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BACK IN WASHINGTON, Lyndon Johnson, as the Democrats’ Assistant Leader, was having ample opportunity to “read” his party’s senators—to learn what it was they wanted, really wanted—and to make use of what he learned, and into one senator he was reading very deeply indeed. It was during 1951 and 1952, William White was to say, that “Lyndon Johnson fixed his restless, reckoning eyes on Hubert Humphrey.”
If Johnson were to become Democratic Leader, he would find himself faced with the problem that previous Democratic senatorial Leaders had been unable to solve, and that had been a major cause of their failure and humiliation: the hostility-filled chasm between the party’s ardent liberals and defiant conservatives that kept a Leader from presenting a unified front. For him to avoid his predecessors’ fate, he would have to find a bridge over that seemingly unbridgeable gulf, some means of compromise between two factions so bitterly divided that no compromise seemed possible. And since he was regarded as a conservative and would be a Leader placed in power by the conservative bloc, the instrument of compromise would have to be found on the liberal side of the chasm.
As Nathaniel Hawthorne said of Andrew Jackson, “His native strength … compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” No man, in 1951, would have seemed less likely to be an instrument of compromise than the senator Johnson chose; no senator, indeed, would have seemed less likely to be anyone’s tool. But the more cunning the man, the sharper the tool—the more uncompromising the man, the better tool he would be for the making of compromises.
Hubert Horatio Humphrey had burst on the national stage as the very symbol—courageous, passionate—of unwillingness to compromise, as the defiantly unyielding champion of a noble cause.
The stage was the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the last non-air-conditioned convention ever held by either major party, and the temperature on the podium in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall was ninety-three degrees. It was the convention’s third day, the day scheduled for President Truman’s renomination and acceptance speech, but the delegates’ mood, dispirited and downcast because Truman was considered to have no chance to win (in the hall, Alben Barkley was to recall, “the very air smelled of defeat”), had turned angry, over civil rights.
Party leaders, up to the President himself, had concluded that if any slim chance of victory existed, that chance rested on the only section of the country that, in good times and bad, remained solidly Democratic, and they felt that that chance would disappear completely if the party antagonized the South. They had, therefore, agreed that the platform’s civil rights plank would be bland and unspecific enough to satisfy the South; it even contained a sentence—“We call upon the Congress to exert its full authority to the limit of its constitutional powers to protect these rights”—particularly agreeable to segregationists, who could, as journalist Irwin Ross was to put it, “interpret [it] as meaning that little federal action was possible, for in their view Congress’ constitutional powers were severely limited by the doctrine of states’ rights.” And the convention’s organizers had tried to muffle dissent over the civil rights plank by including only about twenty liberals (and only four from the militant Americans for Democratic Action) on the 108-member Platform Committee.
Refusing to bow to the committee’s majority, however, these liberals had held out during the first two days of the convention for a much stronger, uncompromising, civil rights plank, one that endorsed the proposals Truman himself had made two years earlier. They had even rallied some support in the committee, largely because of Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who seemed to have a devotion to civil rights, and who, as Mayor, had not only secured in his city the passage of the nation’s first effective Fair Employment Practices ordinance, but had also worked doggedly to erase the city’s previous reputation as “the anti-Semitism capital of America.”
When, fifteen months earlier, sophisticated eastern liberal leaders had gotten their first look at Humphrey during an ADA Midwest organizational conference in Chicago, he had seemed very unimpressive, with his overly somber black suit, a Phi Beta Kappa key dangling ostentatiously from a gold chain across his vest, and a penchant for farmyard anecdotes so corny they made the Ivy Leaguers wince—until he rose to speak. Decades later, Harvard-educated Joseph Rauh could still recall how “dazzled” he had been by the young Mayor’s passion and sincerity, how he had brought the audience to its feet, applauding and cheering, and how, during the long evening of talk that followed, Humphrey had won their hearts. As uncompromising on the page as on the platform, he had demanded in an article he wrote for the Progressive that the Democratic Party and the Administration “lead the fight for every principle” in the “To Secure These Rights” report. “It is,” he wrote, “all or nothing.” And now, in a steaming meeting room in Philadelphia’s Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, he still wouldn’t compromise, fighting so unflinchingly against party leaders for a stronger civil rights plank that, after one heated exchange, Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois muttered angrily, “Who does this pip-squeak think he is?”—the first of a dozen times Lucas was to use that word, sputtering with anger, in the angry hours that followed. At first, only four or five other committee members supported Humphrey, but as the hours passed and he kept fighting, sweat dripping down his thin, pale face, others began to be swayed by arguments that were not only moral but political; didn’t they understand, he demanded of the stony-faced party elders on the committee, that the black vote was becoming pivotal in the North’s big cities, and that, if the Democratic Party didn’t stand up for a strong plank, they might lose that vote? The battle went on for two days and nights; Humphrey’s friends, knowing that when he got involved in a fight, he forgot about eating, sent him in food (he was, despite their efforts, to lose eighteen pounds from an already thin frame during the convention). At the end, the liberals’ proposals lost by a big majority, and the “moderate” plank was adopted; calling it “a sellout to states’ rights,” “a bunch of generalities,” Humphrey said that when, the following day, the platform was brought to the convention floor for ratification, the liberals would offer a minority plank, and ask the convention as a whole to adopt it instead of the moderate proposal.
Over and over again, that evening and all through the night, the liberals were warned about the fate of the Democratic Party if they persisted, that the southerners might even walk out of the convention and form their own party, that at the very least the party would be split wide open and the last hopes of victory would vanish. And warnings were issued also about the fate of Humphrey, who the liberals all assumed would lead the floor fight, for, as one of his biographers was to put it, only his oratory could “give them a chance … on the convention floor.” Pulling Rauh aside in a hotel corridor, Truman’s assistant for minority affairs, David K. Niles, laid it on the line: “Joe, you won’t get fifty votes on your minority plank, and all you’ll do is ruin the chances of the Number One prospect for liberalism in the country.” Another member of the Administration was angrier: “You ADA bastards aren’t going to tell us what to do,” he said.
