Playboy Interview: George McGovern

A blustery Bronx dawn greeted George McGovern one day last March. For the sanitation men he was to meet--Latin, Slavic, black, Mediterranean--the dreary morning began as usual: with the cluster in the cold before their trucks, the ritual daily "shape-up." To the accompaniment of reporters, tape recorders, audio cables and film crews, the Senator approached them cautiously, with a hand advanced and a small smile. His manner was polite, almost timid, with none of the backslapping bonhomie of a Rockefeller, the easy grace of a Kennedy nor the volubility of a Humphrey. He acted as if he felt that even a candidate for the Presidency should observe a certain decorum among people he doesn't know very well. But the men responded sympathetically--answering his questions about municipal sanitation, offering the opinions he solicited on the war and the Nixon Administration. Although, the television cameras were nearby, McGovern made no speeches. Instead, he sipped coffee from a paper cup and listened--which is unusual for a political candidate. When he left that Bronx garage, it was unclear whether he had won any votes, but he had certainly found out something about the problems of a great city and about the men who live and work in it.

Learning something of these problems is crucial if McGovern is to become President, for he is a country boy to the core. He knows that American society's crisis point is its cities, but he was raised among horses and chickens in South Dakota, and it's there that he still feels most at home. Even McGovern recognizes that it's fair to ask whether a man of 49 can learn enough about America's metropolitan malaise to lead, as he hopes to do, a Presidential campaign for social regeneration. He thinks the answer is yes--but the learning won't be easy. Hence his crash course in urban affairs through the dingy streets of the Bronx, past rows of abandoned buildings, across intersections crowded with junkies, into slum neighborhoods appalling even to hardened New Yorkers.

"If we had taken him into some of those buildings," said an assistant to Bronx Congressman Herman Badillo, "it would have taken him a lifetime to forget the stench. He's not ready for that yet." At one church, he heard blacks and Puerto Ricans denounce one another as racists. At another, they joined together to excoriate the city administration, the Federal Government, the landlords, the poverty program. All day long, McGovern looked and listened--and exposed himself to the staggering variety of inhumanity one finds on the underside of urban life. When the tour was over, he collapsed into the air shuttle back to Washington, his body exhausted and his head swimming, but with the feeling that this had been an indispensable experience.

George McGovern didn't always want to be President. That would have been presumptuous for the son of a dust-bowl preacher growing up in Depression poverty. His father, the late Reverend Joseph C. McGovern, played semiprofessional baseball around Des Moines after World War One before setting out on an odyssey that took him from town to town organizing Wesleyan Methodist congregations. Finally, he set up his own pulpit in Avon, a South Dakota prairie town of 600 people. There George Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922. Six years later, the family--which now included two boys and two girls--migrated to Mitchell, a comparative metropolis of 6000. Etched in McGovern's boyhood memories are days in Mitchell when cabbage and potatoes were all the family had to eat. It is Mitchell that he still considers home.

Educated in the local public schools, McGovern was attending Dakota Wesleyan University when World War Two erupted. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps, won his wings as a bomber pilot and flew 35 missions over Europe from bases in North Africa and Italy. On his 30th mission, when flak struck his plane and mortally wounded his navigator, McGovern nursed the disabled aircraft to a crash landing on the tiny Adriatic island of Viz and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for valor. (He has often said that his military record established the credentials that entitled him to become a Vietnam dove many years later.) After the war, he returned to take his bachelor's degree at Dakota Wesleyan, then went on for a doctorate in history at Northwestern. It was during this period that McGovern, whose family was nominally Republican, became a Democrat--because, he explains, "My study of history convinced me that the Democrats were more on the side of the average American." In 1953, while he was teaching history and political science at Dakota Wesleyan, he decided to enter politics full time.

Just 30, McGovern became the first salaried organizer for the almost nonexistent Democratic Party in South Dakota, which held no major offices and only two of the legislature's 110 seats. After three years of intensive and successful efforts to rebuild the party, he ran for Congress himself. His campaign was conducted on a shoestring, a contribution often consisting of a chicken, which would serve as the candidate's supper. Once he had to peddle campaign buttons at a picnic to earn his transportation to the next day's rally. Yet he won the election and remained in the House for two terms, where he made a name for himself as a man with thoroughly liberal convictions--and enough good sense to make sure the farmers back home were well cared for. In 1960, McGovern ran for the Senate against Karl Mundt, a conservative Republican, and lost. Then the newly elected President, John F. Kennedy, named him director of the Food for Peace program--a perfect platform for a farm-state humanitarian. By getting rid of farm surpluses and feeding the poor, McGovern endeared himself to liberals and conservatives alike. Then, in 1962, he ran for the Senate again and unseated the incumbent Republican, Senator Joe Bottum, by 597 votes.

If there is one issue that has dominated McGovern's entire Senate career, it has been his opposition to the Vietnam war. Since he made his first speech on the subject in September 1963, he has seen the antiwar movement grow from a quixotic lost cause to a majority position, both in Congress and in the nation. It was Vietnam, more than anything else, that attracted him to the Presidential candidacy of Robert Kennedy in 1968, though he had personally been much closer to Hubert Humphrey. After Kennedy was assassinated, McGovern was urged to hold Kennedy's antiwar supporters together by running himself at the Chicago convention; it was a rearguard action, but he received 146 1/2 delegate votes. He also caught a severe case of Presidential flu. Since the election of Richard Nixon, and his own re-election to the Senate, McGovern has intensified his opposition to the war--and worked to solidify his Presidential ambitions for 1972.

Throughout the first years of the Nixon Administration, he made hundreds of appearances on college campuses, trying in his unostentatious way to keep antiwar ardor alive. In the Senate, he cosponsored with Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield a resolution requiring the withdrawal of all American forces from Indochina by the end of 1971. As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, he fixed public attention on hunger in America and refocused on his old objective of feeding the poor. And as chairman of the Democratic National Committee's McGovern Commission, he pressed successfully for adoption of a new set of rules to avoid a repetition of the 1968 fiasco at Chicago by assuring the open, democratic selection of national-convention delegates. Meanwhile, he labored slowly and methodically to build the staff and organization necessary for a Presidential campaign.

On January 18, 1971, McGovern formally declared his candidacy, promising the American people "a way out of the wilderness." It was an unprecedentedly early announcement and the first, of the political season. But it was necessary, McGovern explained, if he was to conduct himself with candor and, at the same time, make up lost ground on his better-known rivals. Since that time, he has stepped up his travels throughout the country, quietly seeking support, developing the themes of his campaign, looking and learning in a manner that befits a scholar and former professor. According to the latest polls, McGovern has been gaining in the race for the nomination--but he still has a long way to go.

It wasn't easy for the candidate to fit in the time for this "Playboy Interview" with Milton Viorst, a political columnist syndicated by the Washington Star. But after a few false starts, the schedule was set, the office phones were turned off, the neckties were loosened and the two men settled down to talk. McGovern made only one rule: He refused to criticize his Democratic rivals. With that in mind, Viorst began by asking him to discuss his aspirations.

[Q] Playboy: Senator, why do you want to be President?

[A] McGovern: Basically, because I have the confidence and the understanding to do something about the most important problems that confront the country today. It may sound old-fashioned to say that I love this country, but I do and I'm deeply distressed over the mistaken directions we're pursuing. We're on the wrong course in the world and the problems we're neglecting here at home have become so acute that 1972 may be the last turnaround chance we'll have. If we continue under the kind of leadership we've had in recent years, it's an open question whether our society can survive.

[Q] Playboy: What makes you think you're more qualified for this job than Nixon--or Muskie, Kennedy, Hughes, Bayh, Jackson, Humphrey and all the other Democrats whose names have been mentioned as Presidential prospects?

[A] McGovern: In addition to my experience, I think I have a steady, dependable temperament, as well as a sense of history and some degree of imagination. And I don't think I explode under pressure.

[Q] Playboy: Are you referring to the reports suggesting that your rival for the nomination, Senator Muskie, is short-fused?

