WILL THE REAL HUMPHREY PLEASE SIT DOWN?
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Will the Real Humphrey Please Sit Down? npHE tragic death of Senator Robert F, Kennedy has added new imponderables to...
...The extent of voter rejection of the Johnson-Humphrey Administration can be seen in the spectacular totals piled up by the combined Kennedy-McCarthy anti-Administration campaigns...
...Now they acclaim him as their leader...
...As the official defender of the faith, Mr...
...He went to the Senate in 1949 as a liberal firebrand who infuriated the Tories in the Senate Club...
...It is conceivable, in this year of the inconceivable, that President Johnson might resign and hand over the Presidency to his ever-loyal number-two man and thus give him the power, the prestige, the patronage—and the freedom of maneuver—of that highest office in the land...
...In those doleful days late last fall, when our country seemed to face the painfully empty choice between President Johnson and former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Senator Eugene McCarthy bravely violated precedent and protocol to offer the nation a meaningful choice in its greatest hour of conflict...
...Almost to a man, they installed Mr...
...We know of no trustworthy evidence that this is what he wants, no authentic indication that he seeks much more than a somewhat longer leash from his Chief...
...Almost to a man, they assured the electorate that the great bulk of the Robert Kennedy following would go to Mr...
...In Indiana it was sixty-seven per cent, in Pennsylvania eighty-seven per cent, and in Massachusetts eighty per cent...
...In the process, too, he was ineluct-ably compelled to accept the Administration's distortion of national priorities and to turn his back on the compelling issues of race and poverty—and revolution—at home...
...In Oregon and Nebraska, they polled about eighty-four per cent...
...It is not recorded, to our knowledge, that any of these powerful forces has been outraged, as was Robert Kennedy and is Eugene McCarthy, by the Johnson-Humphrey policies of escalation in Vietnam or the domestic consequences of spending ten times more in crushing a civil war ten thousand miles away than was made available to meet the revolutionary challenge at home...
...One day, recently, Mr...
...Regardez la difference, we suggest now to liberals who may be brooding over their choice between the two men from Minnesota...
...He is wedded to his Administration's policy of pouring more than $30 billion a year into the senseless war in Vietnam—the big money needed, along with moral regeneration, to put our own house in order...
...Johnson and Mr...
...Humphrey wants to strike out on his own...
...On the overriding issue of Vietnam, progressives must regard the gulf beHumphrey, the 'Ardent Apologist' "At the very time when American foreign policy grew most disastrous, Vice President Humphrey became its most ardent apologist...
...he has brought his creative criticism up to date...
...Eugene McCarthy's position on Vietnam, on the other hand, would go far toward releasing the money and reviving the moral fiber so essential to meet the challenge of social revolution at home...
...The Administration, he charged, is not saying or doing anything different "from what it was saying and doing before the negotiations supposedly began...
...All these myths—so damaging in their consequences—have had the enthusiastic support of Vice President Humphrey...
...A policeman stopped him for going through a red light and he explained, "I saw the white folks going through the green, so I figured the light for us colored folks was the red one...
...Shortly afterward, however, he felt compelled to insist that he had no intention of "renouncing" the policies and programs of the "Johnson-Humphrey Administration...
...Developments in the fortnight between our writing and your reading may prove them right...
...To present the country this fall with a choice between the current Vice President and the former Vice President would be to carry America a distressingly long way back to the time when the country seemed doomed to have to choose between Mr...
...Today, however, Hubert Humphrey is as much a casualty of the miserable war in Vietnam as the thousands of American boys who gave their full measure of blood on the battlefields of a war they never understood...
...If this doesn't make sense to Mr...
...On other aspects of foreign policy in general and Vietnam in particular, the difference between the two Minnesotans was again revealed as decisive this past month...
...He saw in our conduct "an indifference to life and a potential of violence and destruction," and added: "First of all, we must end the war in Vietnam under conditions which do justice not only to our honor but also to the honor of our opponents, and most of all to the common wish to live and to build...
