George McGovern, the three-term senator from South Dakota and 1972 presidential candidate who inspired a generation of Democrats, died today after being hospitalized last week, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader reports.

The AP has an interactive look at McGovern’s life.

The family of former Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) says the 90-year-old is “no longer responsive” in hospice care, NBC News reports.

A newly-released State Department history quotes Henry Kissinger during a March 1976 meeting of top Ford administration officials as they discussed Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign and his foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Said Kissinger: “Brzezinski is a total whore. He’s been on every side of every argument. He wrote a book on Peaceful Engagement and now that we are doing most of what he said in the book, he charges us with weakness.”

The Washington Post asked Brzezinski for comment: “Henry is a friend of mine — he must have meant ‘bore.'”

Former Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to President Richard Nixon in a historic landslide, has moved into hospice care near his home in South Dakota, the AP reports.

Said daughter Ann McGovern: “He’s coming to the end of his life.”

The Week summarizes everything you need to know about the long tradition of presidential showdowns.

Sidney Blumenthal notes that despite history’s attempt to put him above the political fray, Abraham Lincoln was actually a master of political ruthlessness — for the sake of the highest ideals.

“While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution. In the end, Lincoln became the master of events because he was the master of politics.”

“The mythology of Lincoln as too noble for politics began at the moment of his death, with his body sprawled across a small bed in a house across from Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot… The historical truth reveals one of the most astute professional politicians the country has produced.”

Just published: John Quincy Adams by Harlow Giles Unger.

The author spoke to Britannica: “One reason is that John Quincy Adams may have been the most modest American president in history, even having refused to campaign for election in 1824 and 1828. He believed it was beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate to campaign — to make speeches containing promises he would never be able to keep.”

Bloomberg: “Ronald Reagan is the Republican Party’s greatest hero, lauded by those who assert that the party must never waiver from the ideals of smaller government, lower taxes and conservative social values. Yet Reagan presided over a federal government that grew by more than 300,000 employees during his eight-year tenure; while lowering the individual tax rate, he raised taxes about a dozen times; and he worked closely with Democratic congressional leaders.”

Michael Barone has a great look back at when national political conventions actually meant something.

“The national conventions are diminishing in importance, but I would be sorry to see them go extinct. I always feel a twinge of sadness when they adjourn and the maintenance people start popping the balloons and folding up the chairs. There’s something awesome about being part of an American political tradition that goes back to the 19th century.”

Ancestry.com has discovered that John Punch, the first African enslaved for life in America, was the 11th great-grandfather of President Obama.

CNN notes researchers “found the new connection to the president’s African roots through an unlikely link, that of Obama’s Caucasian mother. President Obama’s African American roots had previously been tied to his father’s Kenyan birth. But as genealogists were pouring through documents tracing Stanley Ann Dunham’s ancestors, they found a connection to the Bunch family which had recently published DNA evidence that they had roots in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Maggie Haberman finds an interesting anecdote from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book, Memo to the President Elect, about the 2002 Olympics uniforms:

“This episode is worth recounting because every prospective torch carrier was given, courtesy of the U.S. Olympic Committee, a special uniform consisting of a nylon sports jacket and matching pants. When my uniform arrived, I glanced at the label, which read ‘Made in Myanmar,’ that is, Burma, a country that suffers under one of the most repressive governments on Earth. It was not yet illegal to import clothing from Burma, but public pressure had induced most U.S. retailers to stop doing business there. I had my own grounds for revulsion, having visited the country to pledge support for its courageous democratic leader, the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. I was furious about the uniform but knew it was too late to reorder all the clothing, though I did go out and buy my own shirt and pants (Made in America). When I arrived in Salt Lake City, I informed Mitt Romney, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, about the gaffe; he thanked me kindly for keeping my mouth shut. The following year, Congress approved a ban on all imports from Burma.”

New book: The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade against Smut by Douglas M. Charles.

A fascinating look at the FBI’s crusade against pornography.

An excerpt of Where They Stand:The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians by Robert W. Merry in Salon suggests George W. Bush will be ranked near the bottom of all presidents.

“Based on the contemporaneous voter assessments, the objective record, and what we know of history, it’s difficult to see him even in middle-ground territory. History likely will view Bush largely as the voters did after eight years of his stewardship. And so it’s probably just as well that he doesn’t care much about the verdict of history.”

NPR talks to three political scientists and gets three different answers.

1936 — “The Republicans tried to attack FDR for his New Deal programs, saying they were too expensive and moved the country toward socialism — sound familiar?”

1980 — “Young, unknown president is elected after an unpopular administration… economy in the doldrums, problems with Iran, sense of malaise. Republicans nominate the person who finished second place in the previous nomination… after a divisive nomination struggle.”

2004 — “You have an incumbent president running for re-election in a polarized and closely divided electorate… And the result is again likely to be a close election in which the outcome will come down to a few swing states.”

A British company plans to auction of what it says is a vial of Ronald Reagan’s blood taken at the hospital where he was treated after a 1981 assassination attempt, Reuters reports.

David Grann has a must-read piece on William Alexander Morgan, a Midwesterner who helped Fidel Castro rise to power in Cuba.

“In 1957, when Castro was still widely seen as fighting for democracy, Morgan had traveled from Florida to Cuba and headed into the jungle, joining a guerrilla force. In the words of one observer, Morgan was ‘like Holden Caulfield with a machine gun.’ He was the only American in the rebel army and the sole foreigner, other than Guevara, an Argentine, to rise to the army’s highest rank, comandante.”

“After the revolution, Morgan’s role in Cuba aroused even greater fascination, as the island became enmeshed in the larger battle of the Cold War. An American who knew Morgan said that he had served as Castro’s ‘chief cloak-and-dagger man,’ and Time called him Castro’s ‘crafty, U.S.-born double agent.'”

Later, Morgan “was charged with conspiring to overthrow Castro. The Cuban government claimed that Morgan had actually been working for U.S. intelligence — that he was, in effect, a triple agent. Morgan denied the allegations, but even some of his friends wondered who he really was, and why he had come to Cuba.”

The New York Times reviews Passage to Power and notes it showcases Robert Caro’s “masterly gifts as a writer: his propulsive sense of narrative, his talent for enabling readers to see and feel history in the making and his ability to situate his subjects’ actions within the context of their times.”

“Caro’s descriptions of Johnson — and those of John and Robert Kennedy — have a novelistic depth and amplitude. He gives us a rich sense here of how past experiences shaped their interactions, how one encounter or misunderstanding often snowballed into another, and how Johnson and Robert Kennedy evinced a capacity to grow and change. Even more impressive in these pages is Mr. Caro’s ability to convey, on a visceral level, how daunting the challenges were facing Johnson upon his assumption of the presidency and the magnitude of his accomplishments in the months after Kennedy’s assassination.”

New York magazine excerpts a forthcoming biography of Ben Bradlee, Yours in Truth by Jeff Himmelman, which suggests the legendary Washington Post editor was skeptical about certain aspects of Bob Woodward’s claims about Watergate informant “Deep Throat.”

According to material from Bradlee’s own archive, he expressed “fear in my soul” that Woodward had embellished key details of his reporting.

However, Woodward tells Politico that Himmelman “failed to include” a much more recent interview he did with Bradlee that was more supportive of Woodward.”