[A] McGovern: No, not at all. I'm just talking about an assessment of my own strengths; I think I have the capacity to stand up under enormous pressure. As a matter of fact, that's when I do best. I believe that, should I become President, the confrontation with difficult problems would draw out the best in me rather than the worst. I'm the type of person whose best writing, best speaking, best performances have always come at times of greatest challenge; that's a good quality to have in the President of the United States. I also think I have a broader and more sensitive perspective than the other candidates on the really crucial problems--and the alternative possibilities--before the country. I wouldn't be running if I didn't have the conviction that I had something to offer that the other candidates don't have. There's no point in running just to have a contest among equals.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think are your most serious personal handicaps--in terms of not only becoming President but of exercising the powers of the Presidency?

[A] McGovern: Well. I suppose the fact that I'm not as dynamic, as flamboyant a personality as a Theodore Roosevelt or a Franklin Roosevelt. Though I think there's entirely too much emphasis placed on "charisma" in politics, I must admit that it would be nice if, without being unnatural, I had a few more exciting personal qualities than I do. But I think those qualities will develop. I found in Chicago in 1968, strangely enough, a new vein of excitement running in myself. I was surprised at the way my brief bid for the Presidency stirred currents within me that I felt were transmitted to other people. There was no one in Chicago who said, "Well, he's a nice guy, but he's dull," when I confronted Humphrey and McCarthy on the only stage where all of us appeared. Many of those who were there, as a matter of fact, told me I came across as the most exciting of the three.

[Q] Playboy: It's been said that a man must have an extraordinary sense of righteousness to want to be President, perhaps even a power neurosis. Do you agree?

[A] McGovern: I don't think it requires a power neurosis. As a matter of fact, I believe anyone who backs away from the opportunity--if he's in a position to make a reasonable bid for the Presidency and has some understanding of what needs to be done--may be neurotic. It does require great self-confidence and maybe some degree of arrogance to run for the Presidency, but to me that stops short of being a neurosis.

[Q] Playboy: It's also been said that a man who wants to run for the Presidency has to have a kind of political killer instinct--and that you don't have it.

[A] McGovern: The great Presidents, in my judgment, weren't men with the killer instinct. The three biggest Presidential monuments in the Capitol are dedicated to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. These were very tough-minded men, but it wasn't the killer instinct that guided them. I think these were men with a rare degree of prudence, wisdom and compassion--qualities that are much needed now. Some cynics feel that decency in a politician is a handicap. But I think a sense of decency--not prudishness nor sanctimonious self-righteousness but old-fashioned concern and love for others--will be essential in the next President. That's the kind of President I want to be.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you find that you have to compromise yourself to some degree in order to raise money, to make alliances, to organize a coalition behind you, to disassociate yourself from supporters who have become liabilities?

[A] McGovern: Well, I've probably had to do less of that sort of thing than most candidates setting out for the Presidency, because I've recognized from the beginning that the principal assets I have as a candidate are my reputation and my record of being myself, of not trying to create some kind of manufactured position or image. I've tended over the years to speak out with considerable candor. I haven't backed away from any of the tough issues, even though they required paying a penalty. It may well be that in seeking the nomination, I'll be more circumspect about the kinds of groups I'm associated with, but so far I haven't rejected identification with controversial groups. I was one of the first to speak out against such sacred cows as J. Edgar Hoover, and I'm going to continue such direct talk, even recognizing that it may cost me support in some areas.

[Q] Playboy: In this connection, is it possible that the press--or your opponents--will dredge up a scandal in your closet?

[A] McGovern: I don't think so. I wouldn't want everything in my personal life spread on a billboard any more than anyone else would, because we've all had our escapades. But I've never in my life knowingly cheated anybody out of a penny nor taken a bribe nor done anything that I feel is basically dishonest. And I don't think there are any scandals that are so serious that, if they were spread around, would be of any particular consequence. They might be embarrassing, but I don't think they'd be fatal.

[Q] Playboy: Who's supplying the money for your campaign?

[A] McGovern: We've had a few contributions in the $1000 or $2000 range, but 99 percent of the more than $300,000 we've raised so far has come in small amounts--averaging around ten dollars apiece--from direct mail, which may be new in American politics. I don't think any Presidential campaign ever began with a direct-mail fund appeal in advance of an actual announcement. And it's been successful. At least at this point, I can legitimately claim to be a glass-roots candidate.

[Q] Playboy: How much money will you need between now and the convention?

[A] McGovern: We'll need $500,000 in 1971, probably another $500,000 for the first couple of primaries--and beyond that, no one can tell. It can run into millions, depending on how many primaries we enter and on how well we do. We must show some strength in the early primaries to raise the kind of money it takes to campaign in such big states as California, New York and Illinois.

[Q] Playboy: How do you see your strategy for the nomination shaping up at this stage? Will you stress personal political contacts or primaries or just try to make a big popular wave?

[A] McGovern: I think we have to do everything. Every time I think we've got a neat strategy worked out, I see some missing element that we have to fill. I find it's a very bad operating procedure, for example, to go into a state without advance telephone calls and personal letters to key party leaders, labor leaders, farm leaders--those who regard themselves as the real movers and shapers in their state. All this takes an enormous amount of time, but it's essential when you consider that when it comes right down to it, the candidate will be selected by about 1500 of these people at the next national convention.

[A] You can anticipate that 50 or 60 percent of those who were delegates in '68 are going to be back in '72. Though the delegations haven't yet been selected, I know at least a dozen people who will be delegates from South Dakota, because they're going to do whatever is necessary, no matter what the system of delegate selection is, to see that their names are put forward. That tends to be true in every state. If we're intelligent enough, we'll be able to anticipate and work with at least half of these former delegates.

[A] Beyond that is the question of how you influence their votes. One way is to show that you have broad popular appeal and that you can be elected. That requires effective speaking when you're in the state and some demonstration that you know how to put together an organization. But if there's just one central approach that I'm trying to keep in mind, it's to demonstrate to people that they can trust me, that when I tell them something, I mean it. If there's any over-all strategy, it's to resolve every question on the basis of what is honest and then to stay with that position.

[Q] Playboy: In view of the reforms of your own McGovern Commission inside the Democratic Party, aren't all convention delegates supposed to represent a popular mandate much more than before, so that as individuals they will, presumably, assume less importance?

[A] McGovern: That's correct. But even within a perfectly open, responsive political system, the person who works the hardest at trying to get selected as a delegate is still going to do pretty well. No matter what system we devise--whether it's a primary or a caucus or a convention system--the most ambitious and the most persistent potential delegates are, in at least 50 percent of the cases, going to be the ones who come out as delegates.

[A] But it's a fact that the 18 guidelines of the so-called McGovern Commission will make the next convention a more grass-roots convention than any political party has had in memory. The guidelines are devised to eliminate boss rule, to make certain that women and minorities are well represented, to prohibit excessive fees and expenses and to assure that delegates aren't chosen before the issues and candidates are known. In short, the guidelines will take delegate selection out of the back rooms of politics and into the open. I think it will make a difference in that the slates will be more representative than they've been in the past. I would think, for instance, that at the next convention we'll see a representation of blacks, young people, women, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans and Indians that's far closer to their proportion in the population, certainly closer than ever before in history.

[Q] Playboy: You said the commission's guidelines have been devised to eliminate boss rule at conventions. Does that include Mayor Daley?

[A] McGovern: Mayor Daley likes to win elections, and he saw the disastrous impact that boss-type images had on the Democratic Party in 1968. It wasn't an accident that Mayor Daley motioned at the Illinois State Convention to adopt the McGovern Commission guidelines unanimously. It wasn't an accident that he was the lead-off witness at the McGovern Commission public hearings in Chicago in 1969. He's a very able and astute political figure who realizes that it's not smart to be against political reform these days.

[Q] Playboy: Are you the kind of man, like Mayor Daley, who surrounds himself with those who agree with you, or do you like to employ people who'll tell you the truth about yourself even when it isn't pleasant?