Humphrey was told to his face that speaking for the minority plank would ruin—permanently—his own career; that, as Ross reported, “he was sacrificing a brilliant future for a crackpot crusade. ‘You’ll split the party wide open if you do this. You’ll kill any chances we have of winning in November.’” And for many hours of that night, Rauh recalls, Humphrey “was not at all sure what to do…. He was reluctant to make a big fight and speech on the floor.” He was well aware that, “personally,” as Ross put it, “he had much at stake”—starting with his own upcoming bid for the Senate. “If he won, he was likely to be one of the national leaders of the party….” And, as Ross puts it: “Humphrey’s personal sympathies were firmly engaged in the cause, of that his colleagues never had any doubt; on the other hand, he was a professional politician who was being asked to challenge the entire national leadership of the party.”
Humphrey himself was to recall that “It was sobering … we were opposed by all of the party hierarchy.” He was well aware, he was to say, that the customary course in such a situation was to compromise. “I knew that the traditional thing to do was to make a gesture toward what was right in terms of civil rights, but not so tough a gesture that the South would leave the Democratic coalition.”
But, Humphrey was also to say, some issues were beyond compromise. “For me personally and for the party, the time had come to suffer whatever the consequences.” At about five o’clock in the morning, after he and a small group of liberal friends had been talking for hours in a hotel room, he said abruptly, “I’ll do it.” His friend Orville Freeman recalls him saying, “If there is one thing I believe in in this crazy business, it’s civil rights. Regardless of what happens, we are going to do it. Now get the hell out of here and let me write a speech and get some sleep.” And the next afternoon, after the majority plank had been proposed, Hubert Humphrey, in a stifling hall (the Secret Service had closed all the doors in anticipation of Truman’s arrival to accept the nomination) packed to the rafters with hot, bored delegates impatient to hear the President—many of them hardly knew who Humphrey was—stepped to the microphone.
For once he paused for a long moment before beginning to speak, as if he was gathering himself, a very thin figure perspiring so heavily under the glare of the lights that sweat made his black hair glisten and ran down his high forehead; and his face, as David McCullough puts it, was “shining,” with sweat and sincerity. “No braver David ever faced a more powerful Goliath,” Paul Douglas, who was sitting in the throng below him, was to say twenty years later. “I can see Hubert still, his face shining with an incandescent inner light.” And as he began to speak, his words slashing across the murmur of the restless throng, “the audience,” as one writer put it, “grew quiet, suddenly aware that someone they wanted to listen to was talking.”
For once his speech was short—only eight minutes long, in fact, only thirty-seven sentences.
And by the time Hubert Humphrey was halfway through those sentences, his head tilted back, his jaw thrust out, his upraised right hand clenched into a fist, the audience was cheering every one—even before he reached the climax, and said, his voice ringing across the hall, “To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights—I say to them, we are one hundred and seventy-two years late.
“To those who say this bill is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this—the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”
“People,” Hubert Humphrey cried, in a phrase that just burst out of him; it was not in the written text. “People! Human beings!—this is the issue of the twentieth century.” “In these times of world economic, political and spiritual—above all, spiritual—crisis, we cannot and we must not turn back from the path so plainly before us. That path has already led us through many valleys of the shadows of death. Now is the time to recall those who were left on the path of American freedom. Our land is now, more than ever before, the last best hope on earth. I know that we can—know that we shall—begin here the fuller and richer realization of that hope—that promise—of a land where all men are truly free and equal.”
ALL HIS LIFE, Hubert Humphrey had had a voice that could bring people to their feet, that could make them raise their banners and march, and people came to their feet now, banners raised, marching.
The Minnesota delegation’s seats were surrounded by those of Georgia to their left, Louisiana to their right, Virginia behind them, and Kentucky in front of them, so that when the Minnesotans jumped up, the first delegation to do so, coming shouting to their feet as Humphrey shuffled his papers together and turned away from the podium, their banners were surrounded by the seated, glaring delegates of the South. But their banners were not alone for long. While Humphrey had been speaking, there had been something else that Paul Douglas would never forget: “hard-boiled politicians dabbing their eyes with their handkerchiefs.” Turning to Ed Kelly, the Mayor of Chicago, who was seated beside him, Douglas said, “Mr. Mayor, that was a great speech.” Mr. Mayor, he said, we can win now. “If Illinois will lead a parade,” we can win. “We will fall in behind you.” Kelly had been adamantly opposed to the stronger civil rights plank because he thought it had no chance of passage and would only divide the party. “Paul,” Kelly said now, “we ought to have a parade, and Illinois ought to lead it. I would like to do so. But I am getting old, my legs are tired, and I couldn’t hold up under this terrible heat.”
“He paused for a moment,” Douglas was to recall, “and then he said, ‘But, Paul, I want you to lead the parade.’” Lifting the Illinois standard from its socket, Kelly handed it to Douglas, and then turned to the delegation, pointed at Douglas, and motioned them to follow him. The towering, white-thatched figure moved down the aisle. A forty-piece band that had been organized by James Caesar Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians, had been kept hidden under the podium because it was not supposed to begin playing until President Truman appeared in the hall later that evening to give his acceptance speech. But Petrillo had been staring up at Hubert Humphrey as Humphrey spoke, and suddenly now, Petrillo motioned the band to begin playing. As Douglas led Illinois forward, the big California delegation fell in behind it. “Then New York, overcoming the caution of its Tammany leaders … Delegation after delegation joined us…. Here and there groups of sullen Southerners and conservative Northerners remained stubbornly in their seats, but the main mass of Democrats was moving with jubilant feet toward a better and more equal America.”
