Word: mcgoverns
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...McGovern began with a feeling condemnation of the war as "a moral debacle." Over the Nixon years the suffering had begun to involve more Asians and fewer Americans, but the war, he said, had not become less of an issue merely "because the color of the bodies has changed." He reminded the electorate of the statement that Candidate Nixon made in October 1968: "Those who have had a chance for four years and could not produce peace should not be given another chance...
Dictator. Then McGovern laid out his plan to end the war; it was largely a summary of his previously articulated views. Unlike Nixon, who seeks a negotiated exit, McGovern would carry out a unilateral U.S. withdrawal requiring a minimum of cooperation from the Communists. If the war was still raging on Inauguration Day, McGovern would stop the bombing and other "acts of force," halt the flow of supplies to Saigon and begin a 90-day withdrawal of U.S. forces-keeping U.S. airbases in Thailand open and Seventh Fleet ships on station until Hanoi released the 539 American P.O.W.s and helped...
...McGovern turns off some would-be supporters because he sometimes seems to want not only an end to the war but an act of national moral self-flagellation. "We tell him to go easy on the blood and bomb stuff," says a McGovern adviser, "but it does no good. He just feels too deeply to change." During a flight to Minneapolis one day last week, campaign aides played a tape recording of a young veteran's horror and guilt over his participation in the devastation of Viet Nam. Deeply moved, McGovern played it for his audience that night...
...polls suggest that McGovern's sense of moral outrage is not shared by most Americans, who tend to go along with Nixon's gut conviction that a U.S. President cannot simply get out of Viet Nam without an "honorable" settlement. As Gelb, now with the Brookings Institution, says, it is true "both that the American people want out and that they don't want the place handed over to the Communists...
...done to so many other things, the interminable, infinitely complex war in Viet Nam has turned meanings inside out. McGovern, with his angry moralism and his too-eager willingness to ratify the worthlessness of the long U.S. effort, offends a deep sensibility in the American people. This allows Nixon, who has not ended the war as he promised and continues to destroy a small corner of the earth with all of the firepower the U.S. can muster, to campaign as the peace candidate...