George McGovern, A Man Who Can Recall

Wisdom is not automatic; it is the gift not of years but of effort, awareness, and experience. The last decade in American government has shown us that one can be as old as Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, or George Bush and still burden the world with the fantasies and delusions common to the adolescent mind. And later, you can fall back on the convenient dementia-image of the elderly, as Cheney did in his recent interview with the FBI.

One of the defining marks of wisdom is its scorn for those “I can’t recall” moments so common to dead and dying tyrants such as Cheney. One of our nation’s wisest political minds, George McGovern, has an excellent memory, and is offering its treasure to the current administration.

George McGovern is one of those 80-something men who can recall, all too well. He can easily recall why, in 1970, he gave one of the most blisteringly truthful speeches ever heard in the Senate when he excoriated his colleagues for their complicity in the murderous insanity of Vietnam:

Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land – young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

Oh yes, George McGovern recalls: he recalls so well that he can deliver the best advice that a man 40 years his junior could receive:

A historian, McGovern said he would remind Obama that foreign powers have been trying unsuccessfully to prevail in Afghanistan “ever since Alexander the Great. Genghis Khan even made a shot at it. The British throughout the 19th century were in there several times trying to pacify the [country] and finally gave up. The Russians were there for 11 years, 1979 until 1990, they put in 100,000 crack soldiers, 25,000 of them killed … in Afghanistan, another 25,000 crippled or injured. And the Russian treasury went broke, and some of our best Soviet experts believe that’s what really led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Asked how he would get out of Afghanistan if he were president, McGovern said: “I would say to the Afghan people that ‘we’ve been here for eight years, and we’ve come to the conclusion we can’t resolve your problems. You’ve got the Taliban, you may have al-Qaida, but—our soldiers have fought, died bravely—but it’s my conclusion, as president of the United States, that we can’t resolve the problems here. We’ll do what we can to help you, but we can’t do it with our military forces. As a matter of fact, while we’ve been here, the Taliban have grown stronger, and we don’t know where al-Qaida is—we think they’re in Pakistan—but having our troops in Afghanistan is not going to help that. So it’s our judgment that the best thing for us, and maybe for you, is for you to take over the handling of your own problems.”

He even has advice for the youngsters in Congress:

Critical that Obama “started with a compromise proposal” that came out of Congress as a 2,000-page document, McGovern said, “I would have just had a one-sentence bill: ‘Congress hereby extends Medicare to all Americans.’ Period.”

Wisdom, in this time and this culture, is exceedingly rare: it is far more convenient to forget or deny than to remember, learn, and teach. Amid a dark dementia of “I can’t recall,” George McGovern offers a clarity of memory and insight that we ignore at our great peril.