Those whom we know who had an acquaintance with Senator McGovern, who died this morning, always conveyed to us the sense that he was, apart from our political differences, a nice person. We had that impression ourselves the only time we met him, which was only the most glancing conversation at a book party that had spilled onto a sidewalk where he and mutual friend had fallen into a conversation. Yet we will always think of his story as a tragedy for the generation of liberals for whom he became a tribune and for the Democratic Party he led into the political wilderness. It is a sad burden, but there it is.

Until we ourselves went off to Vietnam — this was 1970 — our instincts were with the doves and the Democrats. The more we became invested in Vietnam, though, the clearer became the comprehension that it was our side, and that of our Free Vietnamese allies, who were in the right. We don’t question the patriotism of the peace camp, merely their judgment. “We are the party that believes we can’t let the strong kick aside the weak,” McGovern wrote in his recent book about what it means to be a Democrat. It was a reference to domestic programs, but in Vietnam, the party defending the weak was America, not the Soviet Union for whom McGovern had become, by the time he ran for president, an apologist.

No need to take that on our authority. The most famous figure who called McGovern for what he was turned out to be the president of the American Federation of Labor-Council of Industrial Organizations, George Meany — an “apologist for the Communist world,” is how he labeled McGovern, according to a dispatch of the Washington Post. That was said by Meany just after the Democratic National Convention at Miami, where the leaders of the free trade union movement — figures like Meany — were locked out, while the convention hall was flooded with members of the new left. That was the year Big Labor stood neutral.

McGovern was buried in a landslide, with many of Meany’s followers voting Republican. It fell to the Republicans try to find an honorable end to a war the Democrats started. When the end came it was only President Ford and Secretary Kissinger and a few others like Congressman Michel, the minority leader in the House, pleading with the Congress not to cut off Free Vietnam entirely. It proved to be a vain plea. The deed was finally done, and then came the gruesome reports — the reeducation camps in Vietnam, the killing fields in Cambodia, and hundreds of thousands of boat people. Whatever moral authority McGovern might have hoped he’d once had evaporated with each passing report of the communist horrors.

We don’t remark on all this with any pleasure. It is a sad story. By 1981, McGovern’s years in the Senate were over. He would eventually write that he had lived a kind of ideal American life. He’d grown up on the prairies, the son of a minister. He’d gone off to war and flown courageously against our enemies. He’d had one wife to whom he’d been long-married. The Wall Street Journal has a wonderful editorial up this evening about him and how his purchase of an inn in Connecticut in late phase of his career brought him new wisdom that he’d lacked in the Senate. All the more tragic that he failed to see through the Vietnamese communists when we were all in the lists.