In the vote on Humphrey’s minority plank, Truman’s Missouri, Barkley’s Kentucky, Democratic Chairman Howard McGrath’s Rhode Island, and of course the southern delegations all voted no. But Illinois’s sixty votes, which had been controlled by Kelly and which had been counted in the southern camp, were cast for the minority plank. And then came the states of the Northeast: the thirty-six votes of New Jersey, the ninety-eight votes of New York, the seventy-four votes of Pennsylvania (“the latter,” Irwin Ross writes, “an implied repudiation of the chairman of the platform committee, Pennsylvania’s own Frank Myers”). The vote, 651½ to 582½ was for the minority plank. A huge roar of triumph filled the hall. Later, analyzing the victory, Humphrey would say it could be explained “in part by conscience, in part by political realism.” The bosses of the Northeast “probably supported us because they wanted something to attract the votes of liberals, Negroes, minorities, and labor. Maybe they wanted to protect us from the appeal on the left of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party….” And, “they reflected, and our victory reflected, a deep current running in the party and in the country.” But that evening, there was no analysis, there was only triumph. “All we knew was that we, a group of young liberals, had beaten the leadership of the party and led them closer to where they ought to have been.” Leaving the hall, Minnesota’s National Committee-woman Eugenie Anderson heard a reporter say, “Can you beat that? The ADA has licked the South.”
“AT THE WHITE HOUSE,” as McCullough has written, “angered by the turn events were taking, Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as ‘crackpots’ who hoped the South would bolt.”
Southerners did walk out during the balloting for the presidential nominee, but only some southerners: the Mississippi delegation and half of the Alabama delegation. Those that remained decided at the last minute to nominate their own candidate (Russell), but he received only 263 votes (to Truman’s 947½). Delegates from four southern states eventually formed a Dixiecrat party and nominated their own candidate, Strom Thurmond, but in the November election those four states, with a mere thirty-nine electoral votes, were all that Thurmond carried. And, as McCullough writes, “The fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reeled Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.” A crucial element in the President’s stunning upset victory in November was the allegiance of blacks in the big cities.
At the time, there were not a few comparisons between Humphrey’s speech and what has been described as “the only convention speech that ever had a greater impact on the deliberation of the delegates”—William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” oration of half a century before—but later events were to blur the memory of Humphrey’s speech so that today it is all but lost to history. Nothing, though, could ever dim the memory of that speech for those who were there to hear it. “It was the greatest speech I ever heard,” Paul Douglas would say a quarter of a century later. “He was on fire, just like the Bible speaks of Moses.” Recalling the “magnificent” line about moving out “into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Douglas would say, “To me, he will always be the orator of the dawn.” And at the time, the speech, and the national acclaim it brought him, gave a boost to Humphrey’s career. Although no Democrat had ever won popular election to the Senate in Minnesota, he had entered the race against the formidable incumbent, Joseph Ball. Now, arriving back in Minneapolis after the convention, he was hoisted to the shoulders of a crowd that carried him through the streets, and he went on not only to win, but to win in a rout. His arrival in Washington in January, 1949, as a senator-elect was heralded on the cover of Time magazine, on which the “glib, jaunty, spellbinder with a listen-you-guys’ approach” was portrayed as a whirlwind spiraling into the capital. The “Number One prospect for liberalism in this country” was greeted by Washington liberals as a man who, as The New Republic said, “has a well-knit liberal philosophy and a powerful urge to right wrongs”—as a politician whose beliefs were so firmly held that he was willing to fight for them without compromise, and who, in the face of long odds, could win.
The subject of the cover story considered this image accurate. His victory at the convention, the victory he had won without compromise, had apparently made him believe that his ideals could become reality without compromise. In his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, published a quarter of a century later, he would recall his feelings after the Democratic convention: “I had taken on our establishment and won. It was a heady feeling. But it confirmed something I felt and hoped. You could stand for a principle in politics and you could move an unwilling party toward a necessary goal.”
But in the next sentence of that autobiography, Hubert Humphrey wrote, “How slowly and with what difficulty you kept it moving I was yet to learn.”
It was the Senate that taught him.
HUBERT HUMPHREY came to Washington determined to right the wrongs he hated so deeply, and, euphoric because of his convention victory, and because of Truman’s, which liberals viewed as a mandate for progress in civil rights, he was understandably confident that he could defeat the establishment in Washington as he had defeated the establishment at the convention—overconfident, in fact, so that his stridency, always annoying to new acquaintances until they had had a chance to discern the sincerity and passion beneath it, was at its most irritating.
Arriving to be greeted by journalists’ predictions that, despite the liberal victory, Congress would again stall civil rights legislation, the freshman senator called a press conference (a well-attended press conference) to inform reporters that “there are enough votes in Congress” to pass the legislation “if [members] are honest and sincere—and I warn them that if they are not honest and sincere they may have trouble in the future.” Friends tried to facilitate Humphrey’s entree to the capital’s Democratic establishment and took him to lunch with one of its pillars, Jim Rowe, at the august Metropolitan Club. “My God, I was shocked,” Rowe would recall. “This guy was just awful. He knew everything about everything.” Dining at a nearby table was Arthur Krock, and when Rowe pointed him out to the newcomer, Humphrey said that Krock was always too hard on civil rights advocates. But now, Humphrey said, he had arrived in Washington and “I’ll knock his block off.” When Krock wrote a column criticizing him, he replied in a letter to the Timesthat attacked the columnist by name, as well as “the unholy alliance of the Republican party with the conservative wing of the Democratic party.” He employed similarly uncompromising terms in a speech to a black audience at Howard University, denouncing the filibuster not only as “purely and simply an undemocratic technique to permit rule by a minority” that “will fail because history is against them, the people are against them, the times are against them” but also as a “rotten political bargain” between Republicans and southern Democrats. Even worse, he showed up at the Senate Dining Room one day with a black member of his staff, Cyril King, and when the head waiter, himself a black man, told them they could not be served (one can only cringe at the thought of one black man forced to tell another that because of his color he was not welcome as a guest), Humphrey first softly, and then loudly and angrily, kept insisting that he and King were going to eat together, until at last they were allowed to do so. Worse still, he accepted the national chairmanship of the ADA, an organization regarded by the “unholy alliance” with hatred and scorn, accepted it because, as he was later to say, he felt that by doing so, “I would be more than a freshman senator … I would become a national leader.”
