Childhood Hunger

Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter About the Third Freedom

December 2000

Dear Friend,

Over the holidays I came across former Senator George McGovern's new book: The Third Freedom: Ending Hunger in Our Time. It is a slim volume of some 160 pages, written from dual perspectives: his current role as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Agencies on Food and Agriculture in Rome, as well as from nearly half a century's activism and accomplishment fighting hunger. I bought a copy for myself and ordered a quantity for Share Our Strength supporters around the country, as well as our staff.

If it weren't for George McGovern there might never have been a Share Our Strength. In a way I consider myself one of his many and scattered political offspring. While our ideology and political style are generations apart, there is a direct and unbroken link between his work and ours. We don't know each other well. His last years in the Senate were my first on Capitol Hill. But on the several occasions we've met or enjoyed breakfast together in the Senators Dining Room, I got the sense that he also recognized and took some pleasure in a part of his lineage being carried forward if only in a modest way.

My formative professional experience was working for Gary Hart. It was where I learned the power of ideas and the grassroots organizing tools that bring them to fruition. I borrowed liberally from this experience when starting Share Our Strength. Gary Hart's formative experience was working for George McGovern. It was in his role as campaign manager of McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign that Hart first came to the nation's attention and to my own. The campaign was a longshot, underfunded and barebones. Hart became what the circumstances demanded: the classic entrepreneur, leading a guerrilla effort that made strengths of its weaknesses, stretched resources, innovating and discovering assets where others saw only liabilities.

In the fall of 1972, McGovern's campaign brought him to the University of Pittsburgh, twenty minutes from my home, to speak to the students who were such an important part of his base. Still a junior in high school, I was in the audience that day. It was the first time I'd shaken hands with a presidential candidate. He spoke with an eloquence that the certainty of losing permits, and patiently answered questions, lingering at the edge of the stage late into the evening. I was hooked.

A few months later McGovern's loss of 49 states ended his national political career, but at the same time jumpstarted Gary Hart's, having both liberated and prepared him to run for the Senate from Colorado two years later. I followed the race in the New York Times from my freshman dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania. The day after my graduation three years later I drove from Philadelphia to Washington, DC, and after finding someone to make the necessary introductions, walked into Gary Hart's office on the second floor of the Russell Building and became an intern.

Over the next ten years, as I worked my way up to become his legislative and political director, there were countless times when Gary instructed me to "head up to New Hampshire to do the things for me I did for McGovern" or reminded me that "in the McGovern campaign, twenty-three year-olds were always our best organizers." He invoked the McGovern campaign regularly, like a users-manual for a make of car no longer on the road, but still worth keeping in your back pocket.

McGovern's new book begins with one line that captures a lifetime of learning, a diagnosis that contains the seed of a prescription as well: "Hunger is a political condition."

Anyone who has worked on hunger as long as George McGovern or as relatively short a time as those of us at Share Our Strength, realize it is not about food shortages or lack of resources, but insufficient political will. As he goes onto explain: "The earth has enough knowledge and resources to eradicate this ancient scourge... When I ran for the presidency in 1972, 35 percent of the world's people were hungry. By 1996, while the global population had expanded, only 17% of the earth's people were hungry... Despite the dire predictions that the world's population would soon outstrip food production, it has been the other way around: food production has risen a full 16 percent above population growth."

Another memorable statistic he offers is that: "The American Association for the Advancement of Science has noted that 78% of the world's malnourished children live in countries with food surpluses. Clearly this condition indicates a need for keener social conscience and better political leadership."

The heart of McGovern's book is a two front strategy to defeat world hunger: direct special feeding programs for schoolchildren and pregnant and nursing mothers and their infants; and improved local agricultural practices. To accomplish both he outlines a five point program that embodies many concepts Share Our Strength supports, funds and has worked to advance. And he puts forth some new ones for us to consider. They include:

• Expanding the school lunch program worldwide with the U.S. paying half of the $3 billion start-up cost over two years.
• Global expansion of WIC, the Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children that provides food, nutrition counseling, and access to health services for low income women, with the U.S. paying one half of the $1 billion start-up cost over two years.
• The establishment of food reserves around the globe.
• Assistance to developing countries in improving farm production, food processing and food distribution through a Farmers Corps patterned after the Peace Corps and using retired farmers to teach abroad.
• Appropriate utilization of high-yield scientific agriculture, including genetically modified crops.

