One Bright Shining Moment is a Biography About Sen. George McGovern

For political junkies, there is no greater spectacle than the election of the President of the United States. The appeal of this long, torrid quadrennial affair stems from its ability to simultaneously showcase the best and worst aspects that democracy and mankind has to offer. 

For about a year, this soap opera with global implications engulfs the nation’s media as they cover all the victories and missteps by the field of candidates who are pursuing the office of the President, a position awarded to only 43 men in over 200 years.

One Bright Shining Moment is an insightful documentary that examines the life and candidacy of one of the men who failed, South Dakota Senator George McGovern. He ran as the Democratic nominee in 1972 and lost to President Richard Nixon, who was running for re-election, in one of the worst defeats in Presidential politics.

Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Network’s Democracy Now!, narrates the film, which opens with a brief introduction about McGovern detailing his rise to national prominence during the 1968 Presidential primaries when while running for re-election to the U.S. Senate he stepped in after Robert Kennedy’s assassination to act as a voice at the convention for Kennedy’s supporters. McGovern came in third behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who won the nomination though he won no primary, and Senator Eugene McCarthy.

McCarthy ended up having a great impact on future conventions. He along with Congressman Donald Fraser chaired a commission that took the power of selecting Presidential candidates out of the smoke-filled, dimly lit back halls and put the emphasis on the primaries and caucuses.

The film jumps back to present his biography, growing up in South Dakota during the Great Depression, meeting his wife Eleanor, serving in the WWII and in the Democratic party at both the state and national level. He served in the Kennedy Administration as director of the Food for Peace program until he became a Senator in ’62.