Hubert Humphrey: A Biography

...HHH's failure to win the presidency in 1968 was as much the result of what the liberals, the media, and the electorate took to be self-betrayal, as it was of LBJ's conduct of the war or Richard Nixon's promise of more decisive and effective leadership Close as the election was, the ineptness of the campaign's management-Mr...

...Throughout his life HHH had brimmed over with indiscriminate love, ever ready to press his ardor for suffering Mankind on all and sundry, yet sadly unable to spare his wife and children much of himself...

...His mother was of Kent Owen is a writer living in Bloom-ington, Indiana...

...It is a sharp irony that a national politician of HHH's gifts should have been so badly disorganized in his major campaigns...

...It was a pattern of conduct HHH would show repeatedly: first a challenge to established authority...

...His father made a middling living as a pharmacist, kept busy as a go-getting civic booster, and stood his ground as an argumentative, free-thinking Democrat...

...The temptation to regard HHH as fleshed out caricature must jostle the mind of anyone who tries to estimate him...

...While anti-Communist ADA liberals like Reinhold Niebuhr and John Kenneth Galbraith were pleased if startled by his zeal, some liberals of pinker hue remained unforgiving, charting his fall from grace during the war in Vietnam to that transgression...

...HUBERT HUMPHREY: A BIOGRAPHY Carl Solberg/WW...

...in need of training he went off to Denver to earn a pharmacy degree in record time (HHH was ever a master of the quick study...

...On his return to the Senate, HHH the man grew steadily in the affections of his colleagues in government and of the American people...

...It was the authentic HHH...

...Solberg makes it clear HHH was a poor organizer and administrator, unable to decide who was to do what-and the lack of money-HHH had a lifelong distaste for fund-raising, although he did a lot of it-compounded the credibility problem and undermined the whole effort...

...For a man who so craved the approval of his allies, the demotion from humanitarian to warmonger-in the simplistic view of outraged liberals and enraged radicals-was cruel enough to stun him into incomprehension...

...After twenty years of being in advance of the Democratic Party and the American People, HHH was, through an ironic reversal of fortunes, now behind them...

...I know every Senator better than I know my own family," he once said...

...Suddenly, he strode forth as Hubert the Bold, embattled to fight the good fight, rousing the ranks to enter the fray...

...While HHH was too aware of his place in history to suffer the ludicrous indignity of, say, his fellow Minnesotan, Harold Stassen, or that ghost of elections future, John Anderson, his own liberalism seemed, especially toward the end of his life, sadly worn if not entirely exhausted...

...It was a voice straining with impatience to blare out earnest concern, sincere sympathy, moral intensity, righteous indignation...

...HHH was, after all, most himself when he was holding forth on the convention platform or factory floor or at a civil rights rally, binding spells onto his listeners out of the divine afflatus...

...It was that exploit plus his civil rights speech at the 1948 convention that gained him the support of the Americans for Democratic Action...

...HHH came by his politics naturally, having grown up in South Dakota villages where the prairie populism of the Non-Partisan League and, across the border in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party had cut inroads to the stolid Republicanism of the upper Middle West...

...In short, the course FDR's New Deal had set in the 1930s still held fast for HHH well into the seventies, revised only to encompass grander schemes, with LBJ's Great Society as the neplus ultra...

...During the 1950s, HHH moved to the forefront of American liberalism, attracting his own set of special constituencies that ranged beyond the borders of Minnesota-labor unions, Zionists, small business, agriculture (both working farmers and agri-businessmen), academic liberals, and, of course, the ADA...

...He bustled about their several errands, pushing conglomerated liberalism far beyond the populism of Bryan and enlarging it from that of FDR...

...Tracing the influences of family, small towns, and rural life on HHH's character, Mr...

...HHH's loyalty to his leader-which LBJ had demanded as the vice presidency's quid pro quo- reveals just such a flaw, a tormenting need to court the President's favor, even at the cost of self-respect...

...Winning a political science fellowship to Louisiana State University, where his master's thesis was "The Political Philosophy of the New Deal," HHH saw for himself what segregation was like: "Why, it's uneconomic...

...His oratory held sway through a peculiar, follow-the-bouncing-ball rhythm, rising, falling, speeding up, slowing down, bounding back, leaping forward...

