George McGovern died this morning. I hope one of my favorite commenters, russpoter, will forgive me for straying from the tax reservation to reminisce, again. McGovern was the first candidate I voted for in a Presidential election. It is tough to make judgements like this when your own life is so tangled up with the events of the world, but I think it is reasonable to say that the 1972 election was the end of an era. America was much more divided then, although some may find that difficult to believe. I certainly saw it. I liked, respected and admired too many people on different sides of various issues to ever make it good guys and bad guys, but that was not a universal view.
From 1966 to 1970, I attended Xavier High School at 30 West 16th Street in Manhattan, a few blocks north of Greenwich Village and oddly enough not that far from the main office of Forbes. Each day, as I rode the bus and subway to make my way from Fairview NJ, I wore one of three military uniforms, one of which was a close enough approximation of a US Army uniform to prompt a lady, on the Orange and Black Bus, to ask if I was “going back”. I was 17. It was plausible. The military science faculty was made up of older retired sergeants and an active duty officer and some younger active duty sergeants. The latter were just back from tours in Vietnam. We were required to salute, among others, any faculty member we encountered on the street. Young Jesuit scholastics and priests, whose uptown friends were under observation by the FBI, were embarrassed and asked us to stop. By the time I was a senior the Regiment had become a bizarre parody of a military struggling with an unpopular war. A friend of mine told me that all the Cadet First Sergeants of the eight regular companies were taking bribes to mark kids present at drill. None of that with the Regimental Supply Corps, where I was keeping the roster.
My eeriest memory of the period was in 1967 or 1968. My class 2-G, sophomore classic honors, struggling with ancient Greek under the direction of Mr. Hands, a Jesuit scholastic (It takes a long time to become a Jesuit priest. Scholastic is one of the steps.) There was an antiwar demonstration in Union Square. As we sat there in our Army-like uniforms, we heard the clip-clop of the New York City mounted police going down 15th Street. All I could think of was the Cossacks in Doctor Zhivago. I’m certain it was not all that bad. I was a kid with a lot of imagination.
In 1970 along with seventeen or so of my high school classmates, I headed off to Worcester Massachusetts to attend The College of The Holy Cross. As I remember only one of us wore a uniform there and only on Mondays, my good friend Victor Donovan, who retired from the Air Force a couple of years ago. He introduced me to Bob Gasser, another now retired colonel who was George Bush Sr.’s personal physician during the Reagan years. Bob was probably the most conservative guy I knew. During one of the occasional antiwar demonstrations he stood in front of the Air Force ROTC building reportedly saying that he could not stop them but he could probably take a few with him. The Air Force ROTC building had been fire bombed, before my class arrived. It had a peace sign painted on the roof, which was very apparent since the campus is laid out in a series of terraces on the side of one of Worcesters many hills. The Air Force left it there. Bob had a story about being contacted by CREEP (The Committee to Reelect the President) to keep an eye on the McGovernites on campus. He turned them down.
The Vietnam War seemed interminable. 2-S draft status was eliminated for people a year younger than me and by that time college seemed only a temporary refuge anyway. We pondered how many people who started college in 1966 must have been in Vietnam. I remember in 1971, somebody asking me if I wanted to go to Washington for the big demonstration to end the war right now. I told him I would go next year. With all that I don’t have a distinct memory of voting for McGovern. It would have been an absentee ballot. I remember Victor had a problem getting his and that he drove to Flushing in his decrepit Studebaker to vote that day. I’m pretty sure that even he voted for McGovern. The joke afterwards was a college professor who said he could not see how Nixon won since everybody he knew voted for McGovern.
There is a lot of irony about the 1972 election. During that time World War II military service was in practice a requirement for a Presidential candidate. Nonetheless, McGovern, the peace candidate, arguably had the strongest combat veteran credentials to date, perhaps overall, with 35 combat missions in a B-24 and a DFC. The best story about McGovern I ever read is in Stephen Ambrose’s The Wild Blue. On one of his missions they were forced to jettison their bombs. He was horrified to see them drop on an Austrian farmhouse. It was around noon. Himself, a farm boy, he was haunted by the imaged of a farm family sitting down to lunch and his bomber raining death from the sky on them. Years later he was on a radio call-in show in Europe and he related that story. Somebody called in and told McGovern that he was a member of that family. They had heard his plane and were safely in a slit trench when the bombs fell. They hated Hitler and if his plane shortened the war by a minute it was worth losing their house.
The other irony is that the United States would not have gotten out of Vietnam much, if any, sooner, had McGovern been elected. I was a junior when I voted for McGovern. During my senior year a Navy pilot alumnus was speaking to my Sociology class about his experience in the Hanoi Hilton. I had just graduated and was in VISTA training when Saigon fell. I remember being alienated from people with leftish views who were concerned about accepting Vietnamese refugees because we were experiencing high unemployment. Another good friend of mine Hung Pham Do, the first Vietnam born Massachusetts CPA, was on the last plane out of Tan Son Nhut. I’m really glad we have him. America is better for having him and every other Vietnamese American I have ever been personally acquainted with.
The one tax thing I remember from the campaign was that McGovern wanted to raise the estate tax. I never learned the pre-1976 transfer tax system, so I don’t know how radical the change was. I think it was portrayed as being confiscatory. During that period the income tax was very high marginal rates and holes you could drive a truck through. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 was the start of the hole closing project that began accelerating early in my career. The one tax abuse I remember them talking about a lot then was percentage depletion for oil. I read about it in Ramparts. The more things change …..
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Originally published on Forbes.com Oct 21st, 2012