Was George McGovern a Fluke?

In his 1958 campaign for re-election to Congress, George McGovern faced a potentially lethal opponent. Joe Foss, the popular and handsome Republican governor, could match—indeed top—McGovern’s exceptionally distinguished war record. Foss had won the Bronze Star, Silver Star, Purple Heart, and Congressional Medal of Honor after shooting down a record-setting twenty-six Japanese bombers. His face had even graced the cover of Life magazine. Furthermore, Thomas J. Knock tells us in the first volume of his biography of McGovern, “the state’s entire Republican establishment, not to mention the White House, would be behind” Foss (p. 204). The state’s “establishment” included the notorious anticommunist and McCarthy ally, Senator Karl Mundt, who some at home called “King Karl.” Since South Dakota had more Democrats “in the closet” than out (p. 154) and McGovern had won his first election by a mere 546 votes, Foss could reach an easy conclusion. The way Foss saw it: “George McGovern was a fluke” (p. 204).

McGovern went on to win that congressional contest as well as three terms as senator. Had the story of U.S. politics ended in 1958, or even in 1968—as Knock’s narrative does—the facts would be unassailable. Despite the well-known tendency of the state to vote Republican, its ongoing support for a liberal Democrat like McGovern was no fluke at all. As Knock tells it, McGovern was a local son whose remarkable advocacy for farmers won him thousands of cross-over voters every cycle—South Dakotans who “’vote[d] for the man, not the party’” (p. 23). When in 1968 his position on the Vietnam War put him to the left of the Democratic establishment and Nixon won the state by a landslide, McGovern still won his Senate seat by a comfortable majority.

The Rise of a Prairie Statesman is based on scores of hours of interviews that Knock did with McGovern, his family members, aides, friends, political allies, and opponents, as well as extensive research in the McGovern papers at Princeton University and at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, South Dakota. McGovern provides a rich subject for a biographer: he seems to have been everywhere of lasting importance in both the pre- and post-war eras: in the desperate Dust Bowl region of the Northern Plains during the 1930s; in a B-24 bomber over Germany until the very last day of the war in Europe; at Northwestern University when noted historians like Ray Allen Billington and Arthur Link were among the professoriate and Alfred Young was a fellow student; traveling internationally with Food for Peace during the early years of decolonization; in Washington D.C. for the days of “Camelot” and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King; on the floor of the Senate to debate the Civil Rights Acts and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago as a possible nominee. Knock writes fluidly and grippingly about McGovern’s views and experiences in these years; a great deal of the book is simply unforgettable. For example, Knock tells us that, as Mayor Daley’s police fought demonstrators in the streets of Chicago, McGovern and his family had what was akin to a front-row seat: their hotel room windows were just a few floors above the fray. Combining material from three interviews and two published sources, Knock reveals that

His family doctor . . . was disturbed by how two or three police would pin down a single protester and beat him in a deliberate way. “Dr. Thompson would say, ‘Look, they’re hitting him in the kidneys,’” Pat Donovan recalled. “We were just in horror up there.” McGovern had never witnessed police brutality. Gloria Steinem later wrote that his staff was shocked to hear him shouting obscenities out the window “at teams of policemen ganging up on individuals.” George Cunningham . . . would never forget how one of the volunteers...