Historical Figures Series, The Career Of Hubert Humphrey Part 5: The 1968 Presidential Election

 

 

A personal interlude before we begin. When I was twenty-one I saw Oliver Stone’s beyond controversial JFK. I thought that it was unfocused but I believed it was a cinematic masterpiece. More than twenty years later I believe it is a masterpiece but only in the sense that we regard movies such as The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will.

JFK is, from beginning to end, not merely a polemic but one of pure propaganda. It is an investigation into a murder where everyone had a motive even though the victim did nothing to bring it about.  The opening narration basically argues that Kennedy was a saint trying to bring about systemic changes and that as a result, the military-industrial complex had him killed. Stone, using Jim Garrison as his stick figure, basically argues that Kennedy was killed because of the system and in what is the most direct act of slander in a movie, more or less, says that Lyndon Johnson was an unindicted co-conspirator who agreed to let Kennedy be killed and let the Vietnam War escalate so he could become President.

This was essentially refuted within months of Stone’s film and there has never been any evidence to support it beyond the rantings of conspiracy theorists.  Yet Stone has never backed down from that perspective. If anything, he has done everything in his power to argue for the Kennedy legacy. In a separate documentary for Showtime, he more or less accused every President since World War II of being responsible for maintaining America as an empire. But he deliberately absolved JFK of any responsibility and maintained his argument that Kennedy was essentially killed because of his threat to the military-industrial complex. Recently he did another documentary where he continued to argue that the CIA was responsible for multiple assassinations during the Kennedy administration but that Kennedy never took part in them and was trying to dismantle them.

Just as there has been no evidence in the last sixty years to refuted the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald acted alone, there has been a plethora of evidence arguing that Kennedy not only knew of the CIA’s operations, particularly in Cuba, but actively supported them. The Pentagon Papers made it very clear that the Kennedy administration did nothing to shrink the Vietnam War and was in fact responsible for authorizing the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem’s a month before his own murder. And as I have mentioned in my own series on the Kennedy’s, even Robert himself admitted based on the evidence that they had, his brother would have escalated the war.

But despite all this, despite the fact that most of Johnson’s cabinet were holdovers from Kennedy’s administration, despite the fact that Johnson himself was held absent from any real decision making in any part of domestic or foreign policy, the vast majority of Americans, at the time and now, still refuse to acknowledge that Kennedy bares any responsibility for the Vietnam War.  They will argue he was a saint, even though he slept with countless women during his administration and before, and though he essentially stole the 1960 election from Nixon. Stone himself acknowledged as much in his own movie on Nixon four years after JFK. But none of that has made into his documentaries since then. He may claim to be a truth-teller but he is one of the fiercest propagandists of the Kennedy legacy.

Now I’m not saying that LBJ doesn’t bare a large amount of blame for everything that happened in Vietnam; he did deceive the American public about what was happened and he did continue to recklessly expand the war against the protesting. That should not negate all the great things he managed to accomplish in his administration, particularly during the first two years after being reelection. The Great Society accomplished more things for minorities and the underprivileged that Kennedy had managed to do in his entire term; that Kennedy himself would probably never have tried to do.  But that never mattered to the people marching in the streets then and to countless people for decades afterwards. Lyndon Johnson was in office when the Vietnam War escalated, therefore it was his war.

Now imagine how much worse it was for Hubert Humphrey. The moment he was sworn in as Vice President, his own legacy of the past sixteen years was essentially discarded by everybody. Not merely the critics of the administration, but the administration itself. Humphrey himself knew it and was fiercely unhappy. “The President has 190 million bosses he once said. The Vice President had 190 million and One.” When a friend tried to tell him that because Johnson himself had been Vice President, he had to understand what Humphrey was going through, Humphrey was blunt: “There is no President who understands.”

And it was so true. Humphrey’s relationship with Johnson was almost immediately ruined within a month of his being sworn in. In February of 1965, he disagreed with Johnson over his decision to launch a sustained bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. He opposed escalating the war. He believed Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara would support him but they said nothing. Johnson was furious with what he considered Humphrey’s betrayal  and essentially froze him out for the next year. Worse he began to essentially take credit for all of Humphrey’s accomplishments on Civil Rights by abolishing two committees Humphrey had chaired and putting their responsibilities under the Justice Department.

Their relationship more or less went from mentor and student to master and servant. Johnson did everything in his power to weaken Humphrey, from refusing him to take reporters when he traveled, to blaming  him for most leaks that came from the White House, to berating him in public. When Humphrey was finally brought back into the fold in 1966, Johnson  would essentially make him the administration’s spokesman for policy in Vietnam.

