The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Humphrey then plunged into the politics of FDR’s bid for a fourth term, leaving his teaching job at Macalester and serving as the president’s Minnesota coordinator. In 1945, he filed again for the mayoralty of Minneapolis and was elected at age thirty-four over the incumbent.6 His reformist agenda not only reduced crime but also combatted racial discrimination and anti-Semitism in the city. In 1947, during a time when communist elements had begun to infiltrate the DFL, Humphrey went to Washington for the founding meeting of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), formed to strengthen anti-communist political and labor involvement in the Democratic Party, and was elected vice chairman.7

  In the summer of 1948, Humphrey was propelled into the national spotlight when he led the fight for a strong civil rights plank in the party platform at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. He argued strenuously with Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois for a stronger and more explicit plank in defiance of the party’s southern wing. Lucas at one point demanded to know: “Who does this pipsqueak think he is?”8 When the committee voted to send its own plank to the convention floor, Humphrey joined in writing a single additional paragraph calling on Congress to guarantee the rights of “full and equal political participation … equal opportunity of employment …, security of person, and equal treatment in the service and defense of our nation.”9

  Lucas and others warned that this plank would split the party and cost the Democrats the 1948 election. But Humphrey went ahead. “There are those who say … we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” he said. “I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years too late. There are those who say this issue is an infringement on states’ rights. The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”10 The Humphrey plank triggered a walkout of southern delegates, but the convention passed it, and Harry Truman was easily nominated over Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, supported by southern delegates who remained behind.11

  Humphrey’s success at the convention, followed by his outspoken opposition to the Taft-Hartley Act (also known as the Labor Management Relations Act), which was despised by organized labor, and his firm defense of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, swept him into the U.S. Senate that November, as Truman upset Dewey for the presidency. It could be said that Humphrey talked his way into the Senate, making nearly seven hundred speeches as a full-throated disciple of the New Deal agenda. As the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress, he was the first Democrat elected to the Senate from his state in nearly half a century. As icing on the cake, Humphrey became the ADA chairman and a prime spokesman for the party’s liberal wing.

  None of this endeared him to the southern Democrats, who for so long had dominated the Senate. He locked horns with them over Taft-Hartley, seen in Dixie as protection against union incursions into the region. Humphrey also plunged into the fight over civil rights but was rebuffed by a phalanx of filibustering southern Democrats and allied Republicans.

  The Minnesota freshman cosponsored a host of social welfare bills, including a health insurance plan for the elderly that sixteen years later became Medicare. Along the way, he rounded off some of his brash edges and with his natural ebullience won the name the “happy warrior.” He became close to another member of the Senate class of 1948, Lyndon Johnson, who had ties to the old southern lions.

  In 1952, President Truman’s political operatives asked Humphrey to run as a favorite son in the Minnesota primary, a move that kept out Senator Estes Kefauver, a declared challenger to Truman. When Truman decided not to seek a second full term, Humphrey helped deliver the Minnesota delegation to Adlai Stevenson, and in 1953 with Johnson’s help, Humphrey was given a seat on the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee.

  In 1958, he had an eight and a half hour meeting with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at the Kremlin, with the discussion ranging from agriculture and trade to the division of Berlin, which Khrushchev menacingly called “a bone in my throat.”12 The meeting’s extraordinary length became instant news around the world, triggering more talk of national office for the ambitious Minnesotan.

  Humphrey finally took the plunge in 1960, taking on Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination in early primaries in Wisconsin and West Virginia. He had neither the Boston Irish charm nor the money of his rival’s father, Joseph Kennedy, a former ambassador to Britain. The tacit issue in the race was Kennedy’s Catholicism; no one of his faith had ever been elected to the presidency, and the first one who ran, Al Smith of New York, had been soundly beaten. But Humphrey was called “Wisconsin’s third senator” because of mutual interests and his work in behalf of his Badger State neighbors, and he had high hopes of winning there.

