Hubert Humphrey in Mid-Passage
Shannon, William V.
Hubert Humphrey in Mid-Passage by WILLIAM V. SHANNON Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, now 47 and a veteran of ten years in national politics, is no longer the boy wonder of the Senate. One...
...Johnson's case rested on the premise that it was time for a temporary truce in the North-South cold war within the Democratic Party...
...He would leave no doubts where he stood...
...The liberal bloc cannot remotely match the cohesiveness of the 20 or so members of the Southern bloc, held rigidly together by the racial totem...
...The critical test came once again on civil rights, the perpetual moral and political battlefield of our generation...
...Humphrey has related his disarmament studies to the riddle of China policy...
...There are other men of high stature who rival or surpass Humphrey in certain ways...
...A man of awesome energy, he has such zest and verbal fluency that he makes others in a room seem tongue-tied or the victims of "tired blood...
...Liberals in the Senate are like liberals everywhere...
...What would be gained for civil rights if he sacrificed his personal ambitions in a hopeless sortie...
...Imbued with confidence by Stevenson's encouragement, Humphrey on the spur of the moment and with almost no organization decided to make a try for it...
...This involved no change of heart for him...
...What is more, he will be up between seven and eight the next morning ready to start the same routine again...
...It subjected him to some severe criticism in the ADA (an organization of which he is a former national chairman and for which he is a perennial banquet orator) and in other circles...
...The platform was acceptable to Kennedy and Kefauver, his principal rivals, and to Stevenson...
...How, he has asked, can we have an enforceable nuclear test ban or a disarmament agreement of any kind with the Communist bloc if mainland China is not included...
...Notwithstanding the adverse reaction this maneuver aroused, Humphrey decided after the 1954 elections (in which the Democrats recaptured Congress and in which Humphrey was decisively reelected) to try the experiment of a collaboration...
...It is not generally realized, for example, that as a subcommittee chairman in the Government Operations Committee, he has presided in the hearings and handled on the floor all of the Hoover Commission reorganization plans of the last four years...
...His persistent aspiration toward this dusty and anomalous office may at first seem odd, but it is consistent with Humphrey's unremitting instinct to educate, to uplift, to convert, to persuade...
...His critics remarked bitterly that Humphrey had suppressed his views in hopes of winning Southern support for the Vice Presidential nomination...
...He has had much to do with keeping alive the pressure for a ban on nuclear testing to which the Eisenhower Administration recently acceded, two years after Adlai Stevenson proposed it...
...In the past, Democratic floor leaders had shunted the Northerners into the Senate Labor and Education Committee, which became a liberal ghetto...
...The bill which passed after elaborate, cynical maneuvers by both parties was clearly a pre-election gesture made by the Democrats to defend themselves against the Nixon-McCarthy charge of being "soft on communism...
...he does not, for example, have the formidable intellectual strength and singleness of purpose of Paul Douglas of Illinois nor the personal glamour of John Kennedy of Massachusetts...
...On his side, Humphrey could point to some tangible gains for the liberals deriving from his willingness not to rock the boat in public...
...He pushed for the creation of the Disarmament Subcommittee and has headed it since its inception...
...If none of them was willing to force an open fight, why should he...
...He made it a point to consult with Humphrey on big issues and small...
...The man Johnson sought would have to be authentically representative of the liberal Northern group and not a straddler or a modern doughface...
...The members of the press, tending to be camp followers of success, have largely ignored the patently disadvantaged liberals...
...On a routine day, he will dictate correspondence, attend a committee meeting or two, and film a television interview before lunch, make an appearance on the Senate floor for a few brisk remarks, partake in a colloquy with two or three newsmen while returning to his office to greet constituents, fly out of town to address a convention banquet, tour the hotel rooms shaking hands with convention delegates, and wind up around midnight in some smoke-filled caucus room where he will go strong for another couple of hours...
...Security Council to India...
...If that amendment had carried, the United States would not have found itself in the autumn of 1958 committed to the defense of these indefensible and valueless islands...
...Johnson and Humphrey came to the Senate together in 1949 and are almost exactly the same age...
...Is he not perhaps too sanguine about the ultimate reasonableness of the Russian and Chinese rulers...
...He has never made any secret of his desire to be Vice President and he remains a willing candidate for the office in 1960...
...The liberals polled 38 votes for a rules change, and three absent members went on record in the affirmative...
...Stevenson, eager to have the convention decide a real and not a sham Vice Presidential race, may well have expressed similar words of encouragement to Senator Kennedy, Senator Kefauver, and others...
...He urged Humphrey to enter the contest and assured him he was not only acceptable but in many ways his preferred candidate...
...he would have to stand ideologically at the core of his faction much as Senator Richard Russell of Georgia typifies the Southern bloc...
...As a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Humphrey has been tireless in pressing alternatives to the policies of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles...
...There followed a concerted campaign of personal courting on Johnson's part of his Minnesota colleague...
...Humphrey had helped lead the first assault on Rule 22 in 1953 when an unsuccessful attempt drew 21 votes...