[A] McGovern: I certainly wouldn't characterize Mayor Daley as you do, but speaking for myself, I can take criticism, though sometimes it depresses me if I hear it late at night when I'm tired. Yet I know it's desperately important to have people around you who'll tell you the truth. I think that's the greatest single hazard that a President of the United States faces. One of the best books on politics I've seen in a long time was written by President Johnson's press secretary, George Reedy. It describes with marvelous insight the way in which Presidents are isolated from reality by ambitious assistants, and also the way in which the office corrupts a President. He's flattered and cajoled. It's always helicopters waiting and drivers and Secret Service and secretaries and everything right at his command. He's also under such great pressure that anyone who wants to get his ear tends to develop views that are compatible with the President's.

[A] The great master at that art was Walt Rostow, who could always put into a neat rationalization the horrible things that we were doing in Southeast Asia. Whenever some catastrophe would take place out there, Walt had a way of saying that it was part of Plan A or Plan Z, designed to give great difficulty six months from now to the Chinese Communists. Everything was rationalized into a pattern. You have to avoid the rationalizers, who are always trying to make you look good and who have a way of explaining away catastrophes instead of telling you the truth.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think President Nixon has isolated himself as Johnson did from diverse opinion?

[A] McGovern: Yes, I think he has. I think the people around Nixon are people who are generally compatible with him and with his views; I don't think he's got anyone on his staff who's really a devil's advocate. I don't think he really invites people who disagree with him in for lengthy discussions. In view of what happened to his predecessor, I really don't understand why Nixon doesn't have a steady stream of people coming in from various parts of our society--people who are critical students of the American scene: journalists who will really level with him in private, clergymen, professors, poets, people of all kinds who will tell him the truth. I would do that if I were President--if only to keep myself intellectually alive.

[Q] Playboy: Is your personality so different from Nixon's?

[A] McGovern: I don't know Nixon very well. I really don't know what his personality is like. Of all the men prominent in public life, I know the least about Nixon and feel the most uncertain about what kind of person he is. Yet I would say, instinctively, that over the years I can't think of anyone I would regard as more of an antithesis of me than Richard Nixon.

[Q] Playboy: In what ways?

[A] McGovern: Well, in terms of the way we reach judgments and the way we deal with people, I have the feeling that Nixon is a very detached man who sees politics as a process in which you manipulate various levers to advance your career, rather than as a process you use to advance certain ideals. Maybe that's unfair to him, but much of his career seems to me to have been built on undercutting the reputation of other people. He's almost the last man I wanted to see become President of the United States. If someone had told me in his great witch-hunting days back in the Forties and Fifties, when he was on the Joe McCarthy line, that he would someday be President, it would have appalled me.

[Q] Playboy: Does it appall you now?

[A] McGovern: Well, yes, it does. I suppose one of the reasons I'm not more appalled is that I think the Democrats invited it by not addressing themselves to the transcendent issue of the Sixties, which was the Indochina war. We played into Nixon's hands in standing so faithfully by President Johnson's disastrous war policy, allowing Nixon to assure the American people, quite falsely, that he had a secret plan for peace. How any President can then go on to tell the American people that Vietnam is one of the finest hours in our national history--while claiming to be "winding down" the war--is just beyond my comprehension. Either he is so totally out of touch with reality that he should not be President, or he's willing to be just a cheap propagandist in order to put a false face on something the people need to confront for what it is. Nixon had an opportunity when he was elected to say, "I didn't start this war, but I did pledge to end it and I'm going to do it." But when he says it's the finest hour in our history and that he's going to do whatever is necessary to meet any kind of challenge from the other side, I think that's not only a betrayal of the public trust that brought him into the White House, I think it's also deceitful and dishonorable.

[Q] Playboy: The President said not long ago that the reason he dismissed Gallup Polls indicating widespread public disenchantment with the war in Vietnam is that he "understands history" better than most Americans. What do you think of that?

[A] McGovern: Nixon is a shrewd enough historian to know that where you stand in the polls in 1971 has very little to do with where you're going to be in 1972. I'm sure he figures that if he diminishes the war on the ground and reduces casualties and if the economy bounces back with some strength, he'll be in pretty good shape by Election Day. I think he does have that kind of historical perspective. As for the great trends of history, however, I think that the American people's sense that we're on the wrong course is more profound than the President's. He's more inclined to put a rosy interpretation on the situation than the American people are; I think they're closer to reality. In that sense, I believe his knowledge of history has failed him.

[Q] Playboy: Does he have an anti-Communist ideologue's view of history?

[A] McGovern: It may very well be that he's clinging to his old prejudices and, because of that, has cut himself off from sound historical perspective. But I must say, he seems to show signs of moderation. He's made overtures to the Chinese, he's let the Salt discussions go forward and he's been to central and eastern Europe.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel he's beginning to think in terms of coexistence?

[A] McGovern: I hope so. Speaking for myself, I think communism is another economic system that doesn't happen to fit my view of how society ought to be organized, but I'm willing to live in a world of diversity and I think we can get along with the Communists. If people want to be organized under a Communist system, we've got to accept the fact that this is their judgment to make. The Soviets may be in competition with us, but that doesn't mean we can't coexist peacefully with them. And I think the same thing is true of the Chinese. We have had the view too long that because they are Communists, they are our mortal enemies.

[A] I think even Nixon is beginning to see that. I mean, he seemed to enjoy being wined and dined in Romania by the Communist government. And he doesn't seem to be particularly disturbed about communism in Yugoslavia. He even talks of being concerned about Czechoslovakia because of its difficulties with the Soviet Union. So I think even he is beginning to see that you can survive in the same world with Communists, that we don't have to get involved in any more holy crusades to "stem the Red tide."

[Q] Playboy: If that's true, why does Nixon remain so hostile to the idea of Communist representation in a postwar Vietnamese coalition government?

[A] McGovern: That's where his anti-Communist instinct has survived most disastrously. You can't run a schizophrenic foreign policy. A foreign policy has to stand for--and against--the same things everywhere. I simply don't understand how he can reconcile himself to communism in Romania and yet not stand the prospect of communism in Vietnam. As far as I'm concerned, who controls Vietnam is of approximately the same strategic significance as who controls Albania. If we hadn't become involved there, most of us wouldn't even know where Hanoi is. I think it was Ken Galbraith who said that if we hadn't become involved, Vietnam would be enjoying the oblivion it so richly deserves.

[Q] Playboy: We gather that you don't believe in the domino theory.

[A] McGovern: If you're talking about the theory that when one country falls to communism, others will somehow follow it, sort of automatically, I don't believe that at all. In fact, I believe quite the reverse. Our meddling in Indochina has hastened the fall of the dominoes. Laos and Cambodia were doing quite well until we came along, and now I'm not sure what's going to happen to them.

[Q] Playboy: Do you sympathize with the aspirations of the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies?

[A] McGovern: In that they're striving for national independence, yes. Their posture is more legitimate than that of General Thieu, who is really a creature of French and American power. I can scarcely condone the terror the Viet Cong and Hanoi have adopted as a military tactic, but they've been on the side of Vietnamese national self-interest ever since they expelled the Japanese and then the French. Now it's our turn.

[A] However good our intentions may originally have been--saying we were going there to ensure self-determination--our purpose began wearing thin from the very beginning. The moment Eisenhower said Ho Chi Minh was the choice of 80 percent of the Vietnamese, we made ourselves into hypocrites by claiming we were there to advance self-determination. We were there for precisely the opposite reason, which was to prevent the overwhelming sentiment of the country from bringing into power what we felt would be a Communist government and to use all our military might to keep the unpopular anti-Communist government in power.

[A] Toward that insane end, we have nearly destroyed their nation with our guns and our bombs. My Lai is just a tiny pimple on the surface of a raging boil. The whole war is a massacre of innocent people and we all share in the guilt for it. Probably 1,000,000 innocent people have been slaughtered or maimed by American bombs and artillery. Another 4,000,000 or 5,000,000 have been systematically driven out of their homes and herded into miserable refugee centers. What makes Lieutenant Calley's acts so barbaric is that he personally looked down the barrel of a rifle and shot women and infants pleading for their lives. No matter how you explain it, that's more barbaric than a pilot under orders from a commander dropping bombs on a civilian target. But the results are just as devastating when you've killed several hundred people from 20,000 feet as when you've gunned them down in a village.

