GloucesterTimes.com, Gloucester, MA

News

McGovern to plead with Obama about Afghanistan

Former Senator wants president to 'see the error of losing American lives' in continuing war

By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer
Published: July 19, 2009

Former Sen. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate who lost 49 states but diagnosed the tragedy that was the Vietnam War, yesterday pleaded repeatedly for President Obama to "see the error" of losing more American lives to the war in Afghanistan.

McGovern said he had an agreement with the White House to meet privately with the President, and said he intended to use the meeting to lobby him against committing more American soldiers to the war.

"I'm nervous about his venture in Afghanistan," said the World War II bomber pilot who is the first and only nominee of a modern, major American Party to campaign explicitly against a bi-partisan war policy, organized out of a Cold War mentality that presumed the danger was Communist advance through the former colonial possessions of Southeast Asia.

Many developments piled up to doom his 1972 campaign and put Republican Richard Nixon in the White House — a winner in 49 states but not Massachusetts — but McGovern's reading of the war, as an expression of post-Colonial nationalism, was proved wise, albeit discounted.

"Maybe (Obama) will see the error of losing American lives over there," McGovern said. "I'm going to see President Obama, and I'm going to plead with him to take another look at Afghanistan before it is too late."

McGovern also said he has formed a "council of elders," made up of retired senators, who would be available to provide counsel for today's generation of elected national officials.

Recent US policy announced by President Obama will wind down the American commitment to the war in Iraq while deepening the American commitment in Afghanistan.

A buildup is under way but already more than 30,000 American troops are engaged in fighting Taliban and other terrorist forces in a war that was initiated after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, considered the mastermind of the suicide attacks on multiple American targets.

A history professor before he entered South Dakota politics in the mid-1950s, McGovern was in Gloucester on a book signing tour for his latest, a brief biography of Abraham Lincoln.

In the course of a sweet and self deprecating lecture from the podium of the restored auditorium where he noted inspirations of his — Supreme Court Justices Oliver Weldell, Louis Brandeis and Emerson and Thoreau had spoken during the 19th century — he conveyed wonder at how Lincoln, despite a single year of formal education, turned himself into the "greatest writer we ever had in the White House."

He made clear he considered Jefferson a close second, due to his proclamation of America's dedication to the ideal of "self evident" truths as way toward "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Washington was Lincoln's hero, McGovern noted,

As it was McGovern's 87th birthday, he wondered whether "he should have opened my talk by saying, 'Four score and seven years ago ...." the phrase that Lincoln used to begin the Gettysburg Address in 1963.

The quip sent chuckles through the standing room only crowd of perhaps 500 people, many from McGovern's generation at the event sponsored by the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library.

"Aging left of center activists," said former Congressman Michael Harrington, who represented Gloucester in the 1970s, commenting from the balcony.

He recalled that he was a delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention for Sen. Edmund Muskie, while former Judge David Harrison, who introduced McGovern, was a McGovern delegate.

After McGovern finished speaking and answering questions, he chose to outline and clarify his reasons for fearing that Afghanistan could become for Obama — a President whom McGovern lauded for his intelligence and decency — the defining catastrophe that Vietnam became for President Lyndon Johnson and then, Nixon, who succeeded Johnson in the 1968 election that unraveled in the wake of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

McGovern showed impressive mental acuity throughout the event. In response to one question — why he chose to enter politics — he meandered from recollections of teaching college history, to the G.I. bill that had financed his post military education, a minority report on Tom Brokaw's now iconic description of McGovern's as the "greatest generation (McGovern leans toward the founders)," to a historical survey of invasions of Afghanistan.

"I wandered all over the place," he admitted. Then, he recaptured the thread of the question he was answering without missing a beat.

It was Adlai Stevenson, the intellectual, two-time nominee and loser to the two Dwight ("I like Ike") Eisenhower election inevitabilities in 1952 and '56 that got McGovern inspired to build the Democratic Party in South Dakota, which later elected him to Congress twice and three times to the Senate.

His ramble's main digression or footnote reviewed the failed efforts, first by the British Empire, then the Soviets and now the Americans to impose invaders' order on the largely uncivilized mountain nation of tribes and ancient affects of Afghanistan.

"British and Russian mothers and fathers weap the way we do," he said.

McGovern completed his argument about the expanding war in Afghanistan by reminding his audience that Lyndon Johnson "didn't believe in the way," and neither did Georgia Sen. Richard Russell, who had a reputation as an arch conservative and hardliner in racial and geo-politics.

"What the hell are we going to do with the mess in Vietnam?" McGovern quoted Johnson as asking his mentor, Russell, during the buildup and expansion of the Vietnam War before Johnson withdrew his name from consideration for a second term in 1968.

Then, McGovern quoted Russell as telling Johnson, "I told Jack (Kennedy) that we'd never get out of there."

He related the prescriptive part of his discourse with the audience to the ostensible topic of the day — Lincoln — by pondering the challenge of his conducting a war that took 600,000 lives, more than America lost in both world wars combined, while struggling with "melancholy" or "what today we call clinical depression" without modern medication.

"Lincoln hated war," McGovern said.

Photos