George McGovern, Democratic Party icon, dies

George McGovern, the three-term senator from South Dakota who carried the Democratic Party's liberal banner in the Vietnam War era, launched a star-crossed bid for the presidency in 1972, and energized many of the leading Democrats of the past generation, died Sunday at a hospice in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

Family spokesman Steve Hildebrand confirmed the death to the Associated Press. The cause was not disclosed.

In a public career spanning more than five decades, McGovern may be best remembered as a presidential candidate of near-epic futility, in which he lost 49 of 50 states. The senator's liberal agenda -- supporting civil rights and anti-poverty programs and strongly denouncing the Vietnam War -- was critical to his landslide defeat to President Richard Nixon. But those views also helped define the future vision of the Democratic Party.

"In many ways, he revolutionized the Democratic Party," said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political-science professor and an authority on congressional politics. "His followers drove out the old guard. Some would say it was the end of the old Democrats, but others would say, 'No, it opened up the party to women and others.'"

Among those who worked on McGovern's 1972 campaign were Bill Clinton, a future governor and president; Hillary Clinton, a future senator and secretary of State; and Gary Hart, a future senator and presidential candidate.

McGovern, a minister's son, was raised in a South Dakota farm community during the Depression and was a decorated bomber pilot in World War II. Both experiences -- seeing hobos begging for food at his family's doorstep and witnessing emaciated child beggars in wartime Italy -- molded his political career from the moment he was first elected to Congress in 1956.

In the early 1960s, he conceived the idea of the U.S. Food for Peace program, which gave foreign nations credit to buy surplus U.S. crops, and served under President John F. Kennedy as the program's first director. In that position, he played a central role building the United Nations World Food Program, a humanitarian organization that has provided food assistance to hundreds of millions of victims of war and natural disasters.

After winning his Senate seat in 1962, he spent much of his public life working on the expansion of food-stamp and school-lunch programs and championing civil rights and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the Senate. After being defeated for re-election to the Senate in 1980, he served as the U.S. representative to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome and as a U.N. global ambassador on world hunger.

As part of his humanitarian interests, McGovern was synonymous with the anti-war movement. In September 1963, he became the first person to challenge the burgeoning Vietnam War on the Senate floor, with five paragraphs tucked into a speech about disarmament.

But McGovern voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964, giving President Lyndon Johnson almost blank-check authority to escalate the war. By the next year, McGovern joined a small group of senators who called U.S. involvement in Vietnam a mistake.

"We are fighting a determined army of guerrillas that seems to enjoy the cooperation of the countryside and that grow(s) stronger in the face of foreign intervention," he said in a Jan. 15, 1965, Senate speech that marked him as the leading Senate pacifist. "We are further away from victory over the guerrilla forces in Vietnam today than we were a decade ago." He then laid out a five-point program for withdrawal from the war.

With Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., McGovern proposed an end to the Vietnam War by Dec. 31, 1971. The McGovern-Hatfield Amendment failed on a Senate vote in 1970, but millions of Americans embraced McGovern as a prophet; millions of others considered him a traitor.

After being re-elected to the Senate in 1968, McGovern led a commission to overhaul the Democratic Party's nominating process. The experience proved crucial: McGovern entered the 1972 presidential race knowing the rules better than anyone else.

The race against Nixon was seen by most as a sure loss. The Nixon administration's involvement in the Watergate scandal -- which stemmed from a 1972 break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters -- had not yet sunk into the public's consciousness.

McGovern offered the vice-presidential slot to several prominent Democratic lawmakers, but he was turned down. When Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri accepted the position, McGovern said he backed him "a thousand percent."

Within two weeks, Eagleton stepped down amid revelations that he had undergone psychiatric treatment.

McGovern replaced Eagleton with Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who was founding director of the Peace Corps and U.S. ambassador to France. But the campaign never recovered.

"I wish I had stayed with my initial judgment to keep Tom" on the ticket, he told the Washington Post in 2005. "I could have stood up for him had I known more about mental illness at the time."

The McGovern-Shriver ticket received only 38 percent of the popular vote, carrying just Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, for 17 electoral votes. Nixon won 520 electoral votes.

McGovern was born July 19, 1922, and grew up in Mitchell, S.D. He left Dakota Wesleyan University to serve as an Army bomber pilot during World War II. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and several Air Medals.

After the war, McGovern graduated from Dakota Wesleyan in 1946. Torn between the ministry and the study of history, he attended the old Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., then transferred to Northwestern University, where he received a master's in 1950 and a doctorate in 1953, both in U.S. history.

Survivors include three daughters, Ann McGovern Mead, Susan McGovern Rowen and Mary McGovern. His wife of 63 years, the former Eleanor Stegeberg, died in 2007 at 85.

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