October 20, 2012 By: Juanita Jean Herownself Category: Uncategorized
Thank you, George McGovern, for inspiring a generation of Americans to tune back in and not drop out. You fought the good fight and I remain indebted to you.
I’m still sorry you lost. You would have been a good President. Maybe not a good as Hubert Humphrey would have, but still good.
May your feisty life give you a peaceful passing.
Welcome to The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon, Inc.
My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
I am honored and privileged to know Miss Juanita Jean Herownself, hairdresser extraordinary and political maven. Since she does not have time to fiddle with this internet stuff, I type her website for her and you can read it if you want to. If you don't, she truly does not give a big bear's butt.
A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
This ain't a blog. Blogs are way too trendy for me. This is a professional political organization.
It appears that he will have a “good” death: one without pain and misery. Since none of us will get out alive, this is the best we can hope for and he certainly deserves the best. He was the victim of incendiary politics in the Democratic Party at the time and lost what should have been an easy win against Nixon.
I just remember registering to vote for the first time at his campaign office in Los Angeles and voting for him in the California Democratic Primary and them voting for him for President in Texas. Have never regretted either of those votes.
1He was the first presidential candidate i ever voted for, and one of the most honorable politicians of his generation. He was also a WW II hero, proving that being patriotic and being a hawk were not necessarily synonymous. I stood in line for an hour to cast my first vote. Now we vote early and rarely encounter any lines at all, but casting that ballot is still just as thrilling.
2The first campaign I ever worked on was George McGovern’s run for president. He didn’t have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam as Nixon inferred he had in 1968. George McGovern just said he would end it. He arrived at a campaign stop in Madison, Wisconsin to a hero’s welcome, and he deserved it. He deserved to win the election too, especially after all the things we thought might be true about Nixon, turned out to be true.
3A truly fine man.
4One of the good guys is going to a place easier than this. He deserves a good rest.
5George McGovern was one of our demi-gods when I was in college. His sister-in-law visited our dorm during the 1972 campaign because she and her sister and their husbands had lived there. That was George and Elenore.
After the 1972 election, during the Watergate hearings, I wrote Senator McGovern a letter in which I asked him how he felt about all those dirty tricks. He wrote back and said, “It’s always darkest just before the stars come out.” I have never forgotten that. It helped me a lot during the Florida recount in 2002 and again when Bob Perry helped invent swiftboating in 2004.
6An honorable man in politics– we’ve had a few. First politician I ever cared about, when he ran for president in 1972 and I was four years too young to vote. “Instead of asking 25 people to give a million dollars, we’re asking a million people to give $25” to his presidential campaign.
He also did a great deal to fight hunger in the world for over 40 years.
McGovern’s post-political career has generally enhanced his reputation; Tom Brokaw wrote in 1998 that “He remains one of the country’s most decent and thoughtful public servants.”
McGovern’s legacy also includes his commitment to combating hunger both in the United States and around the globe. He has said, “After I’m gone, I want people to say about me: He did the best he could to end hunger in this country and the world.” Overall, when confronted with the Serenity Prayer’s desire to “grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”, McGovern has said simply that he rejects that notion: “I keep trying to change them.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern
7Hopefully he will pass sweetly and with the same kind of grace he lived in THIS side of the veil. He certainly deserves his rest.
8My first vote, my first Democratic Presidential pick. A good man.
9His war service is featured in Stephen E. Ambrose’s The Wild Blue; I didn’t know in 1972 that he was a war hero, I only knew that he was standing up against the Viet Nam war. I loved the story about him telling a heckler on an airplane “let me tell you a little secret: kiss my ass.”
10The first presidential campaign I worked on was Eugene McCarthy’s (I got to meet Paul Newman!) But I didn’t turn 18 until late November. George McGovern got my first presidential vote and I am still very proud of it.
11Amen!
12A good man has gone from this earth.
I remember those times. They were scary yet exhilarating.
My first vote also
13I worked on his campaign and I am to this day proud to say so. I did correspondence. When someone sent in a contribution along with a personal note, I was the one who wrote and sent out a personal thank you.
God bless you and keep you, George McGovern!
