POLITICS: Front and Center for George McGovern

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McGovern turned Lowenstein down, with misgivings. He was up for re-election to the Senate in 1968, and he decided that keeping his Senate seat was more important to the antiwar cause than a hopeless fling at the presidency. Following McGovern's advice, Lowenstein turned to Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota; Robert Kennedy jumped in after McCarthy showed strongly against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. After Kennedy was shot in California, McGovern pondered and finally announced for President 16 days before the Chicago convention. He wanted to be a rallying point for the pro-Kennedy remnant that could not accept McCarthy, but garnered only 1461 delegate votes. McGovern joked: "By announcing when we did, we at least eliminated the possibility of peaking early."

After re-election to the Senate in 1968, McGovern helped write the reforms to open the Democratic Party's nominating process to greater participation by the rank and file (TIME, Dec. 6, 1971). Those reforms have helped make his candidacy; state and local party satraps, never pro-McGovern, now have a diminished role in picking the 1972 nominee. In the Senate, though he has taken a major role in trying to end hunger in the U.S., he remains best known for a series of unsuccessful resolutions and amendments, co-sponsored by Republican Mark Hatfield of Oregon, that would set a date for ending the U.S. presence in Viet Nam. "This chamber reeks of blood," he bitterly told his colleagues just before the Senate voted on the first McGovern-Hatfield amendment in September 1970. If elected, he has promised to end U.S. bombing on Inauguration Day and to get the U.S. out "lock, stock and barrel" within 90 days in return for the release of American P.O.W.s.

For a time, McGovern risked being known as a one-issue candidate because of his early and unequivocal opposition to the war. But in putting together his first primary victory of 1972 in Wisconsin, he plainly attracted voters to whom the state of the economy is a more pressing concern. Moreover, he was the first—and is still the most thorough—of the candidates to lay out detailed position papers on such other issues as tax reform and defense spending. Not much attention was paid to the McGovern papers at first, since he did not seem a likely winner.

That oversight was a mistake, as McGovern's plan for changing the tax structure and redistributing the national wealth constitutes a radical economic scheme reminiscent of the days when Huey Long promised to make "every man a king." Among those consulted in its preparation: John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard and James Tobin of Yale, a member of John Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers. MCGOVERN IF YOU REALLY WANT THINGS TO CHANGE read his billboards in Massachusetts. His whole program would mean just that—real, profound change. Among its main elements: