WHATEVER
BECAME OF HUBERT?
Pity
Al Gore. No matter how many times the Democrats nominee has switched
campaign strategies, advisers, and locales, he has still found
himself facing the same, basic conundrumhow to run for President
from the Vice-Presidents office.
It
is a deceptively difficult problem. Thanks to Americans shrinking
attention spans, the Vice-Presidency, once a political dead-end,
has become vitally important for anyone with designs on the White
House.
Yet
the office creates its own dilemma. If the outgoing President
is not popular, how to distance yourself from him? And if he is
popular, how to grab some of the reflected glory without offending
his lame-duck President being notoriously touchy fellows, very
concerned about their place in history.
This
has baffled savvier politicians than Al Gorethough Gores problem
has been peculiarly acute thanks to the man hes serving under.
The Vice-President has been unable to avoid being tarred with
the Clinton administrations worst excessesas with Gores notorious
fundraiser at a Buddhist temple. At the same time, he was been
able to glean little credit for the prosperity of the Clinton
yearsperhaps because of the Presidents endless strategies of "triangulation,"
or because of his underlying conviction that government really
has very little role to play in modern American life.
Yet
for all of Als travails, it is safe to say that neither he nor
any other Vice-President has endured the sort of torment that
Hubert Humphrey underwent during the 1968 campaign.
Humphrey,
running in the wake of President Lyndon Johnsons stunning withdrawal
from the race, was seeking to lead a nation torn apart by racial
strife and the war in Vietnam. He was also facing two extremely
charismatic opponents for the nomination, his old protégé,
Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedymen who had been transformed
almost overnight from mere senators to redeeming national icons.
Humphrey
himself was a bright, ebullient man, all but bubbling over with
enthusiasm. After coming to national attention with an impassioned
plea for civil rights at the 1948 convention, he had gone to the
Senate, where he ran up an outstanding record as a domestic liberal
and a Cold Warrior. But he was nobodys idea of a savior, and the
apocalyptic campaign that followed only underscored his shortcomings.
In the context of the times, Humphreys natural enthusiasm made
him seem nearly deranged. Making his official entrance into the
race on April 27 some three weeks after the assassination of the
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the bloody scourge of race riots
that followedhe proclaimed, "Here we are, the way politics ought
to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose,
the politics of joy!"
Before
the California primary, he actually got on a stage in Watts to
receive the endorsement of James Brown. "You can do the boogaloo,
man," the Godfather of Soul told him, "if you got soul." As the
political columnist Jules Witcover described it, "Humphrey, awkwardly
attempting [to dance], wailed, Oh, my goodness, Jimmy.
Yet the real problem lay not in Humphrey himself, but in his guiding
political star, Lyndon Johnson. Humphrey was desperate to distance
himself from Johnsons policy in Vietnamyet he also had to stay
in Johnsons good graces. He was getting walloped in one primary
after another, losing by huge margins to both Kennedy and McCarthy.
Only the support of the old party bosses, loyal to the President,
kept his candidacy afloat.
Things
reached a nadir with the convention in Chicago that August. The
Democratic party fell apart on national television, as Mayor Richard
Daley screamed anti-Semitic epithets from the convention floor,
and his police clubbed demonstrators in the streets, and reporters
and delegates in the hall. Humphrey watched his nomination in
his hotel suite, while tear gas drifted in the window from the
streets below. Even this wasnt enough to dim his almost bizarre
enthusiasm; he jumped gleefully up and down when he won, and rushed
over to kiss a picture of his wife on the television screen.
Even
after Chicago, Humphrey continued to wobble, and his campaign
soon degenerated into sheer torture for the candidate. On the
one hand, he was under constant attack from four of the most unscrupulous
individuals ever to run in a presidential campaignthe Republican
ticket of Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and that terrifying third-party
tandem of George Wallace and Gen. Curtis Le May.
On
the other hand, he was heckled vociferously at nearly every campaign
stop by anti-war activists. Once, Humphrey had been the countrys
leading liberal light; now, disenchanted liberals and leftists
interrupted his speeches with obscenities, and raised banners
proclaiming DUMP THE HUMP, and even HITLER, HUBERT AND HIROHITO.
Finally,
with just five weeks to go in the campaign, Humphrey exploded
to an aide: "Damn it, Im on my own two feet. Im sick and tired
of hearing about how Lyndon Johnson will react or how Gene McCarthy
will react. Lets start thinking about what Hubert Humphrey wants."
It was a cathartic moment, and led to a speech in Salt Lake City,
in which he promised, "As president, I would be willing to stop
the bombing of North Vietnam as an acceptable risk for peace."
