By Chris Hedges
In the summer of 1972, when I was 15,
I persuaded my parents to let me ride my bike down to the local George
McGovern headquarters every morning to work on his campaign. McGovern,
who died early Sunday morning
in South Dakota at the age of 90, embodied the core values I had been
taught to cherish. My father, a World War II veteran like McGovern, had
taken my younger sister and me to protests in support of the civil
rights movement and against the Vietnam War. He taught us to stand up
for human decency and honesty, no matter the cost. He told us that the
definitions of business and politics, the categories of winners and
losers, of the powerful and the powerless, of the rich and the poor, are
meaningless if the price for admission requires that you sell your
soul. And he told us something that the whole country, many years later,
now knows: that George McGovern was a good man.
McGovern, even before he ran for president,
held heroic stature for us. In 1970 he attached to a military
procurement bill the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, which would have
required, through a cutoff of funding, a withdrawal of all American
forces from Indochina. The amendment did not pass, although the majority
of Americans supported it. McGovern denounced on the Senate floor the
politicians who, by refusing to support the amendment, prolonged the
war. We instantly understood the words he spoke. They were the words of a
preacher.
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