  The race took a difficult turn for Humphrey in West Virginia. Kennedy threw heavy resources into the state and, in a high-risk strategy, played on prospective anti-Catholic sentiment to make religious tolerance an open issue. In his first appearance in Fairmont, Kennedy asked, “Is anyone going to tell me I lost the primary before I was born?” Citing his award of a Purple Heart in the Pacific, he declared, “No one can tell me that I am not as prepared as any man to meet my obligations to the Constitution of the United States.”13

  Then, in a state where Franklin D. Roosevelt had achieved saintly dimensions, the Kennedy camp brought in the late president’s namesake son, who strongly suggested that Humphrey had been a draft dodger in the late war. “I don’t know where he was in World War II,” he would say, handing out papers professing to substantiate the charge. Humphrey wrote later that the only thing he remained “unforgiving” of in the Kennedy campaign in West Virginia was FDR Jr.’s continued slander after evidence of the untruths had been provided to the Kennedy campaign.14

  In a primary campaign in which candidates were “slated” with popular local candidates in the various counties and money passed hands regularly, the Kennedy wealth easily outspent the Humphrey shoestring effort. At a dinner in New York, Kennedy felt comfortable making a joke about it: “I got a wire from my father: Dear Jack, don’t buy one more vote than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’ll pay for a landslide.”15 But a landslide it was in West Virginia, Kennedy winning the primary with 60.8 percent of the vote. Returning to the Senate, Humphrey at LBJ’s urging was named majority whip.

  When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Humphrey was immediately drawn into the inner circle of the new president, Lyndon Johnson. In LBJ’s speech to a joint session of Congress, he said, “No memorial or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy than the earliest passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” As the bill’s floor leader, Humphrey received LBJ’s marching orders to achieve that goal, which he did the next June, after seventy-five days of debate and filibuster.16 Humphrey experienced the presidential transition from his ringside seat, watching some old Kennedy hands stay and others move on when LBJ placed his own people into positions of influence and prestige while striving to advance the agenda of his fallen leader and at the same time asserting his desire and will to shape his own presidency.

  Soon the 1964 presidential election was upon Johnson, and with it the issue with which he had intimate acquaintance—the selection of a running mate. In May, LBJ told Humphrey he’d prefer to have him as his running mate, provided no obstacles came up, a signal that his performance as Senate majority whip would be critical to the outcome.17 In the meantime, Johnson enjoyed stirring the pot by dropping names of governors and other officials as prospects, sometimes letting Humphrey in on the game, sometimes not.

  Through all this, Humphrey’s name and that of his Minnesota colleague in the Senate, Eugene J. McCarthy, were most frequently mentioned, along with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. McNamara reported later that Johnson had offered him the vice presidential nomination before the convention. When he declined, he said, LBJ proposed to make him his “numb
er one executive vice president in charge of the cabinet,” which sounded like creating an assistant presidency, which McNamara also declined.18

  So while Johnson may have “preferred” to pick Humphrey, he apparently was not yet settled on him. The one thing he did know was that he didn’t want Robert Kennedy waiting in the wings for his departure. Johnson thereupon conferred with his old adviser, Clark Clifford, about the best way to let Robert Kennedy down. Clifford dreamed up the ludicrous rationale read aloud by Johnson at a hastily called meeting with reporters: “It would be inadvisable for me to recommend to the Convention any member of the Cabinet and or any of those who meet regularly with the Cabinet.… In this manner, the race has been considerably narrowed.”19

  It certainly had, at least by one, without Robert Kennedy even being mentioned. Kennedy responded by sending telegrams to fellow cabinet members, saying, “Sorry I took so many of you nice fellows over the side with me.”20 Left in the boat of prospective vice presidential nominees were Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey. McCarthy, fed up with being a foil in Johnson’s little game, sent a telegram to LBJ saying he should go ahead and pick Humphrey. So after Humphrey had worked out a compromise over a Mississippi delegate fight at the convention, Johnson summoned him to the White House and told him he would be his running mate, cautioning him to say nothing of it to anybody, not even to his wife, Muriel. Soon after, Humphrey was called to the White House again, this time accompanied by Senator Tom Dodd of Connecticut. James Rowe, a Democratic insider and Humphrey confidant, told Humphrey that LBJ’s inclusion of Dodd was “just a cover” and that he wanted “to continue the speculation.”21

