George McGovern - Post-Senate Life and 1984 Presidential Campaign

Post-Senate Life and 1984 Presidential Campaign

McGovern did not mourn leaving the Senate. Although being rejected by his own state stung, intellectually he could accept that South Dakotans wanted a more conservative representative; he and Eleanor felt out of touch with the country and in some ways liberated by the loss. Nevertheless, he refused to believe that American liberalism was dead in the time of Reagan; remaining active in politics, in January 1981 he founded the political organization Americans for Common Sense. The group sought to rally liberals, encourage liberal thinking, and combat the Moral Majority and other new Christian right forces. In 1982, he turned the group into a political action committee, which raised $1.2 million for liberal candidates in the 1982 U.S. Congressional elections. McGovern shut the committee down when he decided to run for president again.

McGovern also began teaching and lecturing at a number of universities in the U.S. and Europe, accepting one-year contracts or less. From 1981 to 1982, McGovern replaced historian Stephen Ambrose as a professor at the University of New Orleans. McGovern also began making frequent speeches, earning several hundred thousand dollars a year.

McGovern attempted another presidential run in the 1984 Democratic Presidential nomination primaries. Friends and political admirers of McGovern initially feared the effort would prove an embarrassment, and McGovern knew himself that his chances of winning were remote, but he felt compelled to try to influence the intraparty debate in a liberal direction. Freed from the practical concerns of trying to win, McGovern outlined a ten-point program of sweeping domestic and foreign policy changes; not seen as a threat, fellow competitors did not attack his positions and media commentators praised him as the "conscience" of the Democratic Party.

While having name recognition, McGovern had little funding or staff, although he did garner critical funding from some prominent celebrities and statesmen. He won a surprise third-place showing in the Iowa caucuses amidst a crowded field of candidates, but finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary. He announced he would drop out unless he finished first or second in the Massachusetts primary, and when he came in third behind his former campaign manager Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, he made good on his promise. He later endorsed Mondale, the eventual Democratic nominee. McGovern hosted Saturday Night Live on April 14, 1984.

McGovern addressed the party's platform committee and his name was placed in nomination at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, where he delivered a speech that strongly criticized President Reagan and praised Democratic unity. He received the votes of four delegates. He went on to actively support the Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro ticket, whose eventual landslide defeat bore some similarities to his own in 1972.

During the 1980s, McGovern was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

McGovern had made several real estate investments in the D.C. area and became interested in hotel operations. In 1988, using the money he had earned from his speeches, the McGoverns bought, renovated, and began running a 150-room inn in Stratford, Connecticut, with the goal of providing a hotel, restaurant and public conference facility. It went into bankruptcy in 1990 and closed the following year. In 1992, McGovern's published reflections on the experience appeared in Wall Street Journal and the Nation's Restaurant News. He attributed part of the failure to the early 1990s recession, but also part to the cost of dealing with federal, state and local regulations that were passed with good intentions but made life difficult for small businesses, and to the cost of dealing with frivolous lawsuits. McGovern wrote, "I ... wish that during the years I was in public office I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender."

After briefly exploring in early 1991 another presidential run in the 1992 contest, Instead, in July 1991, McGovern became president of the Middle East Policy Council, having previously served on its board since 1986, a non-profit organization that seeks to educate American citizens and policy makers about the political, economic and security issues impacting U.S. national interests in the Middle East. He held this position until 1997 when he was replaced by Charles W. Freeman, Jr.

On the night of December 12–13, 1994, McGovern's daughter Teresa fell into a snowbank in Madison, Wisconsin, while heavily intoxicated and died of hypothermia. Heavy press attention followed, and McGovern revealed his daughter had battled her alcoholism for years and had been in and out of many treatment programs while having had one extended period of sobriety. He authored an account of her life, Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism; published in 1996, it presented a harrowing, unsparing view of the depths to which she had descended, the torment that he and the rest of his family had experienced in trying unsuccessfully to help her, and his ongoing thoughts and guilt about whether the demands of his political career and the time he had spent away from the family had made things worse for her. The book was a modest best-seller, and with the proceeds, he founded the Teresa McGovern Center in Madison to help others suffering from the combination of alcoholism and mental health problems. He would later say that Terry's death was by far the most painful event in his life: "You never get over it, I'm sure of that. You get so you can live with it, that's all."