Flashback, May 1911: Hubert Humphrey, Herald of “Sunshine of Human Rights,” Born)

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a legislative giant who achieved more in the U.S. Senate than a number of Presidents have in the Oval Office, especially by calling on Americans to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the brighter sunshine of human rights," was born on May 27, 1911 in South Dakota to a druggist and his wife. Upon the death of his father, young Humphrey—now in Minnesota—took over the small family business, and customers came to like the young man.

So far, the story sounds like the early trajectory of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, except that Humphrey was able to achieve many of his dreams—and, through his life’s work, helped more than a few others achieve theirs.

Friday’s New York Times included an excellent op-ed piece by Rick Perlstein on “America’s Forgotten Liberal.” "January was the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, and the planet nearly stopped turning on its axis to recognize the occasion,” Perlstein writes (albeit slightly inaccurately: The Gipper’s centennial actually occurred on February 6—an error that the eagle-eyed copyditors behind “All the News That’s Fit to Print” still haven’t gotten around to correcting.) “Today is the 100th anniversary of Hubert H. Humphrey’s birth, and no one besides me seems to have noticed.”

Actually, I had intended to write about Humphrey’s centennial for awhile now. Humphrey is the type of leader who, in ways both ideological and personal, has now largely faded, if not entirely disappeared, from the national political scene, for reasons beyond even what Perlstein astutely notes.

Unfortunately, the lack of attention to Humphrey says as much about many progressives’ historical amnesia as it does about Americans’ as a whole, perhaps even more so. At the height of his career, when the Oval Office was within the grasp of Lyndon Johnson’s Vice-President in the closing days of the tumultuous 1968 campaign, the American left, judging him a Johnny-come-lately to the effort to end the Vietnam War, boycotted the election in large enough numbers that they were able to assure the political resurrection of Richard Nixon—and with it, four more years of the war they abominated, not to mention Watergate.

Much campaign journalism, from the likes of Theodore H. White and Hunter Thompson, examined the Minnesotan on the hustings in these and the three other Presidential races he mounted, but he has achieved little of the scholarly interest that Reagan has attained. You might be able to count on the fingers of one hand all the biographies that focus only on him.

But, if you want a vivid idea of what Humphrey achieved—and of the isolation he had to endure, first from the right, then from the left, to gain it—there are two other vivid accounts you can read where, though he is not the sole focus of the writers, he plays important roles. One is the “Orator of the Dawn” chapter in the third volume of Robert A. Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson biography, Master of the Senate. The other work is Robert Mann’s excellent history of the 16-year effort to enact meaningful civil-rights legislation, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

The Caro biography lays out the painful price that Humphrey paid, after his 1948 election to the Senate, from Southern colleagues for his memorable advocacy of a civil-rights platform at the Democratic Convention that year. That segregationist bloc, led by Richard Russell of Georgia, consistently isolated this most gregarious of politicians, helping to assure that most of his legislative initiatives went nowhere.

Over time, Johnson, as Majority Leader of the Senate, managed to bring Humphrey in from the cold by relentlessly preaching the necessity of compromise, enabling the Minnesotan to forge relationships with the Southern bloc, enough so that he could begin to pass most of his non-civil rights bills. By 1964, LBJ—now esconsed in the White House—used Humphrey—now Senate Majority Whip—as his indispensable floor manager for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Humphrey’s partnership with LBJ led to his greatest political triumphs, as well as the deepest disappointments of his long public career. The Vice-Presidency, a thankless office to begin with, became for Humphrey the graveyard for his own longstanding Presidential ambitions, as LBJ insisted on repeated public support for the Vietnam War that was at variance with his longtime colleague’s private views. “Dump the Hump” began to be hurled at him by anti-war protesters.

When Humphrey finally broke with the President on the issue with a month left before polling, the far left judged it too little, too late. (Like Achilles sulking in his tent, Eugene McCarthy didn’t get around to endorsing his state colleague in the Senate as his party’s Presidential standard-bearer until a week before the election.)

The war sparked much of the left’s harshest criticism of Humphrey, but it wasn’t the only point on which they faulted him. As time went on, they regarded him with growing condescension. His call for a “politics of joy” was derided by those thrusting their fists into the air. Even the humble beginnings (watching his father “grinding his life away between unpaid bills and unpaid accounts” before finally having to sell the family home) that spurred his liberal fighting faith led to a mocking nickname: “Drugstore Liberal.”

Perlstein bemoans the passing of Humphrey’s brand of economic liberalism in favor of the free-trade, looser-regulation brand favored by Bill Clinton, but progressives are culpable in another manner for the passing of his type. From the 1970s through this decade, Democrats consistently marginalized pro-life Democrats, even those who, on every other conceivable measure of economic security were well within the party’s liberal wing. The apotheosis of that effort came when Kathy Taylor, a member of Pro-Choice Republicans for Clinton, was able to stand before the 1992 Democratic National Convention, but not pro-life Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania.

