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mhm from Gainesville, Florida Yeah, hello, I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. George McGovern is the former Democratic senator from South Dakota and was his party's nominee for president in 1972 in the wave of conservatism in the 1980 elections, McGovern was defeated in his bid for 1/4 term in the United States Senate.

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At present, he is chairman of Americans for Common Sense, a public interest group headquartered in Washington, D. C. He has served as a visiting professor at numerous universities, including Columbia, Pennsylvania, Northwestern American and the Innsbruck, Austria, summer session of this university in collaboration with the University of New Orleans.

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During his tenure as a senator, he served on the Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee and was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. He was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee on African affairs. He was also a member of the Joint Economic Committee.

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Senator McGovern is the author of six books, War Against Want Agricultural Thought in the 20th Century. A Time of War. A Time of Peace. The Great Coalfield War, written with Leonard F. Goodridge, an American journey, and his autobiography, entitled Grassroots Senator McGovern and his wife, Eleanor, have four daughters and one son and four grandsons.

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A conversation With George McGovern When I return in a Moment, Live Live presents conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Dr Michael Vegan in professor of history and ethics and assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Senator McGovern. Welcome to the University of Florida and welcome to conversation. It's a special to like to talk with a fellow historian if I may identify you that way for a few moments, because I'm very interested about your perceptions of the historical process and your understanding of the history of the American people in view of your own considerable practical experience in politics, does it make a difference to have had the kind of experiences you've enjoyed with what, 18 years in the Senate, Uh, four years in Congress and a race for the highest office in the land?

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I remember back in the 1960 presidential campaign, there was a format in that campaign in which the reporters went on television with John Kennedy and Richard Nixon during their debates and after the opening statements by the two candidates. The reporters would then ask each candidate to respond to the same question.

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The first question was What one quality do you think commends you to the presidency of the United States? More than anything else, Mr Nixon answered first, and he said he thought it was his experience, and he gave what I thought was a rather convincing question, a convincing answer about his years as vice president in the Senate, in the House and world travel.

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I was wondering what Jack Kennedy would say when it came his turn, because he had much less experience than Richard Nixon, and he startled me by saying that he thought his most important asset as a politician was his sense of history, he said, By that I mean the capacity to understand the great underlying values and forces that have shaped American history and also to be able to discern in our own day the forces that are worth supporting and the ones that we ought to oppose.

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I thought it was really a pretty nifty answer. I was very impressed with it, and I suppose even before that, but certainly from that day to this, I've never forgotten about my historical background. I agree with Santayana that those who who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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I do think history has a lot to teach us and that we need people in the public life of this country who can bring some long term historical perspective on the problems of our own time. I should have mentioned that you also had wartime experience. During the Second World War, you flew a B 24 bomber out of Italy.

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35 or so missions. Which one for you, the distinguished Flying Cross. After that, it was your original intention, I believe, to enter the ministry which had been the profession and calling of your father. And did you not go to Northwestern University originally with that in mind, I did.

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I I came out of World War Two thinking that whatever time I had left in life, I would devote to the cause of world peace. I still think that's the number one challenge before the human race to find some way to achieve our our salvation from nuclear annihilation from annihilation of any kind.

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I worry about these conventional weapons to were undergoing a revolution there where they're becoming vastly more destructive than they were in any previous war. So the experience that I had 35 or 40 years ago dealing with the destruction in World War Two has convinced me that we have to do everything in our power to find some arrangement to break free from the war system.

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It's war itself. That's the evil. It's not the nuclear power. That's the evil. It's the war system that is the evil in the international community. And we have to find some way now that countries have achieved the capacity to utterly destroy each other and maybe to end all life on this planet.

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We've got to find some better way of settling our differences than than killing each other, which could mean the end of the race. I'm very interested to hear you say that it's not nuclear weapons as such, that has altered, uh, the dimensions of warfare. Uh, because I would venture to say that man has always been prepared to destroy his enemies by whatever means happened to be at hand.

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And indeed, many people tend to forget that in the closing years of the Second World War, the United States was routinely destroying many more lives than were lost in Hiroshima with the A bomb with the incendiary firebombing of Tokyo and other cities in in in Japan.

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I think in just one night's raid in July or June, whichever one of the months before August 45 when the A bomb was dropped, the United States destroyed more lives that were lost with the dropping of the bomb. So we were prepared to do that even without the A bomb.

