Compromiser

By Donald Morrison

HUBERT HUMPHREY: A BIOGRAPHY by Carl Solberg

Norton; 572 pages; $19.95

In 1945, shortly after Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. became mayor of Minneapolis, he got a call from his father. Hubert Sr. was shocked: his son had been seen dining with bankers. The small-town druggist delivered a warning against the lures of wealth, power and compromise.

That hardly seemed necessary at the time, or for a decade to come. As mayor and later U.S. Senator, Humphrey fought the good fight for civil rights, full employment and the whole postwar liberal agenda. But as Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, he became a cheerleader for the Viet Nam War, alienating many of his supporters, splitting the Democratic Party and losing his own 1968 presidential run. As Author Carl Solberg sadly but honestly notes, Humphrey had many liabilities: he talked too much, he thought too little, he let Johnson humiliate him. But perhaps his biggest mistake was to ignore his father's warning. Humphrey's life was a peculiarly American tragedy of a good man who made too many compromises.

The failing was evident back in South Dakota, where Humphrey grew up struggling to save the family pharmacy from the Depression. Despite an early conviction that he belonged in politics, he stayed on to help his father. And stayed. At 26, on the verge of nervous collapse, he finally left to study political science at the University of Minnesota, then to teach the subject at a local college. He put his reformist ideas into practice as an officer of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but even then he was trimming his sails. The avowed leftist not only dined with bankers, he helped expel his former radical friends from the party as the cold war dawned.

Humphrey exploded onto the national scene with a powerful speech before the 1948 convention that put the Democrats irrevocably on the civil rights train. Winning a Senate seat that year, Humphrey continued brashly in Washington. He denounced the seniority system, accused his conservative colleagues of ties to special interests, introduced hundreds of progressive bills. He got nowhere. Something besides conviction was necessary, he decided, and he learned the Senate skill of log rolling. With it, he guided through nearly all the major liberal bills of the 1960s, some of which he had proposed years earlier: the 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Medicare, food stamps.

Politics, after all, is the art of compromise, and Humphrey was merely practicing the trade. The problem, says Solberg, a former TIME writer and visiting lecturer in history at Columbia University, is that Humphrey was still compromising as the tide of liberalism swept past him. Having failed to gain the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1956 and the presidential spot in 1960, he saw Johnson's 1964 invitation to join him on the ticket as his last hope. Humphrey wanted to be President so badly that he buried his aversion to the Viet Nam conflict. Johnson abused Humphrey shamelessly, sending him out to stir up support for the war and keeping him uninformed about matters of importance. For a politician, he was perhaps too loyal, too kind. "Wanting to be loved, he was unable to be cruel," says Solberg. "He could make neither his allies nor his adversaries fear that his anger would have long-term consequences for them."

Even so, Humphrey managed to leave behind a legacy of liberal legislation that has survived three Republican Administrations. In a 1977 poll of 1,000 leading Capitol Hill figures, he was named the top Senator of the past 75 years. (Humphrey, then fatally ill with cancer, responded to the news: "Jesus Christ, Lyndon Johnson's going to be sore as hell about this.") Solberg, whose biography is the first to benefit from Humphrey's papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, recounts his subject's career in impressive detail, but stumbles when he tries to explain Humphrey's self-defeating diffidence. The answer may lie in the other legacy Humphrey left behind: a certain sweetness, a corny, prairie-bred conviction that folks don't have to be mean and nasty to get what they want. That naivete was his undoing but also his strength. Early in his career, the politician asserted, wide-eyed, "The proof that God exists is that all men are brothers." Hubert Horatio Humphrey never learned any different, or any better.

--By Donald Morrison