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worldwide, he worked in partnership with Bob Dole, former Republican leader of the Senate where they'd both served.
• During his years of political retirement -- he lost his South Dakota Senate seat in 1980 -- McGovern remained active, lecturing, teaching and writing. He even waged a token presidential campaign in 1984. He'd also run briefly for the 1968 nomination after the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
• In his 2011 book, "What It Means to Be a Democrat" he summed up his credo:
• "Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others. ... It means standing up for people who have been kept down ..."
• That was the essence of his program during four terms in the House, three in the Senate, and a doomed and crushed presidential campaign in 1972. By the time he was nominated for the White House, McGovern had been marginalized by rivals in his own party, who argued that he was too far left to be elected. That probably was so, but President Richard M. Nixon was the overwhelming favorite against any Democratic challenger.
• McGovern got just 37 percent of the vote to Nixon's 61, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Embittered, he considered whether to even stay in politics, especially as other Democrats made him a symbol of what ailed them and kept him off their stages. McGovernite became a label for losers. But he went back to the Senate, and within months he could joke ruefully about his landslide loss.
• "I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out," McGovern later joked of his reform commission, which had broadened the nominating process, driven out the old party bosses and ultimately made the presidential primaries the arenas for choosing nominees of both parties.
• There was nothing strident about McGovern; even when his words were harsh, his delivery tended to be bland. As a young man, he had been a warrior, and a heroic one. As a senator, he opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from the beginning, in 1963. Arguing in 1970 for legislation to cut U.S. war spending and force troop withdrawal, he offended his colleagues by telling them, "This chamber reeks of blood," vehement words delivered in the matter-of-fact McGovern style. His 1972 presidential campaign proposals included withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and steep cuts in the Pentagon budget.
• For a time, he also advocated a $1,000 tax grant to every American to replace complex welfare and income support programs, saying the needy could spend it and the wealthy would pay it back in taxes. It came with no numbers, no estimate of the cost, although McGovern claimed, against arithmetic and logic, that it would balance

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