Thomas J. Knock. The Rise of a Prairie Statesman

George McGovern’s place in recent American history evokes sharply conflicting assessments: feckless landslide loser for his conservative critics, lifelong champion of the progressive cause for his liberal admirers. Until now, what McGovern, who died in 2012, has lacked has been a comprehensive scholarly biography that takes us beyond one-dimensional understandings. In The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern, the first of a projected two-volume work, historian Thomas J. Knock ably fills this void. Knock interviewed McGovern on twenty-three occasions (436) and spoke with many other aging figures who were central to the South Dakotan’s life and career, so this biography is likely to remain definitive. The Rise of a Prairie Statesman concludes in 1968, leaving McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign for Knock’s second volume. With the presidential campaign as the pivotal moment in McGovern’s career, the personality and events traced in the first volume can be read for what they tell us about the longshot antiwar candidate who stunned the Democratic establishment by capturing the party’s presidential nomination in 1972, only to go down to a disastrous defeat at the hands of President Richard Nixon.

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