I have given a lot of my public career to the problems of hunger and malnutrition, both in this country and around the world and I think that began in World War II. I was on a ship, a troop ship that pulled into Naples Harbor with about two thousand other bomber pilots, navigators, and bombadeers, flight engineers, and so on. We pulled into this beautiful harbor in Naples, Italy where we were to be based for the next year hitting targets up in Nazi Germany. And as the ship was approaching the docks, we became aware that there were several hundred little children lined up on the docks on either side of that harbor and as we got closer, you could hear certain words in broken English, “Hey Joe.” “Butterfingers.” “Babe Ruths.” “Milky Ways.” They had down all these candy bars and at that point, the commander of the ship came on the loudspeaker and said, “Do not throw anything to those little children. This is wartime Italy and those youngsters are at the edge of starvation.” “Yesterday,” he said “a troopship, American troopship came into harbor and the GI’s started throwing candy bars and so on and some of it fell into the water and twenty-five children drowned, scrambling for that food”. We then got on a truck and they took us near Folja, Italy where we encamped in tents for the next year and the very first morning, I woke up to a scratching sound outside the tent area and I lifted the flap and looked out and here were a group of what appeared to be young Italians women, mothers and housewives. They were scratching through the garbage dump for bits of food they could take home to their children. Today, you go to Italy - it’s probably the best fed country in the world. You have to work hard to find a bad restaurant in Italy, not so during the war. We saw those same women there day after day scratching through garbage areas. Sometimes you’d see the same women on the streets at night selling themselves for a few dollars to get income for their families and I think from that point on, I’ve always had an interest in hungry people.

Right at the end of the war, I finished my last thirty-five missions three or four days before the war ended. I could have then gone home, but General Twining who was head of the 15th terror force said that he didn’t want us to take a piece of food of any kind back to the States. He said “I want all of our storage areas empty and I’d like to have some of you pilots volunteer to fly that food up to Europe and we’ll have people distribute it up there.” I was anxious to get home. My wife had given birth to our first child while I was flying missions, but I thought I have dealt with these hungry people for all this time and there are more up in Europe so I volunteered to stay for another week or ten days. In some cases, we were distributing food, and blankets, and medications - everything we had to the same people we had been bombing a few days before, but I am always glad the war ended on that note.

Some years later, that would’ve been ’44 and ’45, President Kennedy asked me to be the first director of the U.S. Food for Peace Program at the White House and I have always been glad I took that assignment because it gave me two years between my service in the House, a representative for eighteen years in the Senate, traveling the entire world. Food for Peace was a scheme to give away the enormous food surpluses that were piling up in this country. I come from a farm state, South Dakota, and I knew that we had millions and millions of tons of grain and edible oils and everything’s piled up so this was a way of disposing of these surpluses that were costing the government a billion dollars a year to store. That was in the days when a billion dollars still seemed like a lot of money, but we were able to distribute that food with the help of voluntary agencies, various religious and philanthropic groups. In that period of time, in the early 60’s, we literally kept India alive. We sent in four to five million tons of wheat, wheat flour, corn, cornmeal, soybeans, edible oils, powdered milk, some powdered egg.

Now today, of course India is a grain exporting country thanks to the Green Revolution and other assistance they’ve had, but I saw so many things during that two years. I’ll never be able to forget one of the first missions that President Kennedy sent overseas, this was as early as February 1961 just about six weeks after he was inaugurated. He sent Arthur Schlesinger and me to Latin America just to look at the situations there and to report back particularly what we saw in terms of extreme poverty and hunger. I remember the very first place we entered was a little village up near Racife in northeast Brazil. Brazil of course when you’re in the Copacabana and the upscale areas in Rio de Janeiro, it looks pretty wealthy, but you get up in that northeast drought area, it’s as bad as anything you can find or was then. The very first little cottage we went into, a little mud hut actually, there was a mother sitting on the floor and four or five children scattered around on the floor. One child had died just as we arrived and was lying there with a little cloth over it and the mother who looked to me like she weighed about eighty pounds at most, seventy-five or eighty pounds, a little tiny figure with all of these children, a couple of them with their heads in her lap. They were suffering from chickenpox, which we don’t think of as a fatal disease in this country, but it can be fatal to undernourished children and I was looking at this frail little mother there and there was a young economist from the Brazilian government who was our escort and he saw me looking at this woman and he said she is the symbol of underdevelopment and so she was. We learned a week later before we left Brazil that the mother had died and two more of the children.