One last point: Humphrey’s deep generosity of spirit, an attitude increasingly gone missing on Capitol Hill. According to Caro, LBJ regarded Humphrey’s willingness to let bygones be bygones, to forgive his adversaries, as a weakness. But it also led to two of the finest moments of his life.

Mann’s biography recounts Humphrey’s dogged effort to make it to the 1971 funeral of Russell. Humphrey could have simply used the wicked storm that day not to attend final services for the colleague who had called him “a damn fool” when he first came to the Senate. But Humphrey’s plane braved the storm, making him the only Senate colleague to witness Russell’s burial.

Seven years later, Humphrey’s sensitivity to others led him even to look out for his opponent in the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon. Humphrey blamed the GOP for a back-channel effort that led South Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Thieu to reject LBJ’s peace plan in the closing days of the election and assure a Democratic defeat.

But in the months before he died of cancer, Humphrey—now lionized by his colleagues—reached out to Nixon, by this point still in disgrace more than three years after being forced from the Presidency, to invite him to his funeral. Nixon showed up—the first time he came back to Washington after his ignominious departure.

There are two quotes, I think, that describe the essence of Humphrey. The first explains what he fought for all his life: "The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped."

The second describes the art of compromise that made him anathema to many in his own time and that, in the age of screaming blogs and cable channels of all ideological stripes, would make him even more suspect in today’s environment: "If I believe in something, I will fight for it, with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than nothing."

This Day in Diplomatic History (LBJ Announces Vietnam Bombing Halt)

October 31, 1968—In what Republicans undoubtedly regarded as scarier than any Halloween vampire novel, the Democrats appeared to be coming back from the politically undead when President Lyndon Johnson announced, that in return for an American bombing halt, the North Vietnamese Communist government had agreed to come to peace talks in Paris. The announcement came at a point when the man chosen to carry Johnson’s record into the election, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, had nearly erased a 30-point disadvantage in the polls.

The term “October Surprise” was popularized in the 1980 Presidential election, when Ronald Reagan’s advisers floated the idea that Jimmy Carter might pull off a last-minute deal with Iranian radicals to release American hostages after nearly a year in captivity. But the one they had most experience with came during twelve years earlier.

In retrospect, we now know, the “surprise” in that earlier race was not engineered by Johnson, the retiring incumbent, but by the Republican nominee for President, Richard Nixon—unbearably hungry for victory after losing a razor-thin contest to John F. Kennedy eight years before and a positively embarrassing loss to Edmund G. Brown for the California governor’s race two years later.

The pact, worked out after months of painstaking negotiations, came apart before the election. The late historian Stephen E. Ambrose has taken issue with the conventional narrative of these events, noting that the man who sabotaged it, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, didn’t need much encouragement from Nixon on this point to know when he was getting a bad deal.

I don’t think that Ambrose’s argument holds water, however. In any case, it doesn’t erase Nixon’s culpability in undercutting not merely Humphrey’s electoral chances, but also the foreign policy of his government.

Here is what Nixon did:

* He transmitted a message through a friend of Thieu’s, Anna Chennault, that if the South Vietnamese President refused to negotiate, he would get better terms under the incoming Republican administration.
* Nixon thus reneged on his support for a deal in a phone conversation that LBJ had on October 16 with the three Presidential contenders (the other was third-party candidate George Wallace).
* He charged, in an Election Eve nationwide broadcast, that the bombing halt was a political decision made at the expense of American troops.
* He lied point-blank on the same broadcast in stating that he’d heard “a very disturbing report” that North Vietnamese troops were now moving supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and American bombers couldn’t stop them.

Before American voters cast their ballots—even before Nixon made his broadcast—LBJ had in his hands evidence of Nixon’s shenanigans. Yet neither he nor Hubert H. Humphrey chose to publicize it. Why not?

Because the proof had come by way of the administration’s own subterfuge. Through intercepted South Vietnam Embassy cables, LBJ got wind of the October 27 message to Thieu from Chennault (who, as the Chinese-born widow of Gen. Claire Chennault, founder of the legendary “Flying Tigers” WWII unit, became a kind of Washington grande dame for the GOP) promising GOP support. The President approached the FBI about conducting surveillance of Chennault and the embassy.

What was J. Edgar Hoover to do? His own deeply conservative instincts would normally lead him to side with the Republicans. But he was a Washington player for five decades now, and, old man that he was, he still wanted to retain his power. So he acceded to the President’s wish, justifying the investigation on the grounds that Madame Chennault’s action possibly violated the Neutrality Act and the Foreign Agents Registration Act, both concerning dealings by United States private citizens with the governments of other countries. Before long, LBJ had his proof.