[A] Calley may have disobeyed orders in doing what he did, but the devastation of Vietnam is a deliberate national policy that has the endorsement of the United States Government, its commanders in the field, its Armed Services Committee in the Congress and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that sense, we're involved as a free people in decisions that are murdering innocent individuals. So I think everybody from the President on down is as guilty as Lieutenant Calley. What I'm saying is that the whole Vietnam intervention by the United States is a criminal, immoral, senseless, undeclared, unconstitutional catastrophe, and the answer to the crime of our policy is not to pick out a few scapegoats. The answer is to indicate that we understand we made a mistake and to change our leadership.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the majority of Americans feel as you do?

[A] McGovern: Yes, I think so. The fact that 73 percent of the people in a recent Gallup Poll said they favored the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to disengage before the end of this year is indicative of the problems that confront Nixon. It's not just the war. It's the fallout from the war, the credibility problem, the economic distress, the inflation, the dislocations that the war has wrought in our own society.

[Q] Playboy: If you should become President, and if the fighting is still going on by then--which the Administration claims won't be the case--how would you end it?

[A] McGovern: I would announce on Inauguration Day that we were simply leaving on such and such a date--lock, stock and barrel. Perhaps I'd take a couple of days to notify the interested governments, but no longer. I would think that negotiations for the release of our prisoners and the safe exit of our forces could begin within 30 days after I became President. And once those negotiations were completed, I see no reason why a full withdrawal couldn't be executed in six or eight months' time.

[A] I think the Nixon hang-up is that he won't let go of the Thieu-Ky regime. He somehow feels that we have to continue the bombing even after we withdraw our troops, so that we can ensure the survival of the Thieu-Ky regime--which means, in realistic terms, that American prisoners will be left in Hanoi indefinitely. Obviously, Hanoi isn't going to release our prisoners as long as we continue military operations, even though American ground forces may be gone. It also means that the Americans who remain behind, in however reduced numbers, are in danger of being wiped out.

[A] Suppose Vietnamization works and you get American forces down to 100,000 by the summer of '72; those 100,000 men could be wiped out any time the other side decided to stage another Dien Bien Phu. And, of course, the prisoners would stay in their jails. If that happened, would Nixon unleash the full power of the American Air Force against Hanoi? If so, the prisoners would be destroyed. And if we really jeopardized North Vietnam's survival, I suppose the Chinese would intervene. So I think the alternative to disengagement might well be World War Three.

[Q] Playboy: World War Three could also be ignited by continued hostilities in the Middle East. Do you think the U.S. has a more legitimate stake in that conflict than it does in Vietnam?

[A] McGovern: Yes, I do. The Middle East is more important than Vietnam in terms of both our security and our traditions. But I don't agree with the President that it's more dangerous and explosive than Southeast Asia. The Nixon Administration has done reasonably well in trying to get the Israelis and the Arabs together in face-to-face negotiations. But I don't think we can dictate a settlement, whether on the basis of Secretary Rogers' plan or any other. We must recognize the outstanding differences as essentially an Arab-Israeli concern, and no matter how important the outcome is to us, I don't think we can dictate it.

[A] There are legitimate grievances on both sides. Even the Israelis recognize that the Palestinians who lost their homes have a right to a decent life. As Americans, we should do all we can to help them. It would remove a major obstacle to peace in the region. The principal concerns for Israel are to make sure that its borders are defensible and that its right to exist is recognized by the Arab states. I think Israel won't be fully secure until the United States and other countries guarantee its existence. Israel is the one free state we have in the Middle East. It represents democratic ideals, and I don't know of another country in the world that has the confidence and support of its own people to the degree that Israel has. I would be prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to ensure its survival.

[Q] Playboy: Is Soviet expansionism in the Middle East creating the risk of a big-power showdown?

[A] McGovern: I don't think the Soviets will press their expansion to the point where it precipitates a confrontation with the United States. And I don't think we will, either. I see the deepening Soviet involvement in the Middle East partly as an outgrowth of our obsession with Southeast Asia; I think the Russians thought they could make a little mischief in the Middle East while we were preoccupied with Southeast Asia. But the situation is dangerous. That's why it's so important for negotiations to proceed. Neither Russia nor the United States has the power to impose a solution on the Middle East. But as long as Russia keeps supplying arms to the Arabs, we have to make sure that the balance is sufficient for Israel to defend itself.

[Q] Playboy: While we're at loggerheads with the Soviets in the Middle East, do you think we should cooperate with them on Salt talks for disarmament or on détente for central Europe?

[A] McGovern: Yes, I do. I think, for example, we ought to have a standstill on any further ABM or MIRV deployment. We ought to unilaterally halt any further missile development and then press for agreements with the Soviets on the ABM. At least we could sign off on that one. We don't need the ABM anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Why is the President unwilling to fulfill his promise to sign an anti-ABM agreement?

[A] McGovern: I don't understand why. It may be a Cold War ploy; I'm sure he knows we don't really need it for our security. Or it may be the pressure of jobs and military contracts here at home.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the President would continue the arms race for the sake of jobs, when jobs can be created for peacetime use?

[A] McGovern: Well, I think he probably sees the ABM as a kind of harmless device to both keep people at work and satisfy the pressures on him from the military. I think Nixon lacks the imagination to see that a human-needs program could be pushed through Congress with his leadership. He vetoed the school bill, the hospital-construction bill and the manpower bill. It's ridiculous to build ABMs and MIRVs when you have all these vital things people need in areas where they can be kept employed.

[A] The most outrageous single factor in American politics today, if you leave Vietnam aside, is that we continue to waste billions of dollars on nonessential military gadgets while pinching pennies on providing public-service employment here at home. We desperately need housing, schools, day-care centers, health care, new transit systems, antipollution devices, environmental programs of various kinds. There's enough work in this country for every man and woman who's capable of working, if we set our values straight.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any way other than further arms expansion to ensure our national security?

[A] McGovern: Indeed there is. The best way to ensure our national security is to improve relations with the Soviet Union in every area we can. That means expanding international trade and trying to reach an agreement on such outstanding questions as the Middle East, Berlin, Southeast Asia and arms control. But if we're going to get anywhere in any of these areas, we're going to have to abandon our paranoia about Russia's ambition to dominate the world. I think if the Russians had messianic views at one time, they've largely subsided. The Soviets are interested in a security zone to protect them from another invasion from the West, from revived German militarism, and they see American policy in western Europe as reviving German power and building a nuclear cordon around them. I've always felt that's the real reason they wanted a cushion of Communist states on their western border, from Poland to the Mediterranean.

[A] Though they're not particularly interested in Southeast Asia, except in getting us out, they won't permit us to defeat North Vietnam any more than the Chinese would permit us to defeat North Korea. But the Middle East is different. There's an old czarist carry-over involved there, I think, of wanting to have access to the eastern Mediterranean. I suppose they're concerned about the oil in the Middle East, although perhaps not as much as we are. But they're going to be a force in the Mediterranean whether we like it or not; they're going to increase their sea power in that area.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't it be against our interests to let the Russians expand wherever their ambitions take them?

[A] McGovern: Well, we can't ignore big-power expansionism--our own or anyone else's. We've got to press them for greater restraint and, at the same time, we must restrain ourselves. Perhaps the greatest anxiety of the Soviets today is their relationship with the Chinese. I believe it would be a mistake for us to try to exploit it by unduly increasing their tensions with Peking. Nobody would gain from an all-out war between China and Russia. But I think we've been right in seeking to counteract their mischief-making in the Middle East by selling arms to Israel. And we must leave no doubt that we are committing ourselves to Israel's survival.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Soviet world ambitions have been cooled by our military power?

[A] McGovern: That's possible. But I think we've exceeded our necessary build-up. The enormous American build-up after World War Two almost guaranteed that the Soviets would attempt to offset it. If we had moved with less ambition in trying to encircle them with nuclear power, they might have been less fearful and, therefore, less belligerent than they've become.

[Q] Playboy: If we "let down our guard," to use the term heard in some circles, do you think the Russians would attack us?

[A] McGovern: I think the United States ought to maintain its nuclear deterrents--at a reduced level--but we don't need as large a force in western Europe as we have. I don't see any signs that the Soviets want a major war with western Europe or with us, so we could very safely reduce the size of our military without subjecting ourselves to a Soviet danger.

