Lessons We Should’ve Learned from George McGovern – From Vietnam to Iraq

I frankly don't understand the interpretation that once you get into a war you can't ever pull out until you've won it. We need more politicians in this country who are willing to say, "I made a mistake. Let's correct it as soon as possible." -- George McGovern, 2005, former U.S. Senator from South Dakota and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee


George McGovern’s landslide loss to Richard Nixon in the 1972 Presidential election (my first experience of voting, and one of the worst days of my life) marked the point in the history of our country where the “liberal” label began to become a political albatross, to be shunned by even liberal politicians. Today, the mere mention of McGovern, an unabashed liberal, is enough to send Democratic politicians scurrying to the right, in order to avoid being tainted with the numerous myths about liberals, concocted by conservatives over the past few decades.

Yet it is ironic, as well as grossly unfair, that the main issue on which McGovern was excoriated during the 1972 campaign, his advocacy for unilateral withdrawal from the Vietnam War, is one on which he is today widely recognized as having been correct. And not only correct, but precociously correct, as he came out against that war when only four U.S. Senators were against it and when 80% of his South Dakota constituents were in favor of it.

Though our national news media in those days was far better than it is today (because of Reagan’s veto of legislation to enforce the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, followed by the Telecommunication Act of 1996), it nevertheless excoriated McGovern for his anti-war stance, unfairly calling him an isolationist, “weak on defense”, a pacifist, a “weakling”, and much worse. No matter that he was a war hero in World War II, flying 35 missions over enemy territory as a bomber pilot, and receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. No matter that he repeatedly explained in great detail why our involvement in the Vietnam War made our country weaker, not stronger. The labels stuck because they were repeated over and over and over again.


Why McGovern was right about the Viet Nam War

In order to better understand why McGovern was right about Viet Nam, and how that relates to our current war in Iraq, it is necessary to understand the context of that war:

The Geneva Conference Agreements, which officially ended the war between France and Vietnam in 1954, provided for general elections which were to bring about the unification of Vietnam. However, the United States, fearing a Communist victory in those elections, intervened to prevent the elections from taking place – and so began our long involvement culminating in an eventual Communist victory, but not until two million Vietnamese and 58 thousand Americans were dead.

Though McGovern initially voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (passed unanimously by the House and with only two “no” votes in the Senate), the equivalent of the 2003 Iraq War resolution, McGovern soon came to oppose the war, most forcefully with the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment (defeated by 55-39), which required the complete withdrawal of American forces over a period of several months. McGovern opposed the war for several reasons, both moral and practical:

 The Vietnamese people have a right to decide what kind of government they have.
 The corrupt South Vietnamese government we supported had lost the confidence of the people of all parts of Vietnam.
 We were paying an awful price for the war in terms of lost lives (58,000 dead American soldiers) and money ($600 billion).
 Not to mention two million dead Vietnamese.
 Nixon’s idea of “Peace with honor” was pure bullshit. There is no honor in having millions of people killed for no good reason.
 It had become obvious that we couldn’t win that war.

Today it is widely recognized in informed circles that McGovern was right about all of that – notwithstanding the many Republican wing-nuts who, just like the Nazis of the 1930s (with regard to WW I) like to claim that we lost the war because we were stabbed in the back by our leaders, who refused to prosecute the war vigorously enough. Even Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of State in the Johnson administration and the main architect of the Vietnam War, has admitted as much, in his confessional book, “In Retrospect – The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”, and also in a documentary film, “The Fog of War”. But you wouldn’t guess at that from listening to today’s war mongering news media, who still vilify McGovern for his anti-Vietnam War efforts.

Today the name George McGovern is synonymous with “loser”, because of his landslide loss in 1972, where he carried the electoral votes of only a single state (Massachusetts – due largely to Ted Kennedy’s help). But George McGovern is definitely NOT a loser. Because of his courageous stance on the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon was forced to run on an end the war – but “with honor” – platform. Consequently, the war probably ended much sooner than it otherwise would have, thus resulting in the saving of perhaps millions of additional lives. In other words, George McGovern, in losing the 1972 Presidential election, did far more good for our country than Richard Nixon did in winning that election and serving as President for six years.