McGovern's book is not without its flaws. Some of the proposals that might otherwise be dismissed as conventional are rescued by being given a bold new global reach. Although he estimates that the proposals would cost several billion in new expenditures he fails to explain where the money would come from to pay for them, an Achilles heel that in the past has left McGovern and other traditional liberals vulnerable to big spender charges, and ultimately to political defeat. McGovern shows us the way, but not the means. Still, this is a valuable contribution from a veteran public servant.

In 1960, on President John Kennedy's third day in office he created a White House director for a program of distributing U.S. farm surpluses to alleviate world hunger. The program became known as Food for Peace. The young man that Kennedy tapped to filled the job was George McGovern. Hunger was his focus at the beginning of his public career, during his Senate years as Chair of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, and now forty years later it is his focus still. The historian Thomas Knock of Southern Methodist University, who is now completing a biography of McGovern, has written that he "had coordinated the feeding of more hungry people than any other individual in America."

George McGovern has not worked directly with Share Our Strength, but through my long relationship with Gary Hart there's only one degree of separation. His influence, unrecognized and unstated, cannot be denied. One of life's illusions is that we are shaped most by those with whom we spend the most time, those in our immediate field of vision, if not right at our fingertips. Family, friends, employers, mentors. It is their presence we feel, remember and credit. But this perspective is as flawed as believing it is the car right in front of you that is causing the traffic jam, rather than the bottleneck three miles down the highway. There is always the gravitational pull of people and events who came before. When young you can sense but not see it, like you sense footprints on a road shrouded in mist. With age, the mist clears. The trail from which you've descended becomes clear enough to trace. What once seemed like intriguing coincidences, actually fit a discernable pattern of cause and effect that could not possibly have yielded anything otherwise.

McGovern's own sense of fitting into a larger continuum is evident in his book's title, The Third Freedom, taken from the 1941 State of the Union address in which President Franklin Roosevelt described a world built upon four essential human freedoms and describes the third as "the freedom from want."

McGovern concludes his book with this plea: "I do believe deep in my soul that we can and must end hunger by the year 2030. I'm not referring to the temporary hunger that accompanies a war or civil conflict, or to hunger caused by catastrophes of nature that cannot be foreseen. Rather I write of the chronic hunger of nearly 800 million people, who bear this affliction throughout their miserable, short existence on earth. There is no excuse for this kind of massive, lifelong torture, ending only with an agonizing death. Yet this is the fate that has been dictated from cradle to grave for one out of every seven human beings on our planet. No war in all of history has ever killed so many human beings and spread so much suffering and disease in any year as hunger now does annually. So if we cannot resolve all of humanity's problems, let us resolve to end at least one by the year 2030 -- human hunger."

His is the path of a cathedral builder who won't see his life's work finished. George McGovern is 78 years old. He is still vigorous enough I hope to accept an invitation to speak at the next Share Our Strength Conference of Leaders. After all we are heirs to the part of his legacy that outlived political defeat and earned bipartisan, global support.

Many of the battles against hunger that McGovern waged were won or lost before some of Share Our Strength's staff was even born. That doesn't diminish their relevance to the task at hand. Cadets at West Point and Annapolis study the strategies and tactics of Napoleon, Admiral Nelson, Ulysses S. Grant, and George Marshall. So must we learn from those who took to the battlefield before us, especially those who refused to yield it, even in defeat.

The culture of Washington is one of owing debts to successful patrons. But I find that the debts I owe are to political leaders who fell short -- Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, I see now, George McGovern too. Each, in the very act of failing, left a political path behind but advanced the course of another. The Third Freedom advances it further still.

« Previous letter | Main | Next letter »