The Senate, whose new Majority Leader, Scott Lucas, was the man who in Philadelphia had called Humphrey “a pip-squeak,” responded in typical Senate fashion. When Humphrey rose on the floor (much too soon, by Senate standards) to deliver his maiden speech, he chided the Senate for its slow pace (“Sometimes I think we become so cozy—we feel so secure in our six-year term—we forget that the people want things done”) while supporting Senator James Murray’s proposal for the creation of a Missouri Valley Authority that would “do for the dust bowl what the Tennessee Valley Authority has done for the hillbilly hollows of the South” and would be as well “a symbol of liberalism to the large majority of Americans who voted liberal last November and in other Novembers.” A symbol it was, and the Senate referred it to, and buried it in, committee, as it did, in 1949, bills embodying improvements in the minimum wage and health care, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, and other pledges made at the Democratic convention. And 1949 was also, of course, the year of the civil rights battle in which Lyndon Johnson gave his maiden speech—the battle Richard Russell won decisively, cementing the “undemocratic technique” into place more firmly than ever.
If that was the Senate’s response on governmental issues, there were responses on a more personal level, responses for which Humphrey, unable to hold a grudge, was, as he would later say, “unprepared.” (Although he might have been prepared, given the fury still raging against him in the South; an editorial in the Dothan, Alabama, Register said: “His name is anathema. It will remain for history to tag him as the demagog he is.”)
Scott Lucas, Humphrey was to realize, “still had not forgiven me for Philadelphia”—and neither had the southerners who had placed Lucas in the majority leadership. Humphrey’s requested committee assignments were Foreign Relations and Agriculture. While there was no opening for a freshman on the former, there was one on the latter, and it might have seemed logical for Humphrey since he was from an agricultural state. He was assigned instead to two of the least desirable committees, Government Operations and Post Office, and, in a peculiarly senatorial version of a covert sneer, he was, as one of his biographers was to put it, placed in “the juniormost seat on the Labor and Welfare Committee, whose ranking Republican member was Taft, author of the law Humphrey was committed to repeal.” (Humphrey responded by writing an article for the American Political Science Review in which he attacked the seniority system as “the most sacred cow in the legislative zoo” and tendered the Senate some additional advice: to “give the spirit of youth a larger place in our legislative halls.”) “The extra perks of office that [Lucas] could deny, he did deny.” Since Humphrey was deeply interested in foreign affairs, the Majority Leader didn’t appoint him to any of the many congressional delegations that traveled to foreign countries between sessions. Humphrey requested a seat on a new Select Committee on Small Business, but he was not one of the freshmen appointed to it. Vice President Barkley intervened to add Humphrey’s name to a Senate group traveling to Germany, and, with President Truman’s backing, persuaded Lucas to add him to the Small Business Committee, but he could do nothing about a dozen other slights Lucas managed to inflict. Humphrey despised Lucas (who, he was to say, “of course always voted with us on civil rights [in the Senate] … because it wasn’t going to pass anyway”). As he had proven in Philadelphia, he could defeat Lucas in open combat, but in the Senate nothing was open.
And there were other personal responses particularly hurtful to a man of Humphrey’s open and gregarious nature.
The Senate was such a convivial place, a place of pats on the back and hearty handshakes and warm, welcoming smiles, of banter and friendly exchanges. But there were few pats and handshakes for Hubert Humphrey, and few smiles, either. Paul Douglas would smile, of course, and Estes Kefauver, and Jim Murray, but not other senators, including the most influential, the ones who were the center of the chatting groups in the cloakroom or on the Senate floor. When Humphrey walked into the cloakroom or out onto the floor, there would, in fact, often be a turning away by these men, just slightly but enough to discourage conversation. It began to be noticeable that he was, in fact, being snubbed outright by the southerners and many of their allies.
And there were responses more hurtful than snubs. There were sotto voce comments about him, little jokes. Once, when Humphrey, still a freshman, was speaking yet again on the Senate floor, William Jenner whispered that Humphrey reminded him of some tomatoes he had once planted “too early in the spring and the frost got them.” Some of the whispers got back to Humphrey.
And there were remarks pitched loudly enough for Humphrey to hear. Richard Russell was always polite except when someone was trying to improve the lot of the black man in America, and Hubert Humphrey, who had made those unforgivable statements in Convention Hall, simply would not stop trying in the Senate to improve the black man’s lot. One afternoon, Humphrey was to recall, “I walked from the Senate chamber past a group of Southern senators. They ignored me and I moved silently on, but not out of earshot, and one of them, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, said, obviously for my benefit: ‘Can you imagine the people of Minnesota sending that damn fool down here to represent them?’”
Late in 1949, staff members of Harry Byrd’s Committee on Reduction of Non-Essential Federal Expenditures quietly “analyzed” the cost of every bill that Humphrey had introduced in the 1949 session, came up with estimates—inflated estimates—that put the total at thirty billion dollars, and leaked the figures to right-wing columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. and to newspapers back in Minnesota. Republican senators then used the figures against Humphrey on the Senate floor, Kenneth Wherry saying sarcastically: “That is how he believes in economy.” In retaliation, Humphrey introduced a resolution to abolish the Byrd Committee, which, he charged, “is merely used as a publicity medium” by Byrd, its work virtually duplicating that of a Government Operations subcommittee. He added that its “very existence is a wanton waste and extravagance” and the appropriation for its staff and printing costs “stands as the Number One waste of the taxpayers’ dollars.”
