McGovern discusses life as an alcoholic's father

As a politician, George McGovern seemed hopelessly out of touch, clinging to old-time liberalism even as the American people were rushing to embrace conservatism.

As the Democratic nominee in the 1972 presidential election, McGovern collected a not-so-grand total of 17 electoral votes against Richard "I Am Not a Crook" Nixon, who later became the first president to resign in disgrace.

Politics -- presidential politics, anyway -- was not McGovern's game. But as a U.S. senator, McGovern was a principled statesman who stood up for his beliefs and never wavered in his convictions, even when he found himself on the unpopular side of an issue. And as a human being, McGovern has always been a man who is defined by his kindness and compassion. It just might be that he was too darn nice to excel in the cutthroat world of big-league politics. McGovern's humanity, not his politics, was on display last week when he visited Fort Worth to address the Stars in Recovery dinner benefiting the Tarrant Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. He came to talk about his daughter Terry, whose death in December 1994 ended a lifelong struggle with alcohol. Usually the featured speaker at this annual fund-raising event is a recovering alcoholic or drug addict, a celebrity who is winning the battle against chemical dependency. Actress Ali McGraw was one of the Tarrant council's recent Stars in Recovery. So were actor Troy Donahue, songwriter Paul Williams and sportscaster Pat Summerall. These stars amused us with their dark but witty tales of drunken misadventures; alarmed us with their vivid descriptions of life- threatening addiction; inspired us by recounting their strides toward successful recovery. George McGovern served up no colorful drunkathons detailing the imaginary pleasure and all-too-real pain experienced by the problem drinker. Those stories were buried with Terry McGovern, who froze to death after passing out in a snowbank in Madison, Wis. The former South Dakota senator offered not the searing, firsthand testimony of an addict but the aching, close-up insight of an addict's parent, a loving father who never stops agonizing over his daughter's death and his inability to prevent it. "You begin to question your judgment," he said. "You begin to wonder where you went wrong as a parent. Should you have been tougher? Should you have been more lenient? "Gradually, you come to the view that you're dealing with a baffling, complicated, cunning disease." Baffling, indeed. Terry McGovern went through detoxification 68 times during the last four years of her life. She tried every sort of treatment program, from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to elaborate rehab centers. In the end, after one last stab at sobriety, she drank herself into a stupor and expired at the age of 45. There was no happy ending for Terry, but her father is trying to turn his daughter's tragedy into triumph. He wrote a book, Terry: My Daughter's Life and Death Struggle with Alcoholism, not just to help himself deal with her death but to give her a measure of immortality. He uses Terry's story to wage war against the disease that she could never overcome. He shares his pain to warn others about the cunning enemy that claimed his daughter's life. McGovern compares the lethal effect of alcohol to the Vietnam War, a conflict he opposed long before it became politically popular to do so. The war killed 58,000 young Americans over 10 years, he said, but "we lose twice that many every year to alcoholism." It is a shocking statistic, one that McGovern says he no longer sees as merely a "mathematical formulation." For him, his daughter's death has put a haunting, tragic face on the numbers. We'll never know what McGovern might have accomplished if he'd been elected president. But if you know anything about alcoholism, you know there is nothing he could have done in the White House that would have been a nobler enterprise than the effort he has undertaken in memory of his daughter.

Copyright 1997
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