McGovern was married to Eleanor for 53 years (she died in January 2007) and kept his family intact. Reflecting on his family in a 1996 memoir, the original bleeding-heart liberal neither celebrated his role as a paterfamilias during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s nor derided the hypocrisy of home-wrecking, religious-right politicos. Instead, McGovern explored his role in Teresa’s death on December 12, 1994, when she was found in a snowdrift outside a bar in Madison, Wisconsin.

Early in the memoir, titled Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism, McGovern ruminated that if he were given a second chance with his daughter, he would parent her differently:

It is not easy to live with alcoholics, but it is far harder to live without them when death steals them away. I do not regret one single act of kindness, patience, or support that I gave to Terry. What I regret is her slowly developing death and the feeling that I could have done more to prevent it.

Nor can I escape regret over the ways in which my political career and personal ego demands deprived Terry and my other children of time, attention, direction—and fun with their father. This was a loss to me as much as to them. …

It is sad for me to read passages in her personal journal describing the hurt and sense of loss she experienced as her dad became more and more caught up in public concerns and his personal gratification while having less and less time for her private needs. My other children have, I suppose, made similar notations.

As the passage suggests, Terry was not a score-settling, ego-boosting account of the Great Man’s life. It was a bracing, honest, mature, and empathetic meditation on the private cost of a public life. Like Helios in Ovid’s tale of Phaeton or David in the Biblical tale of Absalom, McGovern reckoned with his paternal legacy to profound effect.

McGovern’s willingness to own up to faults and shortcomings is not his lone virtue, of course. He is physically courageous, having piloted thirty-five bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe; he is a humanitarian, having made significant strides to stamp out world hunger; he is an inexhaustible worker, as his long career shows; and he showed moral courage in speaking out about the Vietnam War, particularly as the Democratic Party’s 1972 presidential nominee. But McGovern’s contrition, it turns out, is limited to his personal sins.

In his new book, What It Means to Be a Democrat, McGovern does not own up to most or even some of his political faults. Yes, he acknowledges his paternity of the post-1968 Democratic Party: its coalition of non-white, female, young, professional-class, and college-town voters; its cultural liberals, including pro-choice feminists; and a key provision of its presidential nominating system, that its party delegates be diverse in terms of race, gender, and age. Yet he is like a husband who left his first wife, got remarried, and fails to reflect on the impact the divorce had on the kids from both marriages.

Take McGovern’s depiction of one of his progeny, the eponymous McGovern coalition, which replaced the party’s blue-collar, Roosevelt coalition (1932–1968), and which every Democratic presidential nominee since 1972 has relied on to varying degrees.

He boasts that this political alliance “took the stage at Grant Park the night Barack Obama captured the election to become our nation’s first African American president.” But those are the coalition’s highlights, not its lowlights or its overall mark. What does McGovern think about the record of the party’s presidential nominees in the last four decades?

As a trained historian, McGovern knows the record better than most. The party has four wins and six losses. (And another loss may be coming: as Nate Silver of the New York Times notes, President Obama is a slight underdog in his bid for re-election.) Compare the record to that of the New Deal coalition. Its presidential nominees had seven wins and three losses. While the gap between .400 and .700 doesn’t sound like much, it is the difference between the greatest pitchers in baseball history, such as Whitey Ford (.693) or Sandy Koufax (.655), and the most pedestrian.

Unlike baseball, politics is about more than winning: it’s about what you do when you win. When Democrats had their Roosevelt or New Deal coalition, its victorious presidential nominees enacted the legislation of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society—a legacy that McGovern praises and accuses Republicans of seeking to undo. But since Democrats have had their McGovern coalition, its victorious presidential nominees have enacted … what exactly?

McGovern mentions most of the achievements, including family and medical leave (1993), the stimulus package (2009), and the health care law (2010). Yet whether those laws represent a proud legacy is unclear. Based on his frequent invocations of FDR’s and LBJ’s records, the reader can only guess. My guess is that McGovern wants it both ways: He pines for the achievements of the family that he divorced (the Roosevelt coalition) but can’t stop dreaming of the promise of his new family (the McGovern coalition). While his dilemma is understandable, his failure to reflect on the political consequences is neither mature nor wise.

Consider, too, McGovern’s depiction of another one of his progeny, the party’s activist-dominated presidential nominating system, which replaced the old boss system (1832–1968).

