"Defense conversion is most closely associated with South Dakota Democrat and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who made it his signature issue in Congress. A recession in the mid-1950s and the military cuts following the Cuban missile crisis gave him the opportunity to push the idea through the Senate, and in 1964 he called for a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) that would oversee the work. McGovern wanted to get the defense industry out of job creation, recognizing, as many liberal and conservative elites did privately, that the military-industrial complex was essentially a “gigantic WPA.” McGovern also wanted to free up hundreds of millions of federal monies for domestic welfare, to shore up the welfare state. But the Vietnam War killed the project, as his fellow Democrats denounced him as a “radical” in the middle of a war."
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Members of the United States House of RepresentativesMembers of the United States SenateUnited States presidential candidates, 1972United States presidential candidates, 1968United States presidential candidates, 1984
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George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922 – October 21, 2012) was an American historian, author, [[w:United States House of Representatives|U.S. Representat
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