Most people of a certain age know that George McGovern lost a presidential race to Richard Nixon in 1972. We now know the landslide was tainted by Watergate and other dirty tricks associated with the dark side of the Nixon presidency. What fewer people realize is that George McGovern was also the first head of the Food for Peace program under President John F. Kennedy, and that he led a commission in the late 1960s that forever changed the way political parties choose their nominees.

McGovern, now 87, is coming to Syracuse to talk about his latest project, a book about Abraham Lincoln. Le Moyne College is hosting “A Conversation with George McGovern” at Grewen Auditorium Monday, Sept. 28, 7 p.m. On Tuesday, Sept. 29, he will appear at Barnes and Noble Booksellers at 3454 Erie Blvd. E., DeWitt. Beginning at 11:30 a.m., the former senator from South Dakota will speak about and sign copies of his ninth book, Abraham Lincoln (Henry Holt and Company, New York City; 208 pages; $22/hardcover). Both events are free and open to the public. His appearance at Le Moyne is sponsored by that college’s Center for Peace and Global Studies.

This is not McGovern’s first visit to Central New York. In 1983 he spent a semester as a visiting professor of political science at Cornell University, and he has fond memories of a lecture he gave at Syracuse University in the early 1980s. During his 1972 presidential campaign, he barnstormed upstate New York with his “End the Vietnam War” message while trying to unseat Nixon. 

That was back in the days before Bill Clinton when New York state (which gave its electoral votes to Ronald Reagan not once, but twice) was considered up for grabs in presidential politics. “When I ran for president I ran all over New York state,” he remembered. “I got 100 percent of the New York delegation to the national convention.”

The New Times spoke with McGovern by telephone from his home in Mitchell, S.D. We wondered why he chose to undertake yet another book on Abraham Lincoln, our most heavily profiled president. 

“That’s a good question,” he said in his soft prairie drawl. “There have been more than 6,000 books written on Lincoln. He remains a fascinating and enduring figure. My book has outsold all the other books in the series. It doesn’t surprise me. This Lincoln-McGovern ticket, I’ve found, sells pretty well.”

On occasion McGovern has been quoted comparing Lincoln and Barack Obama. McGovern was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton in last year’s Democratic primary race, but endorsed Obama after Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008. “Both Obama and Lincoln are brilliant men,” said McGovern. “Both are masters of the English language and diction. Both have a vision of what they wanted this country to be. Both had capacity for tireless efforts. They had those things in common.”

The conversation with McGovern came on the heels of the dustup over South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s interruption of President Obama’s speech on health care. I asked him about the much talked-about lack of civility in politics today.

“In all my years in public life, I never heard anything like that. But it is not like the time of Lincoln. Lincoln came to office in the most divided time in America’s history. It was the only time when Americans actually started killing each other over political disputes. We killed 600,000 of our own people in the Civil War. Lincoln was called an ignoramus, an inhuman monster, a tramp, a traitor. He was on the receiving end of any verbal blast that his enemies could dream up, and eventually became the first president assassinated while in office. He was facing much harsher blasts than anything Barack has faced.

“Lincoln was a man of peace and there wasn’t a day of peace in his four years as president. We’ve never had anything like that or anything to approach it. We’ve had verbal battles but never anything like that."

Does McGovern have any advice for Obama? “Stay out of Afghanistan, except for Food for Peace and water projects and things like that. I hope we get our army out of that country as soon as we can. Barack is a well motivated and highly intelligent man who will come to realize that there is no military role that makes any sense. Get out of Afghanistan and Iraq as soon as possible and don’t leave any bases behind. 

“One of the reasons I want our troops out of Afghanistan is that I want him to be a great success as president. I don’t want him to be bogged down like Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon was a great president, but not for expanding that war in Vietnam. Like Barack, he inherited that war. The Iraq war may be the most senseless war in our history. The whole way we got into that war was worse than anything that happened at Watergate.”

Since McGovern raised the notion of food aid instead of military involvement, I thought to ask him about his own longstanding work toward ending world hunger. “I was appointed by President Kennedy in 1961, and I worked in the White House,” he said. “If you think hunger doesn’t play an important role in these countries, put yourself on a diet of one bowl of cereal a day and you’d see very quickly how urgent an issue hunger is. I’d like to see Food for Peace revitalized today. We can also work with the UN World Food Program--they distribute more food than any other agency in the world.

“When I was President Clinton’s ambassador to the UN Agencies in Rome, I got started what we now call the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. It is an expanded school lunch program around the world. I made the proposal to the United Nations and then took it to Clinton. He got us $300 million to get it started. I persuaded Bob Dole to join with me to give it a bipartisan appeal.”

McGovern also played a key role in the reform of Democratic Party rules after the 1968 Democratic convention drew protesters from all over the country. The Chicago Police Department’s televised crackdown on the youthful protesters was later described by an investigative commission as “a police riot.” McGovern, who lost the nomination that year to Hubert Humphrey, was asked to head a party commission on how convention delegates were selected. 

“Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton,” said McGovern, “could have been serious candidates without the changes we put in place. We went through and looked at each delegation to the convention. Many of them had all their members appointed by a single person. There were delegations in 1968 that did not have a single minority member, delegations that did not have any women, and no one under 30--at a time when the issue of the day was the Vietnam War, a situation where everyone involved was under 30. 

“We changed the rules to say that each delegation had to be ‘reasonably representative’ of the state they came from. Whether they had a caucus or a primary was up to them. We just wanted them to be representative.” 

For more information about George McGovern’s visit to Le Moyne College, call 445-4555. For information regarding the Barnes and Nobles book-signing, call 449-2948.

 George McGovern, circa 1972: Makes two public appearances in Syracuse next week.