HUMPHREY at war with himself
Wechsler, James A.
HUMPHREY at war with himself by JAMES A. WECHSLER TJerhaps the place to begin is at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. I arrived there late on a Sunday afternoon, on the eve of the...
...He has also been sensitive for many years to the dead-end futility of our Chinese exclusionary policy (and he has begun to say so again...
...Too much is still buried in the secret archives to offer a definitive reply...
...One is that Humphrey risked his political future (as he had sixteen years before at the Democratic convention of 1948) in the cause of civil rights...
...No purpose will be served at this late date by rehearsing the factional details...
...The "battle of Mississippi" was looming as the largest and stormiest business of the convention...
...I do come to some instinctive conclusions...
...But I cannot lightly dismiss the solemnity— indeed, the agony—with which he has grappled with the problem...
...In my own judgment two points emerge clearly from those long hours...
...In retrospect I think he may one day look back on this era with the same pain he has confessed over his advocacy of oppressive "anti-Communist" legislation at one juncture during the McCarthy era, when he argued that liberals could clear the air only by, in effect, helping to poison it...
...Whatever happens, it seems to me both minimal wisdom and humanity to recognize in his present predicament the element of tragedy rather than burlesque...
...but neither can his life be glibly written off by those on whose side he has fought so many worthy battles...
...Another is that he is deeply and genuinely resentful of what he regards as a misreading of his own motives...
...I don't know whether I'll ever be President," he told a friend not long ago...
...For myself, the question of what happened to our civilization many years ago is more pertinent and meaningful, and I find no simple answers in the cruel taunts of the anti-Humphrey satirists...
...If the war drags on interminably and inconclusively, or if some sudden, hideous escalation beyond our present imaginings should occur, Humphrey could be a major political casualty...
...Yet at times he seems a man at war with himself—capable of remarkable sophistication and insight in confronting the perils of the nuclear age and then, on another afternoon, reiterating the rigid cliches of Ruskism (so reminiscent of the Dullesisms he used to denounce...
...The question repeatedly raised is why he has so often felt obliged to defend the Administration's course in intemperate terms, to seem more Johnsonian than Johnson, and, on some days, to manifest impatience and disdain for critics...
...At many moments I have found him sadly unconvincing on the merits (as when he has tried to substantiate the view that Saigon is the London of 1940 or the Prague of 1938, or that General Ky bears some resemblance to the young mayor of Minneapolis resisting local Communist machinations in the mid-1940's...
...safe...
...The nomination of Lyndon B. Johnson was, of course, assured...
...Nevertheless he remains, in my own image of him, a warm, sentimental, serious man, graced with vast energies and spirited intellect...
...But anyone familiar with political conventions knows that it is absurd to talk of sure things when an incumbent President is picking his running mate...
...Despite all the abuse—and rational criticism—he has received from some liberals, he must still be viewed by the President as a sort of "Mr...
...I do know that I'm as close to it as any man can be, and there are no games I can play to make it more or less likely...
...Among his books are "The Age of Suspicion" and "Reflections of an Angry Middle-Aged Editor...
...ADA" in the White House...
...is fashionable in many avant garde places these days...
...Humphrey understands better than many men the nature of the ferment that drives the desperate and sick and lonely of the world into the arms of the Communists...
...When it is finally written, one of the harsh questions that may be asked is why Humphrey has been unable to assemble and preserve the kind of staff that might have spared him some of his more vulnerable moments, and why he tends to lean heavily on so-called "practical men...
...He is surely alive and responsive to the revolutionary upsurge sweeping much of the underprivileged world...
...Perhaps such reports were an injustice to the President, but they gained growing credence in the tense atmosphere surrounding the Mississippi quarrel...
...While the Mississippi Freedom Party contingent inexplicably insisted upon depicting an historic breakthrough (which resulted in the flight of the segregationist delegates) as a form of dubious compromise, such veteran civil rights militants as Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and Bayard Rustin had no doubt about the real dimensions of the victory...
...that Mr...
...He had traveled a long, rough road, but this seemed at last his destination in the aftermath of the ruthless accident of history that ended the life of John F. Kennedy and elevated Johnson to the Presidency...
...But most of us did not assert that this disaster rendered all the works of the New Deal inconsequential...
...Whatever speculation and uncertainty remained concerned the choice of his running mate, and most of the politicos deemed Hubert Humphrey the overwhelming favorite...
...Perhaps I have underestimated the complexities of his tenure as Vice President...
...Without violating confidences or exaggerating intimacies, I may legitimately say that I have watched and listened to him in private sessions at which he endeavored to rebut criticism of his Vietnam positions...
...This does not mean, of course, that any Vice President could publicly and aggressively challenge the President's position on large world affairs...
...It may be said that the odds were on his side...
...He did not lead us into Vietnam, and, much as I wish he had muted his tones at many moments, or offered some visible creative initiatives I do not see how he could have single-handedly altered the melancholy history of these long months...
...It is my feeling that ADA would have dishonored itself if it had not extended so congenial a welcome to him at its convention last April despite its disagreement with him on Vietnam...