[Q] Playboy: How about the danger from China?

[A] McGovern: I think the belligerent stance of mainland China, which so far has been largely rhetoric--and which now, of course, shows signs of softening--would greatly lessen if it became a part of the international community, if the government were recognized as the legitimate government of China and if it were made a part of the United Nations.

[Q] Playboy: Then what should be done with Taiwan?

[A] McGovern: I would leave that up to the people of China and Taiwan. It's not an American problem. Both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung agree that it's a Chinese problem.

[Q] Playboy: Would it remain so even if Peking attempted to unify the two Chinas by force?

[A] McGovern: I don't think Peking would do that. I think the Chinese would work out some kind of peaceful arrangement, and my guess is that, if we recognized Peking and it was admitted to the United Nations, Chiang Kai-shek would make good on his pledge to withdraw from the UN. Then it would be up to him whether he headed for Paris or Geneva or sought to work out an arrangement for the future of Taiwan. If I were President, I would be prepared to recognize Peking as the sole and legitimate government of China, leaving the future status of Taiwan to be resolved peacefully by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

[Q] Playboy: Would you recognize any obligation on our part to protect Chinese officials on Taiwan from reprisal?

[A] McGovern: I think if they wanted to leave, as with those in the Saigon government who might not wish to remain behind when we leave Vietnam, we could make an offer of asylum; but I can't envision a situation in which the mainland Chinese would move in there and start massacring people on Taiwan. The primary responsibility for the people of Taiwan is in the hands of the Chinese government. You have to express the hope that it would deal with its people peacefully. We cannot determine the outcome ourselves.

[Q] Playboy: In reassessing our relations with the Communist world, what do you think we ought to do about Castro?

[A] McGovern: My maiden speech in the Senate in March of '63 was entitled "Our Castro Obsession Versus the Alliance for Progress," and the thrust of that speech was that we've blown up Castro out of all proportion to his real significance in the hemisphere. I don't know why we ever broke relations with Cuba. It was a mistake for the Eisenhower Administration to do it and to set up the invasion that John Kennedy later attempted to carry out. That's not the way to deal with a government whose ideology we happen to oppose. It was--and is--a mistake for the United States to be in a counterrevolutionary position in Latin America. I wouldn't recommend that this country support violent movements in Latin America, but I do hope that our policy would not be simply to support anti-Castro movements. It must be identified with the efforts of more enlightened groups to change the social structure. We should condition our aid to benefit the ordinary citizen.

[Q] Playboy: However well intentioned, doesn't that proposal imply continued interference in the internal affairs of our neighbors?

[A] McGovern: It's a different kind of interference. It's an effort to use the influence of the United States on behalf of the ordinary citizen rather than of the governments which have so seldom represented them. We have always intervened in Latin America but, unfortunately, on the side of dictators and of American corporations, which have been content largely with what resources they could withdraw rather than with raising the living standards of the people. It could be argued that we gave Castro the opportunity to seize power by our indifference to the exploitive role played by our own economic interests. Furthermore, we must be careful about the assumption that we can really influence social and political events in other countries. Our influence is extremely limited, particularly because it is suspect, but what we can do with American aid is attach certain conditions to it. We don't have any obligation to give monetary or other aid to an oppressive regime, and we shouldn't. But if there are progressive leaders in Latin-American or other countries who need assistance in carrying out social reforms aimed at better health, better nutrition, better agricultural practices, better population planning, then I think American influence could be both benevolent and constructive.

[A] President Kennedy was very careful to try to give special attention to reform leaders in Latin America. He made a conscious effort to identify with Betancourt in Venezuela, Figueres in Costa Rica and Bosch in the Dominican Republic. He wanted the United States, in a subtle way, to indicate that we weren't going to glorify the Trujillos, the Jiménezes, the Batistas and the other dictators who were exploiting their own people. I think that what Kennedy attempted was to try to say to Latin America that we know the difference between a reformer and a son of a bitch.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel we have no commitment to protect the economic interests of American corporations overseas?

[A] McGovern: No, I don't think we do. When American corporations go abroad, they have to take the risks implicit in the local political situation. Dollar diplomacy belongs with gunboat diplomacy in the early 20th Century. It's got to be abandoned.

[Q] Playboy: How would you suggest we deal with the new Marxist government of Chile under Allende?

[A] McGovern: If that government moves to address itself to fundamental economic and social problems, it will justify American assistance.

[Q] Playboy: You don't regard a Marxist Chile as a threat to our national security or to our economic interests?

[A] McGovern: Certainly not to our national security; to American economic interests, perhaps so. But I don't think it's our concern that Chile elected--and it appeared to be a legitimate election--a Marxist government. We've always said that we believe in self-determination, and that's just what they're practicing.

[Q] Playboy: Why does the drive for social change in most of the underdeveloped world always seem to involve anti-Americanism?

[A] McGovern: Part of it is legitimate, but part of it is scapegoating by political and social leaders who find it convenient to make the United States the whipping boy. But whatever the reason, and however justified it may be, throwing a brick through the window is not the answer. There needs to be more compassion and organized social action on the part of the reform leaders in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and that goes beyond berating the United States. As bad as our record is in these countries, the record of many governments in emerging nations, particularly in Latin America, is even worse. And, their reformers have done very little to improve the situation.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with those who place runaway population growth high on the list of unsolved problems in the Third World?

[A] McGovern: I certainly do. Unless it's checked, population growth will destroy those countries and any chance they have for peaceful survival or development. We can make a contribution to population control, but only in a limited way, in the form of educational and technical assistance, to alert them--as we must alert our own people--to the terrible dangers of unchecked population. Because there's only so much room on the planet, uninhibited population growth is related to almost all the other problems we face, especially hunger and the protection of the environment. The Government should provide educational and birth-control assistance to all those who want them--both at home and abroad. This isn't a question of trying to limit the nonwhite population, as some may think, because there are even more poor whites than poor nonwhites in this country.

[Q] Playboy: You have proposed a Family Allowance Plan that some say would encourage population growth. Is that true?

[A] McGovern: What I proposed is that we cancel the then $600 income-tax deduction for children and replace it with a $600 cash payment for each child. The present income-tax allowance for children favors middle- and upper-middleclass families and does nothing for poor people, who aren't at a level of income where that means anything to them. My proposal wouldn't be a stimulus to population growth. All the statistics show that there is no correlation at all between child allowances and population growth. The Canadians have had this program for years and their population growth is the same as the U.S. growth, maybe slightly below. Though there are many reasons why families have children, collecting a baby bonus isn't one. But I saw myself spending the next couple of years trying to explain all that to people, so I dropped my plan.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think we could devise some kind of program that would discourage having babies?

[A] McGovern: The only way it can be done is by education, by making birth-control devices and information readily available--and not only to the poor. The average welfare family in the United States has somewhat fewer than three children--slightly below the level for more affluent families.

[Q] Playboy: Since you're no longer pressing your Family Allowance Plan as a way to fight poverty, what do you think of President Nixon's Family Assistance Program?

[A] McGovern: I give him credit for the program, which seems to me to be the most enlightened single initiative taken by his Administration. Poverty, after all, is concentrated in families with children. Yet I think Nixon has failed to see the full dimensions of the poverty problem. For example, his vetoes of modest increases by the Congress to provide better health care, better housing, better education, more public-service jobs, more job training, better programs for the cities, his dismantling of the Legal Assistance Program for the poor--all these things make me question whether or not the Family Assistance Program is anything more than a Pat Moynihan initiative that was sold to the President at a time when the welfare program was generally recognized as a mess. I think, the greatest single economic and social problem before the United States today continues to be the simple fact that there are too many people who aren't sharing in the affluence that the rest of us enjoy. As long as that's the case, this society is going to be very unhappy.

[Q] Playboy: Recently, the President made a number of rather revealing statements about his dedication to the puritan ethic--self-reliance, hard work, refusal of charity, that sort of thing. Do you think this reflects an insensitivity, an indifference on his part to the problems of the poor?

