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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
This documentary on George McGovern shows us what the Democratic Party lost.
Sep 16, 2005 | A couple of years ago I was talking to a prominent liberal political columnist at a New York cocktail party. We had met before, and knew we didn't precisely see eye to eye. I said something pretty innocuous -- or so I thought -- about the 1972 presidential campaign, suggesting that it might be time for journalists and historians to take another look at that momentous event, which had so profoundly shaped American politics of the past 30 years.
"No it's not," said Mr. Columnist, cutting me off. "Because in this case the conventional wisdom is right. The left took over the Democratic Party, and it was a total disaster."
I don't really know whether Mr. C's analysis is right or wrong; he is certainly more experienced in politics than I am. But what struck me was the fact that he didn't want to talk about it. Three decades later, the Democratic Party mainstream still can't face the living ghost of George McGovern, who challenged the party to live up to its ideals and then led it to one of the worst defeats in the history of American electoral politics.
If that last sentence summarizes the facts about McGovern's epochal 1972 campaign, those facts are open to endless interpretations, and pose more questions than they answer. Stephen Vittoria's forceful pro-McGovern documentary, "One Bright Shining Moment," offers one interpretation, and it's not going to make Mr. C very happy. It's a deeply flawed film but also an important one; if it does nothing else it should bring this decent and courageous prairie populist, whose very name has become a patently unfair term of abuse, before at least a few members of a new generation.
Drawing on archival footage, interviews with many key figures in and around the campaign -- including Gary Hart, Frank Mankiewicz, Warren Beatty, Dick Gregory, Gloria Steinem and Gore Vidal -- and extensive cooperation from McGovern himself, Vittoria argues that the South Dakota senator was never the wild-eyed radical or squishy-jawed pinko depicted by his opponents. Indeed, McGovern was a decorated World War II bomber pilot, a former Methodist seminarian and a history professor. His entire political career was predicated on a moral opposition to war and militarism, and a corresponding belief in America as a social, economic and political power.
McGovern was one of the very few American politicians to grasp in the early '60s that the military establishment's understanding of the situation in Vietnam was flawed, and that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were pouring American and Vietnamese lives by the thousands down a sinkhole. Parts of "One Bright Shining Moment" give you the sick feeling of a bad dream you keep having over and over again, as in the video clip of a Pentagon press conference in which a young Donald Rumsfeld hovers in the background, his slicked-down hairdo immediately recognizable. While it's unwise to view the parallel between that Asian conflict and the current one too literally, it's also impossible to resist the notion that on the psychological and mythological levels the right and left are still fighting the same old war.
Indeed, Vittoria makes a strong case that McGovern was one of the 20th century's true political visionaries, as well as one of its paradoxes. By 1965, he had been banned from entering LBJ's White House and was viewed by members of both parties as a Red-friendly loose cannon (paving the way, one might say, for what came later). Yet the voters of South Dakota, then as now one of the most conservative states in the nation, elected him to Congress twice and the Senate three times.
If Vittoria does a splendid job of placing McGovern's career as a moral statesman in its fuller historical context, the crucial events of his earthshaking 1972 campaign go rushing past in something of a blur. If anything, there's too much historical context, although it's admittedly difficult to know where to draw the line. Can you understand McGovern's emergence without understanding the dimensions of the Vietnam quagmire or the nearly total anarchy and chaos of 1968? Probably not, so we briefly glimpse the My Lai massacre; the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy; the catastrophic Democratic Convention in Chicago; and the cliffhanger election between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, each a subject worth its own movie.
