George McGovern an unrepentant liberal to the end

George McGovern, a proud liberal who argued fervently against the Vietnam war as a senator from South Dakota and suffered one of the most crushing defeats in presidential history against Richard Nixon in 1972, died before dawn yesterday. He was 90.

A spokesman for McGovern's family said he died at a hospice in Sioux Falls, surrounded by family and lifelong friends.

A decorated second world war bomber pilot, McGovern said he learned to hate war by waging it. In his disastrous race against Nixon, he promised to end the conflict in Vietnam and cut defence spending by billions of dollars. He helped create the Food for Peace programme and spent much of his career saying the US should be more accommodating to the former Soviet Union.

Never a showman, he made his case with a style as plain as the prairies where he grew up, often sounding more like the Methodist minister he'd once studied to be than a senator and three-time presidential candidate.

And McGovern never shied from the word "liberal", even as other Democrats blanched at the label and Republicans used it as an epithet. "I am a liberal and always have been," McGovern said in 2001. "Just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be."

Americans voting for president in 1972 were aware of the Watergate break-in, but the most damaging details of Nixon's involvement wouldn't emerge until after election day. McGovern tried to make a campaign issue out of the bungled attempt to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee, and he called Nixon the most corrupt president in history, but the issue could not eclipse the embarrassing missteps of his own campaign.