...wants, in short, to bury the "new Humphrey" of 1964-1968 and resurrect the "old Humphrey" of 1948-1964...
...npHE tragic death of Senator Robert F, Kennedy has added new imponderables to what has long since become one of the most bewildering Presidential campaigns in American history...
...But Hubert Humphrey must fight the deepening menace of racism and the darkening specter of poverty with one arm in a sling...
...The Vice President commands his most ardent support today from the Bourbons of the South, the captains of industry and investment, the barons of big labor, and the machine politicians of his party...
...In sharp contrast, Senator McCarthy has not only renewed his biting attack on Administration Vietnam policy in the past...
...Humphrey is in no ppsition to criticize his Administration's current handling of the war, with its record-breaking casualties and shameless devastation of the countryside, or his Administration's handling of the Paris peace talks, which has been marked by a stubborn refusal to accede to Hanoi's insistence on the total cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam...
...We're still saying no coalition government—Dean Rusk is—no recognition of the National Liberation Front, accelerate the war, call up more troops...
...What choice will the considerable brain trust put together by the late Senator make...
...But we confess we are disturbed that he has not renewed that commitment since the Paris peace talks began...
...It was Robert Kennedy who joined forces with Senator McCarthy to lead the attack, along the campaign trail, on the Johnson-Humphrey team's blundering military course in Vietnam and its stubborn refusal to respond to the realities of peacemaking in Paris...
...We must put an end to the menace which threatens every human being in our country as well as in the rest of the world: the menace of thermonuclear war...
...We find it a shocking suggestion that the supporters of Robert Kennedy— among the people, the politicians, and the eggheads—could cynically turn their backs against almost every policy and principle their fallen hero had stood for in this campaign by choosing Vice President Humphrey over Senator McCarthy...
...Not merely did he defend the war, he defended every assumption which produced the war—America's moral mission in the world, the great threat from China, the theory of monolithic Communist conspiracy, the susceptibility of political problems to military solutions and the duty to impose American idealism upon foreign cultures...
...He has won the right to carry that counsel of change to fulfillment...
...What the pundits and the politicians seem to be saying is that it doesn't matter what the people think or how they vote...
...Nixon...
...Will the real Hubert Humphrey please sit down long enough to tell the country whether he seeks only a longer leash from his Chief, or whether he genuinely wants to be a free man—free to acknowledge the mistakes and failures of the President he supported so super-loyally, and free to build, on the acknowledgement of those mistakes, new programs...
...It was Robert Kennedy who referred repeatedly to the "common cause" he shared with Senator McCarthy against "the status quo politics" of the Johnson-Humphrey Administration...
...Robert Levine, a leading liberal in our home community of Madison, summed it all up when he said to the followers of Robert Kennedy: "To eulogize the man while deserting his cause would degrade the entire political process...
...We must no longer have our policy interfered with by small and often undemocratic governments who get our support only by their claim to be anti-Communist...
...His irrepressible spirit, his searching mind, his brilliant grasp of the issues, and his deep compassion and crusading for the unfortunate and the underprivileged—all these qualities made him the leader and the hope of the progressive forces of the nation...
...Humphrey's desire to "be my own man" in this campaign would be measurably enhanced if he were not tied so tightly to Mr...
...This result could be achieved, at least superficially, if one of two things happened...
...The difference between them on Vietnam spills over into the explosive domestic front...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Will the Real Humphrey Please Sit Down...
...In the process of supporting the war, the Vice President sometimes becomes even more jingoistic than his Commander-in-Chief, and on occasion, more intolerant of dissent than the brass and braid in the Pentagon...
...Johnson, it is possible, in this year of the impossible, that Mr...
...There were no clear-cut answers as we wrote this in mid-June...
...Whom will his mass following among the poor and the underprivileged support...
...Indeed, the evidence would seem to run in the opposite direction, if only indirectly...
...Speaking to the Fellowship of Reconciliation June 13 in his first address since the killing of Senator Kennedy, Senator McCarthy asserted that the nation must reject "an indifference to life which allows us to conduct a war against a small nation, destroying and maiming human beings day after day, because we have made it part of our political creed that we must save the freedom of these people even if we destroy them in the process...
