Because they'd just dropped the voting age from 21 to 18, George McGovern was the first person I ever voted for who was seeking the office of President of the United States. It was a symbolic vote, true. I went to the polls late in the day and the networks — the ones Richard Nixon always claimed were his sworn enemies — were already proclaiming McGovern had been crushed in a landslide.
It felt good to vote for the man but it had been frustrating to support him…and for much the same reason it's frustrating at times these days to support Obama. You had the strong feeling that the folks out there voting against George McGovern had no idea who he was or what he stood for. At times, listening to people say why he had to be defeated, I wondered: Had I missed some speech in which Senator McGovern had called explicitly for the United States to surrender all its weapons, do away with Freedom and apply for statehood in the Soviet Union? His detractors all seemed so certain that was not just his secret agenda but his avowed one, as well.
McGovern was an intelligent man who would later be proven right about…well, not everything but about a lot more than most candidates. He also seemed like a decent man. He had been a war hero but he instructed his campaign officials not to exploit that in advertising. No man running for president thereafter would make that kind of mistake. Polls showed that few knew and many, because of his anti-war positions, assumed he'd been a draft dodger.
A man who had a house near where I lived at the time had big Nixon-Agnew signs stuck in his lawn. When I tried to engage him on the topic, he told me that, as people tend to do in elections, a vote for his candidate was a vote to save America and a vote for the other guy was a vote to destroy America. I've never thought any election quite came down to that but '72 seemed particularly overhyped in that manner. Less than a year later, I read a well-researched and sourced article that itemized things McGovern had advocated that the campaign-mode Nixon-Agnew team had said were dangerous, Commie ideas but which the second-term Nixon-Agnew administration was now adopting. And of course, McGovern had the satisfaction of seeing not only those positions enacted but both his opponents resign in disgrace. Much of what brought Nixon down was related to a campaign to deliberately lie about and smear George McGovern.
I don't recall McGovern taking any victory laps or going on TV to say, "I told you so." If he did, he was justified but I don't think he did that. I attended a speech he gave at UCLA around 1978 and it was wholly about the future. What little he said about the past was only what was necessary to argue for his visions of what that future should be. It was mainly about equality for women and minorities, and I have no doubt that he had a lot to do with things advancing in those areas. He was a man with considerable influence on his country and it's sad to think that so many merely regard him as a Big Loser.