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The bombing of Dresden, that whole city was just literally incinerated, along with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. That was done with so called conventional weapons. And these conventional weapons today are so much more accurate and deadly and destructive than they were 35 or 40 years ago that it's an entirely different dimension of warfare.

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So while I think the nuclear freeze movement is the most important movement right now in American politics, I hope it won't cause us cause us to lose sight of the underlying danger, which is the system of war itself. We could very well kill tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union, in the United States and Western Europe and throughout the world without ever going to nuclear weapons.

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The greater danger is that if we fall into the use of the conventional weapons as they're called, no one has yet figured out any formula to prevent that from escalating into nuclear weapons. You might say, Well, nobody would do anything so horrendous of that. Well, we've already done that.

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We've already dropped nuclear weapons on great cities. We did that and Japan in 1945 so that arguments over about whether or not mankind might have the recklessness to use nuclear weapons. We've used them once, And that is why I think it's so important that we invest more time and energy than we have in the past, trying to strengthen the international organizations, the United Nations, the peacekeeping capacity that we have to see that war is contained and prevented.

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We've got, incidentally, about 40 wars going on right now around the world, some of them very bloody conflicts. So the danger of violence is never very far away. I would assume from those remarks, You're very much concerned about what's happening in Central America and the United States involvement in not only of Salvador, but now, most recently the Honduran originated excursion into Nicaragua.

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Dean Gan and I can't prove this. But I'm convinced in my own mind that the United States is arming and equipping and training those Honduran forces that are coming across the line into Nicaragua. I think the administration has made a calculated decision to overthrow that Nicaragua and government, and they're using elements that once comprised General Somoza's National Guard, some of them very brutal, hard boiled killers, uh, to regroup on the Honduran side, come across the line into Nicaragua and to attempt a military overthrow the Sandinista government.

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I wouldn't argue that the Sandinista government is perfect. I would say that it replaced one of the most depressive governments in Central America when it overturned. General Somoza and I think it's not in the interest of the United States, either in terms of our fundamental national interests or the values that we cherish in this country, uh, for us to get mixed up in a clandestine effort to overturn that existing government in Nicaragua Do you believe that Castro's Cuba is behind the Salvadorian rebels and their cause and similarly, is the, uh support or the foundation of the Nicaraguan Revolution?

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The Sandinista government? Well, I think the Cuban government, as like the Soviet government, would like to see the El Salvador gorillas when, and I think they'd like to see the Sandinista government survive. Those governments are more compatible ideologically with the Soviet and Cuban view of the world, uh, than their opponents are.

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But that's quite different from saying that Moscow and Havana are calling the shots in El Salvador and Nicaragua. I don't think they are. I think those are indigenous revolutionary movements that come out of the economic injustice and the political misrule that has been the characteristic of life in that part of Central America.

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If you could find some way just to eliminate every single Cuban in the world and every single Russian, that El Salvador revolution would continue, and so would the forces that brought the Sandinista government into power in Nicaragua. So what we have to come to terms with is the seed bed of revolution and trouble in Central America.

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Recognize that a certain amount of revolutionary activity there is inevitable, given the nature of the conditions in Central America. Under those conditions, the best thing for us to do is not to get militarily involved, to try to use what influence we have. And I think our influence is quite limited in bringing about a a negotiated solution to these problems.

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I'd like to stay with the theme of Cuba, but change the context for a moment, if I may. Several months ago on this program, I had a discussion with historian on our campus about the Cuban missile crisis of the very early 19 sixties. We were celebrating the 20th anniversary, as I recall of that very dangerous episode in our country's recent history.

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You went to Cuba and you met and talked with Fidel Castro some years after that event. It would be very interesting to know what he said to you about that crisis. Well, he didn't bring it up, and neither did I until we had talked for several hours.

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He finally told me we were going to leave the office and go to a barbecue. This was along about two o'clock in the morning and we got in his car and drove out to a suburb in Havana to a basketball cord out behind somebody's house. And here was this lamb turning on the skewer, and so we started to eat this roast lamb.

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My wife was with me, and just before we were to break up, I asked him about the Cuban missile crisis and how he thought had been handled. He said, You know, I was a very young man at the time. I think he was about 30. And he said, if I had had my way, there have been a much harsher solution to that.

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I wouldn't have backed down to President Kennedy. But he said, Premier Khrushchev was an older and much wiser man than I was, and the arrangement that he worked out with President Kennedy, I now realize, was the proper one. And then he said, he shook his finger.