...In California the two foes of the Johnson-Humphrey team captured ninety per cent of the total Democratic vote...
...In South Dakota, Mr...
...Humphrey bravely announced that he intended "to be my own man...
...Humphrey has been "one of the most innovative legislators of our era...
...And those who sought, in the past American tradition, to question our policies, were subject all too often to his ridicule and scorn...
...Humphrey, moreover, remains silent on the growing power of the military-industrial complex fed by huge defense budgets—the danger that Senator McCarthy repeatedly warns against...
...Where will the Kennedy delegates go...
...And perhaps most important of all, in this moment of deep emotion, where, if anywhere, will Senator Edward Kennedy invest his legacy of political power...
...Both men, we believe, share a great commitment to peaceful social revolution at home...
...But we can't help recalling that most of these same characters dismissed Senator McCarthy's announcement of his candidacy last fall as a quixotic fling, yawned in the face of his extraordinary achievement in New Hampshire, ho-hummed as he swept victoriously through Wisconsin, and exhibited similar signs of boredom when he captured Oregon and made a remarkably impressive showing on that fateful day in California...
...Humphrey's home state, they rolled up seventy per cent...
...We concur in the judgment of David Broder, political analyst of The Washington Post, that Mr...
...It was Robert Kennedy whose voting record in the Senate closely paralleled Senator McCarthy's, sometimes in opposition to the Johnson-Humphrey wishes...
...wants to share with the nation his agonizing reappraisal of Vietnam, if any...
...Senator Eugene McCarthy San Francisco May 22, 1968 tween the two Minnesotans as unbridgeable—unless the Vice President belatedly reverses or dilutes his long-held position...
...Johnson and the need to defend the dismal past...
...But the pundits of the press and the boys in the back rooms of politics had it all figured out...
...Segregation Jerome Beatty, Jr., the writer, tells of an old Negro farmer in Mississippi who talked his way out of a traffic ticket...
...Humphrey, albeit only quasi-officially, as the Democratic Presidential nominee...
...In contrast to this dismal background of the Humphrey candidacy, Senator McCarthy looms ever more hopefully as a towering force for fundamental change in both domestic and foreign policies...
...Humphrey might resign the Vice Presidency so as to become a free—or at least a freer—agent...
...Vive la difference, the French have said, in a somewhat different connection, for many years...
...As we noted in our May issue, we retain our personal affection for Vice President Humphrey, whom we have known as a friend for twenty years, during most of which—until 1965—we admired and applauded much of his record as an ardent champion of progressive causes...
...wants to reverse the national priorities...
...There is no pull-back, there is no limitation on the search-and-destroy missions...
...Moreover, we find it difficult to believe that the leadership of the Kennedy forces would betray the many young people and the many poor people who rallied around Robert Kennedy precisely because he symbolized—as does Senator McCarthy—repudiation of the politics of the past as practiced by the Johnson-Humphrey Administration...
...And in the realm of practical politics—the hard business of vote-getting—he has revealed an extraordinary capacity to attract the support of moderate Republicans and Independents without whose votes no Democrat can be elected to the White House...
...There is certainly a way to peace which can be found if our offers are credible and if we stop arrogating to ourselves the function of being a policeman over the whole world...
...It is no exaggeration to say, as we have suggested in earlier issues, that the McCarthy candidacy has changed the course of history...
...On the specific and decisive issue of cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam as the indispensable first step toward peace, it was our understanding that Senator McCarthy had long embraced this position, in company with United Nations Secretary-General U Thant, Pope Paul, President de Gaulle, our Canadian neighbors, most of the leaders of friendly and neutral nations, and many of the peace-seeking Members of Congress of both parties...
...Implicit in all this speculation, of course, is the notion that Mr...
...In speeches in the closing days of the California campaign, he placed on the Administration at least part of the blame for the slow pace of the Paris talks...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