McGovern touts the party’s ideology as broadminded: “There are no official Democratic litmus tests … thank heavens!” This is misleading. After all, the party has an unofficial litmus test—the nominee must support abortion rights. Did McGovern forget that feminists prevented pro-life Pennsylvania Governor Robert P. Casey, Sr., from addressing the 1992 Democratic convention about legal abortion, and continues to block pro-life Democrats from doing so?

In addition, McGovern claims that his reform commission (1969–1972) made the Democratic Party more inclusive: “It made sure that, going forward, our delegates included not just middle-aged white men but women, minorities, and young people—any of the millions of Americans who felt they were outsiders to the political decision-making process.” Certainly, McGovern’s reforms helped make the party’s presidential nominating system more democratic internally, as party voters and activists choose the Democratic nominee instead of party bosses.

Yet McGovern’s boast about the inclusiveness of the delegate selection rule is misleading, too. The McGovern commission did more than guarantee non-discrimination for the groups he mentioned. It guaranteed an informal quota to them: State parties were required to choose minorities, women, and young people as delegates “in reasonable relationship to their presence in the state.” This rule change was not made to add to the Democratic family, but rather to divorce the old family and make a new one, which it did. Leaders of the emerging feminist movement of the early 1970s used the gender quotas to align with the Democrats rather than Republicans, and the feminists’ agenda alienated and eventually drove out the party’s cultural conservatives.

Finally, consider McGovern’s depiction of cultural liberalism. He writes that abortion “is essentially a woman’s issue, since none of us men can ever be pregnant or have an abortion.” For someone whose bid for the party’s presidential nomination in 1972 commanded the support of feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug, this statement is not surprising. But for someone whose own daughter had a horrible experience with abortion, it is not only surprising but also jarring.

In Terry, McGovern implies that when he and his wife learned that their 15-year-old girl was unexpectedly pregnant, they agreed with their family doctor’s decision that she should travel to Florida for an abortion. He describes the impact of the abortion this way:

An important part of Terry was devastated by the abortion. Her innocence, her fun-loving nature, and her self-confidence were all deeply shaken, first by an unpleasant sexual experience and then by a pregnancy that she feared and yet did not want to terminate. She later told me of these feelings and then added: ‘I thought that my special relationship with you was over.’ I never knowingly conveyed such an attitude toward Terry. I never expressed anger, nor did I ever hint at any concern about possible political consequences. But Terry felt shamed and reduced by this episode. In retrospect I wish I had gone out of my way to reassure her that for me she remained a ‘special person’ whom I both loved and admired despite her teenage mistakes.

McGovern’s dueling statements on abortion do not reflect well on his intellectual integrity. Publicly, he believes that pregnant women alone should decide whether or not to abort. Privately, he did not grant this power to his own daughter, who did not wish to abort.

Older and historically inclined readers might find it curious that this review has avoided discussing McGovern’s leadership of the opposition to the Vietnam War, the cause for which he is best known. I find it curious that McGovern does little more than broach the topic in What It Means to Be a Democrat. After all, McGovern’s main motive in fathering the modern Democratic Party was not personal glory or enrichment, but ideology: He wanted to end the war.

Almost everything McGovern did in the late 1960s and early 1970s was directed to that goal. His coalition was more likely to oppose the war strongly than Roosevelt’s coalition. Female, minority, and young delegates were more likely to oppose the war than their male, white, and older counterparts. Feminists were more likely to oppose the war than all but a few constituencies.

In short, George McGovern is one of the Democratic Party’s founding fathers—a man as important in party history as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Franklin Roosevelt. Yet What It Means to Be a Democrat is much closer to being the equivalent of a long op-ed rather than Grant’s memoirs or a political analogue to Terry. For a man, now eighty-nine, who owned up so movingly to his familial legacy, it’s disappointing that he barely attempted to own up to his political ones.

Mark Stricherz, a reporter in Washington, is the author of  Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party (Encounter Books).

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Wilcox neglects to answer that question. Which is odd, because his essay raises a related query: Has the loosening of our divorce laws helped or hurt Americans? His answer, a convincing one in my view, is that it hurts them. It hurts kids: Children of divorced parents are two to three times more likely than their peers with married parents to drop out of high school, get pregnant, go to prison, or get divorced. (In the words of one marriage scholar, this is a closer association than that between smoking and cancer). It hurts marital happiness: In the early 1970s, seven in ten men and two in three women reported being very happy in their marriages, compared to roughly three in five men and women today. It hurts the poor and working classes: To take the most alarming statistic, one scholar concludes that virtually all of the childhood poverty since the 1970s can be attributed to family breakdown. It hurts the institution of marriage: Couples, seeing marriages collapse all around them, shack up rather than walk up the altar. And it hurts men: Their health is likely to suffer most, as they don’t have a wife around to tell them to go to the doctor and if they have kids, have less time to exercise.

