Always, he has preferred a public life. President Bill Clinton appointed him as ambassador to the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization in 1997, when McGovern took up residence at an FAO office in Rome, setting out a plan for delivering food to 500 million malnourished people. Two years later, he joined forces with an off-and-on adversary, Bob Dole, in proposing that the United Nations commit to providing a school lunch to every hungry child on the planet. The Clinton administration allotted $300 million for the effort, and the Bush administration has since earmarked $200 million. His efforts and career were recognized in 2000, when Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.
Sitting alongside her husband in the restaurant, a sleepy Eleanor glances at him. He hails their waitress, and they're off, looking out the window on the ride home. An adulthood of traveling the world has left them fascinated anew by the Plains, by everything from the majestic to the ordinary. They were once Dakota kids staring out windows at silos and animals, and now they are Dakota octogenarians absorbed by what is and isn't here.
South Dakota's George McGovern, a prairie populist who lost badly to Richard Nixon in 1972.
(D.A. Peterson)
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"Look at that, George," Eleanor exclaims from the back seat, pointing. She has seen the Senate chamber and the offices of the White House, and lived in Italy, but Mitchell has a hold on her. "Look."
"What?"
"It's a Dollar Discount store, George. Have you been in there yet?"
"No. But I've been to the one in Missoula." He is enthused. "They have a lot. Combs, safety razors, toothbrushes. Anything you'd want."
Eleanor invests the words with wonder: "Dollar Discount."
McGovern says, "We'll go there sometime."
"Great," Eleanor says, and she closes her eyes, contented.
IN THE 20TH CENTURY, only four failed major-party presidential nominees were renominated: Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who lost to William McKinley in 1900 and William Howard Taft in 1908 (he also lost to McKinley in 1896, making him the only three-time nominated loser); Republican Thomas Dewey, who lost in 1944 to Franklin Roosevelt and in 1948 to Harry Truman; Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who fell in the landslides of 1952 and 1956 to Dwight Eisenhower; and Nixon, who after his loss to John F. Kennedy became the only losing presidential nominee in the century to come back and win the White House. Most other also-rans, typified by the Republicans' 1940 candidate, Wendell Willkie, and the Democrats' 1988 nominee, Michael Dukakis, saw their influence plummet after their losses, their names and faces all but purged from their parties' conventions and major campaign events.
It takes a particularly resilient breed of loser to heal and soldier on, politically. Those most successful at it, believes McGovern, have been those who immersed themselves in jobs that had little to do with their presidential ambitions. Goldwater returned to the Senate and became more idiosyncratically popular than ever as a cantankerous, independent-minded Republican. Stevenson eventually went to work for the Kennedy administration as ambassador to the United Nations, temporarily shedding his egghead image to become a feisty Cold War diplomat.
Other also-rans have abandoned political life, resolving to remain graceful in defeat. Ohio newspaper publisher James Cox, the 1920 Democratic presidential nominee, who faced Republican Warren Harding, believed he could see emotional peril, and professional embarrassment, awaiting him if he gave in to self-pity after his lopsided loss. "A great many men have retired from public life defeated and brokenhearted," he wrote in his 1946 autobiography, Journey Through My Years. "Others have shortened their days by their disappointed broodings." He would not be among the depressed, Cox resolved. "I had this great advantage: I was still in public life," he wrote. "I had my newspapers."
Another sanguine loser, 1936 Republican nominee Alfred Landon, a popular Kansas governor who lost badly to Roosevelt in FDR's bid for his second of four terms, took up residence in the Landon family mansion in Topeka after the campaign. He did not exhibit signs of missing elective politics, instead believing he enjoyed a freedom denied to presidents. "He wouldn't have gotten along with Secret Service agents following him around," says Barry Flinchbaugh, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University and a friend of Landon's. "He liked to ride his horse alone, even when he was 90 years old. The path would go under Interstate 70, and there'd be snow on the ground in the winter, and he'd be all alone on it, just the way he liked it. If there is a test for a person after [losing an election], he had as good a life as a man can have."
"BOB DOLE GOT BEATEN pretty soundly by Clinton," Bob Dole says over the phone. "It was no big deal for me. I moved along pretty quickly."
And lucratively. Dole became the first also-ran to strike it big in the political celebrity arena, ascending from failed candidate to winning personality. He became a prominent pitchman for Viagra. He was a hit on "Saturday Night Live" and on the late-night talk-show circuit. He did a television commercial for American Express and another for Pepsi, in which he did a double take while surveying Britney Spears.
It's a wonder, he thinks, that some people view him as a funny man now, when, in the immediate aftermath of his 1996 loss to Bill Clinton, his critics thought that "I didn't loosen up enough, I didn't show enough leg. They said I was too serious . . . It takes several months to stop fretting about it and move on. But I did."
He thinks that his combat experience and injuries suffered during World War II likely made it easier for him to cope with the loss. Long before his '96 presidential run, life had put setbacks into perspective for him and other war veterans like McGovern, he guesses.
Maybe losing decisively to Clinton, he says, made it easier for him to be magnanimous. "People were urging [me] to be a hatchet man against Clinton for the next four years," recalls Dole, whose dozen years as a Senate leader guaranteed him continued stature. "I couldn't see the point. Maybe after all those partisan fights, you look for more friendships. One of the nice things I've discovered is that when you're out of politics, you have more credibility with the other side . . . And you're out among all kinds of people, and that just doesn't happen often for an ex-president; he doesn't have the same freedom. So it hasn't been all bad."
Walter Mondale, a lawyer today in his home state of Minnesota, says that the post-election nights when he would wake up in a cold sweat, replaying what he regarded as his disappointing performance in his last debate with Reagan, are thankfully 20 years behind him. "One of the virtues of getting whomped like I did is that there is less second-guessing," he says.
He won nothing but Minnesota and D.C., which is why, reeling and seeing McGovern shortly after the '84 election, he impulsively asked: So when did you get over it?
Two decades later, the same question is posed to Mondale.
"I'll call you when it happens," he says.
LATE ONE AFTERNOON, McGovern heads for a busy bar run by the Veterans of Foreign War's Post 2750, down on Main Street in Mitchell. He's not a frequent patron, but every once in a while he drops by just to have a little contact with older veterans. A waitress in a T-shirt that says "I Break Hearts" walks over to his table and says, "Hi, George."
McGovern orders a vodka tonic. "You have Absolut?"
She nods and brings him the drink. He's no sooner taken a draw on it than the waitress is back. "Can Joe buy you a drink?" she asks him.
"Who's Joe?"
She gestures with a backhand of a wave at an elderly man who is hoisting a drink a few tables down. "Little guy over there. With glasses."
"Sure. Tell him it's nice of him."
After she walks off, he mutters, "I need another drink like I need a hole in the head."
