'Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country'

by Arnold A. Offner

Yale University Press, 2018, $35

On Law Day 2020, I rhetorically pose the question: Where, oh where, does our troubled Nation find a decent and humanistic public figure, when it so desperately needs one? Ruefully, perhaps the answer lies in the nostalgic dustbins of history. An excellent biography—of Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a pharmacist, a politician and a legislative lawmaker, par excellence—offers some historical perspective.

Humphrey comes across as one of those paragons of public virtue from an era not that long ago. He was, to be sure, also an ambitious man. With each passing year, his memory as a fine and accomplished public servant recedes from the nation's consciousness (a local community leader, too, as mayor of Minneapolis, early on). This fine book brings the memory back to life a bit, and celebrates a life devoted to the public good, driven by a purity of purpose.

Offner offers a frank appraisal of the man with his ambitions and successes and failures. Humphrey's innate decency, ideals and values, vanity and flaws, are plainly interwoven into a full mosaic portrait of a civic-minded person, and a politician, too, through and through. He is neither lionized, nor trashed; rather a nicely balanced portrayal is given that contrasts against the modern era of divisive-zero-sum politicians, with their scorched earth tawdry tactics, amidst discombobulating crises like the latest COVID-19 scourge.

Consistently through his career, Humphrey's niceness bubbles up and through. It is a strong thread that remarkably wins out as a legacy of high character and reputation that offsets, and even displaces, the disappointment in his failure to achieve his lifelong dream to become president.

A specific act of decency towards the very end of Humphrey's life illustrates the high assessment of history that he deserves. The demonstrative act is laudably, almost incidentally, mentioned in the book. I give it heightened attention in this review because I became independently aware of it years ago, in a newspaper column that documented its factual basis. ("Humphrey's Parting Gift," San Jose Mercury News (Jan. 24, 1993) p. 8C, originally published in the Washington Post; written by Paul Rexford Thatcher Sr., national treasurer of a Humphrey Presidential Campaign).

The described "gift" demonstrates Humphrey's forgiving outreach towards a bitter rival, Richard Nixon. Notably, it may well be regarded as a two-fer "gift" to the nation, too, not just an act of personal grace towards Nixon. Shortly before his death, Humphrey directed that an invitation to attend his imminent funeral be extended to the disgraced former president living in exile in San Clemente, Calif. On Christmas Eve 1976, he went so far as to call Nixon personally to extend the invitation. This generous classiness astonished Nixon, and also dismayed many of the unforgiving politicians in attendance in the Capitol Rotunda that day. This last wish placed Nixon in presidential rank at Humphrey's final state-viewing.

Thus, he closed the book of his life with a monumental gesture of profound respect for the Office of President—the office that his rival "stole," some believe with good reason, by "dirty tricks" during the final weeks of the 1968 campaign. Humphrey's virtually snapped salute out his own bier in the magnificent honored Capitol Rotunda was to the highest ideals of statesmanship and principles of Judeo-Christian morality. It transcended the dark pettiness that poisoned the political atmosphere then, and puts to shame the shenanigans on awful display in the politics of the Nation in and around Washington, D C. these woe-filled days. Humphrey's sign-off gift sings still of an "Amazing Grace."

A review of this same biography in America Magazine on March 4, 2019 used this apt lead headline: "A politician worth emulating." Recently, Father Matt Malone, S.J., Editor of America Magazine, in his lead column (Feb. 3, 2020) "Of Many Things," under the title "In Victory, Magnanimity," closed with a beautiful paragraph. He prefaced the peroration with references to acts of forgiving grace towards the Japanese from Presidents John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, (each having fought in the War in the Pacific), and an attribution for the title of the column to a book by Winston Churchill. Father Malone: "The next time someone suggests that forgiveness is naïve or impractical, we should remember this history [supra]. In so many places, at so many times, forgiveness is the only way out. In that sense, nothing is more practical."

Humphrey had always held high an old-fashioned understanding of a necessary institutional Executive Branch fidelity attached to the Office as Vice President. He thus subordinated himself and his personal views to the mercurial and paranoidal President Johnson by supporting the president's disastrous Vietnam "evolving war policies." He checked his own ego and ambition at the Oval Office door to serve faithfully, as he saw it, within the constitutional and traditional constraints of his stand-by Office of Vice President. It cost him dearly, including the loss of the presidency itself.

Few were ever able to figure out how to deal consistently with President Johnson. His egotistical rants and perturbed psychological mood swings are more well-known now, and will be further elucidated when Robert Caro finishes the last volume of his definitive exposition of Johnson's life and final years as president. While the nation suffered from this spiraling disfunction, so did Humphrey.

The peculiar Executive Branch relationship between Johnson and Humphrey had persuaded the latter to display a publicly supportive role, at the costly price of being perceived as the president's uncomfortable shill and defender. Sadly, that role delivered a double-barreled blow of (1) general opprobrium for the disastrous Vietnam policy of escalation and defeat, and (2) personalized soft-shoe and patronizing equivocations from Johnson, instead of full-throated support.

His own party and the nation's voters largely never forgave him for a perceived cowardice in not standing up against the President's policies. Poignantly years later, Humphrey converted that failure to forgive him into an act of grace by forgiving Nixon, especially for his secret interference involving the Vietnam peace talks that affected the outcome of the 1968 election.

I liked the kind characterizations of Humphrey in the book; after all, he was a kind man. I also liked the forthright historical survey of the turbulent times—a big part of my formative adult years as a young lawyer. The book offers a refreshingly objective context of the tempestuous shifts of national mood in the '60s and '70s. Humphrey is treated well and fairly in this book with the reflective and deliberative distance of history, as someone who earned something more important—an honorable place among the Nation's finest public servants of the people served.

While he is also honestly described as part of the usual money-seeking "Ka-ching Ka-ching" crowd and the deal-making grubbiness of ordinary politics, he appears lacking the self-aggrandizing wealth and power enhancement characteristics of so many in politics today. On balance, he is shown to have risen above these unwholesome realities. He is seen through this book as the youthful, starry-eyed idealist, a jaunty champion wishing to serve the best interests of ordinary people of the nation.

I liked this book and recommend it especially to those aging survivors of the post-WWII and Vietnam eras who might like to be reminded, if only nostalgically, of some of the "good old days." Those days burned brightly, even amidst the troubles of the times, at least as seen through the prism of a look backward with rosy glasses, and through the template of this decent and local pharmacist turned national politician. The book puts Humphrey on a pedestal of sorts—as I do in this review—against the seedy backdrop of politics as usual. It is good to have a book like this to reframe public service as seen through the clear-eyed lens of an ordinary, yet outstanding, public servant.

The innate goodness, and even naïveté of the likes of a Humphrey public servant are disdained by modern hard-edged politics and politicians like his "Boss", Lyndon Baines Johnson, who ungratefully abandoned him in the 1968 race. When Robert Caro finishes that final volume of his opus (soon, many hope!), the nation may come to learn better how a Shakespearean-like villain (Johnson) ruined his own legacy and reputation by deeply flawed character defects; but, also, how he ungraciously dragged down with him his faithful vice president.

Humphrey's own main fault, on the other hand, may have lain within himself—so Shakespearean! His misguided fealty to his principal, instead of to his idealistic principles, brought him down as he strained unsuccessfully to reach the pinnacle of his career. In the end, that fault within himself cost him his dream—the presidency. Over 400 years ago, such Machiavellian twists and turns might have inspired a creative plot for another great tragedy from The Bard of Stratford.

Joseph W. Bellacosa is a retired judge of the New York Court of Appeals.