Yet whether women in particular are hurt by the loosening of our divorce laws is no more than broached. Wilcox mentions that in the immediate aftermath of divorce women are “stressed out.” However, he elaborates no further. In fact, a fair-minded reader of his essay might conclude that divorce reform has helped women in a few ways. Wilcox writes that although the bad effects of divorce on children are certain, those on adults are not:

Not surprisingly, the effects of divorce on adults are more ambiguous. From an emotional and social perspective, about 20% of divorced adults find their lives enhanced and another 50% seem to suffer no long-term ill effects, according to research by psychologist Mavis Hetherington. Adults who initiated a divorce are especially likely to report that they are flourishing afterward, or are at least doing just fine.

That last sentence is curious. Who, exactly, initiates most of the divorces? A paragraph later, Wilcox reveals the answer: In two-thirds of divorces, women legally initiated them. It is logical to conclude, therefore, that after a divorce it is not men but women who flourish or report being just fine.

Does Wilcox view the lives of post-divorce women in sanguine terms? I doubt it. He surely knows that for poor and working-class women, the loosening of our divorce laws has been harmful and, arguably, disastrous. Just consider the term the “feminization of poverty.” Is it not a shorthand definition for working-class and poor women who never married or are divorced with kids?

In addition, Wilcox is surely aware of Linda Waite’s latest research on the effects of divorce on adults. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist, collected data from 8,652 people ages 51 to 61. They found that divorce hurts more than people’s hearts and souls; it damages their brains and bodies, to the point that remarriage might not heal them. Although the study did not focus on women, it found that divorce (and widowhood) harmed both sexes. Chronic health conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes increased by 20 percent, and limitations on mobility, such as trouble climbing stairs or walking around the block, rose by 23 percent. In an interview with Newsweek, Waite used terms that suggest she believes divorce is a public health threat: “Anything we could do to help couples build strong marriages and avoid divorce would be like helping them avoid a terrible acute illness.”

While not citing any of Waite’s research, he relies solely on that of Mavis Hetherington, who is a prominent scholar in the field of developmental psychology at the University of Virginia. Hetherington argues that divorce serves to help women and children in “contemptuous” marriages, which she defined in one interview as unions characterized by “sneering and subtle putdowns that erode the partner’s self-esteem.” Her argument cannot be dismissed, as it describes a marriage that no adults would wish to find themselves and their children in. But her claim strikes me as fuzzy and subjective. Maybe I am showing the bias of someone who is married and whose background, like Waite’s, is from the University of Chicago, but I suspect that it was not the process of separation and divorce that made women in contemptuous marriages better off but the intervention of a church, civic group, or even government program. Alas, numerical data about contemptuous marriage is hard to come by, not least because married couples go through many phases of marriage.

By endorsing Hetherington’s research, Wilcox endorses her argument, at least tacitly. That strikes me as a contradiction of the central argument of his essay, against our new “soul-mate” model of marriage. As recently as 40 years ago, people thought that a man and a woman wed primarily to make love, enjoy intimacy, and bear and raise children together. Now we view marriage as a means to achieving and maintaining a high-quality emotional bond. Wilcox claims that this soul-mate model of marriage, by supplanting the older institutional model of marriage, has helped cause the “marriage gap” in the United States, a divide in which marriage is less attractive to the poor and working classes because they lack the emotional, social, and financial wherewithal to achieve the relationship beau ideal referred to in ads for eharmony.com.

Although I agree with Wilcox’s brief against the soul-mate model of marriage, his implied endorsement of Hetherington’s argument undermines his argument at least partly. Shouldn’t the couples in contemptuous marriages realize that marriage is not mainly about their personal self-esteem but rather their children and that they must seek every intervention possible to avoid divorce? I doubt Hetherington would answer yes to that question. But Wilcox, at least when not discussing divorce’s effects on women, surely would.


Mark Stricherz is the author of Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party and blogs at www.trueslant.com/markstricherz and www.newcatholicpolitics.com.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.