Humphrey’s charges had substance, as most of the Senate might privately have admitted—Byrd’s committee had not even met since 1947—but a public attack by a junior senator on one of the pillars of the Senate club was a tactical mistake. And, in a violation of Senate protocol, Humphrey had unknowingly made the charge when Byrd was away from Washington visiting his ailing mother. The counterattack came six days later, and when it began, the Senate Chamber was, as one of Humphrey’s biographers was to put it, “ominously full.” Byrd’s patrician accent had never been softer as the ruddy-faced Virginia apple-grower begged the Senate’s permission to “correct some misstatements” by Humphrey about his committee. When he had finished, he said, “I have mentioned nine misstatements in 2,000 words. This is on average one misstatement in every 250 words—and the Senator speaks like the wind.” Harry Byrd’s drawl grew even more pronounced. “As the Senator from Minnesota is a publicity expert himself,” he said, “his statement, although not intended as such, could be regarded as a compliment from one who welcomes and has been signally successful in creating publicity for himself and his objectives. If he has ever hid his light under a bushel, I am unaware of it. And I have not observed any indication that he is of the shrinking violet type evading publicity.” The Senate in its wisdom could, if it so desired, abolish his committee, Harry Byrd said. If the Senate thought that best, he would not oppose so many colleagues whose opinion he deeply respected. But, he said, “I do not want it done as the result of misinformation such as that which has been presented to the Senate.”
Byrd’s attack, biographer Carl Solberg was to write, was only “the initial salvo of a verbal barrage that has seldom been equalled in modern Senate history.” One by one, southern and conservative senators defended Byrd—and assailed his attacker in personal terms that verged on the vicious. Rising at his front-row desk and turning to stare directly at Hubert Humphrey, Walter George said that of course the Byrd Committee should not be abolished. It was “doing a magnificent job.” The attack on the committee was, he said, “the height of reckless irresponsibility.”
Personal attacks were supposedly forbidden on the Senate floor, and Humphrey tried repeatedly to get the floor to make that point, or to respond, but Barkley, in the chair, refused to recognize him, and Humphrey finally gave up, and sat slumped at his back-row desk as one after another of his colleagues assailed him. When, after four hours, Byrd’s allies finally yielded the floor, Humphrey rose to reply. As he did so, Byrd and every one of his supporters turned their backs on him and strode out of the Chamber.
Humphrey tried to fight back by publishing a letter in the Times, and accepting an invitation to debate Byrd before a liberal group in Richmond. When Byrd declined to appear, President Truman wrote him: “The senator from Virginia wouldn’t have dared to debate with you.” But in the Senate, the hostility to him became increasingly overt. Following an angry debate in the radio studio in the Senate Office Building, Homer Capehart called him a “Commie,” and tried to shove him out the door. Humphrey was only stopped from punching the burly Indianan by an aide who wrestled him away. When news of this undignified display was brought to the Democratic cloakroom, Barkley knew immediately who was to blame, and made a crack, playing on the name of Minnesota’s senior senator, Edward Thye, that within minutes was circulating all over the Capitol: “Minnesota is a great state—first they send us their Ball, then they send us their Thye, and now they send us their goddamned ass.”
Such remarks, which invariably seemed to make their way to Hubert Humphrey’s ears, would be seared into his memory. Talking to an interviewer in 1977, not long before he died, he could still recall how he had felt when he heard Richard Russell call him a “damn fool.” “I just felt sick…. This hurt me more than anything in my private or public life, anything.” Humphrey would call those first years in the Senate “the most miserable period of my life.” They were, he would say, “dark days…. I despaired.” Despairwas a word Hubert Humphrey would, in the last years of his life, use frequently in describing those first years in the Senate, despair and bitter—and, most of all, lonely. He “just couldn’t believe” the way he was treated, he would say. “I was prepared for the normal political opposition you could expect to encounter,” and of course he was aware of the South’s anger at his convention speech, but “I always worked on the basis that when the election was over, you didn’t hate anybody, and you sort of shook hands and you went to work.” And, he would say, “I was a more than normally gregarious person, who wanted to be liked,” and “I wanted to do well, and I knew that my political intensity, my personal enthusiasm, needed a friendly environment to blossom. I didn’t feel any comradeship, any friendship. Nobody showed us around…. We didn’t go to many parties and the few we went to weren’t very helpful.” He envied, he was to say, freshmen like Johnson, Kerr, and Long. “They had friends in the South,” he was to say. “That’s all you needed. I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. No friends anyplace.”
At the time, of course, he tried not to let his hurt show. “I hated to expose my feelings….” And, except to his wife (“Without Muriel, I might have given up…. She was never too tired to listen …”), he didn’t let his hurt show. His broad smile was always in place in public. But that was in public. In the evening, after the Senate day, he would get into his old Buick and drive home to Chevy Chase. And sometimes, driving home, he would cry—Hubert Humphrey, the youngest, and perhaps the best, mayor in the history of Minneapolis, elected to the Senate at the age of thirty-seven in a landslide, Hubert Humphrey who had brought a Democratic convention to its feet with the greatest speech since the Cross of Gold, Hubert Humphrey, as brave as any David who ever faced a Goliath, driving up Connecticut Avenue in the stream of rush-hour cars, with tears running down his face.
DURING HIS EARLY YEARS IN THE SENATE, Humphrey was to say, “Johnson and I had virtually no contact, reflecting, I suppose, the general attitude of the senators toward me.” Johnson’s attitude toward him was, in fact, distinctly chilly. Then, one day in the spring of 1951, Humphrey came out of the underground door of the Senate Office Building to catch the subway to the Capitol, and Johnson and George Reedy were standing on the platform. During the ride, the two senators sat together, and a surprised Reedy heard Johnson speaking warmly to Humphrey. As Reedy was to recall it, Johnson said, “Hubert, you have no idea what a wonderful experience it is for me to ride to the Senate Chamber with you. There are so many ways that I envy you. You are articulate, you have such a broad range of knowledge, you can present it with such absolute logic.” And then, in what Reedy describes as “a sudden change of voice,” Johnson said harshly: “But goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you be something but a gramophone for the NAACP? Goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you make a speech about labor for once? Goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you make a speech about farmers?” And Johnson ended by saying, “Goddamn it, Hubert, why can’t you do something for all those people and the NAACP besides talking about them? You’re spending so much time making speeches that there is no time left to get anything done.” Reedy does not record Humphrey’s reaction to the harshness, but it evidently reinforced whatever it was that Lyndon Johnson’s reckoning eye had seen in him. It was in the spring of 1951 that, Humphrey would recall, “He started to show some interest in me. He didn’t treat me as if I was a pariah.” He began, in fact, “to invite me to his office for talk and frequently for a drink.”