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He said I was wrong. I was wrong. I thought it was quite remarkable that for any politician to ever admit they're wrong. So as much as I criticized some of the things Castro does, and I don't like a lot of the things he does nonetheless, I did give him one point for at least making a candid confession that he was wrong in having recommended 15 years earlier a showdown that might have plunged the world into nuclear war.

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By the way, I hope we'll take a careful historical look at that Cuban missile crisis someday. Did you ever ask yourself why the Russians would be so reckless has to put those missiles into Cuba? Was it really the fact that they intended the Cubans to use them against the United States?

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I think some of the recent scholarship on that Professor Gary Wills at Northwestern the university has written a book recently and which he suggests that the reason the Russians and the Cubans wanted those missiles in there was to forestall a possible follow up to the Bay of Pigs.

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Keep in mind, we had invaded Cuba in the spring of 1961 and plans were underway for a second invasion, this time with full tactical and air and naval support. And that's the first time I've heard of that. Well, you should. You should read Professor Wells book.

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A follow up scenario was was being developed. I don't say that to go ahead had been given on it, but the scenario was being developed also, various hit and run attacks had been launched against Cuba and there was considerable fear there, apparently, that another attack might take place in this time with enough air and naval back up so that it would be a real threat to Cuba.

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And apparently there is strong evidence that they wanted 15 or 20 missiles. They're not for the purpose of attacking the United States, but for making clear that they did have the capacity to retaliate in the event they were attacked. In other words, this was their version of the theory of deterrence, and it's the first explanation I've seen that makes any sense.

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Certainly they didn't put those missiles in there to launch an unprovoked attack on the United States because if they had done that, the island of Cuba would have simply disappeared 10 minutes later. Obviously, Cuba, with 15 missiles, was no match for the United States with 5000, and you don't think that Russia placed those missiles in Cuba as a way of persuading us to withdraw our missiles from Turkey.

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I don't think that had anything to do with it. I think that they I think it was a case of setting the stage in terms of the way countries send messages to each other, that if we were going to try a full scale invasion invasion of Cuba, it might cost as Miami before it was over.

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I think that was the real message they were trying to send. I know that you're concerned about the military posture of the United States vis a vis the Soviet Union, and you've expressed yourself on numerous occasions as gravely worried about the direction of the arms race is taking.

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Do you think that a critical mass has been built up in the arms race, which would encourage the theory that the arms race is almost out of human control? That we've almost lost our grip upon weapons that are of such magnitude they seem to have blunted are rational capacity to deal with them?

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Well, I do think that when I listen to these scenarios of how a nuclear war could be fought and limited in one, I have the feeling that I'm listening to almost insane ravings because there is no defense against a nuclear war. Uh, this last speech that the president made where he raised the possibility that maybe through laser beams we could shoot down incoming Soviet missiles and thus removed the danger of nuclear wear a nuclear war.

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I I found that almost beyond comprehension, the reason being this that let's suppose those laser beams are 99% effective. I don't think they could be 99% of it. But let's say we could devise a system where if the Russians let fly there 10 0 volley of warheads that we could knock down 9000 of them or 909,900 of them.

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Still, if 100 warheads hit the cities of this country from the Soviet Union, whole studies would just simply disappear. We'd have tens of millions of people killed instantly. And that's assuming that the system that you built for defense is 99% effective now. Nobody in all the history of the world has ever devised a defensive system of any kind.

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That was 99% effective. I don't care what time in history you're talking about. We have anti aircraft guns now to knock down planes, but they're not 100% effective and to try to hit a missile traveling at several times the speed of sound, The speed of light coming across the horizon seems to me preposterous.

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Back in World War two, if we sent 100 airplanes against the city and we lost 10 of them to the air defenses, we thought it was a catastrophe. Because what it meant is that in 10 missions, all 100 bombers would be gone, and the amount of damage you could do with 100 bombers wasn't all that catastrophic.

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But today, if you send 100 warheads against Miami and you shoot down 99 of them and one of them hits Miami, the city of Miami disappears. And that raid is an enormous success from a military standpoint, even though the defense was 99% perfect. So that's the dimension of warfare that I think has changed.

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There is no reliable defense. If nuclear war comes, I think we're all going to go If nuclear war comes, that's a very practical and tactical objection. I can think of a strategic long range objection to a defensive system such as the president and others have proposed.

