The Argus Leader: “George McGovern, the three-term senator from South Dakota and 1972 presidential candidate who inspired a generation of Democrats, has died after being hospitalized Monday. He was 90.”
AP’s Italie: “Rock on: George McGovern's candidacy a landmark for counterculture.” Setting the scene: “Abbie Hoffman sobbed that fateful night at the downtown Manhattan apartment of fellow activist Jerry Rubin. So did Rubin and Allen Ginsberg. John Lennon was drunk, and out of control, shouting ‘Up the Revolution!’ in mock celebration of a dream defeated. It was November 1972 and George McGovern had just been whipped in a landslide by Richard Nixon.”
NPR: “If George McGovern often seemed miscast as a presidential candidate, he was at least as improbable as an icon of the anti-war movement. The Vietnam War gave birth to an opposition movement unlike any America had seen in its previous wars. It was young, unconventional and countercultural, defiant of authority and deeply suspicious of government. McGovern himself was none of these things. He was, at the time of his presidential nomination, a 50-year-old two-term senator from South Dakota, a family man and the son of a small-town Methodist minister. He had been a decorated bomber pilot with 35 combat missions in World War II and had spent most of his adult life in politics, mostly in Washington. Few people outside his home state had ever heard of him before.”
Time wraps his life: “An intelligent, confident politician who twice stepped up as his party’s candidate and worked to turn the counterculture of the ’60s into a mainstream political phenomenon, he ultimately remains best known for his vehement opposition to the Vietnam War. McGovern, a World War II Air Force veteran with Ph.D in History, served for 18 years as the Democratic Senator of a heavily conservative state, during which time he served on the Agriculture Committee and attempted to bridge the deepening rifts within his party.”
