St. Augustine Beach, Fla. ? There’s no pretense here at the Beachcomber restaurant — heck, there are hardly any windows here at the Beachcomber — and that befits a place where you have to take a left at the washer and dryer to reach the men’s room. So when the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee walks in for a grilled fish sandwich and an order of fries, the skinny guy with the Panama hat in the overalls with no shirt and the stout guy in the golf shirt and boat shoes give him a bright hello and then pay him no mind.

George S. McGovern is wearing a pair of shorts and a light brown Polo shirt and, at 86 years old, he doesn’t seem like a mortal threat to American values, especially on mornings when he takes his feeble Newfoundland dog for walks along the beach. But more than a third of a century after his quixotic campaign for president — he won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, spawning thousands of “Don’t blame me” bumper stickers at the end of the Nixon years — McGovern remains a noun as well as an adjective, and when people talk about a “McGovernite” proposal, they are pulling out one of the big weapons and they mean no compliment by it.

Sitting here and talking to McGovern — listening to his whispery voice, full of the dust of the northern plains, remembering that he was one of the most celebrated bomber pilots of World War II — it seems as if it may be time to abandon the caricature and examine the man.

Making him a symbol for opprobrium in 2009 is like — do the math and you will see that I am almost precisely right — describing Richard Nixon as a Landonite in the 1972 campaign. By 1972, nobody thought Alf Landon, who lost every state but Maine and Vermont in the 1936 election, deserved to be pilloried anymore.

Yet despite his war record, despite his support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that legitimized the Vietnam War, despite his alliance with conservative Bob Dole on hunger issues, despite the fact that he served for almost a quarter-century in the House and Senate as the representative of a devoutly conservative and resolutely Republican state, McGovern remains a symbol of 1960s radicalism.

Did I mention that McGovern (Ph.D., history, Northwestern) just wrote a biography of Lincoln, for the prestigious American Presidents series, and that the book is relentlessly conventional, which is not a synonym for unimaginative?

“Our greatest president,” McGovern says of Lincoln, and in an instant he is off and running on the 16th president. “He presided over the most difficult problem any president ever had. He always kept his balance. It took him quite a while to get around to it, but he took steps to free the slaves. He thought the Emancipation Proclamation was his greatest achievement. I think keeping the nation together was his greatest achievement. I think if he had been president in the eight to 12 years earlier, he might have prevented the Civil War.”

McGovern had his own moment in history, so long ago that it literally is history to well more than half the country. It was a torrid time, full of passion and pathos, politicians of high rhetoric and politicians of the low road.

McGovern’s 1972 opponent was Nixon, whom he hardly knew. Ten years after Nixon’s resignation, McGovern called the former president and they agreed to meet, at the home of Tricia Nixon Cox. He expected a man full of arrogance and insecurity, the twin features of the Nixon personality. He was wrong.

“All the puffed-up stuff was gone,” McGovern says. “He was relaxed, humorous. He was self-confident again.”

So much for historical caricatures.

McGovern is walking through history as a landslide loser, though, unlike Landon, a landslide loser with a whiff of redemption, which the one-time governor of Kansas never got. Nixon, who defeated McGovern so handily, was humiliated out of office and, though he has enjoyed a small revisionism, still is remembered as one of American history’s more shadowy figures (and he provides a potent adjective himself).

The Vietnam War, which McGovern opposed by the late 1960s and which also has been subject to slight revisionism, is remembered as a botched effort if not a bad cause. Some of the tenets of McGovernism, including a more activist federal government, were embraced in the last breath of the George W. Bush administration as the economy shattered and as Washington rushed to the rescue.

The man whose name was on bumper stickers plastered on 10,000 VW bugs for a decade after his 1972 loss remains quiet and bookish. When I shared a lunch hour with him, he was working on an op-ed on the American role in the Middle East, his argument being that the United States has been a source of instability rather than stability in the region.

His manuscript was full of deletions, insertions and corrections that curled around the margins and spilled over to the back of the pages. It was low-tech but reflected the high church of liberalism, except that Pat Buchanan would likely embrace every syllable. He read it aloud over the din of the bar talk and ESPN sports highlights.

The conversation repeatedly wound back not to Nixon, nor to George W. Bush, nor even to Barack Obama. It returned repeatedly to Lincoln.

“My admiration for Lincoln has only grown, because of his personal strength,” McGovern, on his second root beer, was saying. “I didn’t fully understand until I worked on the book how little formal education he had. But he learned how to read and write and he never stopped trying to be a better reader and writer. I also hadn’t focused on how his greatness in history stemmed in a major part from his writing. He never wrote a book but he wrote these majestic speeches. I came to appreciate how important good writing is to leadership.”

And while Lincoln has lessons for McGovern, McGovern, whose energy is undiminished in his ninth decade, has lessons for us.

“I never had a job in my life I didn’t love. I started out in dust storms and crop failures in the Depression taking care of Mrs. Davidson’s and Mrs. Hart’s lawns. I worked up from 15 cents an hour to 25 cents an hour. That’s my secret. I have always done what I liked and worked hard.”

At 86, he’s still at it, a caricature perhaps, but one with character.

— David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.