POLITICS: Front and Center for George McGovern

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The Northwestern history department leaned strongly to the left politically; McGovern faced the opening of the cold war with dismay and disbelief. He went with his wife Eleanor, whom he had married in 1943 (see box, page 27), as a delegate to the Progressive Party convention at Philadelphia in 1948. But he soon became disenchanted with the fanatical rigidity of some of Henry

Wallace's supporters, and finally did not vote that November. McGovern told his recent biographer, Robert Sam Anson: "I felt then, as I do now, that U.S. foreign policy was needlessly exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union and that we were wrong in our support of Chiang, the French in Indochina and Bao Dai. I liked what Wallace had to say about foreign policy. I still think he was essentially right."

McGovern's fling with Henry Wallace came to hurt him when he entered politics, which he did after a six-year stint as a political science professor at Dakota Wesleyan. First he took on a seemingly hopeless job as the only full-time Democratic Party organizer in South Dakota; at that time, no Democrat held statewide office, and the party had only two of the 110 seats in the state legislature. McGovern once walked into a general store and announced to the proprietor that he understood that he was talking to the county chairman. The owner hushed McGovern quickly: "I'd be out of business if my customers knew." But McGovern's methodical persistence built the state organization to the point where he could run successfully for two terms in Congress (1957-61) despite reminders of his Wallaceite past.

He failed to unseat Republican Senator Karl Mundt in 1960 partly because he openly backed Roman Catholic John Kennedy in heavily Protestant South Dakota. McGovern's reward for that support was the directorship of Food for Peace early in the Kennedy Administration; he made it to the Senate on his second try in 1962. As a freshman Senator, he spoke out against the Viet Nam War. He was the first of a lonely flock of Senate doves that soon included Frank Church of Idaho, Ernest Gruening of Alaska and Wayne Morse of Oregon. McGovern's opposition to the war strained his friendship with his Chevy Chase neighbor, Humphrey, who had been his political mentor when he first came to Washington.

However, it attracted the man who first put the presidential bug in McGovern's ear. Allard Lowenstein, the youth ful antiwar Democrat who was looking for a "symbolic" candidate to run against Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 pri maries, approached McGovern at Rob ert Kennedy's suggestion. McGovern was intrigued; his backers at home were incredulous. In Sioux Falls, Lowenstein bearded Peder Ecker, later Democratic state chairman, who quickly got on the phone to Bill Dougherty, now Lieuten ant Governor. Said Ecker: "Billy, you've got to get over here. There's some Jewish guy here from New York saying that he's going to make George McGovern President."