Food For Peace Director
Having relinquished his House seat to run for the Senate, McGovern was available for a position in the new Kennedy administration. McGovern was picked to become a Special Assistant to the President and first director of Kennedy's high-priority Food for Peace program, which realized what McGovern had been advocating in the House. McGovern assumed the post on January 21, 1961.
As director, McGovern urged the greater use of food to enable foreign economic development, saying "We should thank God that we have a food abundance and use the over-supply among the under-privileged at home and abroad." He found space for the program in the Executive Office Building rather than be subservient to either the State Department or Department of Agriculture. McGovern worked with deputy director James W. Symington and Kennedy advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in visiting South America to discuss surplus grain distribution, and attended meetings of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization. In June 1961, McGovern became seriously ill with hepatitis, contracted from an infected White House dispensary needle used to give him inoculations for his South American trip; he was hospitalized and out of action for two months.
By the close of 1961, the Food for Peace program was operating in a dozen countries and 10 million more people had been fed with American surplus than the year before. In February 1962, McGovern visited India and oversaw a greatly expanded school lunch program thanks to Food for Peace; subsequently one in five Indian schoolchildren would be fed from it. During an audience in Rome, Pope John XXIII praised McGovern's work and the distribution program was also popular among South Dakota's wheat farmers. In addition, McGovern was instrumental in the creation of the United Nations-based World Food Programme in December 1961; it started distributing food to stricken regions of the world the following year and would go on to become the largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide.
Administration was never McGovern's strength, however, and he was restless for another try at the Senate. With the approval of President Kennedy, McGovern resigned his post on July 18, 1962. Kennedy said that under McGovern, the program had "become a vital force in the world", improving living conditions and economies of allies and creating "a powerful barrier to the spread of Communism". Schlesinger would later write that Food for Peace had been "the greatest unseen weapon of Kennedy's third-world policy".
Read more about this topic: George McGovern
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