How Humphrey Made His Choice

With unexpected suddenness, after 20 years of reaching eagerly for the presidency, Hubert Humphrey made his wrenching personal decision: not this time. TIME National Political Correspondent Robert Ajemian was with Humphrey for several days before his announcement and talked with him in his office afterward. Ajemian's report:

All year I've been alone with these decisions," said Hubert Humphrey as he flew from Minnesota back to Washington, where he would soon have to decide whether to give up his deepest ambition. "I have no political counselor whose judgment I totally trust. In the old days, I always had someone, someone like Jim Rowe [longtime adviser to Democratic Presidents]. Now I do things alone."

People close to Humphrey see it differently; they view him as a man who is too ready to take the advice of others. Humphrey leaned back in his plane seat. He could understand why people felt that way. "Everyone thinks he's got his hooks into me," he said. "I do listen to a lot of people, but I've become gun-shy. I end up talking to my wife, Muriel."

Even before the last polls had closed on Carter's Pennsylvania triumph, Humphrey was once again listening to his friends. They called him by the dozens, urging him to stay in the race, and he in turn called others asking what he should do. Almost invariably, they told him he was the only person who now stood between Jimmy Carter and the nomination, and Humphrey agreed. Often they had vested interests of their own, but for the nation's good, they warned him. Carter needed to be challenged: he was too untested, too unknown. Again, Humphrey agreed. The arguments for getting in started to stir his blood. The old fever, the old wanting to be President was still very much there.

But some, like Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss, advised him to stay out. "I reminded him he had no money, no organization," says Strauss, "and that the people who were telling him to jump in today would be back tending to their own affairs tomorrow." The deadline for filing in the New Jersey primary was upon Humphrey--and he had to move. The pressure for a decision began to hurt.

The week before, in Minnesota, during the Senate's Easter recess, Humphrey had been prepared for no such sudden crisis. He did not expect Carter to win so resoundingly in Pennsylvania. Flying around Minnesota to speak at his party's district nominating conventions, Humphrey raised the rafters as he tore into Gerald Ford. It was like being at a prizefight; oldtimers said that Humphrey had never sounded better, and that pleased him. In his speeches, Humphrey's final line always brought his audience cheering to its feet. If his party wanted him as its nominee, he told them, he was now at the fullness of his life and never more prepared to be President. But, he also reminded them, he would enter no primaries.

A few days before the Carter victory, Humphrey sat in his Minneapolis office, away from the crowds, and talked about his political plans. He said that he had decided finally to become more active: he would publicly authorize a committee, headed by his Minnesota friend Robert Short, to line up uncommitted delegates. It would be a low-key effort, in keeping with his pledges to the other candidates to stay out of the primaries. Like most other politicians, he believed Scoop Jackson was certain to win most of Pennsylvania's delegates even if he might lose the popular vote to Carter. "If Jackson does that," said Humphrey, sounding reassured, "I'm sure he'll stick to the end."

But the Jackson candidacy collapsed as Carter took everything. The day after Pennsylvania, Humphrey's ordeal was plain. He would have to get in--or out. In Washington, he met with his closest advisers: Senator Walter Mondale and his top assistant, Richard Moe; Tom Kelm, assistant to Minnesota Governor Wendell Anderson; Max Kampelman, a Washington attorney; Bob Short; and others.

For two hours Humphrey sat in his shirtsleeves and listened to the nine-man gathering tell him that they judged the Democratic race to be over--unless he decided to enter New Jersey. The low-profile candidacy he had planned would do no good. Joe Crangle, the upstate New York Democratic leader, read off a delegate count projecting that Carter would have 1,023 delegates by the end of the primaries if Humphrey made no move. The group was confident that Humphrey could defeat Carter in New Jersey, and Humphrey told them he felt the same way.

But he interrupted them with a question that was at the heart of his own struggle with himself. Asked Humphrey. "How can I run now when I've said over and over again that I wouldn't?"

His words hung in the air. Several in the group felt he had met his pledges; they said the other candidates no longer had any chance. Humphrey did not openly disagree with them, but he felt unconvinced by their argument. As the group broke up, one of the participants read him a prepared statement that said that Humphrey would enter New Jersey. It included a line noting, accurately, that Carter had challenged him to come in. Humphrey, the statement said, was going to oblige him. Humphrey liked that touch, but told them he wanted to sleep on the decision. Most of the group guessed that he had been persuaded to run.

Humphrey then returned a call from George McGovern, who was urging him to get in the race, and left the office with his wife. The two went home to their Washington apartment, along with their son-in-law, Bruce Solomonson. For three hours the Humphreys discussed the whole situation: their life together, their ages, their finances, their obligations. The phone kept ringing. Sometimes Humphrey would suddenly jump up as he remembered someone he wanted to call.

As they talked, it gradually became clear to Humphrey that his wife, who in the past had been so reluctant, who had so much wanted him to stay out this year, was now ready for him to run. "I was really surprised," he said. "It was a dramatic change for Muriel." He reminded her how brutal the last-minute campaign would be, that by his reckoning the most he could bring to the convention would be 600 delegates, and that Carter would have many more than that. "Besides," he said to her, "Carter would be attacking us every day for being a spoiler, for dividing the party--and so would the press." At 1 o'clock they went to bed, and at 6:30 the next morning, deadline day, Humphrey was up and back on the phone. He couldn't let go. It was as if he thought that, by telephoning, he might reach some authority who would convince him to make the fight.

Some of those he talked to told him to stay out of it. Most wanted him to go in, and many of those were clearly anti-Carter. Southerners like Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers, Kentucky Senator Wendell Ford and former Georgia Governor Carl Sanders (who had lost to Carter) urged that Humphrey stay in the race, obviously wishing to deny Carter the nomination. Still, Humphrey could not decide. His wife asked him to remain home a little longer for a last exchange, and they sat together for half an hour. Says Muriel: "I could see that he was essentially negative about running, and I was a little more positive." He told her he would call from the office.

In less than an hour he phoned her and said he would not run. It was a decision, he stressed, that he had had to reach for himself. Even though it might mean the end of all his hopes, he would have his self-respect. And he would spare them both the familiar abuse--that he was Lyndon Johnson's puppet, that he was not tough enough, that people were tired of him--that would surely be heaped on him the minute he announced. As he would say later: "One thing I don't need at this stage of my life is to be ridiculous." Instead, Humphrey told Muriel he would be the Democratic Party healer and bring his longtime supporters to the nominee. He was the one man, he felt, who might be able to deliver that harmony.

In the apartment, Muriel Humphrey hung up the phone and started making the beds. She heard herself singing aloud. "I never do that," she recalled, surprised at herself. But then she knew what it was. She realized how pleased she was with her Hubert.

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