[A] McGovern: I think it does. Even when Nixon was a boy, that view was unrealistic. At the time he was formulating those views, there were millions of people who, no matter what they did, were unable to find work. The only thing that saved us in the Thirties was that Roosevelt came along with programs that enabled people to go back to work. Admittedly, the programs were patchwork; they weren't as well developed as they might have been. But what is needed now is the recognition that there are still millions of people in this country who can't find jobs in the private sector. The jobs just aren't there, and it's going to require a wide range of public-service employment to create jobs for them.

[A] I think if I were President of the United States, it would be one of my first orders of business to get all the agencies of the Government, in cooperation with the labor unions and private industry, to devise alternative sources of employment. I think the President could relieve a lot of the tension between blacks and whites if he stopped talking about welfare chiselers and said, "Look, everybody who wants to work is going to have a job. We don't know quite yet what you'll be doing, but you're going to have a good job. And the Government is going to guarantee employment at decent wages." There is enough important work to do in this country. Everybody should have a chance to work, and most people want that chance. I'd like to give it to them. That would be more helpful than delivering sermons on the puritan ethic.

[Q] Playboy: Both you and Nixon were raised in a comparable Protestant atmosphere. How do you account for your liberalism and his conservatism?

[A] McGovern: It's partly the fact that I was exposed to a much better education than Nixon was. Also, I think I came from a more compassionate family: I was taught that we had to respond to the needs of the poor. I can remember that, during the Depression, there was scarcely a day that we didn't have someone eating at our house. Maybe a young guy on the road looking for work would knock at our door and we would feed him. I just grew up with the concept that we have to help those who can't help themselves.

[Q] Playboy: Your formative years were spent in rural America. But the majority of America's domestic problems today most seriously afflict its disintegrating cities. Isn't all that foreign to your personal experience?

[A] McGovern: I admit that I don't feel as at home in a central city as I do in smaller towns or out in rural areas. But I feel a great sense of compassion for people who have to live in dilapidated neighborhoods, who are forced to live under demeaning circumstances, where the sanitation is bad, health service is inadequate, schools are poor, jobs are few. I think I see very clearly that what we have to do, if we're going to resolve the tensions among people living in the cities, is to broaden the whole spectrum of social and economic opportunities for everyone. In short, I don't find the transition from rural to urban concerns a difficult one to make.

[Q] Playboy: Would Populist properly describe your brand of rural liberalism?

[A] McGovern: I think so. The Populists had a great sense of indignation against the special interests that exploited the poor, in both urban and rural America. You still have great corporate wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people who are largely ignorant of or indifferent to what they're doing to the life of the ordinary citizen. As a Populist, I'm determined to fight for a more just tax system with fewer loopholes for the rich and the powerful.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have an urban program, or a program for minorities, that you could talk about at this stage of your campaign?

[A] McGovern: Yes, I do, though it needs to be more fully developed. But I can tell you this much: On my trips into the cities, I've met with community leaders, black and white, and I find that what they're interested in are programs that give them a fair piece of the action. They want to be a part of the economic development of the community. They want to run their own businesses, their own apartment buildings, their own shops, their own factories. They recognize that over the years they've been denied access to credit and business opportunity and they want some special consideration to help them get off the ground. If I were President, I'd try to help them do just that.

[Q] Playboy: How about an Indian program?

[A] McGovern: Well, I'm the author of what I think is the best proposal that's yet been made for Indians. It would provide the same kind of assistance for Indians that I've just talked about for the urban poor. The Indian people resent the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They feel, for example, that they're perfectly competent to run their own affairs. They need financial assistance, but they don't want a bureaucrat from Washington running their lives, and they shouldn't have one.

[Q] Playboy: Could the President's revenue-sharing program make a difference to the rural and urban poor?

[A] McGovern: I think the President raises false hopes by talking about distributing substantial amounts of Federal revenues as unmarked grants, when we're faced with an enormous Federal deficit. The only thing we have to share is the deficit. I also object to the revenue-sharing plan because he's deducting the money from vital ongoing programs where the money is earmarked for specific purposes. Eleven billion dollars of the 16 billion dollars he proposes to give to the cities and states would have to be taken from education, health, welfare and conservation programs that the poor desperately need. I think Congress can earmark money for those purposes more responsibly than the local politicians who would control these funds, men who are under heavy and direct pressure from special local interests. God only knows where all that money would end up.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with recent criticism of the President by the General Accounting Office for allowing money that was to aid in the desegregation of Southern schools to be spent for such purposes as cars for school boards?

[A] McGovern: I certainly do. And the same thing has happened to crime-control funds authorized in the 1968 Omnibus Crime Bill. Instead of the money's being used to raise the professional standards of police, to provide more training, more education and more intelligent police methods, it was used in many cases to buy riot guns, machine guns and even fancy uniforms--all traceable to lax Federal supervision. These trappings hardly go to the heart of the crime problem. Such instances illustrate that what we really need is not indiscriminate handouts of Federal funds but more careful and intelligent Federal guidelines for administration of those funds.

[Q] Playboy: Are you satisfied with the benefits to the poor of the anti-hunger campaign you've been leading?

[A] McGovern: I think our campaign has been the greatest success story on the social front in the past couple of years. We've doubled the number of people who are receiving food assistance. I would say we're still short of a touchdown, but at least we've moved to the center of the field from the end zone.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have the feeling that most of the current social-reform proposals that are being talked about, particularly among Democrats, are a little stale, and that you'd better start devising some fresh approaches?

[A] McGovern: I think so. We've got to not only come up with a much better welfare-reform program but also--as I suggested earlier--develop a wide range of public-service employment, with the Government paying the entire cost. We've tended to talk about the Government as the employer of last resort, as though this were a kind of desperation measure. I don't see it that way. In some areas, the Government ought to be the employer of first resort. There are certain things that can be done best by public-service employment.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't this sort of program permit the opposition to accuse you of trying to revive the old New Deal notion of putting the people to work on WPA projects?

[A] McGovern: That's exactly what President Nixon said last year when Congress approved Senator Nelson's bill for a public-service job program. He vetoed the bill. But I'm not talking about make-work jobs. There are very useful things that can be done by aerospace and defense employees in civilian fields, on jobs that demand the full talent and ability of workingmen and -women.

[Q] Playboy: Were you tempted to vote for the SST on the grounds that it would provide 50,000 jobs?

[A] McGovern: No, I wasn't tempted at all, because I don't think we need that airplane. We need those workers and those resources for other things. We need a whole new housing industry in this country; we need new transit systems in our cities; we need to rebuild our schools. We need paramedical, paralegal personnel.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't the sine qua non of any major domestic-reform program a drastic cut in the military budget?

[A] McGovern: Yes, there has to be a cut of 30 to 40 billion dollars in the military sector, not only because we need that money but because we need the scientists, the technicians and the research people currently working in defense. We need to phase them out of military tasks and start using their talent to modernize our machine-tool, shipbuilding and transportation industries, and to develop more efficient housing construction.

[Q] Playboy: Can you persuade the American people that a defense cut of that magnitude can be made without a threat to our national security?

[A] McGovern: I think so. A good case could be made by an intelligent President that the national-defense structure has to rest on more than simply piling up new and more sophisticated weapons. I think you could convince the American people that their own health and education, and the state of the economy, are as important to national defense as another half-dozen aircraft carriers, most of which would be sunk in the first few minutes of any major war, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Thirty to forty billion dollars is almost half of the current defense budget. Apart from aircraft-carrier construction, what would you cut?

[A] McGovern: I think the first cuts would come by withdrawing our forces from Indochina and, secondly, by withdrawing all but one division from western Europe. I would discharge those people from service and put them to work on civilian enterprises or send them back to school on the GI Bill of Rights. I would also immediately freeze the ABM and the MIRV, halt the development of a new bomber and new supersonic fighters and cancel construction of a new tank that the military is proposing.

[Q] Playboy: Would you expect the Russians to trim their own defense programs in response?

[A] McGovern: I think they're desperate to get out from under the same pressures we're under, that they're looking for some opportunity to divert funds away from the military into their own economic-development plans. If they didn't, we might have to reassess these considerations; I wouldn't want to put the country in danger. But we've got an overwhelming deterrent now. The Russians know that if we didn't build another thing for the next five years, we'd have the capacity to completely annihilate them in a nuclear exchange. That ought to be enough.