  On arrival, Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti led Dodd in to see LBJ while Humphrey cooled his heels in the parked limo. He finally dozed off until a knock on the window stirred him, and he was ushered into the Presence—obviously more drama building. Johnson asked Humphrey again of the vice presidency: “Why would you want to have the job? You know it is a thankless one.” He told Humphrey that the relationship between a president and his vice president “is like a marriage with no chance of divorce.” Johnson finally relieved Humphrey by saying, “If you didn’t know you were going to be vice president a month ago, you’re too damn dumb to have the office.”22

  In the fall campaign, Humphrey and his party traveled by a chartered plane dubbed the Happy Warrior, and his own staff prepared speech drafts that not surprisingly were to be cleared by the Johnson White House.23 It was obvious from the start that Goldwater and his ultrapartisan running mate, Congressman William Miller of upstate New York, would be no match for Johnson and Humphrey. The Democratic ticket easily won a landslide 61.1 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 482 electoral votes to 52.

  As vice president, Humphrey became a member of the Johnson cabinet and his National Security Council, and LBJ also gave him the chairmanship of a host of executive agencies dealing with civil rights, efforts against poverty, the Peace Corps, and the space program. Humphrey served as a liaison with the nation’s mayors and navigated the legislative agenda through Congress. Included in Humphrey’s achievements over the next years were passage of the voting rights act and pursuit of bills on Medicare, the Model Cities Program, and the domestic Marshall Plan.

  A serious cause of friction between Humphrey and Johnson, however, was the Vietnam War. In February 1965, as Viet Cong and North Vietnamese attacks on the South intensified and Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in retaliation, Humphrey expressed doubts about this strategy at a National Security Council meeting. He sent Johnson a memo arguing that the action “in fact adopted Goldwater’s position” and risked the intervention of Communist China and the Soviet Union, as well as draining resources from the Great Society agenda at home. Johnson, fearing leaks, was not pleased with the communiqué. Humphrey said later that LBJ told him, “We don’t need all those memos, Hubert.”24

  What concerned Johnson more was that, in front of others, Humphrey was offering views that differed from LBJ’s own, which he had warned the vice president never to do. Soon Humphrey was being frozen out of meetings, yet was still expected to sell the president’s war goals and policies to Congress and the public. His carrying of LBJ’s water on Vietnam particularly vexed fellow liberals, and by year’s end a Gallup Poll found that 56 percent of those surveyed didn’t want Humphrey as a future president. He summed up his acceptance of his subservient role by telling one interviewer, “I didn’t become vice president with Lyndon Johnson to cause him trouble.”25

  On Christmas Day, 1965, however, Johnson ordered a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam, saying, “We’re going to try it Hubert’s way.”26 But the pause didn’t last and the bombing was resumed, followed by Johnson’s decision to send Humphrey on another mission to sell the war, a two-week swing through India and nine Far East countries of the Pacific Rim, including South Vietnam. Johnson sent Jack Valenti along to report back on the vice president’s performance. Throughout, Humphrey defended the Johnson policy, tying himself more inextricably to it while talking himself back into LBJ’s good graces.

  When asked about Robert Kennedy’s suggestion that the insurgent Viet Cong’s political arm, the National Liberation Front, be brought into the South Vietnamese government as a way to bring peace, Humphrey’s reply was instant: “Putting the Viet Cong in the Vietnamese government would be like putting a fox in the chicken coop.… We are not going to permit the VC to shoot their way into power.”27 The statement not only cemented Humphrey’s commitment to Johnson’s policy but also roiled the political waters back home among former liberal supporters.