Humphrey has taken a fair amount of blame then and now for becoming such an enthusiastic cheerleader for everything going on in Vietnam, especially as the conflict worsened.  Many of his liberal friends accused him of betraying the movement he had once lead. Yet I am inclined to view it simply as another case of Humphrey’s pragmatism.

Hubert Humphrey wanted to be President of the United States. To do so, he had to remain in Lyndon Johnson’s good graces. If he did not, there was every chance the temperamental Johnson would drop him from the ticket in 1968 and his political life would be over. If he played the good soldier and went along with it, he would most likely be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 1972. He would have to fight out with Robert Kennedy, but considering how much Johnson loathed RFK he would more likely have the support of the White House. So Humphrey hid whatever doubts he had, took the abuse from the protestors and his own colleagues and just held on. He had no idea what was coming.

In March of 1968, Lyndon Johnson told Humphrey that he was calling for a bombing halt and more importantly that he was not going to run for reelection. Humphrey was appalled. Johnson said otherwise no one would believe he was going to try and end the war.

On April 27, Humphrey announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. From the start, he isolated almost everyone when his announcement when he said his candidacy would invoke: “the politics of joy.” From a nation that had undergone several years of rioting and protesting, that earlier this same year had involved the failures in the Tet Offensive, Johnson’s essential resignation and the assassination of Martin Luther King earlier that month, Humphrey’s announcement was considered tone-deaf.

It did not help that, unlike Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, Humphrey chose not to compete in the primaries. Instead, he chose to get his delegates from the party elders and power brokers that had made Presidential nominees since time began. This outraged the voters in the base, but it was a successful strategy.

On the night of the California Primary, Humphrey noted Eugene McCarthy’s loss as negating him as a contender for the nomination. Robert Kennedy was going to be a problem, but Humphrey thought he could deal with it in the floor fight. It should be noted that even as the Kennedy campaign celebrated its victory that night, there was an awareness that within a matter of days at most, Humphrey would clinch the nomination.

Muriel Humphrey would later say that the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy wounded Hubert, and it was true. Humphrey most likely would have won the nomination anyway, but he needed to battle it out on the convention floor with Bobby in order to make his victory legitimate.  Kennedy’s death essentially took all the steam out of the anti-war side of the platform. Eugene McCarthy would win the New York primary basically unopposed, but he had no taste for the fight and essentially barely participated in the convention ahead.

The rioting in the streets outside Chicago were nearly as tumultuous as the battles on the floor. Humphrey knew the only chance he had for the White House was to essentially make a break from Lyndon Johnson’s policy. But while Johnson did not attend the convention, he made it very clear that any deviation from his policy would not be met with any support from his administration. I fundamentally believe Johnson seemed more determine to protect his legacy in Vietnam rather than let someone who opposed his policies enter the White House the next January. That is why he was rethinking his decision not to run in August and contacted John Connally during the conflict asking how much support he could get and why he only refused to appear at the convention when Richard Daley told him bluntly if he showed up in Chicago they could not guarantee his safety.

So as the whiffs of tear gas caused Humphrey’s eyes to water in his hotel suite, Humphrey was faced with a problem even before he finally accepted the nomination he had sought his whole life.  He could not make a change to the Democratic platform; he could not make a speech assailing his mentor at the convention. “I was a victim of the convention,” he said after the election. “I felt when we left that convention we were in an impossible situation. I could’ve beaten the Republicans easy, but it’s difficult to take on the Republicans and fight a guerilla war in your own party at the same time.”

If Robert Kennedy had not been killed, one wonders if Humphrey could have solved many of his problems by naming his Vice-President.  The anti-war protestors and the peace wing of the party would have been willing to support the ticket more easily had Kennedy been on the ticket, and some in his entourage thought even before the primary he might have accepted it. “Bobby’s a Roman; he’ll go where the power is.” Ted Sorensen said in May.

Instead, his choices came down to three men: Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, then only thirty-seven and a vehement critic of the War, Cyrus Vance, the Deputy Secretary of State and Edmund Muskie of Maine, solid, sound and middle of the road.  He chose Muskie, who would end up being  a huge benefit to the ticket, not only in comparison to his rivals Spiro Agnew and Curtis LeMay, but in how well he managed to campaign and deal with protestors on the trail.