[Q] Playboy: The failure of the Nixon Administration to reallocate national priorities from war to peace is one of the reasons young radicals threaten what some have called "a new American Revolution." Would Nixon's re-election move us closer to that?

[A] McGovern: I don't think a revolution of the kind the young militants are talking about would go very far in this country. The forces of counterrevolution are so much stronger that all you would get is a great era of repression. But even without a revolution, the re-election of Nixon would be a real cause for despair--on the part of not only the young but also a great many working people and old people living on fixed incomes. I think even a lot of the business class would despair if Nixon were re-elected. His defeat in '72 is imperative to restoring to the country the confidence to implement a more humane set of values. But it depends on who's going to replace him. We don't want a Democratic Nixon or an old Cold Warrior of the previous Democratic era. It would simply give us more of the same.

[Q] Playboy: If you were elected, wouldn't you be one of the most liberal Presidents in American history?

[A] McGovern: That's what's called for today. The problems are so vast--and the opportunities so great--that we really need liberation, in the broadest sense of the word. We need to emancipate the poor, the young, the nonwhite, the unemployed--all the excluded classes--and make full use of their talents.

[Q] Playboy: How about the silent majority? What have you to offer them?

[A] McGovern: The hard-hats are concerned about their jobs and their neighborhoods; white-collar people feel squeezed by growing tax pressures, small merchants by business monopolies. They want leadership in the White House that is dedicated to establishing a just tax structure, job security and fair competition, that addresses itself to the construction of more homes and not more weapons, that's interested in building better neighborhoods, schools and health facilities. That's what I would fight to get for them.

[Q] Playboy: Another of the items at the top of your Presidential agenda, you said some time ago, would be the dismissal of J. Edgar Hoover from the FBI. Do you feel he's outlived his usefulness?

[A] McGovern: I don't think any man ought to be permitted ever again to hold the top job in the Federal Bureau of Investigation over a long period of time, as Hoover has been. Hasn't he been there 47 years? I would say one Administration is enough for any one man in a job with the capacity to compile dossiers on individual citizens. Hoover should have resigned 25 years ago. He has become paranoid. In that sense, he is not only a menace to personal citizens but a chief obstacle to proper law enforcement. The FBI's own documents, from the files in Media, Pennsylvania, show clearly how widespread is the intrusion of the FBI into the private lives of ordinary Americans.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think our whole program of information acquisition-retention-retrieval--which has been the subject of hearings by Senator Sam Ervin--is a threat to liberty?

[A] McGovern: Absolutely. The Army surveillance of civilians, the compilation of data banks on the moves that citizens make--all that material worries me, particularly when it's in the hands of men who are a law unto themselves, as Hoover is. The Congress ought to set up a permanent watchdog to keep that kind of surveillance under control and see that it doesn't reach the point where it jeopardizes personal privacy. I've had colleagues come up and say, almost in terror, "Aren't you afraid Hoover is going to spill your file to some newsman?" It's a terrible thing to be faced with that kind of situation. You shouldn't have to live in fear of J. Edgar Hoover. He ought to be accountable to us, not the other way around.

[Q] Playboy: High on the list of law-enforcement problems deplored by Hoover are (continued on page 190)Playboy Interview(continued from page 70) those associated with drug abuse and the erosion of traditional moral values. What's your own view of drugs and sex in our society?

[A] McGovern: I'm terribly worried about the drug problem. I think it's an enormous danger--the way it's crept down even to the grade school level. I believe that especially to the average thoughtful black in the ghetto today, drugs are a very serious worry. He's terribly afraid that his children may become hooked on heroin and other addictive drugs. As for the change in sex mores, I'm not particularly concerned about it. People today are simply more honest about and at ease with sex. I don't see any fundamental change in sexual morality. But the drug thing is different. It's being deliberately pushed to enrich the underworld, and I think a larger segment of law-enforcement agencies ought to be going after those people. We ought to do much more in the way of education and rehabilitation of drug addicts, and medical people ought to be better trained to deal with the problem.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think should be done about the widespread use of marijuana?

[A] McGovern: Well, it worries me, because I know that in some cases it leads young people into emotional difficulties. Particularly with adolescents, marijuana can tend to make the pressures of life more severe. It leads, in some cases, to a dramatic fall-off of interest in academic excellence and to a lessening of interest in self-improvement. I don't know whether or not it has any physical effects; I guess we don't know enough about what damage it does. It's probably no more harmful than alcohol or tobacco, but I know for a fact that, with some youngsters, it's an emotionally destabilizing influence in their lives.

[Q] Playboy: Have your own children brought you any insights into drugs?

[A] McGovern: Yes. Like other kids, they point to the hypocrisy of adults' using alcohol and tobacco excessively, then crying out in anguish about the use of marijuana. That seems to be a recurring theme with young people. We have one daughter, however, who used marijuana to the point where it really had a disruptive impact on her life. She may be a rare case, but she developed serious emotional difficulties. She's well now, though.

[Q] Playboy: Have you drawn any conclusions from her experiences, and from what you've observed elsewhere, about the extent of alienation by young people from society?

[A] McGovern: There would be something wrong with them if they weren't alienated from the policies we're pursuing today. I can't imagine idealistic young people not being alienated from our policy in Indochina. It would take a rather dull and cold-blooded youth to endorse what we're doing there. And the same thing goes for racism. I don't have any trouble understanding why young people are alienated, given a set of national values that permits some people to go hungry while others hide behind their tax shelters. Those are the things that alienate the young--and me. I hope they stay alienated, not by dropping out but by remaining indignant to the point where they won't accept our society until we correct these deficiencies in our national life. Some of them feel that our society is too corrupt, too far gone to save, but I really have to combat anger on my part when I confront that kind of attitude, because I know it's not true. You can make a difference, and you don't have to be a Senator or a Congressman. Ralph Nader has more influence on the attitudes of this country than the most powerful corporation executive in America. Yet he is just one young man. He and many like him perform a great service for all of us.

[Q] Playboy: At one point, you said you were going to run for President with the young, the poor and the black as your chief constituency. Do you still feel that way?

[A] McGovern: What I said was that the young, the black and the poor provide the core with which I'd begin. But no one is going to be elected President with that coalition alone. I want to develop programs that have broad appeal for workingmen and -women, organized and unorganized. As we move along, I also want to speak out on the concerns of women. And I intend to focus on the problems of rural America as well as of the cities. I'm not a one- or two-issue candidate.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it hard to speak out with complete candor on many issues without breaking up your coalition?

[A] McGovern: No, I don't think so. The programs that will improve the standards of life for the poor and the black will also improve life for the white workingman and the middle class. Those groups are warring with each other because the Government hasn't provided enough opportunities for black, brown, red, yellow or white working-class people. There are too few jobs, too few decent neighborhoods. That exacerbates tensions between them.

[Q] Playboy: Did your feeling for the young, the poor and the black have much to do with your decision to work for Robert Kennedy rather than Eugene McCarthy for President in 1968?

[A] McGovern: No question about it. I admire very much what Gene McCarthy did in New Hampshire--the way he stood up to Johnson on the war issue; he made a great moral challenge there, for which he deserves much credit. Kennedy was late in seeing the possibilities, but once he came into it, Bob recognized that the problem was broader than the war, that we had enormous social and economic injustice here at home that had to be redressed. Bob Kennedy really bled for the poor, the blacks, the Indians, the down-and-outers. Gene McCarthy, in contrast, somehow addressed himself to the issues that were compatible with the interests of the middle class. He lacked empathy with the guy at the bottom.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you make that foredoomed last-minute effort in 1968 to win the nomination at the Democratic Convention?

[A] McGovern: I did it largely under pressure from the Kennedy delegates, many of whom told me they just wouldn't go to the convention otherwise. I didn't believe them at first and I asked why they couldn't stick together on the war and move to the McCarthy camp. But they were adamant and the whole Kennedy apparatus threatened to fall apart.

[Q] Playboy: Did they dislike McCarthy so?