McGovern was NOT weak on defense

George McGovern was no pacifist (no offense to pacifists) and he certainly was never weak on defense or an isolationist. His steadfast opposition to the Vietnam War was not based on a knee jerk reaction against all wars, but on the specific reasons noted above. In fact, many stands that he has taken before and since the Vietnam War illustrate his willingness and even his eagerness for war or other intervention when necessary for national defense or humanitarian reasons – which are the only justifiable reasons for war according to international law and according to decent moral standards.

Not only did McGovern eagerly participate as a bomber pilot in WW II, but he advocated the bombing of Nazi concentration camps, in order to more directly combat the genocide taking place in those camps (Whether he was right or wrong that the bombing of those camps would have helped more than hurt the prisoners being held there – and there is controversy over that – is beside the point. The point that I am making here is that he passionately believed that it would help).

As a U.S. Senator in 1978, McGovern was one of the very few U.S. politicians who advocated intervention in Cambodia in order to stop the genocide taking place there. McGovern asked in response to that genocide, “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch a population slaughtered or do we marshal military force and put an end to it?”

McGovern’s view of our intervention to stop the genocide in Kosovo is indicated by fact that he supported General Wesley Clark – the primary advocate and architect of our Kosovo intervention – for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination.

And last but not least, McGovern’s vigorous and continuing efforts to ameliorate or end world hunger mark him as anything but an isolationist.

No, George McGovern was not (and is not) any of those things that the right wing fanatics, as well as the mainstream corporate media, often claim him to be. Rather, it was largely his belief that a country’s having a Communist government does not provide justification for making war on that country, that abstract concepts like “honor” don’t provide justification for continuing a war that has no other justification, and that the Pentagon budget should be subject to the same oversight that all other budget items are, that set him apart from most politicians of his era and made him such a target. As McGovern recently said about his opposition to the Vietnam War:



McGovern is also right about the Iraq War

A major problem with our involvement in the Iraq War is that we started that war on false pretenses, and the Bush administration has given every indication that we are there for its own purposes, and NOT to bring democracy to Iraq, as Bush now claims. It is largely for those reasons that so many Iraqis are now so hostile to our continued occupation of their country. Reasons for their suspicions of our intentions include:

The lies that provided the initial rationalization for our invasion; evidence that our occupation is meant to be permanent, by actions such as refusing UN assistance and hinting that we might seek permanent military bases in Iraq; by rushing to guard only the oil ministry rather than dealing with the initial chaos after Saddam’s fall, Bush lent much credence to the belief that oil was a prime motive for the invasion; and, the highly lucrative no-bid contracts that were given to Bush administration benefactors such as Halliburton further confirm the corrupt purposes for which it started the war.

McGovern explains to BuzzFlash:



What we can learn from the example that George McGovern gave us

Those Americans who accept our corporate media’s point of view that George McGovern is a “loser” should rethink that conclusion. George McGovern is a loser only in the sense that George W. Bush is a winner, or that John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were losers – they were all cut down due to forces beyond their control, for courageously doing what they believed to be the right thing. George McGovern was walloped in the 1972 election mainly because of a combination of four reasons: sloppy and malicious press coverage; dirty election tricks (part of the Watergate scandal); an opponent who took away his biggest campaign issue by promising (for the most part falsely) to do what McGovern himself promised, though more slowly and “with honor”; and our country wasn’t quite ready for him. Democrats need to stand up more to supposedly unbiased and non-partisan corporate media shills like Tim Russert and Chris Matthews, rather than allowing them to define the important issues. As McGovern himself recently said, “We shouldn't be cowardly and silent, just because we've taken a couple of beatings.” Unless and until we find leaders who will heed that advice, our country will never be ready for the likes of George McGovern.

he may have been right on the issues, but he didn't win the election (in fact horribly lost it).

A politician is more than a policy advocate. Speaking all the great policies are useless if you can't effect change.

If we are to learn from McGovern, we need to learn what his (and to a lesser extent Kerry's) mistakes were and how to avoid them. Not to continue to love their position while losing elections.

he may have not been as an effective campaigner as some would have liked, but he was and is right with respect to Vietnam.

