Watertown Public Opinion excerpt:
There's something unique you realize after you lose an election for the presidency, says 1972 Democratic candidate and South Dakota native George McGovern.
"You notice how quiet it was," he said, after the crowds of cheering supporters leave and the Secret Service security detail walks away for good. What's worse, he said, is that he lost in a landslide to the since-much-reviled Richard Nixon, who later resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
McGovern, 85, was in Watertown Dec. 15 for the last in a series of three interviews to document his life, political career, and current work.
Historian Eric Abrahamson, a former Democratic candidate for state lieutenant governor, interviewed McGovern before a crowd of about 120 at the Heritage Theater in the Watertown Event Center.
Losing South Dakota, his home state, in the 1972 election was especially hard on him, said McGovern. South Dakotans saw him rising in the party leadership in the Capitol and wondered if he was moving too far away from the state.
"'What is George doing running for president?'" he said many South Dakotans likely thought. "'He's just a college professor from Mitchell.'"
Nixon's resignation from the presidency was necessary, and he deserved to be impeached, McGovern said. But while he didn't join those calling for Nixon's impeachment, he felt justified for what he had said during the campaign against Nixon.
"I felt fully vindicated," he said.
The resignation caused him to seriously consider another run for the presidency, especially with all the anti-Nixon sentiment in the country. But McGovern, still a senator, enjoyed the job he had.
The 1980 campaign for the senate, which McGovern lost, felt like a right-wing Republican hit job, he said. Conservative groups worked together to take down six prominent senators, including McGovern. They poured money and personnel into the states, ignited the abortion issue and turned the states into battlegrounds.
The loss of most of the targeted liberal senior senators brought a chill to the spine of those who were left in office and moved the center line of American politics, he said.
"It was a real massacre, let me tell you," he said. "Nothing's been the same since."
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