However, in his acceptance speech in the midst of cheering the great leaders of the Democrats in the past, he ended his speech with Lyndon’s name and was greeting with loud boos.

And when the acceptance speech was over, the police who had behaved horribly on the streets of Chicago, began to beat and abuse several McCarthy acolytes.  Humphrey was asleep at the time and when McCarthy learned of this he more or less broke from the Democrats during that episode. McCarthy essentially refused to campaign or even make commentary during the fall campaign: he actually spent several weeks writing an article for Sports Illustrated on the Cardinals-Tigers World Series. The McCarthy bloc had at best been lukewarm for Humphrey before the convention; after it, a large number never returned the fold.

If anything, things got worse for Humphrey in the initial weeks of his campaign. He made speeches to sparse crowds, made gaffes that the Johnson administration constantly repudiated, and protestors screamed and called him a sell-out everywhere he went. The fact that the convention had been scheduled in August (mainly because the year before Johnson had wanted to accept renomination for the Presidency on his birthday!) gave the campaign no breathing space, no advance men and no money. Worse he could not attack his own administration or defend the issue before a divided electorate and Democratic party. It did not help that by mid-September,  third-party candidate had reached 21 % in the polls, only seven percent below Humphrey.

Humphrey began to turn things around on September 30^th when he made a nationwide speech televised from Salt Lake City. For the first time in his campaign, he signaled a desire to end the bombing and to negotiate. Slowly but surely students began to stop heckling and argue for him. Money began to roll in and the McCarthy campaign was willing to endorse him.

Things began to turn around as he reduced Nixon’s lead in the polls from fifteen points in mid-September to eight by mid-October. Furthermore, the Wallace campaign percentage began to drop from 21 percent to 13 by mid-October.

Then on the last week of the campaign two events occurred, one that seemed to signal an end to conflict, and one that was clearly a violation. On October 26^th it began to leak that the end of the war was imminent. On October 31^st LBJ announced on TV an American cease-fire. But on November 1^st,  Saigon announced that it opposed Paris talks which made it look like Johnson was trying to end the war for Humphrey.

It is now a matter of public record that an ally of Nixon Anna Chan Chennault, acting under the influence of Haldeman and Ehrlichman , had helped use her influence to mobilize Saigon to oppose the agreement with the understanding that they would get better terms from a Nixon administration than a Humphrey one.

It is not until fairly recently that we learned that LBJ had audio-recordings of this event but chose not to share them with Humphrey at the time nor make them public. He told attorney general Ramsey Clark that after all the conflict that had surrounding this year, he did not want to accuse a Republican candidate for President of what was basically treason for the good of the country. I admit that is possible and  if it is true, Johnson may have acted in the best interests of the nation.

However, part of me also knows that at the end of the day, Johnson had doubts about Humphrey and had expressed doubts to men such as Clark Clifford about his ability to carry on the policy towards Vietnam. He thought Nixon was closer to him on more issues than Humphrey was, particularly the war. I also know many Southern Democrats had doubts about Humphrey, such as men like Richard Russell. Did Johnson do what he thought was best for the country or what he thought was best for his own legacy? We’ll never know for certain. All we know was the final result.

On November 5, 1968, America voted for President. It was another long night for the country and it was not until the wee hours of the morning that the networks called the election for him. As I mentioned in an earlier article, it was another close one: less than one percent of the popular vote, nearly half a million out of 73 million votes cast. But it looked far worse electorally for Humphrey: he only received 191 electoral votes while Nixon received 301. Wallace took 46. Furthermore, the South, which had been Democratic for more than a century had been divided up by Nixon and Wallace; the only Southern state Humphrey carried was Texas.

Humphrey was understandably heartbroken by his defeat. For all the disarray in his party he had assumed that voters would unite to defeat the much loathed Richard Nixon. But considering that through much of the campaign Humphrey had been unable to deviate sufficiently from Johnson’s platform, there is an excellent possibility that many voters chose to stay home or vote the Democratic ticket and not for Humphrey. The election did not produce a mandate for Nixon in Congress: the Republicans gained five seats in the House and five seats in the Senate, nowhere near enough to erase the Democrats formidable majority in both houses of Congress. (Richard Nixon became the first President in 120 years to enter office with the opposition party in control of both houses of Congress; he is one of three Presidents in the 20^th Century to never have a Congress controlled by his party.) Still Humphrey’s defeat was a blow to his soul, perhaps because he expected his political life was over.

It wasn’t. In the final entry in this series, I will deal with Humphrey’s return to both the Senate and Presidential politics.