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be more accommodating to the former Soviet Union.
• Never a showman, he made his case with a style as plain as the prairies where he grew up, often sounding more like the Methodist minister he'd once studied to be than a longtime U.S. senator and three-time candidate for president.
• And McGovern never shied from the word "liberal," even as other Democrats blanched at the label and Republicans used it as an epithet.
• "I am a liberal and always have been," McGovern said in 2001. "Just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be."
• Americans voting for president in 1972 were aware of the Watergate break-in, but the most damaging details of Nixon's involvement wouldn't emerge until after Election Day. McGovern tried to make a campaign issue out of the bungled attempt to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee, and he called Nixon the most corrupt president in history, but the issue could not eclipse the embarrassing missteps of his own campaign.
• McGovern was tortured by the selection of Missouri Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as the vice presidential nominee, and 18 days later, following the disclosure that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for depression, the decision to drop him from the ticket despite having pledged to back him "1,000 percent."
• It was at once the most memorable and the most damaging line of his campaign, and called "possibly the most single damaging faux pas ever made by a presidential candidate" by the late political writer Theodore H. White.
• After a hard day's campaigning -- Nixon did virtually none -- McGovern would complain to those around him that nobody was paying attention. With R. Sargent Shriver as his running mate, he went on to carry only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning just 38 percent of the popular vote.
• "Tom and I ran into a little snag back in 1972 that in the light of my much advanced wisdom today, I think was vastly exaggerated," McGovern said at an event with Eagleton in 2005. Noting that Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, would both ultimately resign, he joked, "If we had run in '74 instead of '72, it would have been a piece of cake."
• McGovern's campaign, nevertheless, left a lasting imprint on American politics. Determined not to make the same mistake, presidential nominees have since interviewed and intensely investigated their choices for vice president. Former President Bill Clinton got his start in politics when he signed on as a campaign worker for McGovern and is among the legion of Democrats who credit him with inspiring them to public service.
• "I believe no other presidential candidate ever has had such an enduring impact

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