“I found him fascinating right from the beginning,” Humphrey would recall. “A marvelous conversationalist in private conversation. Told a lot of stories, a lot of human interest stuff. He had been close to Roosevelt, who was my political hero. And he knew the operations of the House, and he knew all the personalities. And he knew all the little things that people did. He was a great mimicker, too, you know.” To hear Hubert Humphrey recall those talks in 231 is to hear a man utterly charmed by Lyndon Johnson.
Charmed—and impressed. Humphrey had a master’s degree in political science, and had been the mayor of a major American city, but in these conversations with Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey was learning a political science that couldn’t be learned in college, or even in City Hall. Beside Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey was only a student, and he knew it. A note he wrote Johnson at the time says, “I am learning a great deal from you. You are one teacher who makes a fellow like what he’s taught.”
Some of the lessons that Johnson taught about politics were pragmatic, basic. “Johnson said the first lesson of politics is to be able to count,” Humphrey would recall. “I have never forgotten that.” Some were about personalities. “From the very beginning, it seemed to me, he understood the most intricate workings of the Senate. It seemed that he got there aware of the backgrounds of most of the members, and he took the trouble to find out about the ones he didn’t know about. He was like … a psychiatrist. He knew how to appeal to every single senator and how to win him over. He knew how to appeal to their vanity, to their needs, to their ambitions.” And some of the lessons were at a higher level. With every conversation, it seemed, Hubert Humphrey was becoming increasingly aware that Lyndon Johnson was operating on a level of politics of which he himself had been only dimly aware. “He knew Washington as no other man in my experience. He understood the structure and pressure points of the government, and the process and problems of legislation. He understood … the appointed officials. He knew the satellite worlds of Washington: the business lobbyists, the labor movement, the farm and rural-electrification lobbyists, the people interested in health research and social security….”
“I was always fascinated by his knowledge of politics,” Hubert Humphrey was to recall. “If you liked politics, it was like sitting at the feet of a giant.”
HUMPHREY WAS IMPRESSED not only by Johnson’s politics but by his personality. The words and phrases with which he describes that personality—words and phrases sprinkled through Humphrey’s autobiography, and through the texts of interviews he gave to writers and to oral history interviewers—reveal an admiration that verges on awe.
Big is a word that recurs frequently in these descriptions. “You have just almost got to see the man,” Humphrey says. “He’d get right up on you. He’d just lean right in on you, you know. Your nose would only be about—he was so big and tall he’d be kind of looking down on you, you see….” “He was like a plant reaching out for water,” Humphrey says. “Like a tree. And his whole demeanor was one great big long reach.” He talks about Johnson’s hands—“those great big hands of his. I can still see him clap them.” Recalling Johnson’s use of Hill Country maxims to make a point, Humphrey says: “One of his favorite expressions was ‘If you’re going to kill a snake with a hoe, you have to get it with one blow at the head.’ And he’d give a dramatic expression of what he meant with his hands, those hands that were just like a couple of great big shovels coming down.”
Strong is a word that recurs frequently—along with words that are evocations of strength. “This fellow is a very strong man, strong willed, strong of body,” he said of Johnson; “he was a muscular, glandular political man.”
In describing Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey describes him as subtle. “He was a born political lover. It’s a most amazing thing. Many people look upon Johnson as the heavy-handed man. That’s not really true. He was sort of like a cowboy making love.” He describes him as fierce: “a lion … clever, fast and furious when he needed to be and kind and placid when he needed to be.” He describes him as an elemental force of nature. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door, and he’d take the whole room over. Just like that. Everything.” In describing Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey paints with his own words—unwittingly, perhaps, but vividly—a portrait of two strong personalities in interplay, and of one, strong though it was, coming more and more under the spell of the other.
OF ALL JOHNSON’S QUALITIES, none impressed Hubert Humphrey more than the fact that, as he was to say, “Johnson was always able to take the measure of a man. He knew those that he could dominate; he knew those that he could out-maneuver. Right off the bat he sized you up.”
Did Lyndon Johnson “size up” Hubert Humphrey? Were these talks behind the closed door of Johnson’s office a perusal, a studying—a reading, by a master reader of men, of a very difficult text?