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Namely that if we did have in place or were about to complete the emplacement of a defensive system. The Soviets might think that they would have to unleash it, attack against us because they would not have an opportunity ever again to do so. And it could provoke this sort of war that the missiles in place were supposed to prevent.

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Or perhaps this would be a possibility that the president would have to share that defensive technology with the Soviets in order to assure a safe world in which neither side would be tempted to attack the other. Well, if he's going to share it with him, why not just share a little common sense right now on both sides agree not to build it.

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Then we can save about $100 billion on each side. Sharing a defensive system of that kind is a little bit preposterous, anyway, because the same kind of laser beam that can shoot down missiles for defensive purposes can also attack targets in the Soviet Union. If you can burn a missile out of the air by a laser beam that's, uh deployed from outer space, the other side is going to realize that those laser beams can also be deployed against cities and factories and missile installations on the ground, so that what you've constructed in the name of defense becomes one of the most deadly offensive systems ever devised.

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There's no country that's going to share that kind of offensive power, or even, for that matter, that kind of defensive capability, if they ever get it. And I think a far better test of wisdom is whether we have the capacity right now when each side has the capacity to destroy each other many times over to say, that's enough, we're not gonna build one additional warhead on either side, not one additional missile, no more nuclear carrying submarines or bombers or other weapons of destruction of that kind were going to call a halt to this right where it is now on both sides.

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And this is the thing, the American people. That's the message the American people were sending in this last election. When in the eight states and the District of Columbia, the nuclear freeze resolution appeared on the ballot, they endorsed it overwhelmingly. The only one of the states where they didn't was Arizona, where it failed by a narrow margin.

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What is the feeling in the Senate? Has the Senate gone along with the administration's request for massive infusions of new money for weaponry? Well, they did last year, but every indication is that they're finally balking and saying that this has gone too far. I don't think I'm going too far out on the limb to predict today that the Senate will reject the president's current military budget.

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I think they'll cut it by a good many billions of dollars. How about the current crop of candidates, uh, now jockeying into position for a run at the Democratic nomination for president? Do you see any one of that number who is particularly gifted in the area of arms control?

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I suppose Alan Cranston is the one who's given the greatest thought to it. The seniors entered in California. I think he really means it when he says that he would make that the highest priority of his administration if he were elected. But all of the Democratic contenders have made similar statements.

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They may not have made it with the same single minded force that Senator Cranston has, but I have no doubt that, for example, Ruben, ask you here in Florida is interested in would give a lot of time to bringing the arms race under control. I think that's true with former Vice President Mondale, with my old campaign manager, Gary Hard, Fritz Hollings, and in South Carolina, John Glenn and Ohio.

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All of them have said that if elected, that would be a very high priority. I don't see any one of them, frankly, Dean Gannon, that's really broken out of the pack. Yet that's excited, a lot of passionate following in the country. Maybe that will come later.

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Is there anyone high in the Reagan administration who has spoken favorably about a freeze or very strongly about arms control Is the number one priority of the administration? Well, if there is, he must have been put under wraps. I haven't heard any sentiment of that kind coming out of the administration.

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The grassroots movement to develop a freeze initiative in our society is unique or fairly unique in our recent experience. Isn't it the town meetings developing these very complex resolutions of which we've read? I think it's almost unprecedented. I suppose. The closest thing we've had to it was the anti Vietnam War movement back in the sixties and early seventies and then the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties.

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But this movement is different even from those in the sense that it's so broadly based. It's essentially a middle class, nonpartisan American movement. I I can use that old phrase. It's really as American as apple pie. It comes out of the church is out of the discussion groups out of the women's organizations, the There are a lot of lawyers and bankers and farmers and plumbers and clergymen, people of all kinds involved in that movement.

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I've spoken to some of the nuclear freeze groups, and it's like talking to any community group that might be they're interested in a new gymnasium or interested in a safety campaign. They're just concerned citizens who want to be heard on what they regard as an issue of great importance.

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Senator McGovern. I thank you very much for coming to the University of Florida coming back, I should say, because after your surprise showing in the New Hampshire primary in 1972 you came to this campus to give an address which turned into a very excited rally on your behalf That's 13 years ago or so now or 11 years ago.

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And, uh, we're glad to welcome you back to the campus. Thank you for being with me on conversation. Thank you. It's good to be with you. We had a lot of people out. We didn't get very many votes, but we had We didn't meet a lot of wonderful people.

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That's great. Thank you. Okay, solution.