Thirty five years ago this week, Sen. George McGovern accepted the Democratic nomination for president in an acceptance speech that was bumped out of prime time by a raucous session that included no fewer than 39 nominations for vice president.
His eloquent call to "Come Home America" was heard by too few Americans and his character was later slimed by Republican operatives -- not unlike the ones we're familiar with today. This honorable and decent American hero was labeled a radical extremist. His detractors said he favored "Amnesty, Acid and Abortion".
Sen. McGovern, of course, lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon. But two years later, Nixon himself was out the door.
Take a few minutes to read some excerpts -- and see how much unfortunately applies today. And also send some good thoughts to Sen. McGovern, still alive and kicking and set to celebrate his 85th birthday on July 19!
McGOVERN ON TRUTH AND OPENNESS
In the literature and music of our children we are told, to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. And for America, the time has come at last.
This is the time for truth, not falsehood. In a Democratic nation, no one likes to say that his inspiration came from secret arrangements by closed doors, but in the sense that is how my candidacy began. I am here as your candidate tonight in large part because during four administrations of both parties, a terrible war has been chartered behind closed doors.
I want those doors opened and I want that war closed. And I make these pledges above all others: the doors of government will be opened, and that war will be closed.
Truth is a habit of integrity, not a strategy of politics, and if we nurture the habit of truth in this campaign, we will continue to be truthful once we are in the White House.
MCGOVERN ON THE WAR
And this is also a time, not for death, but for life. In 1968 many Americans thought they were voting to bring our sons home from Vietnam in peace, and since then 20,000 of our sons have come home in coffins.
I have no secret plan for peace. I have a public plan. And as one whose heart has ached for the past ten years over the agony of Vietnam, I will halt a senseless bombing of Indochina on Inaugural Day.
There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools. There will be no more talk of bombing the dikes or the cities of the North.
And within 90 days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.
And then let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.
'COME HOME AMERICA'
So join with me in this campaign. Lend Senator Eagleton and me your strength and your support, and together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.
From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick -- come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world, and let us be joyful in that homecoming, for this ?is your land, this land is my land -- from California to New York island, from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters -- this land was made for you and me.?
So let us close on this note: May God grant each one of us the wisdom to cherish this good land and to meet the great challenge that beckons us home.
And now is the time to meet that challenge.
Still rings true, eh?