This "is the first volume of a major biography of the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate who became [an American] critic of the Vietnam War. In this ... book, Thomas Knock traces George McGovern's life from his rustic boyhood in a South Dakota prairie town during the Depression to his rise to the pinnacle of politics at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago where police and antiwar demonstrators clashed in the city's streets"--Dust jacket flap.