  In March 1966, Humphrey played a key role in the Senate’s rejection of an attempt to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Johnson thereupon raised the American troop level in Vietnam to 380,000 by the end of the year, which amounted to a confession that the war was not going as well as the administration had suggested to the American people. Meanwhile, the Gallup Poll showed disenchantment with the Democratic administration, generating some speculation that Robert Kennedy would replace Humphrey as LBJ’s running mate in 1968. When Hubert told an audience in St. Louis that he was sure Johnson would keep him, Johnson chastised him for saying so. Humphrey was obliged to comment a few days later, “The realities of politics require that a president have many options.… I don’t predict whom he will want in 1968.”28

  Johnson apparently was having doubts about his own future, telling Valenti in September, “I won’t be around then,” but adding, “They would say I was playing politics if I resigned and gave the job to Humphrey. My own party has turned against me, and the Republicans are chiming in. We probably need a fresh face. Humphrey would start with a clean slate.… As of now, I have lost Congress.”29 A year later, he dictated a draft letter of resignation to his press secretary, George Christian, but nothing more came of it.

  On Election Night in 1966, despite Humphrey’s campaigning through twenty-six states, the Democrats lost forty-seven House seats, three in the Senate, and eleven governorships. The mercurial Johnson put Humphrey in the deep freeze again, amid increasing reports of gratuitous presidential rebuffs of his vice president. After a second Humphrey trip to Southeast Asia, he came back with more doubts about the prospects and of success. He urged Johnson to switch from an offensive military strategy to one of containment and negotiation. Still, he remained LBJ’s public mouthpiece on the war and was sent to Congress to cajole more money for his Great Society agenda in what was now being labeled a policy of “guns and butter.”

  Many advocates of the “butter” part still admired the domestic agenda but were dead against the “guns” portion. A couple of University of North Carolina alumni, Allard Lowenstein and Curtis Gans, approached Robert Kennedy to head a Democratic dump-Johnson effort. Kennedy declined. They also courted Gene McCarthy, who first told them, “I think Bobby should do it.”30 But he later agreed, announcing his candidacy on the last day of November 1967.

  Fueled by the anti-war protest and a sizable army of college d
ropouts and graduates, McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary. Johnson loftily declined to campaign, sending surrogates instead. Then, on the last day of January 1968, the lunar New Year celebration of Tet in Vietnam, the supposedly decimated Viet Cong forces suddenly swarmed over major South Vietnamese cities, shattering assurances of Humphrey and others that the war was going well. Despite U.S. claims that the enemy had suffered major casualties, the Tet Offensive had a demoralizing effect on American public opinion at home.

  In New Hampshire on Election Night, the absent president “won” but with only 49.4 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary compared with a surprising 42.2 percent for the little-known senator from Minnesota. The result was widely reported as a huge upset and a ringing denunciation of Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Kennedy had been following McCarthy’s run and now was reconsidering. He had been saying he wasn’t challenging Johnson because he didn’t want any of his own efforts to be seen as a personal vendetta or to be accused of splitting the Democratic Party. But the vote in New Hampshire, he said, had shown there already was “deep division” in it. Kennedy thereupon entered the presidential race.31

  In the next Democratic primary, in Wisconsin, it was too late for Kennedy to get on the ballot, and McCarthy was on the verge of defeating the president outright. Two nights before Wisconsin Democrats voted, Johnson went on nationwide television and, after telling the country he had decided to restrict the bombing of North Vietnam in the hope of encouraging peace talks, declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”32 In the wink of an eye, Hubert Humphrey’s longtime dream of the presidency suddenly had been resurrected, at least as the likely heir to the support of much of the Democratic establishment.

  Johnson summoned Humphrey to the White House and told him he did not intend to take sides in the race. Considering the low state of LBJ’s popularity, it wasn’t the worst news Humphrey could have heard. He made a key strategic decision. It was too late to develop a campaign from scratch through the primary-election process, so he would stay out of the primaries and rely on his longtime connection with party leaders and the labor movement. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April brought the campaign to a sudden halt, and it was not until later in the month that Humphrey finally declared his candidacy and continued to pile up delegates without entering a single primary.