George McGovern
===============

George McGovern was the Democratic Party's 1972 presidential nominee, defeated in a 49-state landslide. John Kiriakou discusses him in two registers: as the occasion for the creation of superdelegates, and as the subject of one of his own formative political memories.

The 1984 announcement

In 1983 Kiriakou was a sophomore at George Washington University and, as he puts it, speakers committee chairman and effectively the entire committee of the College Democrats, in the days when he was a Democrat. Reading a short item in the Washington Post that McGovern was considering another run, he wrote offering the university's theater and a ready supply of student volunteers.

McGovern telephoned him a few days later, waking him, and asked to see the theater. He came to campus, nobody recognised him on the walk over, approved the venue, and told Kiriakou not to tell anyone, but that he was going to run for president again. Kiriakou put out the press release; the Marvin Theater was packed and the announcement made the news.

Kiriakou's account of the guest list is affectionate: McGovern "brought his own influencers", Mo Udall, the Arizona congressman who had run in 1976; the Academy Award-winning actor Cliff Robertson and his wife Dina Merrill; and Frank Mankiewicz, who had been Robert Kennedy Sr.'s press secretary and was serving as McGovern's. After the announcement McGovern shook every hand and then invited Kiriakou back to his apartment, where his wife made tuna sandwiches. "Just the loveliest people."

McGovern finished third in the 1984 contest, behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart, a result Kiriakou calls crazy given where he had started. He notes that McGovern was pressed continually to drop out, and reads the pressure as being about the constituency he held: "because he was pulling young people."

The introduction, at nineteen

Kiriakou's connection to McGovern spans his whole political childhood. He was "even as an eight-year-old" a volunteer on the 1972 campaign, stuffing envelopes because his parents were active; twelve years later he was on the platform. "I introduced George McGovern when he announced his candidacy for president in September 1984. And in my speech of introduction, I said that he was one of the few senators to stand up to the illegal and immoral war in Vietnam."

He raises it against himself, as the counterweight to the position he was taking on the draft and on Grenada in the same period, a contradiction he explains only by his age: "when I was a kid, 19 at the time... still figuring it out."

See also

- Superdelegates
- John Kiriakou
