Index of University Press Releases

Clinton, McGovern met during '72 campaign

Seth Tupper
The Daily Republic - 10/07/2006

George McGovern and Bill Clinton go way back.

Way, way back. So far back that McGovern can easily recall a mental image of Clinton as a 25-year-old political novice with shaggy 1970s hair.

Their association began in 1971 when McGovern took a phone call from Gary Hart, the manager of McGovern’s presidential campaign.

“He said, ‘George, there’s a young guy here just out of Yale Law School, and he wants to go to work for you,’ ” McGovern said.

Hart was so impressed by the young man that he agreed, with McGovern’s blessing, to let Clinton lead the campaign’s organization in Texas. Clinton’s then-girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, also joined the team.

McGovern remembers the young Clinton as a “very talented, well organized, well motivated guy.”

“Every time I’d go to Texas,” McGovern said, “he’d meet me at the plane and come bounding up the steps — he had a huge head of hair.”

An Associated Press photo from that era shows Clinton’s impressive mane in all its glory, blowing around in a strong wind as he leads McGovern away from an airplane. Clinton failed to lead the McGovern campaign to a victory in Texas, where the Democratic ticket garnered only 33 percent of the votes.

Still, McGovern thinks Clinton learned some valuable lessons from the 1972 election.

“He apparently learned how to win, how to avoid defeat,” McGovern said. “He pulled it out 20 years later.”

Today, the two men will be reunited at the dedication of the George and Eleanor McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service. The ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. on the lawn outside the library at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, and Clinton will give the keynote address.

Since the presidential race of ’72, which McGovern lost to Richard Nixon, McGovern and Clinton have continued to cross paths. Despite sharing membership in the Democratic party, they haven’t always agreed.

When McGovern announced to the National Press Club in 1991 that he would not run for president in 1992, he gave a speech that was critical of the new arm of the party that Clinton represented. National political writer and South Dakota native Chuck Raasch, who covered the speech, wrote that McGovern “took a swipe at the Democratic Leadership Council, a cadre of more conservative young Democrats led by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who think the party should embrace more conservative positions.”

“We need a conservative party in the United States,” McGovern said, according to Raasch, “but with all due respects to the Democratic Leadership Conference, we don’t need two conservative parties.”

Clinton eventually entered the 1992 race himself and went on to beat incumbent President George H.W. Bush. In 2000, after Clinton had defeated Bob Dole to win a second term, Clinton gave McGovern the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The award is the highest civilian honor bestowed by the president.

During the presentation of the medal, Clinton recalled McGovern’s South Dakota roots and Methodist faith.

“After more than a half-century in public life, George McGovern still draws on those teachings and traditions, and he still imparts them to the rest of us by the power of his example, the courage of his convictions, and his proud legacy of public service,” Clinton said.

In the days prior to the Medal of Freedom ceremony, the old Senate colleagues McGovern and Dole came together to help win Clinton’s support for the Global Food for Education Initiative, a $300 million pilot program that used surplus U.S. agricultural commodities to feed millions of schoolchildren in developing countries from 2001 to 2003.

The pilot project was converted to an ongoing effort known as the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. Clinton praised the program as one of McGovern’s lasting legacies.

“This initiative could not only feed hungry children, but lead to the enrollment of millions of children not now in school, especially girls in poor countries,” Clinton said in 2000.

“So, George McGovern’s work continues.”