Clarksville, Ark. ---Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate George McGovern will speak at University of the Ozarks at 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 19, in the Walton Fine Arts Center on the Clarksville campus.
The speech is the final event of the university’s 2004-2005 Walton Arts & Ideas Series. Tickets are $15 each and can be purchased by calling 479-979-1346. McGovern, who will turn 83 in July, served as a Democrat U.S. Senator from South Dakota from 1963 to 1981. He ran for president in 1968, 1972 and 1984. His humanitarian efforts on behalf of American farmers and hungry children throughout the world have earned him global admiration. Running on a platform to end the Vietnam War and on instituting guaranteed minimum incomes for the nation’s poor, McGovern was elected the Democratic Party nominee for president in 1972. He lost to Richard Nixon, 62 percent to 38 percent, in the presidential race. McGovern, a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II who began his professional career as a college history professor, represented South Dakota in the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms before beginning an 18-year stint in the U.S. Senate in 1963. He was a vocal opponent of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, often criticizing the policies of fellow Democrat President Lyndon Johnson. McGovern, who in 1960 was appointed by President John F. Kennedy as the first director of the U.S. Food for Peace Program, served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Agencies in Rome from 1998-2001 and was appointed United Nations Global Ambassador on World Hunger in 2001. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. He has lectured at more than 1,200 American colleges and universities throughout the world and is the author of seven books.
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