14Seeing all the comments about the McGovern campaign in 1972 being their first, I too, add my name to the Honorable List. I was 18. Nice to see so many people who were Democrats in 1972 and have not lost their way.
15I always respected McGovern,the man helped create the Food for Peace program and he served as U.S. ambassador to the Rome-based United Nation’s food agencies from 1998 to 2001. He spent his later years working to feed needy children around the world. He and former Bob Dole collaborated on the creation of an international food for education and child nutrition program, for which they shared the 2008 World Food Prize.
“I want to live long enough to see all of the 300 million school-age kids around the world who are not being fed be given a good nutritional lunch every day,” McGovern said in 2006. he did not make it but God love him, the man tried
and that alone should have secured his place in heaven.
He never shied from the word “liberal,” even as other Democrats blanched from it and Republicans used it as an epithet. God love him, in the darkest days of 2001 he said, “I am a liberal and always have been. Just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.”
He was a war hero, (earning the Distinguished Flying Cross), who learned to hate war. While McGovern said little about his decorated service in World War II, Republicans depicted him as a weak peace activist. Like Charley Hoarse, I loved the story about McGovern being forced to defend himself against assertions he had shirked combat. Apparently he’d had enough when a young man at the airport fence in Battle Creek, Mich., taunted that Nixon would clobber him. McGovern leaned in and said quietly: “I’ve got a secret for you. Kiss my ass.” A conservative Senate colleague later told McGovern it was his best line of the campaign.
He was a history teacher who who had gotten into Democratic politics as a campaign volunteer. He left teaching in 1953 to become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party making it a force to be recconed with. He ondce said “I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.” He was right.
McGovern led a Democratic Party reform commission that shifted power to the voters’which had previously been wielded by party leaders and bosses at the national conventions. The result was the system of presidential primary elections and caucuses that now selects the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. A system that has allowed people like Juanita Jean, her ownself and several other frequent contributors to this site to become delegates.
Teacher, historian, reformer, fighter, lover of peace, friend to the poorest and neediest among us, McGovern was an inspiration and he will be missed.
16My first vote too. My then husband and I mailed our absentee ballots from a tiny town in Brazil. We were in the Peace Corps.
17Ditto, first vote. My former husband and I were in Europe the summer of Watergate, waiting by news stands in major cities to receive the English language newspapers to shock us with the latest revelations. We returned stateside, Paul started law school shortly thereafter, we volunteered for the McGovern Campaign. We then moved to Colorado after graduation, where we divorced, and I became a rowdy Democrat working on Gary Hart campaigns, who had been McGovern’s campaign manager. Rest in Peace, dear warrior. You will always be a beacon for many of us.
18Mr McGovern and Mr Nixon were the first presidential campaign I remember (I was 8)! The first political happening I remember was Bobby Kennedy’s funeral. I don’t even remember the year, but my brother and I broke the TV set trying to find cartoons…I think it was 1969? The most boring was the watergate hearings. My mother was making new fully lined pleated draperies for the living room (!) and had the sewing machine out there to accomate large expanses of fabric. I sighed as I navigated the living room, asking how she could watch that boring stuff, and she told me it was important, she needed to know, and that I ought to try to pay attention to some of it too, because it was going to be important history. And boy do I remember those tapes! I remember Erlichman and Dean and how they all tried to blame each other; I still can’t stand that thug Liddy.
19And Mama was right too, because a lot of the “executive priviledge” crap the Rs prose on about has it’s roots in that whole watergate situation, and they are STILL determined to go back to those “good old days” ! They prove that those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it…
Anyway, thanks for the heads up on Mr McGovern JJ and thanks for the quote DonA – maybe we will be able to see Mr McGovern “when the stars come out”
Accomodate! Where the heck is the “smart” phone today?! It corrects everything else fer petes sake!
20And privilege!! I guess Sunday is its day of rest! 🙂
21Ah but JJ to judge him inferior to Hubert “Stop the bussing; support the Vietnam War; favor capital punishement…” Humphrey is an affront to McGovern’s memory.
22Iless, I agree. McGovern’s was the one campaign I felt unequivocally proud to work for. No doubts, no regrets, no excuses. As JJ says, McGovern “would have been a good President.” As Chris Hedges writes, “He Never Sold His Soul.”
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