[A] McGovern: I suppose it was a personal bitterness and also it was partly because they didn't feel McCarthy spoke with genuine conviction on domestic problems--on racism, poverty, hunger.

[Q] Playboy: Have you heard people say they can't forgive you for ruining McCarthy's chance at the nomination, thus blowing the opportunity to nominate an antiwar candidate and saddling the party with Vice-President Humphrey?

[A] McGovern: Of course, but that's a lot of nonsense, because if I had thrown my support to McCarthy, many of the Kennedy delegates simply would have stayed home. Before I announced, 32 of them quit in the California delegation alone. I waited, you know, for a period of time, thinking there might be some movement toward McCarthy, but if I had waited longer than I did, perhaps as many as one third or one half of the Kennedy delegates wouldn't have shown up at the convention at all. Even the combined vote that McCarthy and I got, finally, wasn't enough to nominate Gene. If I hadn't been there to bring the Kennedy votes together, it would have been even worse.

[Q] Playboy: It's academic, of course, to speculate about history, but do you think there was any chance that Bobby could have swung the convention and won the nomination in '68?

[A] McGovern: It's conceivable. I think the presumption is that he wouldn't have been able to do it, since a third of the delegates were picked before 1968, before Bobby even thought about running, and they were all L. B. J. delegates. They were picked at a time when we all assumed we were going to Chicago simply to ratify Johnson's renomination. Johnson also controlled the favorite-son candidates: Connally of Texas, McNair of South Carolina, McKeithen of Louisiana, Smathers of Florida. Then the big labor bloc--many of whom were Johnson's--switched to Humphrey. I know the Kennedy people think that he would have gone on to sweep the nomination. My own view has always been that, in addition to the delegates that he won in the primaries, he might have been able to pick up 300 to 400 more during the summer--but not enough to bring it off.

[Q] Playboy: There was talk at the convention that Mayor Daley was thinking of withdrawing his support from Humphrey and throwing it to Ted Kennedy. Was there any truth to that?

[A] McGovern: I may be wrong, but I think that was a ploy to get Teddy out to run as Vice-President with Humphrey. But Daley would never publicly endorse Kennedy. Kennedy asked him and said, "Before I would consider coming out, I would have to have an endorsement from you." Daley wouldn't give it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think McCarthy will be back in the race in 1972?

[A] McGovern: I doubt it. Only Gene would know this, but I can't believe he'd have retired from the Senate if he had plans to run for the Presidency again. I know he's been talking about a third-party candidacy, but I think that might happen only if the Democrats nominate somebody Gene felt was simply a Democratic Nixon. I think if he thought there was a real choice, he would see no point in running on a third-party ticket. The only result would be to throw the election to Nixon by splitting the peace-progressive vote two ways.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if Humphrey were nominated again?

[A] McGovern: I'd probably support him.

[Q] Playboy: How would you justify that?

[A] McGovern: I'd justify it on the grounds that, in the past few years, he has endorsed the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment. He has also publicly said he was wrong about the war and has urged the United States to accept the Soviet offer of a freeze on the ABM, which puts him in a different stance from the Administration on arms reduction. He's been much better than he used to be on economic policy here at home and he's taken issue with Nixon's tight-money policy. I think Humphrey is the kind of guy you could persuade to go for a full-employment approach of the kind I described. And he's always been good on civil rights; he never got proper credit for leading the civil rights fight in 1948, when it was a very hazardous thing to do. So Humphrey to me stands in sharp contrast to Nixon now, much more so than he did in 1968. But even in 1968, I quickly endorsed him and campaigned for him once he got the nomination. I have no regrets about that decision.

[Q] Playboy: Despite the fact that there was no indication in 1968 that Humphrey would have settled the Vietnam war?

[A] McGovern: That's right. That's why I challenged him in Chicago. But I thought that on all other issues he was preferable to Nixon. I made the judgment that he would have been the better of the two candidates and that sitting on the sidelines wasn't the answer. I feel even more certain today that he would be a much more progressive and peace-oriented President than Nixon.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there's any chance that Senator Henry Jackson or someone else from the pro-war wing of the party will receive the Democratic nomination?

[A] McGovern: That could happen if we got too many people in the Democratic primaries representing similar views. A Lindsay candidacy--as a Democrat--might deliver the nomination to Jackson if you had Lindsay, Hughes, Muskie and myself all competing in the New Hampshire primary, going on to Wisconsin, Oregon and California. You might fracture that segment of the party to a point where a man like Jackson could walk off with the nomination.

[Q] Playboy: Does the Jackson wing of the party have any real strength in the Democratic Party?

[A] McGovern: It sure does. Though I don't think it's a majority, that wing has a very powerful strength. To whatever extent the military-industrial complex has power. Jackson would have the full backing of those who favor present military priorities, as well as the supersonic transport, ambitious space programs and the development of new weapons systems. Programs of that kind still have a solid and well-financed constituency in this country.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you think you would be the strongest Democrat to face Nixon in 1972?

[A] McGovern: I think I could defeat him. It's hard to say who would be the strongest candidate, but I'm confident I can defeat him if I get the nomination.

[Q] Playboy: As of now, Senator Muskie is regarded as a leading contender. How do you expect to overtake him?

[A] McGovern: The Democrats who choose our nominee in 1972 will be looking for a candidate with a broad range of concerns, one who has been looking ahead at ways of solving many kinds of urgent problems. The Democrats will want a man who can think and talk clearly about the challenges facing the country without being burdened by the myths of the past. I think that describes me pretty well. And if I have a better political organization than the others, it will make my prospects even better.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think 1972 will be a Democratic year no matter who the nominee is?

[A] McGovern: I'm not sure of that at all. I think the Democrats could boot it away. If they don't call for a fundamental change in priorities, I think a lot of people may well decide to go along with Nixon again.

[Q] Playboy: Which Democrats do you think might lose to Nixon?

[A] McGovern: I'd rather not speculate.

[Q] Playboy: When you look at the prospects for a year from now, do you sincerely believe you can and will be the nominee?

[A] McGovern: I do. I have a strong feeling that the positions I've taken will gradually become majority positions in this country. As I look back at the positions I've taken in the Senate since I first came here in '63, there isn't one I've had to alter fundamentally. By 1972, I think I'll be recognized as the most broadly based candidate and the one who has the best chance of winning not only the nomination but the election.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you a little intimidated at the prospect of being the President of the United States?

[A] McGovern: No; as a matter of fact, I'm thrilled at the prospect. The opportunities that lie ahead for the United States in the Seventies are so great, and the dangers so vast, that I can't resist an all-out effort to advance the values I think the nation ought to be pursuing.

[Q] Playboy: What will you do if you're not nominated?

[A] McGovern: If I don't make it myself, I will in all probability be out campaigning for the Democratic nominee. And in 1974, I suppose I'll be working very hard on my South Dakota constituents to convince them they ought to re-elect me to the Senate. Next to the Presidency, I think a United States Senator has the greatest job in the world. I've come to realize the limitations on a Senator in changing national policy, but I've also come to appreciate the fact that you can wield considerable influence in the job. That's where I would want to spend my service for whatever time I have left.

[Q] Playboy: As exhausting physically and emotionally as it certainly is going to be, do you dread or look forward to the next 15 months of campaigning?

[A] McGovern: I think it will be a very zestful experience, though the major mistake we've made so far is overscheduling me. We had thought we were going to be able to block off some rest periods, but I find that my campaign staff doesn't properly appreciate the demands on me as a Senator who feels an obligation to remain active in the Senate. They tend to schedule me as though I'm doing nothing but running for the Presidency. But a tough schedule is a minor consideration.

[A] I had a meeting with my staff several weeks ago and I said I thought I had the greatest opportunity that's ever open to any American: to talk thoughtfully, with common sense and passion to the American people about our aspirations and our hopes for the future, as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. There is no way I can possibly lose, no matter what the vote count is. I will have participated in the most marvelous educational undertaking that's available to a human being. The thought that a man from South Dakota, a small rural state, could now be running for the Presidency of the United States stirs my soul. No matter what else happens, I'll go through this experience with a spirit of joy, anticipation and--I hope--deep satisfaction.