POLITICS: Front and Center for George McGovern

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For McGovern, that strategy has not only been shrewd; it has been necessary. When he announced for the presidency more than a year ago, there was skepticism, irreverence, even downright disbelief. But George Stanley McGovern, 49, once an obscure prairie politician, has somehow struck a responsive chord in the voters; he is now ahead in the extraordinary testing of Democratic presidential postulants in 1972. With Muskie out of the race, McGovern's chief rival is Humphrey, the ever-ebullient 1968 nominee, a hardy perennial compared to the burgeoning McGovern. If his momentum holds, McGovern could well take the Democratic nomination; if it does not, and Humphrey becomes the candidate, the fierceness of McGovern's supporters could well mean a Democratic Party sundered more deeply than it was even in 1968. And should McGovern win at Miami Beach, the campaign could be the most spirited and sharply drawn since John Kennedy and Richard Nixon faced off in 1960.

Unlike Humphrey, say, or Wallace, 2 whose persons and prejudices are clear and familiar, McGovern remains a paradoxical figure. He is a very liberal

Democrat from a very conservative, very Republican state. He is the plain-spoken son of a country preacher who now sports $15 Gucci ties and owns an elegant Japanese-style house in a quiet corner of northwest Washington, D.C. He is a middle-aged prairie populist whose strongest national appeal has been to the young and to the affluent and well-educated citizens of suburbia. He is an outwardly diffident, gentle man—Robert Kennedy once called him the only decent man in the U.S. Senate —whose professorial facade conceals a core of toughness and ambition. He likes movies and chocolate milkshakes, and has fired subordinates for unduly chewing out people working under them. He is a complex man, a curious mixture of pragmatism and principle, patience and restiveness, at once a staunch, almost pedantic moralist and a calculating, hard-driving politician.

Broad Horizon. Like Hubert Humphrey, McGovern grew up in a small town in South Dakota. His father was a Wesleyan Methodist minister in Mitchell (pop. 6,000). In a state where debating once ranked as football does in Ohio, or basketball in Indiana, young George took eagerly to oratory as a high school student. World War II broadened McGovern's horizons beyond the prairie: as pilot of Dakota Queen, a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber based in Cerignola, Italy, he flew 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, often through heavy antiaircraft fire. Once, with two of the four engines out, he nursed the plane to an emergency landing on a tiny airstrip on a Yugoslav island.

The war made McGovern, already a solemn young man, still more somber and earnest. Back home, he plunged into history studies at Dakota Wesleyan, then went off to study for the Methodist ministry. The limitations of the clerical life soon disillusioned him, and he switched to graduate work in American history at Northwestern University, taking a master's and a Ph.D. The subject of his dissertation was the Colorado coal strikes of 1913-14, which culminated in the Ludlow massacre of miners and their families.