...It was only the visible manifestation of a more subtle and increasingly cordial cooperation between Johnson and Humphrey on a wide range of issues...
...The exchange, Humphrey argued, was not all one way...
...Humphrey is an engaging person in other ways...
...Humphrey has never quite caught on with the national audience in the way that his exceptional energies and abilities would warrant...
...Johnson's cultivation of Humphrey was unflagging...
...It played an important part in helping him persuade recalcitrant Southerners to forego a filibuster against the right-to-vote bill several months later...
...It reached a crescendo at the 1956 Democratic convention when Humphrey refused to join the abortive struggle to amend the platform's civil rights plank in a floor fight...
...Leaving aside these imponderables, however, Humphrey, among all practicing politicians of the first-rank, has demonstrated one of the liveliest, most inquiring, and acute intellects...
...He has written and spoken on behalf of a more affirmative program in the Middle East both before and after the Iraq revolution last July disclosed there was something very much wrong with the Administration's policies in that area...
...in another, less secular age, this former college professor and crack debater might well have become a religious missionary...
...One of his party's most reasonable and effective spokesmen on foreign policy issues, the leader in formulating disarmament policy, an important strategist in both the farm and labor blocs, a durable battler for civil rights, and the leader of the party organization in his home state, Humphrey has become one of the half-dozen movers and shapers of the Democratic Party...
...Concerning India itself, he has proposed that the United States make available a low-interest loan of $900,-000,000 to meet the 1958-59 deficits in the present five-year plan...
...On the other hand, he has a relatively clear, uncomplicated picture of the good society and what he ought to do to help bring it about...
...they tend to be a cantankerous, independent breed, free with advice and not easy to lead in any given direction at any given moment...
...If he had joined the short-lived rebellion against the civil rights plank, Humphrey would have destroyed this Vice Presidential effort...
...Humphrey, by solid, day-in-and-day-out hard work, continued to grow in respect and influence among his colleagues...
...But perhaps for these very reasons, he is best-fitted to quarterback and captain the liberals in their legislative maneuvers and political planning...
...Herbert Lehman, then a Senator from New York, wanted to make another attempt in 1955, to "make a record" and develop a tradition of militancy on this question even though he and his liberal colleagues were well aware any such effort would be foredoomed to failure...
...It is worth taking the measure of Humphrey at this point in mid-career because he is the most experienced and most effective politician that the Northern liberal wing of the party has in the Senate...
...Humphrey's Vice Presidential ambitions in 1956 were rekindled the night of July 3 after he and other party leaders had attended a farewell dinner in honor of Senator Walter George, then about to retire...
...There are ambiguities and uncertain implications in some of Humphrey's foreign policy judgments and proposals...
...Moreover, Humphrey felt he could claim credit for seeing to it that Johnson followed through on his promises to bring up the Niagara public power bill sponsored by Lehman and the Hells Canyon bill ardently desired by several Western Senators...
...He is an unreconstructed liberal with few doubts or hesitations...
...Willard Edwards, in a typically joshing but not wholly unfriendly article, wrote in the Chicago Tribune last April that Humphrey in one week in February rose to talk about the following: disarmament, the recession (repeatedly), Hoover Commission reports, dairy supports, disaster loans...
...When the new Senate convened in January, 1957, Humphrey was in the vanguard of those fighting for revision of Rule 22...
...This accommodation to Johnson's desires for intra-party harmony started off the 84th Congress of 1955-56 in smooth style...
...With his experience in the House in the 1930's, Johnson has a fund of Roosevelt and WIltlAM V. SHANNON is chief of the Washington bureau of the New York Post...
...The bill was subject to criticism on two grounds: as a practical matter, it was unnecessary and would do no good...
...This decision represented one of the major turning points in Hubert Humphrey's career...
...New Deal associations and memories on which he could draw to establish psychological common ground with Humphrey, an enthusiastic and almost self-conscious protagonist of the Roosevelt-New Deal tradition...
...Humphrey was in the thick of the complex backstage negotiations with Vice President Nixon which preceded the latter's advisory opinion in favor of the liberals on the key parliamentary question...
...He functions at high efficiency because his personal ambition gives an edge to his ideals while his ideals, happily vivid and unspoiled, provide the gusty enthusiasm that refreshes a man convinced he is doing the Lord's work...
...The first evidence that Humphrey had been influenced by Johnson's arguments came near the end of the 83rd Congress in August, 1954 when he sponsored an ill-considered proposal to outlaw the Communist Party by name...
...The necessary qualifications were two...
...If the Democrats put up a united front and demonstrated they could help run the country in a dignified, responsible fashion, Johnson contended they would be restored to power much sooner than otherwise...
...Secondly, he would have to be wholly a political man, ambitious, industrious, and fully engaged in his work...
...The wounds opened by the Truman Civil Rights Report of 1948 and the platform battle in the Democratic convention that year (in which Humphrey had played a leading part) should be allowed to heal...
...The mood of the convention was obviously one of North-South harmony...
