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to finally stand up. Your father stood there and took all of that beating."
• Speaker after speaker said McGovern never wavered from his guiding principles.
• "When I think of George, I think of a man of uncompromising integrity," said Democratic U.S. Sen. Tim Johnson.
• The ceremony featured heartfelt tributes by McGovern family members, longtime friends and political loyalists. The crowd of hundreds sat hushed as snippets of McGovern's acceptance speech from the 1972 Democratic National Convention crackled on a church loudspeaker. "We are entering a new period of important and hopeful change in America," came the echo from the past.
• All afternoon, mourners filed past his open casket and paused in the pews of a Methodist church to reflect. In the sanctuary, images of McGovern were displayed on screens and poster boards. They showed him during his presidential campaign, in his World War II Army uniform and with his wife, Eleanor, who died five years ago. In one, he is hunched in a field with the words "Prairie Populist" in a corner. Mourners came from surrounding states and as far away as Connecticut.
• Retired educator Mike Schroeder, of Sioux Falls, recalled meeting McGovern at a church supper in the small town of Bridgewater when McGovern was first running for office. Schroeder was a Republican but wound up voting for McGovern in the Democrat's every race.
• "I just remember the Vietnam War, and he was right on a lot of the things he said on the war," Schroeder said. Plus, he said, "He helped put South Dakota on the map."
• McGovern's 1972 candidacy centered around his pledge to pull America out of Vietnam, telling those who would listen that his "heart has ached" over the war. "I have no secret plan for peace," he said in his Democratic National Convention speech accepting the party nomination. "I have a public plan."
• It was a plan he never had a chance to execute. He lost that year in a rout to incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, who won all but one state. South Dakota even went Nixon's way.
• Todd Hong was just 15 and a high school student when he volunteered for McGovern in the final months of the White House campaign.
• "He was a great voice of reason at the time," said the 55-year-old technical writer who drove from Eden Prairie, Minn., to pay his respects. "I was losing friends in Vietnam, friends' brothers. We weren't immune to the effects."
• Holding back tears, Hong said McGovern's principled stands took courage. "I don't see politicians like that anymore," he said.
• McGovern's political career would effectively end eight years later, when he was

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