University and married classmate Eleanor Stegeberg on Oct. 21, 1943. But within months, he left to fly a B-24 in World War II. On his bunk, he read philosophy and history. The books broadened him, and he came home, he said, wanting to know more about "the nature and destiny of man, about the adequacy of our contemporary value system and the capacity of our institutions to nurture those values."</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He also returned a hero. On one of 35 missions against Nazi targets in Europe, he took hits that blew out most of the nose of the plane and wounded a gunner. Shrapnel cut the hydraulic brake and electrical lines. He ordered his crew to crank down the landing gear and tie parachutes to girders just inside the rear hatches. He landed and released the parachutes. Not a life was lost. McGovern was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">After the war he returned to Dakota Wesleyan, then entered Garrett Theological Seminary in Chicago. He liked preaching, but the counseling and ceremonies that were part of ministry held little appeal. So he switched to Northwestern University and history.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He read Hegel, then Walter Rauschenbusch, a noted advocate of what was called the social gospel. To McGovern, it meant applying the idealism of Christianity, and it became his secular belief. He supported the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace for president in 1948. But, according to Robert Sam Anson's "McGovern: a Biography" (1972), McGovern grew disillusioned by fanaticism among Wallace's supporters, so he became a Democrat. He opposed the Korean War and favored recognition of the communist government of Beijing. He earned a doctorate in history and returned to Dakota Wesleyan to teach.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"The principal reason I wanted to move from the classroom into politics [was] that I felt I could influence the course of history more directly," Anson quotes McGovern as saying.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1956 he ran for Congress and became the first Democrat from South Dakota to be elected to the House of Representatives in 22 years. After two terms, he ran for the Senate in 1960, but lost.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Newly elected President John F. Kennedy asked McGovern to open an agency to send surplus food abroad. By late 1961, McGovern had Kennedy's Food for Peace program operating in a dozen countries. It was one of McGovern's proudest achievements.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1962, he became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from South Dakota in 26 years. His chief interest was world peace. He challenged "our Castro fixation," decried America's capacity for nuclear "overkill" and proposed a $4-billion reduction in the U.S. defense budget. He also supported Medicare, school lunches and the war on poverty.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Conservative South Dakotans re-elected him twice, despite his 81% rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Part of his success was his attention to constituents. But another part was his authenticity, decency and sense of mission. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) noticed it. "Of all my colleagues," he said, "the person who has the most feeling and does things in the most genuine way is George McGovern."</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">McGovern was one of the first senators to warn against involvement in Vietnam, in 1963. Two years later, he opposed extending the fighting into North Vietnam and called the war a "moral debacle." After Robert Kennedy was assassinated during his run for president, McGovern mounted his first campaign for the White House. He was defeated at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where young antiwar protesters were clubbed by police on the streets of Chicago.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Four years later, with antiwar sentiment at a pitch, he ran for president again. Almost immediately, McGovern became a target of attacks that grew into Watergate. President Nixon's aides saved their worst for other Democrats, because Nixon thought McGovern would be easier to beat. Nonetheless, they took steps to insert a Nixon "plant" into McGovern's campaign.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In his authoritative 1976 book, "Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years," J. Anthony Lukas documented how Nixon's aides did better than a single "plant." They placed a spy among reporters covering McGovern's campaign, they sent a private investigator to infiltrate his state campaign in California, and they inserted still another spy into his national headquarters near Capitol Hill.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">This spy provided a floor plan, including electrical outlets and air ducts. Nixon's men used it in several attempts to install electronic listening devices inside McGovern headquarters. Only after failing at this did they break into and bug the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But that was not all. A private eye spied on McGovern headquarters at the Democratic convention in Miami, and a Nixon operative hired an airplane that flew over the convention with a sign: "Peace, Pot, Promiscuity. Vote McGovern."</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Supported by party irregulars, McGovern won the Democratic presidential nomination at a chaotic convention. He picked Eagleton as his vice presidential candidate, only to learn that his running mate had suffered depression and taken electric shock therapy. The public fretted that a potential commander in chief might become dangerously depressed. McGovern said he stood behind Eagleton "1,000%" and would keep him on the ticket.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In the end, however, McGovern could not weather the political storm, and he dumped Eagleton. Then he was seen as disloyal and indecisive.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">On Election Day, he won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He stands tied with Walter F. Mondale, who lost to Ronald Reagan, for the worst state-by-state thumping in U.S. history.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In time, Nixon and his vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, were forced to resign, and more than 30 administration officials, campaign officers and financial contributors pleaded or were found guilty of breaking the law or covering up illegal activity. Nixon might have gone to prison but for a pardon from President Ford, who had succeeded Agnew as vice president and then took over the presidency when Nixon quit.