They were good friends, occasionally still with some ideological distance despite their anti-Vietnam liberalism in common, but I would say at the very least Hatfield was McG's closest Republican friend in the Senate during this period. You're right on the other fronts with folks like Bobby and Harold Hughes and such; Hatfield stands out as a case where McGovern really did cross the aisle in a close relationship, and they had a mutual buddy in Ted Kennedy, with whom the very anti-nuclear weapons Hatfield worked on disarmament issues for years. But the closest period of their friendship was this point in time, end of the Sixties to about the mid-Seventies. The bill was on the one hand an instrument in deepening the relationship, and a flowering of a relationship that had started already.I mean they had that bill together, but I've never heard of them being close friends. I could just be stupid, though.
Oh I'm the McGovern-knower now? I thought I was the Britain-knower, at my advanced age it all gets confusingBy the accounts I've heard, they were very close. But you're not stupid, I hadn't heard that myself until our resident McGovern-knower told me.