The first major biography of the 1972 U.S. presidential candidate and unsung champion of American liberalismThe Rise of a Prairie Statesman is the first volume of a major biography of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who became America's most eloquent and prescient critic of the Vietnam War. In this masterful book, Thomas Knock traces George McGovern's life from his rustic boyhood in a South Dakota prairie town during the Depression to his rise to the pinnacle of politics at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police and antiwar demonstrators clashed in the city's streets.Drawing extensively on McGovern's private papers and scores of in-depth interviews, Knock shows how McGovern's importance to the Democratic Party and American liberalism extended far beyond his 1972 presidential campaign, and how the story of postwar American politics is about more than just the rise of the New Right. He vividly describes McGovern's harrowing missions over Nazi Germany as a B-24 bomber pilot, and reveals how McGovern's combat experiences motivated him to earn a PhD in history and stoked his ambition to run for Congress. When President Kennedy appointed him director of Food for Peace in 1961, McGovern engineered a vast expansion of the program's school lunch initiative that soon was feeding tens of millions of hungry children around the world. As a senator, he delivered his courageous and unrelenting critique of Lyndon Johnson's escalation in Vietnam-a conflict that brought their party to disaster and caused a new generation of Democrats to turn to McGovern for leadership.A stunning achievement, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman ends in 1968, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, when the "Draft McGovern" movement thrust him into the national spotlight and the contest for the presidential nomination, culminating in his triumphal reelection to the Senate and his emergence as one of the most likely prospects for the Democratic nomination in 1972..

Prologue ix1 Yours, for Fixing Up This World 1
2 A Boy Never Gets over His Boyhood 11
3 A Clasping of Hands Meant Everything 29
4 The Best B-24 Pilot in the World 48
5 I Would Have to Call Him a Progressive Agrarian 77
6 America Was Born in Revolution against the Established Order 101
7 The Confused and Fear-Ridden Temper of the Times 124
8 What a Loss to History! 146
9 Washington, DC 176
10 The Apostle of Agriculture, Education, and Peace 203
11 The Quest for the Senate 231
12 Food for Peace 256
13 We Are Determining the Priorities of Our National Life 286
14 The Right Song for the Wrong Season 315
15 The Cup of Peril Is Full 347
16 But There Are Still People with Hope 379
17 The Kind of Man the Future Must Have 412
Epilogue: Come Home, America 425
Acknowledgments 431
A Note on Sources 435
Abbreviations 437
Notes 439
Index 501