The Life and Times of George McGovern

Описание: The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern is the first major biography of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who became America’s most eloquent and prescient critic of the Vietnam War. In it, Thomas Knock traces McGovern’s life from his rustic boyhood in a South Dakota prairie town during the Depression to his rise to the pinnacle of politics at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago as police and antiwar demonstrators clashed in the city’s streets.

Drawing extensively on McGovern’s private papers and scores of in-depth interviews, Knock shows how McGovern’s importance to the Democratic Party and postwar American politics extended far beyond his 1972 presidential campaign. He vividly describes McGovern’s harrowing missions over Nazi Germany as a B-24 bomber pilot, and reveals how McGovern’s combat experiences motivated him to earn a PhD in history and stoked his ambition to run for Congress. When President Kennedy appointed him director of Food for Peace in 1961, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of the program’s school lunch initiative that soon was feeding tens of millions of hungry children around the world. Then, as a junior senator, he delivered his courageous and unrelenting critique of Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, a conflict that brought their party to disaster and caused a new generation of Democrats to turn to McGovern for leadership. In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the “Draft McGovern” movement thrust him into the national spotlight and the contest for the presidential nomination, and culminating in his triumphal reelection to the Senate.

Thomas J. Knock is Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of the prize-winning To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Oxford University Press) and the coauthor of The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (Princeton University Press).

The Center for Presidential History: http://www.smu.edu/CPH

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