So I came back to Washington renewed in the determination to use what offices I had to deal with this problem of human hunger. I also found it in the United States to my surprise. Eleanor and I were driving home from a concert one night and on the CBS news they announced that the next day they were doing a one-hour documentary called Hunger USA. That would have been 1968. I was then a United States Senator. I said Eleanor, “What are they talking about? Hunger USA? There is no hunger in the United States.” And that was my view, but I decided to watch that documentary. Two of my daughters were interested in it too and CBS with their cameras went right into the migrant labor camps, into the slums of great cities, onto the Indian reservations in my state, and they went into a school lunch program in South Carolina. And we arrived there just as it was school lunch time and I told them I’d like to take a look at the program and Bob Dole was the ranking Republican on the committee. He and I later became great friends and worked together in a bipartisan way on hunger both in this country and abroad, and I noticed when we walked into the school lunchroom, which was a room I would gather about the size of this one, there were a lot of children sitting down at tables eating and then around the room standing up were children who weren’t eating and the CBS reporter focused the camera in on one little boy who was standing there and asked him what he thought about not being able to eat while the other children were eating. I thought he would say he was angry or something of that kind. He said, “I am ashamed”. And the reporter said, “Why is that?”. And he said, “Because I ‘aint got any money”. And I said to my two daughters, “It’s not that little boy who should be ashamed, it’s George McGovern.”

I went back to the Senate and introduced a resolution to create a select committee on nutrition and human needs and this is the point at which Bob Dole joined as the ranking Republican on that committee. I was the Chairman. For the next seven or eight years, we virtually revolutionized food assistance in this country. We doubled the size of the school lunch program by providing for free lunches for youngsters that had no money at all or their families and reduced prices for kids who could pay something, but not the full price and it was handled in such a way that nobody knew who was paying and who was not, which is the best way to administer a charitable contribution. We doubled the size of the food stamp program. We started a new program called WIC. W-I-C for women, infants, and children under which nutritional supplements are given to low-income, pregnant, and nursing mothers and their infants until the age of five. And that’s been a very helpful program and one that I think this country can be proud of.

When I first went into the Food for Peace Program, the very first day I got a call from the Dean of the University of Georgia and he said, “I just want to tell you Mr. McGovern, I read in the New York Times this morning that you are going to run the Food for Peace Program. Let me just tell you my observation. I think the Federal School Lunch Program has done more to underwrite the development of the South than any other federal program.” I said, “ Well Dean, that’s a pretty sweeping statement. What about Social Security? What about minimum wages?” He said, “Well those things are important, but I stand on what I said”. He said that, “In World War II, a third of all the young men called up for Selective Service were declared ineligible because of physical deficiencies of one kind and in some cases mental deficiencies, but with the coming of the Federal School Lunch Program, those problems are now largely behind.” He said, “How do you think we produce all these winning footfall teams down here in Georgia and Louisiana and so on?”