...Curiously enough, HHH's tragic flaw-perhaps pathetic is more accurate-was not hubris, but false humility, self-abasement as a means to what seemed a higher end...

...Once more at home he tried, at some cost to his health, to come to terms with his demanding father, married Muriel Buck, and at the age of 26 made his way back to Minnesota to continue his studies (under the mentorship of Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane...

...His own family's hardships brought him home from the University of Minnesota to help run his father's drugstore...

...Solberg suggests HHH may have developed such habits in the relationship with his father, but spares the reader the murkier suppositions of psychobiography...

...To understate the significance of his one surpassing talent is to undervalue the historic worth of the man, so much was he a creature of the performance and of the moment...

...What Mr...

...For all the persons he called his close friends, he was strangely friendless, incapable of devoting enough of himself to sustain friendships of true depth...

...Maybe so...

...Of a certainty, there was more than sufficient pride in him...

...As the White House's chief apologist, he was scourged by the liberal cohorts for apostasy...

...The people know that Stevenson can think their thinking for them...

...The image is still vivid: lofty forehead gleaming like a Disney whale, dark eyebrows circumflexed, jaw ajut, wattles aquiver, eyes darting, smile too eager...

...His admiration for Henry Wallace, Popular Front and all, underscored his readiness to make allowances for wayward factions...

...He lost his first race for mayor of Minneapolis in 1945, but two years later won the office going away...

...Norton/$19.95 Kent Owen The name reverberates like a steam calliope in heat: Hubert Horatio Humphrey...

...Instead, his speeches released bursts of swelling energy, cantorial surges of passionate appeal, often operatic in force and duration...

...If there is a single error a politician must not make, it is to show he has failed to understand his own times, no matter how out of joint they may be...

...In light of his relentless drive toward statist solutions, HHH was essentially a socialist in all but name...

...Even in memory he remains urgently earnest and vaguely comic, the pre-eminent champion of American liberalism...

...then an eagerness to gain acceptance and to show he knew his place...

...Who can ever know what confusion of motives wracked the mind of HHH...

...Not until HHH had proved capable of mastering the intricacies of a tax bill and of having the patience and savvy to maneuver it through, did he gain the respectful attention of his elders...

...However, the question remains throughout (most pointedly in the relationship with Lyndon Johnson): Did HHH himself take the initiative in such causes, or did he act only when pressed by others...

...Solberg, he was inadequately prepared to deal competently with foreign affairs, a field in which his facility of quick study was less serviceable...

...Solberg is evidently willing to make that admission, so long as it be noted that HHH's own form bore the features of prairie populism...

...Solberg offers a frank assessment: "At fifty-seven, the man who had always been ahead of his time had been overtaken by changing attitudes and opinions...

...otherwise, his drive to succeed would never have impelled him to pursue the presidency as fitfully as he did...

...Hoping for a career in college teaching, he returned to Minnesota and took charge of a WPA adult education program, and as one thing led to another, he was soon off and running in politics...

...Solberg thinks HHH virtually invented the modern Democratic senator...

...No matter how much one wishes to respect his achievements and bountiful goodwill, there is the perhaps ungenerous feeling that his expan-siveness was, after all, excess and his undoing...

...When it became apparent he was dying of cancer, his courage" and steadfastness set a noble example that exalted him above the decent respect occasioned by the circumstances...

...Even if HHH was not the first to carry on so, he was among the first to have regular and ready access to the news media on a nation-spanning scale and, more important, to extend his influence through them...

...It is odd Mr...

...But HHH was nerved to lead the crusade that reclaimed the citadel...

...Perhaps it is enough to say that he tried to do the principled thing, according to his lights...

...If liberalism's original strength, under the old English dispensation, was the appeal to reason, HHH gave it blaring passion, which, in turn,, made it hectip and diffuse...

...Writing to William Benton, one of his mentors, he reviewed the Democratic campaign of 1952: "Politics is a strange admixture of mind and body, of ideas and guts...

...On the basis of Mr...

...then a willingness to make accommodations...

...It applies to his sponsorship of the Communist Control Act of 1954, which was in part the result of his skirmishes with the Minnesota Reds in the DFL ten years before...

