Mixed Achievement

...Humphrey simply could not bring himself to believe that his opponent was aware of these clandestine intrigues...

...After complex maneuvering to soften Humphrey's original language, Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, one of the most disgraceful invasions of individual freedom in our history...

...He endured agonizing radiation and chemotherapy...

...Knowing that the only hope of passage depended on breaking down the usual Southern filibuster, he adroitly played upon the vanity of Illinois' Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, then the Senate Republican leader, generously shoveling credit in his direction, and in the end enlisted enough Republicans to push through the first important piece of civil rights legislation since the 1870s...

...Separate operations removed his bladder and colon...

...At the start of 1965 he was assigned the task of thanking rich contributors to the President's Club and putting the bite on them for an additional thousand dollars to renew membership . The business media were quick to note the mellowing of yesterday's populist...

...Still, Humphrey was intensely ambitious, having been bitten early in his career by the Presidential bug...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Only one statute has Hubert Humphrey's name attached to it: the Humphrey-Hawkins Balanced-Growth and Full-Employment Act, which became a dead letter on the day in 1978 that Jimmy Carter, with minimal enthusiasm, signed it...

...The furthest Humphrey was willing to go—his Salt Lake City speech, where he hesitantly separated his future policy from LBJ's —immediately evoked a favorable surge in the polls...

...He pushed the idea of food stamps from the early 1950s until its endorsement by Congress in 1964...

...Major achievements of the Kennedy years— such as the Peace Corps, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty—originated in earlier Humphrey initiatives...

...it did not...

...Humphrey's purely political accomplishments were considerable as well...

...Humphrey's decline began on the day that Johnson tapped him for the Vice Presidency—after dangling it before Minnesota's junior Senator, Eugene McCarthy...

...A good man himself, Humphrey thought the best of his friends and enemies . In his 1968 campaign for the Presidency he declined to harry Richard M. Nixon with the evidence that Anna Chen-nault, in collusion with the GOP campaign, was advising the South Vietnamese government to block the Paris peace negotiations because Nixon would give them a better deal...

...But the provision also gave enough blacks and liberal whites reason to stick with the Democrats (rather than defect to the Progressive Party's Henry Wallace), enabling Truman to edge out the overwhelming favorite, New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey...

...Fearing no retribution from Humphrey, his friends and associates seldom hesitated to support opponents or oppose measures he favored...

...As Theodore White put it, "I know of no more essentially decent story in American politics than Humphrey's refusal to [exploit this...

...Unhappily, this decent but pliable man never completely liberated himself from a domineering father and seems to have adopted Johnson as a parental surrogate...

...Eventually, of course, Lyndon Johnson gave Humphrey his Vice Presidential opportunity...

...and he responded, "I've changed...

...I've become more tolerant, too...

...Whatever his lapses of political courage, he bore his medical afflictions with exemplary fortitude...

...and would have forbidden them had he known...

...His lesson learned, Humphrey became a vociferous hawk...

...Carl Solberg, the author of this excellent biography, plausibly argues that his subj ect' s fiery oratory at the 1948 Democratic Convention won that year's Presidential election for Harry Truman...

...Even in 1968 he could not bring himself to break with Johnson's bankrupt course, although his advisers unanimously insisted that unless he cut his ties to the White House Nixon would surely win the election...

...When you come up the hard way, as I did, you become a bit brittle...

...His greatest moment was his masterly management of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...

...Fortune asked, "What's new about Humphrey...

...I've become more prudent...

...Numerous Great Society programs bore his imprint, among them Medicare, the Job Corps and the expansion of Federal aid to education...

...As Vice President, in obedience to orders from on high, he became LBJ's ambassador to big business...

...If submissiveness before dominant personalities was a major flaw in Humphrey's character, a second, equally serious foible was his yearning for popularity...

...It should have encouraged Humphrey to go further...

...After living most of his life modestly, he died modestly well-to-do...

...Chennault's activities...

...No doubt Humphrey spoke too long and too often— partly because he needed the fees to support his family—yet as this triumph shows, he was among the most forceful and inspiring orators of his generation...

...Then he proceeded to play it himself by introducing a measure more extreme than any the Republicans had advocated—one that actually made membership in the party a crime...

...Humphrey was famous, too, for forgiving those who let him down or double-crossed him...

...Then, when life has been good to you, you become more tolerant...

...The tale is all the sadder because in 1965 Humphrey wrote Johnson a private memorandum against bombing North Vietnam...

...had no hand in them...

...This was not the only time Humphrey's desire for approval led him down the garden path...

...In politics, as Solberg sorrowfully points out, sweetness of disposition is seldom a source of strength...

...He was deeply disappointed in 1956, when Adlai Stevenson, after a bit of characteristic dithering, decided not to name him as his running mate and instead left the choice to the convention—producing a close contest that saw Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver prevail over John F. Kennedy...

...He leaves me with the impression that Humphrey made a marvelous Senator and would probably have been a disappointing Chief Executive...

...It was his cheerleading for the Vietnam War that saddened his liberal friends, alienated him from the young and defeated him in 1968...

...Yet its author was one of the most creative legislators in American history...

...The domineering former Majority Leader of the Upper House had helped turn the brash prairie rebel into an insider, had used him as a bridge to the liberals, and had taught him the art of compromise as well as how to derive nourishment from half loaves...

...Admittedly, the tough race-relations plank Humphrey forced into the party's platform drove out the Dixiecrats and cost Truman four Southern states...

...This document so enraged its recipient that for many months Johnson—a sadist of rare virtuosity— excluded his Vice President from meetings of the National Security Council and other important bodies...

...He writes with no great literary distinction, but much of his information is new, and his judgments are sympathetic yet firm...

...In August 1954, at the height of the witch hunt that was going on, Humphrey shouted, "I am tired of having people play the Communist issue...

...his instinct was that Richard Nixon, personally, had no knowledge of Mrs...

...Solberg has produced a splendid political biography...

...Humphrey's final years were frustrating and physically painful...