Anyway, he was wanting to urge me to concentrate on setting up school lunch programs in Africa and Asia and Latin America and we have a number of them started, but when I went back to Rome many years later appointed by President Clinton to the United Nations World Food Program and the related Agency on Food and Agriculture, I found that frankly all the countries of the world had gathered in that same city two years before in a Great World Summit and had resolved to cut in half the number of hungry people in the world. It was estimated that about eight hundred million people were chronically hungry and malnourished and they were going to cut that to four hundred million by the year 2015. That’s now only nine years away. I said, “Well how much progress have you made on this?” And it was sort of an embarrassed smile and finally the people who were briefing me said, “Well actually it is now eight hundred and fifty million. We have actually added another fifty million.” So I began think, here are all these talented people: experts on nutrition and agriculture and related things. What can we come up with that will enable us to get our minds around this problem? Maybe get our arms around it. Get around it someway. And I thought about the U.S. Federal School Lunch Program and what that Georgia Dean had told me so many years before and I began to do some research. I found out that there are three hundred million school-aged kids around the world that get nothing to eat during the school day. They trudge off to school. Maybe walk a mile or two to the village school and then sit there for the next five or six hours with nothing to eat. Why not extend the U.S. School Lunch Program to the whole world under the auspices of the U.N. with the United States taking the lead and making the first offer.

Let me tell you what happens when you do that, when you start a school lunch program. Out of these three hundred million kids not now being fed, one hundred twenty million have dropped out of school or they never started. Most of those are girls because of the favoritism towards us males in most societies, but once you start one of these programs, U.N. researchers have discovered that this is what is happened in the pilot programs we have happened over the years – school enrollment jumps dramatically. Both the girls and the boys get to schools. Nobody has yet been able to find a stronger magnet to pull hungry kids into school other than school lunch.

The second thing that happens is that academic performance jumps dramatically and of course athletic performance and overall health. The third thing that is fascinating to me and I ask you to remember this because a lot of people tell me when I talk about human hunger, you’re never going to get on top of that problem until you control population. There is something to that theory. Some evidence of it, but let me tell you what happens thirdly. I’ll have to put it this way. These little girls that stay at home, illiterate, can’t even sign their names. They have an average of six children for each of these little underfed, illiterate girls. They start getting married as early as eleven, twelve, thirteen years of age. I was in Ethiopia awhile back and I saw a little girl riding towards us on a donkey. I am always attracted to donkeys, I have always liked little girls having reared four of them. So I engaged her in conversation with the help of our interpreter. I said “Where have you been?” She had on a little white frilly dress and a little tiara. She said, “I just got married.” I said, “Well, gee isn’t that nice? Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” And she straightened up to her full height and smiled and she said, “Well, I’m ten.” Well I think that is terrible. They had a custom in that particular part in Ethiopia where the bride and groom separated for a few hours after the ceremony.

So I have dedicated what years I have left, as has Bob Dole, to seeing what we can do about getting the U.N. to take care of these three hundred million kids, not now being fed. It is going to cost some money. We persuaded President Clinton to come up with 300 million dollars to get the program started. We’ve gotten another 200 million out of the Bush administration. All of this ratified by Congress. I don’t know where Clinton got that first 300 million. It was just two weeks before he finished his two terms and I really don’t care where he got it as long as we got it. The Presidents can always come up with something if they really want to.

Anyway, it used to be when the subject of aging came up, I would say, well it doesn’t matter so much how many years you live. It’s what you do with the years you have. Now that I am eighty-three, I don’t say that anymore. I want to live to be a hundred and one of the reasons it’s going to take another seventeen years to get all of the things done that I want to see done and not the least of which is this universal school lunch idea. If we can pull that off in the next five or ten years, it’ll transform life on this planet. I really believe that. It might even, I can’t prove this, it might even reduce some of the tensions and the frustrations and anger that drives the terrorist impulse against wealthy countries like ours. We can’t promise that of course. I don’t know all of the things that are in the minds of these terrorists. I am quite sure we’re not going to defeat terrorism with military containment. I don’t think that works too well against fanatics so that’s a reason that I hope both Dole and I will live awhile because I think we can get this job done with the help of other interested people.

We are also raising money from private corporations and foundations and so on and this is a soluble problem. I used to think world peace was the first problem to battle, but people have been killing each other ever since Cain and Able. This last century, the 20th, was the bloodiest in the history of mankind - humanity - men and women have tried to say. But hunger is a soluble problem. We can do this. We know how to do it. We have the resources. We even have the food. We know how to package things. We know how to store them. We know how to distribute them. So this is a political problem to get governments around the world, including ours to do more on this.