The twenty-sixth amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the voting age to eighteen, was passed in 1971. That was too late for me. I was only twenty in 1968. So, the first ballot that I cast for president was in 1972.

The choice was incredibly easy. One candidate was a war hero with an impeccable record of promoting humanistic causes and peace. That was George McGovern, who died yesterday at the age of ninety.

The other candidate was Richard Milhouse Nixon, a despicable skunk who somehow persuaded millions of naïve people ‒ until they heard his private conversations on tape or his public interview with David Frost ‒ that he was a family man who put his nation’s interest before his own. He died in 1994. One of the major disappointments of my life is that I never took advantage of the fact that my company had some clients in California in order to schedule an excursion to Yorba Linda and dance on his grave.

My late father and I did not argue much. Our favorite topic of dispute was the subject of who was the worst U.S. president ever. I posited that Nixon was the worst; he championed George W. Bush.

I freely admitted that Bush was a horrible president. He started two stupid wars, wiped out the Clinton surplus with a stupid tax cut, and ended up crashing the economy. Bush was also definitely a serial liar. His biggest whopper was probably when he claimed that he did not know why the tax cuts had a ten-year time limit.

I also admitted that I was prejudiced against Nixon. Nixon was the guy who sent National Guard troops into universities to confront people demonstrating against the war (or at least against the draft). The blood of the students who died at Kent State ‒ gunned down by American troops on a college campus! ‒ is on his hands. He also was president when I was drafted in 1970 even though he had promised that he had a “secret plan” to end the war. So, I hold him personally responsible for stealing eighteen months from my life. If I live to be 90, that would be 1.67 percent of my time on earth.

My biggest complaint about Nixon,however, is that he put that reprehensible war-monger, Henry Kissinger, in charge of foreign policy. Together, they presided over the massive expansion of the Vietnam War, the CIA’s secret war in Laos, and the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile in favor of a military dictatorship. God only knows how many people died to promote the realpolitik favored by these two psychopaths. I pass over without mentioning the fact that his administration was full of fascists like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and the them. The whole crew made my blood boil.

Would George McGovern have been a better president? I do not know; he might have been a catastrophe. I just know that he was a much better human being, and I would not have been ashamed of my country if he had been its leader.

Ben Franklin approved of the McGovernment ’72 shirts that Sue and I wore at the NABC in Philadelphia.

The fact that Americans could not see this in 1972 depressed me. I stopped participating in elections because I concluded that my ballot was worthless. It took the prospect of Dan Quayle being a heartbeat from the presidency to make me change my mind sixteen years later.