HUMPHREY FOR PRESIDENT? “TOUGH, MEAN, HARD” MAN WANTED IN WHITE HOUSE

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31770, 29 August 1968, Page 10

HUMPHREY FOR PRESIDENT? “TOUGH, MEAN, HARD” MAN WANTED IN WHITE HOUSE

'By

ROY MACARTNEY,

writing from Chicoaol

(Reprinted from the "Sudnev Morning Herald" t>u arrangement)

Hubert Horatio Humphrey, who seems certain to be the Democratic Presidential nominee, is an enigma. Can a man who smiles so often, talks so much, and cries so readily, make a strong President?

At 57, the effervescent and highly emotional Mr Humphrey has, at first glance, the experience and qualifications for the White House. But .does he have the judgment and the fibre? Can he be a “sonofabitch—tough enough, mean enough, hard enough to be a successful President?”, as Stewart Aisop asks in the current issue of the “Saturday Evening Post.”

Mr Humphrey is better known as a “happy warrior”— a man who can interrupt a prepared speech on the woes of the nation with a bubbling interpolation: “What a magnificent time to be alive.” He is cursed with a face that does not inspire confidence, as correspondent of "The Times,” Louis Keren commented earlier this year. The eager smile between the

pointed chin and high forehead has at times been rather fixed in the Vice-President. Heckled by Labour M.P.s in London, pelted with eggs in Brussels, spat at in Berlin, hit by a lemon in Florence, Mr Humphrey survived a tempestuous tour of Europe early last year. More recently—campaigning at Watts—Mr Humphrey was driven from the platform by booing Negroes. The cheerful Vice-President is finding that a ready smile and the politics of joy do not suffice. Mr Humphrey is sensitive to charges that he talks too much. His charming wife, Muriel, once chided him: “You don’t have to be eternal to be immortal.” And at times, Mr Humphrey can be corny enough to make Lyndon Johnson look a sophisticate. Frequently Mr Humphrey presses a gift of cufflinks or bracelet bearing the VicePresident seal—and eagle and 13 stars—on sometimes reluctant recipients. Gift To Kosygin Strolling in the Presidential garden in Delhi early one morning at the time of the Shastri funeral, the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Kosygin, and his daughter, Ludmila Gvishiani, found Mr Humphrey dropping into step. Before long the unlikely wearers had links and bracelet to bear back to Moscow. In Washington on one occasion, Mr Humphrey gave a pair of cufflinks to the editor of a major national magazine who was volubly impressed by a long interview with the Vice-President, When presented with the links bearing the seal, the editor announced enthusiastically that he intended to wear them on his shoulders.

“If you like. Mr —said a Humphrey aide, “we’ll break up another set and give you one for your navel.” There was a pause, after which the editor was amused —and then the Vice-President. Mr Humphrey, by his own admission, cried when John F. Kennedy was killed, and sobbed the day President Johnson showed him his abdication draft. He is both lovable and lachrymose. In many ways the former

South Dakotan pharmacist could be one of the last homespun heroes to move from a small town to try to lead modern urban America.

( “By golly,” “good grief” and "oh, my, I was a rascal in those days,” are the sort of asides which pepper his speeches. They leave young listeners giggling, but then—as statistician Richard Scam-

mon has pointed out—the entire vote under 25. allied with that of the Negro population is less than 15 per cent. Quest For Unity It is the centre—the “forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the non-demonstra-tors,” as Richard Nixon described them in his acceptance speech—who will elect the next President. That is why tire Democratic Party has turned to Hubert Humphrey, belatedly, in a quest for unity.

Conservatives no longer regard him as a way-out liberal: businessmen do not regard him with their former suspicions: even the South does not look on him with the hostility it did some years ago when he was in the vanguard of the civil rights movement. Only among the liberals has he lost most pf his friends. Vice-President Humphrey came to the parting of the ways with the intellectuals when he emerged as an articulate and convinced supporter of the war in Vietnam. He was the founder of America's best-known liberal organisation, “Americans for Democratic Action” (A.D.A.I, but the association today endorses the candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Its current chairman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and former chairman, Arthur Schlesinger, were Kennedy New Frontiersmen.

Their subsequent trenchant criticism of the JohnsonHumphrey Administration led former A.D.A. head John Roche to say of the disgruntled intellectuals: "Power corrupts; loss of power corrupts absolutely.” Vice-President Humphrey has been both lucky and unlucky—lucky that his good friend Lyndon Johnson tapped him for the Vice-Presi-deney in 1964 and opened the way to the White House itself, and unlucky because he thus became a liberal who had to reconcile his views with the responsibility of power. This is the cross Mr Humphrey will bear at Chicago. Patriotic, self-deprecatory, engaging, long-winded and evangelistic, the Vice-President is finding these characteristics a mixed blessing. He has yet to show he is his own man. In one self-effacing estimate of his role as VicePresident, Mr Humphrey told surprised delegates to an American Newspaper Guild convention in Washington: “I’m Lyndon Johnson's Eleanor Roosevelt.” The Vice-President meant that Mrs Roosevelt, too. had travelled widely at home and abroad so she could report what was going on to the President. But some unkind listeners thought Mr Humphrey’s description also fitted “an old woman.”

Johnson’s Man

Despite early clashes with the Texan in the Senate, Hulbert Humphrey has for long been regarded as Lyndon Johnson’s man. "I became Vice-President because he made me Vice-President." Mr Humphrey once said to an interviewer. “And I became Senate Whip because he made me Whip. As a matter of fact, I’ve had a helping hand from Lyndon Johnson from the beginning.” Because of loyalty ana identification, Hubert Humphrey cannot repudiate Lyndon Johnson. Stung by Stewart Alsop's question whether he could be a “sonofabitch," Mr Humphrey angrily recalled fighting rackets and firing police when he was a young Mayor of Minneapolis. And he had been tough enough to put up with four years as Lyndon Johnson's Vice-Presi-dent, he implied. Hubert Humphrey has a warmth and trustworthiness lacking in Richard Nixon. Otherwise there are similarities between the two men. Both hitherto have been I only “number two” men. Both are losers— Humphrey to John F. Kennedy in the Primaries, and Nixon to Kennedy in the main Presidential race of 1960. Both are I now “middle-roaders. This year will separate them however. One should enter the winning column and become the thirty-seventh [President of the United I States.