LBJ confronted Nixon about what he had learned. Of course, Nixon, being Nixon, did what came naturally to him: deny, deny, deny. The President also called Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen, telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he would go public, with the result that America would be shocked “if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.”

Ultimately, Johnson sat on the evidence. Disclosure would have revealed intelligence-gathering methods he wanted kept secret, particularly the ones by the National Security Agency that brought the cables to light. He’d also have to explain why he was tapping the phone of Ms. Chennault. The woman was not only an American ally but also a high-placed member of the opposition party. Finally, though he clearly had Chennault dead to rights, LBJ couldn’t specifically tie Nixon to it. There was a cloud of smoke, but, to use a phrase that gained currency six years later during the Nixon impeachment hearings, no “smoking gun.”

So Nixon won the election, and the war dragged on for four more years. In the next election, Nixon would try his own hand at a late-October announcement with the famous statement from Henry Kissinger that “Peace is at hand.” Of course it wasn’t. Another three months would elapse before that occurred. In the meantime, more soldiers had died.

Nixon resigned in disgrace over his Watergate coverup. But his actions on the brink of the 1968 election were equally disgraceful, perhaps more so. As Ambrose noted, no American political figure except for LBJ had pushed harder for deeper American involvement in Vietnam, dating all the way back to when he had urged use of the atomic bomb to deal with the Communist insurgency in the Eisenhower administration.

But this time, Nixon had not only advocated a misguided policy but, as a private citizen, had undermined American diplomatic efforts and helped drag out a remorseless conflict, for terms that he could not improve on. Ambrose contends that it’s part of the liberal indictment of Nixon. But you don’t have to be liberal to abominate playing with service personnel’s lives for the sake of electoral roulette.

This Day in Presidential History (JFK Establishes Peace Corps)

March 1, 1961—Acting on a late-campaign challenge at the University of Michigan the year before, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps, challenging America’s youth to work for international development. Three days later, he appointed as its first head his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver.

The idea was not originally the President’s—that honor fell to Rep. Henry Reuss and Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. By the end of JFK’s “Thousand Days” in the White House, however, the agency had become indelibly associated with him, with 7,300 volunteers answering his call to international service in 44 countries. That number more than doubled at the organization’s zenith, in 1966.

As I argued in a prior post, posterity has cast Kennedy and his 1960 rival for the Presidency, Richard Nixon, as characters out of Shakespeare—Prince Hal vs. Richard III.

At the time of their closely fought race, they were almost equally matched in government service (both coming to Congress in the class of ’47), separated by only four years in age, and, the debates notwithstanding, not that far removed from each other in terms of the Cold War issues that dominated political discourse of the age. 

Subsequent revelations about JFK’s dealings with what successor LBJ called “a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean” out to eliminate Fidel Castro have further reduced the contrast between the two most successful politicians of their era.

But I retain the belief of my youth that Kennedy left Americans feeling better about government and their part in it than Nixon ever did.

Even try, if you can, to leave Watergate out of the equation. Can you imagine Tricky Dick, the man for whom politics was preeminently a blood sport, calling on the idealistic instincts of his countrymen? I think not.

In fact, in his second inaugural address, in a rather flat-footed attempt to invert a now-legendary piece of rhetoric from JFK, Nixon said: “In our own lives, let each of us ask—not just what will government do for me, but what can I do for myself?”

Nixon initially predicted that the Peace Corps would merely become a haven for draft dodgers, and when he got his hands on the organization he tucked it into the umbrella agency ACTION (an action reversed eight years later by Jimmy Carter, whose mother was a volunteer in the Sixties).

To be sure, the Peace Corps was not entirely without fault over the years. In the late 1970s, one of my high school friends observed, after doing a stint with the Corps in Africa, that it was one of the most inefficient, most bureaucratic organizations he could ever imagine.

But the organization also left a positive imprint on many, more of the 150,000 volunteers who passed through it over its nearly 50-year history. Former volunteers include Christopher Dodd, Donna Shalala, Robert Taft, Carol Bellamy, author Paul Theroux, and film director Taylor Hackford.

Unlike other assassinated Presidents—Garfield and McKinley—JFK in the popular imagination has assumed martyr status that rivals Abraham Lincoln’s, despite the fact that his achievements do not match the magnitude of the Great Emancipator’s.

But maybe the public is not entirely wrong in regarding the two Presidents in a similar light.

Both, though hardened by war—one in middle age, the other in youth—still managed to call on what Lincoln termed, in one of the most poignant phrases of his Presidency, “the better angels of our nature.”

Undoubtedly, the Peace Corps represented the better angels of Kennedy’s nature, as well as all of ours.