From In These Times
By Laura S. Washington

The old antiwar horse is still kicking.

In 1972, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern (once a World War II bomber pilot) won the Democratic presidential nomination on an antiwar platform. In 2007, he’s still got game.

In March 2007, McGovern called on Vice President Dick Cheney to resign. A month later, opining in the Los Angeles Times, he revisited the trauma of the Vietnam War era and excoriated George W. Bush and Cheney for blithely sacrificing American lives once again. “We, of course, already know that when Cheney endorses a war, he exempts himself from participation,” he wrote. “On second thought, maybe it’s wise to keep Cheney off the battlefield — he might end up shooting his comrades rather than the enemy.”

For more than a year, the retired senator and former ambassador to the United Nations has been stumping for a book he co-wrote with foreign policy analyst William R. Polk called Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. He has buttonholed dozens of members of Congress, urging our immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

McGovern lost the presidential election in 1972 because of his conviction that the Vietnam War was wrong. To this day, conservatives blast him for being a liberal anti-American. He’s still not backing down.

“I’m very proud of the things that I stood for in ‘72 and I make no apologies for anything,” McGovern told me in a Nov. 28 phone interview. “I said what I thought was right. And I am proud of what we stood for in that campaign. We didn’t win, but lots of people in history have proposed ideas that were good for the society of their time but weren’t accepted until years later.”

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