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Nonetheless, McGovern was marked as a loser.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1974, McGovern won reelection to the Senate.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Six years later, his opponents called him a baby killer because he was pro-choice and was considered a traitor for voting to let Panama take control of the Panama Canal. The attacks, plus Reagan's first fitting in presidential coattails, were too much, and they cost McGovern his Senate seat.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1984, he ran again for president, preaching a resolutely liberal message. Instead of soldiers, he said, send envoys into hot spots. Be more even-handed in the Middle East. Use defense savings to build a new railroad system, create jobs, save fuel and cut pollution. Offer cheap loans to first-time home buyers. Give surplus food to the hungry.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He could not resist a dig at Watergate. "At least," he told his campaign audiences, "I don't have to check in with a probation officer before coming here."</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Even so, McGovern visited Nixon and made peace.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">When he failed to place second in the Massachusetts primary, the only state that had voted for him 12 years before, he withdrew. But he had won back his dignity. For many, he became an icon of liberalism.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">McGovern returned to teaching and for several years headed the Middle East Policy Council, dedicated to informing Americans about Islam and the Arab world.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But his later years were torn by personal tragedy. His daughter Teresa, who suffered from depression and alcoholism, was found in December 1994 in Madison, Wis., frozen to death in the snow after an evening of drinking. She was 45 and the mother of two.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In her diary, McGovern read how she had suffered as a youngster through his long campaigns and his endless nights in the Senate and how she had missed him and felt desolate, rejected and abandoned.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">McGovern was overwhelmed with guilt. "I'd give everything I have, and I mean everything," he told The Times, "for one more afternoon with [her], just to tell her how much I loved her."</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In deep depression himself, he sought help and finally regained his health.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Then, in 1998, his son, Steven, also an alcoholic, was jailed in Massachusetts after pleading guilty to beating his female companion.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Yet McGovern's optimism was undiminished. Teresa's death, he said, simply renewed his compassion for others. "I guess I've always been an optimist," he once told a reporter. "I don't know how you can live any other way."</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In 1998, Clinton sent him to Rome as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In 2000, Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. A year later, the U.N. made him its first global ambassador to ease hunger. In 2008, McGovern and his former Senate colleague Bob Dole (R-Kan.) shared the World Food Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize for combating hunger.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Over the years, McGovern published a dozen books. His last, "What It Means to Be a Democrat" (2011), summed up his political beliefs.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Be compassionate, he urged. Put government to work to help the less fortunate. End hunger. Spend more for education. Protect the environment. Reduce military spending. And forge peace in the Middle East by listening to all parties.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">McGovern's wife, Eleanor, died in 2007 and his son, Steven, in July. He is survived by his daughters Ann, Susan and Mary, 12 grandchildren and six<strong></strong>great-grandchildren.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">---------------</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="text-align: left; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">George McGovern and his wife, Eleanor, in their wedding photo in 1943.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><img src="cid:933F25BB-8288-4B10-AF39-9EBCB517922F" alt="600.jpeg" id="933F25BB-8288-4B10-AF39-9EBCB517922F" width="600" height="435"></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">---------------</p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="text-align: left; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">George McGovern with running mate Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Fla., in July 1972.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><img src="cid:0129A6F4-165C-4E4F-8FDC-2F5A75EBD34A" alt="600.jpeg" id="0129A6F4-165C-4E4F-8FDC-2F5A75EBD34A" width="600" height="435"></p></div><div><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">------------------------------------</span><br><br><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Rest well, senator.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "> </div><div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Tom Hansen</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Moscow, Idaho</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="huge" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; ">"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."</span></span></div></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="huge" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; ">- George McGovern</span></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="huge" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; "><br></span></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="huge" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; ">"No man should advocate a course in private that he's ashamed to admit in public."</span></span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="huge" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; ">- George McGovern</span></span></div><span style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto; "><br></div></span></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "> </div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>