...For a freshman he was hardly inconspicuous: "In all, he offered 57 bills and joint resolutions, in his first year in the Senate, inserted 180 items in the Congressional Record, from blue babies to river parkways, and spoke on 450 topics...

...In a Senate lorded over by the likes of Richard Russell, Tom Connally, Walter George, Arthur Vandenberg, and Robert Taft, there was little sympathy for an upstart in an unsafe seat...

...Sorry a tale as it is to tell, HHH let himself be used by the masterful deceiver...

...The question is, does he 'feel' for them...

...In the main, domestic issues claimed HHH's enthusiasm, for he knew, according to Mr...

...Solberg presents is as much a case study of the political vocation in twentieth-century America as it is an account of the career and personal history of a very public man...

...To his lasting regret, he dropped his initial resistance to the United States' expanded involvement in Vietnam and, under LBJ's bullying, became the administration's mouthpiece (Mr...

...Nonetheless, there are traces in his earlier dealings in the mid-forties when the Communists took over the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, and HHH at first "worked comfortably with the Communists and their sympathizers...

...All to no avail...

...Speech titles cannot begin to suggest the forensic devices and techniques he used to such powerful advantage...

...At least he fashioned a style of holding the office that was first all his own and later imitated by such epigones as Fred Harris, Birch Bayh, George McGovern, Walter Mon-dale, and, perhaps, Ted Kennedy...

...Summing up the Humphrey of 1968, Mr...

...And there is nothing quite so passe as last year's liberal...

...Whatever his critics and opponents may have charged against him, it was neither arrogance nor hypocrisy that brought him down...

...The voice itself cut across the words with a strident rasp, only to ease into a parlor-organ glide...

...Solberg's word) for whatever policy the President found expedient...

...Solberg does not pay more attention to HHH as a public speaker, especially to the characteristic features of his rhetoric and delivery...

...All the same, HHH was admired for his liberality of spirit, a quality of no small merit, given the plethora of the meager-hearted in public life...

...Only a few politicians of the presentday have made their marks as orators, and HHH was decidedly foremost among them...

...Then in 1948, HHH startled the Democratic convention with a compelling speech on civil rights (arguably the best he ever made, probably the shortest), and that fall at age 37 was elected to the United States Senate...

...Solberg's evidence, one may infer that HHH subordinated his judgment to LBJ's will, not primarily to strengthen his own chances for the presidency, but to keep his word to LBJ and thus to act in the national interest, insofar as that interest was defined by the President...

...Norwegian pioneer stock, an orthodox churchwoman, and a practicing Republican, if not rock-ribbed, at least bone-corseted...

...What HHH brought to the Senate was an agenda of social and economic initiatives, which, however haphazardly pieced together over the course of a long career, amounted to the approved syllabus of American liberalism: health, welfare, civil rights, education, housing, employment, disarmament, foreign affairs...

...It was HHH's litany of good intentions, eventually to be willed to Mondale and Kennedy...

...then a reassertion of himself, but in concert with well-cultivated allies...

...If he could stir a church full of Norwegian Lutherans in the farmlands of Minnesota, he knew he could uplift any audience, save the Union League of Philadelphia...

...Buoyant and indefatigably cheerful, to the end he radiated a gallant goodness...

...One can only guess at what misadventures and false alarms might have beset a Humphrey Administration...

...Tirelessly energetic, quick to play Johnny-jump-up at the sight of microphone or camera, morally earnest about any number of issues, eagerly available to an array of special interests, adept at the mechanics of legislation- these are indeed the marks of the model major senator...

...Solberg probes the relationships between LBJ as President and HHH as Vice President in so thorough a way there can be no doubt of the humiliations and manipulations alleged against the Texan...

...By HHH's frequent admission, the hard times marked him for life and spurred his fight for economic security: He had learned how cruelly the forces of nature and the market could smash across even the most tranquil and isolated places to impoverish whole families...

...Yet he was rarely eloquent in the classic tradition-stately phrases, balanced Ciceronian periods, controlled modulations of timbre, tone, and stress...

...Carl Solberg, formerly of Time and a sometime visiting scholar in Columbia's history department, has resisted that course in his evenhanded, thoroughgoing, and agreeably written biography, the best so far of HHH...

...He sounded out of date...

...Solberg places him tellingly against the backgrounds of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl-producing droughts...