It is possible that Lyndon Johnson never had a more difficult text to read, for the interplay between him and Hubert Humphrey was very complicated. It was, after all, not only Johnson whose life was fired by burning ambition; that quality was blazoned as boldly as idealism across Humphrey’s life; with his characteristic frankness, he had once asked a group of Minneapolis supporters, “What’s so un-American about being ambitious? Of course I’m ambitious.” Both men were, in fact, fired by the same ambition, reaching for the same distant goal. Joe Rauh, who first met Humphrey in 1947, recalls that “From the moment we met, he was talking about how he was going to be President someday.” In fact, about a month before the 1948 Democratic Convention, when he was still only a young mayor—utterly inexperienced in national affairs, and little known outside Minnesota—he persuaded Rauh and two other ADA friends who were acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugenie Anderson and James Loeb, to travel up to Hyde Park and ask her if he should skip the Senate race against Joe Ball and instead follow the course her husband had taken in 1920, when he ran as Vice President on a losing ticket, and try to go on Truman’s ticket (which virtually all the experts expected to also be a losing ticket) as a prelude to a later presidential run. (Mrs. Roosevelt replied that “Of course [if you run for Vice President] you’re going to get better known.”) It was only after the utter impossibility of obtaining the vice presidential nomination became apparent to him that he settled down to concentrate on the Senate race. That great goal was to glimmer before Humphrey, always out of his reach but always to be sought for, throughout his life. He was to make three all-out tries for the presidency—in 1960; 1968, when he received the Democratic nomination and almost won the election; and 1972—and he was about to make a fourth try, in 1976, when the realization was borne in on him that he was about to be defeated this time by cancer. These were two men, almost the same age, who never took their eye from the same target. It was not only Lyndon Johnson who was so driven that his quest was filled with “energy” that made other men, even men of great energy, marvel; it was not only Lyndon Johnson who brought to his quest a willingness to sacrifice sleep and family and so many other considerations that influence other men. And if Lyndon Johnson was strong, what was the man Paul Douglas had been moved to liken to the Bible’s heroic David? Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a spindly youngster with a sunny smile and a strikingly open, bright cheerfulness that “made you feel good when he was around,” was the son of a small-town druggist who struggled to make a living in a series of the little towns that dot the windswept prairies of Minnesota and South Dakota; he got himself to college, but then was forced to drop out for six years and work behind the counter to help his father survive in a Depression-ravaged area where their farmer-customers had no money to pay their bills; he eventually returned to graduate and then get a master’s degree through sheer determination. And as Mayor of Minneapolis—elected at thirty-four, he was the youngest mayor in the city’s history—he was uncompromising in ramming through measures for social justice: when even the publisher of the city’s leading black newspaper urged him to drop his fight for a municipal FEPC because of the bitterness it was engendering, he replied, “To hell with that, it’s right and it’s going through”; while he was Mayor, a mayor who hung two big portraits of Franklin Roosevelt in his office, Minneapolis became not only the first city with an effective FEPC but the first city to offer free chest X-rays to those who couldn’t pay for them. And he was so tough in ending police brutality toward blacks and union strikers that when he died, Thurgood Marshall, the great black attorney, would say that of all Hubert Humphrey’s achievements, none had impressed him more than “what he did with the police.” When Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson sat talking behind the closed doors of Johnson’s office, it was not only one of those two men whose life was a study in determination and strength of will.
Difficult though the text may have been, however, Johnson read it—and made use of what he read.
It is possible to know why Lyndon Johnson befriended Hubert Humphrey, for in later years Johnson would boast about the use he had made of him, and because of a memorandum “written” during those Senate years by George Reedy but virtually dictated by Johnson, that spelled out, in considerable detail, Humphrey’s usefulness to him.
Humphrey could, Johnson saw, be the bridge to the northern liberals which he needed. They acknowledged the Minnesotan, as much as they acknowledged any man, as their leader; they viewed Johnson as a typical southern conservative, but if Humphrey came to like him and trust him, he would, should Johnson become Democratic Leader, be a link between Johnson and the liberals; there would be at least a beginning of unity among Senate Democrats. He might, indeed, be the only bridge possible; as the “Reedy” memo put it: “Senator Humphrey is about the only force that is able to control the [liberal] extremists.”
Johnson wanted, in fact, to use Humphrey as an emissary between the two senatorial camps, as an instrument of compromise, someone through whom could be worked out the compromises necessary for unity, necessary to at least soften the antagonisms in the party, the compromises necessary for a Leader to have a chance of success. Such an emissary, to be effective, would have to believe, first, that compromise was desirable, and second, that it was possible. He would have to believe that at bottom there existed some common ground between Lyndon Johnson and the liberals, that their aims were not, after all, totally dissimilar. And, moreover, Johnson wanted Humphrey to be a friendly, sympathetic instrument, so that in negotiating for compromise, he, Lyndon Johnson, would be negotiating through someone who liked and trusted him. Reedy wrote that there was a reason that Humphrey, seemingly so uncompromising, might be such an instrument—because he believed deeply and sincerely in what he was fighting for, and therefore victory in the fight was very important to him. “There are compulsions upon Senator Humphrey—both of conscience and of constituency—which force him to lead a civil rights fight. But he is not going to win a civil rights fight by splitting the Democratic Party. The only way he can win the fight is to drum up enough votes on his side and soften the opposition on the other side.”
Johnson wanted Humphrey not only to bring southern and northern Senate blocs closer together, but to bring him, Lyndon Johnson, closer to the northern senators. For him to become President, he needed the North. Viewing him as a typical southern conservative, however, northern liberals, even those of them who were beginning to like him personally, still deeply distrusted his philosophy and aims. He needed the liberal senators to trust him, or at least to feel they could work with him; he needed them to be convinced that at bottom they shared some of the same goals. The best way of convincing them would be to have someone within their own camp who would argue for him. And who better to do that than Humphrey? If the Minnesotan liked and trusted him, he would be the best possible means to the personal rapprochement required for the realization of Lyndon Johnson’s great ambition.
And, lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what Lyndon Johnson wanted in his dealings with Hubert Humphrey was to modulate that great voice. Of all the liberals who could rise on the Senate floor and embarrass—humiliate, in the Johnsonian lexicon—a Democratic Leader by demanding that he pass liberal legislation which he was in fact not able to pass, no one could do so nearly as eloquently and effectively as Humphrey. No senator could enunciate liberal aims more persuasively, could arouse liberal emotions more dramatically, could mobilize national liberal opinion against a Senate Leader more effectively than that mighty orator from the plains, and Johnson knew it, as “Reedy’s” memorandum makes clear: “The most compelling reason” for making Humphrey a link between the two sides, the memorandum states, “is that a running battle between Senator Humphrey and the leadership will place the leadership in the public mind as a ‘sectional southern’ leadership continually battling the northern liberals.” Humphrey, the memo said, is “a national figure around whom” liberals can rally; if he continues fighting the southern senators, “it would split the party. He has sufficient prestige and sufficient standing that he may do precisely that.” He had to be brought to Johnson’s side.
