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McGovern said in 2006.
• His opposition to armed conflict remained a constant long after he retired. Shortly before Iowa's caucuses in 2004, McGovern endorsed retired Gen. Wesley Clark, and compared his own opposition to the Vietnam War to Clark's criticism of President George W. Bush's decision to wage war in Iraq. One of the 10 books McGovern wrote was 2006's "Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now," written with William R. Polk.
• In early 2002, George and Eleanor McGovern returned to Mitchell, where they helped raise money for a library bearing their names. Eleanor McGovern died there in 2007 at age 85; they had been married 64 years, and had four daughters and a son.
• "I don't know what kind of president I would have been, but Eleanor would have been a great first lady," he said after his wife's death in 2007.
• One of their daughters, Teresa, was found dead in a Madison, Wis., snowdrift in 1994 after battling alcoholism for years. He recounted her struggle in his 1996 book "Terry," and described the writing of it as "the most painful undertaking in my life." It was briefly a best seller and he used the proceeds to help set up a treatment center for victims of alcoholism and mental illness in Madison.
• Before the 2008 presidential campaign, McGovern endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination but switched to Barack Obama that May. He called the future president "a moderate," cautious in his ways, who wouldn't waste money or do "anything reckless."
• "I think Barack will emerge as one of our great ones," he said in a 2009 interview with The Associated Press. "It will be a victory for moderate liberalism."
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McGovern an unwavering, often unrequited, liberal
WALTER R. MEARS,AP Special Correspondent
• CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) -- George McGovern was an unwavering, often unrequited advocate for liberal Democratic causes. He pursued those goals in plainspoken, usually understated, Midwestern style. He was a dedicated, decent man, a devoted Democrat even when the party establishment turned away from him in defeat.
• He wasn't good at political gamesmanship. He suffered his worst blunders when he strayed from straight talk in his doomed 1972 presidential campaign. It didn't fit the man and it shook the credibility he treasured.
• McGovern was a partisan without the poison that increasingly infected American politics. In his career-long quest for programs to feed the hungry, in the U.S. and (Continued on page 24)
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