considered a traitor for voting to let Panama take control of the Panama Canal. The attacks, plus Reagan’s first fitting in presidential coattails, were too much, and they cost McGovern his Senate seat.

In 1984, he ran again for president, preaching a resolutely liberal message.

He could not resist a dig at Watergate. “At least,” he told his campaign audiences, “I don’t have to check in with a probation officer before coming here.”

When he failed to place second in the Massachusetts primary, the only state that had voted for him 12 years before, he withdrew.

McGovern returned to teaching and for several years headed the Middle East Policy Council, dedicated to informing Americans about Islam and the Arab world.

His later years were torn by personal tragedy. His daughter Teresa, who sufferedfrom depression and alcoholism, was found in December 1994 in Madison, Wis., frozen to death in the snow after an evening of drinking. She was 45 and the mother of two.

In her diary, McGovern read how she had suffered as a youngster through his long campaigns and his endless nights in the Senate and how she had missed him and felt desolate, rejected and abandoned.

McGovern was overwhelmed with guilt. “I’d give everything I have, and I mean everything,” he told The Times, “for one more afternoon with [her], just to tell her how much I loved her.”

In deep depression himself, he sought help and finally regained his health.

Then, in 1998, his son, Steven, also an alcoholic, was jailed in Massachusetts after pleading guilty to beating his female companion.

Yet