I am not what you would call a “man of mystery.” – George Stanley McGovern

The candidate likes to pride himself on that. As a matter of strategy, as much as of personal style, George McGovern wants what he says and does, even what he thinks, to be just as open as a prairie sky, as plain as Dakota wheat. Instant “knowability” is one of those qualities (along with “courage” and “honesty") that McGovern believes sets him apart from the ordinary run of politician. And one does not have to be around George McGovern long to discover that, mild-mannered or no, McGovern does not consider himself ordinary at all. It is his words that give him away. “People look to George McGovern for honesty,” he will say. Or, “George McGovern is not going to deceive anyone.”

McGovern says it so unashamedly—as if courage, honesty, and knowability were self-evident marks of grace that only a fool or a heretic would question—that it is hard, at first at any rate, to seriously dispute him. Especially when he adds in the next breath that Richard Nixon is sorely lacking in all three of those departments. Again, it is hard to dispute him. Mystery is Nixon, the unknowable Agonistes. George McGovern? Why, everyone knows George McGovern.

Until he became the Democratic nominee, and the country suddenly began wondering just what it had wrought. There really didn’t seem too much to know. The man and his life seemed rather one-dimensional; a relatively straightforward progression up the electoral ladder of success, aided, to be sure, by a formidable sense of organization and an even more phenomenal streak of luck. Add to that a twanginess of speech. a smattering of radical politics, faint suggestions of soaking the rich, an even clearer implication of “America. First,” and, quicker than you could say “public image,” out stepped the Prairie Populist. Plain? Honest? God, he was plain to the point of being boring. The worst his critics seemed to be able to s...