I don't see how it can be claimed that he was a bad campaigner either.

He drew very large crowds and generated a lot of excitement.

But the national news media blew every little mistake in his campaign way out of proportion.

Also, his opponents in the Democratic primaries wounded him quite badly. So he was on the defensive from the beginning.

horribly or not -- does not necessarily mean that they were a bad politician. There are numerous reasons why politicians lose elections, and only some of them have to do with how good of a politician they were.

What is it that makes you say that McGovern was a bad politician, other than the fact that he lost the election badly?

Just because someone may lack skills in one area doesn't mean that we can't learn a lot from him or her in another area.

I think that this country should have learned a lot from the Vietnam War, and McGovern was at the forefront of the effort to spread the lesson that we should have learned from that war. If Americans had learned that lesson well they might have objected strenuously enough to the Iraq War that it would have been politically unfeasible. Instead, there has been a revisionist history movement in this country which spouts the view that there was nothing wrong with the Vietnam War itself, and that it was winnable if only we had pursued it more vigorously. That is absurd. Nixon wanted to "win" the war more than anything, and he certainly would never have pulled out as long as he thought it was winnable.

The Vietnam War was not winnable because there was almost no support among the people in the country for our efforts. That is the lesson that we should apply to Iraq. Whether or not McGovern was a good politician is not the issue. I am certainly not advocating that we elect unelectable candidates. That is the very last thing that I would want.

That was a bad mistake but it had nothing to do with McGovern being liberal. If a moderate had made the same mistake, and faced Nixon's illegal tactics to hijack the election, the moderate Democrat would have lost just as badly.

And let's not forget that many of the conservative party leaders did nothing to help McGovern, so we can rightly blame them for helping to sabotage McGovern as well. That's something conservative Democrats do to liberals in their own party to this day. They don't show the same loyalty they expect from us.

to help McGovern, and they even may have sabatoged his campaign some. I think that they wanted very much to avoid being labelled as too anti-war. The same problem that we have today.

I would not characterize McGovern's handling of the Eagleton affair as a bad mistake on McGovern's part. We should remember that McGovern did not have the nomination sewn up even coming into the convention. So he had only a couple of days or so to choose a VP. So his staff was not able to identify Eagleton's past history of depression, and Eagleton wouldn't admit to it when he was interviewed by McGovern and his staff. And then, McGovern hesitated on his decision of what to do about it, first standing behind Eagleton and then letting him go after it became apparent that he could not politically afford to keep him on the ticket. Is that different than any other Presidential nominee would have handled the situation? I don't think so. But the media made a big bruhaha about it, and McGovern was politically damaged by it.

I was so impressed with him that I become a volunteer for his campaign and was a member of his Million Member Club. I worked for months almost daily at the local campaign headquarters in Bedford. That was a very cold fall and we froze there because the former Howard Johnsons had no heat. But day after day into the night I returned and did any job they gave me. We were all inspired by McGovern and were willing to work our tails off to elect a President who would end that awful Viet Nam War.

On election day I stood outside a polling place most of the day passing out his flyers and talking to voters. The response was very good. I stayed there until the last person voted and the poll workers locked the door. I drove home which only took less than two minutes. I was so cold and so tired. I was about to put the key in my door when my son opened it and said, "He lost!"

I asked how could that be possible? I just left the polling place, they haven't even had time to count the votes yet! I was deflated. All the televison stations were confirming the same, "He lost!"

I still believe that the vote was fixed, McGovern could not have lost that badly. Fast forward to 2000 and they did it again!

:cry:

I also worked in the campaign as a volunteer, but not as hard as you did. I did some door to door work, and I drove people to the polls on Election Day. That was in Indiana, which is a very red state -- hasn't once voted for a Dem for President since 1964. My the work I memories of did are not good. I remember getting some bad reactions from people.

I suppose that I should have seen it coming, but it hit me very hard when I found out that he lost. My opinion of the average person in this country went down quite a bit as a result. That was probably one of the darkest days of my life. But 2000 and 2004 may have been even worse.

The American voters were wrong that year, not the Democratic Party.

I don't doubt that he would have been another FDR.

Of course, the right wingers would have done everything in their power to make his Presidency a failure.