...he supported a solution to the Mississippi crisis that significantly broke the power of the racists at this and future Democratic conventions...
...He did so at a moment when some of his more timid counsellors were imploring him to play it JAMES A. WECHSLER is editor of the editorial page of the New York Post...
...In the interim he cannot ask immunity from criticism...
...One is that Humphrey is utterly persuaded of the authenticity of the President's desire for an honorable peace (even while recognizing perhaps belatedly that some opportunities may have been missed...
...During the early phase of the post-election period, Humphrey apparently occupied a negligible place in foreign policy discussions...
...Yet there was still suspense in the air...
...In the end, a minor political revolution was wrought...
...For many days the word had been whispered that Humphrey had been assigned the delicate task of conciliation, and that his own selection as the President's running mate might be upset if the conflict got out of control...
...his assignments seemed largely confined to home-front legislative matters...
...But he would hardly be alone...
...I assume it was Humphrey's way of saying that no requirements of his office—or any calculations about 1972 —have obliged him to recite what even many of his admirers regard as a surplus of self-righteous rhetoric on Vietnam...
...Some of the same men had vainly tried, on many previous occasions, to persuade him to sever his ties with Americans for Democratic Action...
...It was at the time of the U.S...
...At times I have wondered whether he suffered from a lack of respect for his own best instincts...
...The story circulated through the lobbies and corridors in various forms...
...What is hardest to reconcile is his "fox-in-the-chicken-coop" thrust at Senator Robert Kennedy's proposals for a negotiated settlement with the seeming earnestness of his own quest for a tolerable way out of the deadlock...
...It happens that I hold no brief for most of what he has said and done in the public phases of the Vietnam debate...
...The crudest version was that "LBJ has told Hubert it's up to him to handle the liberals"—with the implied suggestion that failure in this mission would undermine and perhaps destroy his credentials for the number two post...
...Was it fully tried...
...whether he is right or wrong or somewhere in between, Humphrey is a man who feels a deep compulsion to believe what he says he believes...
...At one point the President was reported to have remarked: "We're going to try it Hubert's way now...
...The story is told now as part of an effort to place the Humphrey controversy in perspective...
...Johnson could have chosen Senator Thomas Dodd (as he seemed capriciously prepared to do at one belated moment) and gotten away with it, especially in view of the identity of his Republican opponent...
...Certainly Humphrey was convinced that a real effort was made but that Hanoi and the Vietcong felt no disposition to negotiate as long as the tide of battle seemed favorable to them...
...Mercifully and miraculously the war in Vietnam may somehow end before the tragedy is fatally compounded...
...But I would hardly equate the two matters...
...What I do contest is the oversimplified devil-image of Humphrey now so widely promoted in liberal areas...
...I think he has been enduring a rough time, but I am also old enough to remember the high moments as well as the disappointing ones...
...Anyone who has followed his career can cite limitless chapter and verse from his own speeches...
...As Robert Bendiner recently noted, there was a President named Franklin D. Roosevelt who denied the Spanish republic the chance to fight for its life...
...and the reply was, "No, was I supposed to...
...At times one almost had the sense that he construed the rebuffs we encountered as a personal affront, and a blow to his future usefulness...
...but on another day he will produce conventional tributes to the simple glories of the free enterprise system that sound like something delivered at a Rotary Club luncheon in George Babbitt's heyday...
...Johnson had given so many earlier indications to liberal and labor spokesmen of his preference for Humphrey that he could no longer back away without inviting a massive upheaval...
...The song Whatever Became of Hubert...
...This starting-point will assume the aspect of apologia in the minds of those who have exiled Humphrey from the liberal community because of his pronouncements on Vietnam...
...I have no secret answer nor do I consider myself qualified to engage in an extended psychoanalytic study...
...I arrived there late on a Sunday afternoon, on the eve of the sessions...
...peace offensive" in Vietnam that his voice seemed to acquire more meaningful status in the diplomatic area...
...And there may well have been times when he has been pointedly reminded by his chief of his inability to keep his old liberal constituents in line...
...The plain truth is that Mr...
...There may be another clue relevant to the record...
...Among the younger set a favorite story goes that the President and Humphrey were attending a dinner when LBJ suddenly whispered to him, "Hubert, did I hear you belch...
...Above all, let him not be dismissed as a simple, scheming man, as John and Robert Kennedy were so prematurely and mistakenly excommunicated by liberal purists...
...Some of Humphrey's most ardent supporters were quietly pleading for a cease-fire on the ground that his designation for second place on the ticket would matter more to the cause of civil rights in the long run than any parliamentary triumph over Mississippi's segregationist bloc...
...Did Dean Rusk have his heart in the effort, or was his State Department permeated with self-defeating skepticism from the start...
...Nothing outrages him more than the suggestion that his words are coldly dictated by the prospective politics of 1972...
...All that I can report with certitude is that, during the fateful interval which might well have involved his political life and death, Humphrey never asked the civil rights leaders to retreat to favor his private fortunes...
...But that is surely not the whole story...
...We may then have the chance to look anew at Hubert Humphrey...
Vol. 30 • July 1966 • No. 7