Told
about the speech fifteen minutes before air time, Johnson only
pouted, "Well, youre going to give the speech anyway." The Hump
and his advisers had finally figured out that it was Johnson who
had nowhere to go, that only a Humphrey victory would be seen
as any kind of vindication for his administration.
Feeling
liberated, Humphrey nearly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
At the time of his breakaway speech, he was trailing Nixon by
fifteen points in the polls and was barely ahead of Wallace; In
the end he lost by only seven-tenths of a percentage point, and
Nixon himself later admitted that if the race had lasted another
two days, Humphrey would won. Yet even here, the Johnson connection
worked against him. The Democratic convention had been scheduled
late in the summer so that Johnson could be officially renominated
on his birthday, August 27. By the time he had dropped out, it
was too late to change itfatally delaying Humphreys efforts to
consolidate his campaign.
"If
Lyndon Johnson had been born on the Fourth of July," Humphrey
campaign aide Joe Napolitan later claimed, "Hubert Humphrey would
have been president."
Perhaps.
Orwere the seeds of Humphreys tragic 1968 actually sown long before,
when he first decided to put aside his principles and take a place
on Johnsons ticket, back in 1964?
This
had been an earlier trial by fireone sparked by Johnsons typically
crude demand that he was looking for a Vice-President "who will
kiss my ass in Macys window, and swear that it smells like roses."
This alone should have given Humphrey pause, but after a failed
bid for the nomination in 1960, he was anxious to find a new route
to the White House.
Johnson
promptly put him to the test. That year, Mississippis all-white,
segregationist convention delegation had been challenged by a
rival delegation from the integrated, "Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party" (MFDP). The MFDP was spearheaded by activists working to
bring about civil rightsand particularly voting rightsfor African-Americans,
and that summer they had already endured the murder of three of
their co-workers, plus constant threats, beatings, arrests, and
firebombings.
Despite
his seminal work in passing civil rights legislation, Johnson
still feared alienating the white Southern vote. He therefore
selected Humphrey to go to the MFDP and essentially negotiate
the impossiblea compromise which would leave the all-white delegation
seated while placating the insurgents. If Hubert were to fail
this little test, Johnson hinted strongly, the Vice-Presidential
nomination was likely to go to another Midwestern liberalperhaps
Eugene McCarthy.
Humphrey
promptly threw himself into the negotiations, and succeeded in
at least sweeping the controversy mostly under the rug. Yet the
compromise he worked outto keep the official delegation, and seat
two members of the MFDPpleased no one. Refusing to sit with any
blacks, the all-white delegation walked out, along with the segregated
delegation from Alabama. In the fall, Johnson would lose five
Deep South statesand win in a landslide anyway.
Meanwhile,
the MFDP delegates had gone through too much to celebrate their
de facto victory. The deal brokered by Humphrey only convinced
most of them that they could expect nothing from the Democrats,
and should look outside "the system" for their rights.
Humphrey
had accomplished enough to win Johnsons approval, but it would
prove a Pyrrhic victory. The shape of things to come was grasped
not by Humphreybut by a political naif, one Fannie Lou Hamer of
the MFDP. Hamer was one of the great heroes of the civil rights
movement, an African-American sharecropper, whose undaunted faith
and courage helped her rise from an impoverished, nearly illiterate
background.
Hamers
testimony of her arrest and torture at the hands of the Mississippi
state police, for the crime of attending a civil rights protest,
had already moved the nation. She had been eager to meet Humphrey,
a hero of hers from his earlier stand for civil rights. Now, she
was disillusioned to find him arguing on the side of caution and
compromise.
"The
trouble is, youre just afraid to do whats right," she gently told
Humphrey, who was on the verge of tears by this time.
"You
want this job, and I know a lot of people have lost their jobs,
and God will take care of you, even if you lose this job. But
Mr. Humphrey, if you take this job, you wont be worth anything.
Mr. Humphrey, Im going to pray for you again."
Hamers
heartfelt appeal wasimpolitic. She found herself excluded from
all future negotiations. Yet her instincts had been better than
those of the canniest Washington insider. Had Humphrey refused
to undermine his old cause, had he been more cognizant of his
own worth, chances are that Johnson would have tabbed McCarthy
instead. It would have been Clean Gene, then, hopelessly yolked
to the policies of the Johnson administration in 1968. It would
have been Humphrey who was perfectly positioned as a consensus
alternative.
This
is not to say that Al Gore would have been better off if he had
never accepted his Vice-Presidential nomination. Judging from
his string of primary losses to Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis
in 1988, it was his best hope of becoming President. Never having
built any national constituency of his own, Al Gore is, well,
no Hubert Humphrey.
But
like Humphrey, when dealing with that man in the Oval Office,
he would have been better off remembering an old adage: He who
sups with the devil had better have a long spoon.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
