Badger State labor leaders told their memberships not to vote for McGovern because he hadn’t voted to end a right-wing filibuster against an antilabor right-to-work law in 1966. This was nasty politics: actually McGovern’s labor voting record was just about flawless, better than John F. Kennedy’s in 1960—so good, in fact, that he feared for his reelection in 1968 in a conservative state like South Dakota. Upon which George Meany, like some labor pope, had granted McGovern an absolution to vote against right-to-work in 1966. In 1971, Meany had explicitly signed off on McGovern as an acceptable
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