...One of the clearest proofs of his importance is the attention which is paid to him by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, an exceptionally astute judge of the relative strengths and weaknesses of men and factions...
...Humphrey, a realist, knows that Presidential candidates pick their running mates...
...Johnson and Humphrey also collaborated to build a productive record for the 1955-56 Senate on domestic economic legislation...
...If a private talk seemed desirable, Johnson usually went to Humphrey's office rather than have the latter come to him...
...This more aggressive course had the support of organizations such as Americans for Democratic Action and the industrial unions, groups which form a part of Humphrey's natural constituency as a liberal political leader...
...On the one hand, he wants power, likes to run things, is competitive and ambitious...
...This was not 1948 and the young Lancelot of that civil rights triumph was now keeping discreetly to his tent...
...He affords that always engaging spectacle: a public man who has brains and is not afraid to use them...
...Humphrey's refusal to participate dulled the appetite for battle among other Northern liberals and killed the attempt...
...Against this Johnson strategy, there was the argument that the party should, so to speak, move to the left, develop clear-cut alternatives to the Eisenhower policies, and maintain an attitude of unrelenting militancy...
...Humphrey has for some time argued the desirability of writing off the Chiang Kai-shek government and attempting to transfer China's permanent seat on the U.N...
...From time to time, he firmly and persuasively argued his case...
...Whether his liberal critics were justified or not, he resolved to disarm them...
...The criticism, however, did not abate...
...With his party's strength strongly on the rise, Humphrey is strategically placed to affect its choice of candidates in 1960 and to influence national policy in the years just ahead...
...Following 'the dinner Adlai Stevenson, established by his California primary victory as the almost certain nominee, told Humphrey of his secret decision to throw the Vice Presidential nomination open for decision by the delegates...
...He had won nothing, and his liberal reputation had been somewhat dimmed...
...The 1957-58 Congress, despite its failures to do much in education and in housing, produced some substantial achievements...
...That harsh verdict did Humphrey something less than justice...
...The ceaseless drive is generated from within...
...In 1955, and again in 1957, Johnson—with Humphrey doing most of the private haggling on behalf of the Northerners —assigned Northerners in a reasonably fair manner to all the major committees...
...it originates in a happy union (less common among major politicians than one might expect) of the ego and the dream...
...As the only Democrat from a big grain-producing state, Humphrey has also been active and influential in the laborious struggles between Congress and Agriculture Secretary Benson over the last two farm bills...
...This appeared to be Humphrey's reasoning during the crisis days of the convention...
...For all his admirable hard-headedness in domestic politics, may he not be underestimating their Satanic lust for world overlordship...
...Looking over the badly-thinned ranks of the Northern Senate Democrats in 1953, Johnson had no doubt that Humphrey was his man...
...He had modulated his expression of his civil rights views in 1955-56, but he had not changed those views...
...One immediate and symbolically portentous result of Humphrey's decision was the failure of the liberal Democrats to renew the struggle to overturn Rule 22, which protects filibusters, on the opening day of the new Congress in 1955...
...One reason is that he is a liberal, and for most of his decade in the Senate it has been winter season for liberalism...
...In 1955, Humphrey was one of the far-sighted 13 who bravely voted for the amendment striking Quemoy and Matsu from the Formosa resolution...
...since Johnson was not a leading Presidential possibility, the nomination for second place was not within his power to bestow...
...From the moment he took office as leader of the minority Democrats in the Senate of 1953-54, Johnson was in search of a politician in the Northern wing of his party with whom he could do business...
...His latent ambition for the Vice Presidency, however, sprang to life only a few weeks before the convention and is not an adequate explanation for his alliance with Johnson during the preceding 18 months...
...Although on most issues the de facto liberal leader, Humphrey does not, of course, have any recognized formal status...
...This overall showing of 41 votes, nearly double the 1953 result, forced Johnson's hand on the civil rights issue...
...while as a symbol, it set the unwise precedent of banning what was nominally a political party...
...The outcome was another victory for the South, but a pyrrhic one...
...no "dinner party Senator" or easy-going hack would suffice for the kind of serious partnership Johnson had in mind...
...The Middle East Economic Development Authority which Humphrey has long advocated and which President Eisenhower belatedly and reluctantly took up last summer seems to have been from the first a more promising gambit than Secretary Dulles' Bagdad Pact...
...Although his role is informal and the size of his following is variable, Humphrey's power is nevertheless real and substantial...
...Since Humphrey could not be ignored, many have patronized him by writing up one of the most serious and consequential political personalities of the day as a faintly comic figure of garrulousness, cock-sureness, and the apparently mortal Senatorial sin of "spreading himself too thin...
...Humphrey could readily see that the 1956 convention was for him a debacle...
...If his 1956 performance did not have the pristine drama and simple moral appeal of his insurgency eight years earlier, it was nevertheless not, in realistic terms, in any sense really discreditable, and in human terms it was wholly understandable...
...Humphrey, increasingly of late, has made his impact in the field of foreign affairs...
Vol. 22 • December 1958 • No. 12