And Johnson, capable of making every man his tool, knew how to use Humphrey to attain the ends he wanted. Was there, shining out of that text, ambition? Knowing now that Humphrey wanted the same thing that he did, wanted it perhaps almost as badly as he did, Lyndon Johnson used that knowledge—used it so skillfully that the intensity of Humphrey’s ambition would serve only to make him a better tool for realizing Johnson’s ambition. Since a rapprochement with the liberals would strengthen Johnson’s position in his run for the presidency, and Humphrey was of course smart enough to see this, Johnson made Humphrey believe that ultimately it would be to his own benefit for Johnson’s position to be thus strengthened. For Humphrey to believe that, he had to believe that Johnson was no threat to his presidential dreams, and, that in fact, building up Johnson’s support would wind up helping him more than Johnson. And Johnson made him believe that.
The exact words he employed we do not know, for there is no record of these conversations. But we do know the general nature of the arguments he employed—for Humphrey believed them and later repeated them to others. There was no point in trying to convince a man as intelligent as Hubert Humphrey—and Johnson fully understood the keenness and depth of Hubert Humphrey’s intellect—that Johnson didn’t want the presidency. Instead, Johnson acknowledged to Humphrey that he wanted the presidency but said he knew he would never get it—and he convinced Humphrey that he would never get it, explaining to him, with apparently deep conviction, why no one from the South could be President. And he convinced Humphrey as well that since Johnson couldn’t get the nomination it was to his advantage to build up Johnson as a candidate, make him as strong a candidate as possible, because his strength would eventually go to whomever Johnson wanted—and so long as he and Johnson were allies, it would eventually go to him. Humphrey, believing him, was to explain all this in a strictly off-the-record conversation with Robert Manning, then a reporter for Time magazine, who relayed Humphrey’s words to his editors in a confidential memo: “Nobody can love politics as much as Johnson does, and not want to be President,” Humphrey told Manning. But, Humphrey also said, “for all his political sagacity and influence on party affairs, even if he guns for it, he’s not repeat not going to be nominated.” In fact, Humphrey explained to Manning, Johnson’s ambition would end up helping him, Hubert Humphrey, receive the nomination, since “Johnson votes [the votes from southern states] could very well determine who else gets the nomination,” and those votes “could very well go to Humphrey.” During those chats behind the closed door in 231, Johnson was not the only one of the two young senators who was trying to use the other. If Johnson needed the North if he was ever to become President, and saw Humphrey as a means to obtaining it, so did Humphrey need the South—and see Johnson as a means of obtaining it. And Johnson made sure that Humphrey kept seeing him that way. Carl Solberg, the author of the only thoroughly documented biography of Humphrey, concludes that in his dealings with Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey was thinking that only one of them was going to be President—and that he was going to be the one; that he had a better chance because he wasn’t from Texas; that while Johnson might be under the impression that he was using him, in reality, he was using Johnson.
Was there, shining out of that text, idealism? Personal admiration—awe, even—could never be a decisive influence with a man who believed as deeply in principles, in moral goals, as did Hubert Humphrey. “Our little group of 25 [sic] or so liberal senators were very suspicious of Johnson, in those early years, very suspicious of him!” Humphrey was to recall. He was very suspicious of Johnson. In order for him to ally himself with Johnson, he would have to be convinced that the alliance would not involve any betrayal of principle—that, in fact, the alliance would improve the chances for realization of those goals.
Humphrey’s recollections of the conversations in 231 give some hint as to the methods Johnson employed to make him believe that they shared the same principles. One was for Johnson to identify himself with the President who to Humphrey had been the supreme embodiment of these principles. Like the great storyteller he was, Johnson brought alive those two paintings on Humphrey’s office wall, talking endlessly about his private dinners and breakfasts with FDR. Humphrey could never get enough of these stories, and to him they did indeed validate Johnson’s liberalism. “Johnson was a Roosevelt man,” Humphrey says. “That was his greatest joy. To remind people that Roosevelt looked upon him as his protégé. A hundred times I heard him mention that, you know. That was his great moment…. This made him in a sense, in his contacts with many people like myself, a sort of New Dealer.” And Johnson talked also about Ben Cohen and Tommy the Cork and other almost legendary New Dealers with whom he was friends. “David Dubinsky was another one of his heroes, and the ILGWU, and how he and David always worked together.” And Johnson also talked, as only Lyndon Johnson could talk, about the episodes in his life in which he had fought for the things in which liberals believed, about fighting the private utilities to bring electricity to the Hill Country, about the months he had spent in Cotulla. “I knew he was very sympathetic to the Mexican-Americans,” Humphrey says. “Johnson never forgot that he was a schoolteacher down there.”
Humphrey could see with his own eyes that Richard Russell also regarded Lyndon Johnson as his protégé, that the senators with whom Johnson was on the most intimate terms were the southerners, but Humphrey felt, after those talks with Johnson, that he understood that. “Johnson never was a captive of the southern bloc,” he says. “He was trying to be a captain of them, rather than a captive…. He was, I think, biding his time, so to speak, and building his contacts.” He was not yet fully convinced of Johnson’s liberalism, but he was convinced that there was much more liberalism in his new friend than he had previously believed.
Was Johnson also reading in Humphrey his loneliness, the loneliness of a gregarious man, shunned in the Senate, who badly needed a friend? Of all the things that Lyndon Johnson made Hubert Humphrey believe, in those years when one was not yet President of the United States and the other was not yet his Vice President, one of the most important in binding Humphrey to him was to convince Humphrey that Lyndon Johnson was his friend.
Johnson liked him, Humphrey would say, he was sure of it. “We were hitting it off.” Looking back at those Senate years in 1972, from a very different vantage point, he would say, “I really believe that Lyndon Johnson looked upon me—I’ve tried to think about this even after the Vice Presidency and all—I think it’s fair to say he liked me as an individual, as a human being.” He thought he understood why. “Johnson had a sense of humor, and he could kid with me,” he would say. “Johnson didn’t enjoy talking with most liberals. He didn’t think they had a sense of humor.” And there was in Johnson’s attitude an implicit assumption that they were comrades-in-arms, friends fighting for the same cause. He not only showed Humphrey a mountaintop—that both of them would rise (although because he, Johnson, was unlucky enough to be from Texas, Humphrey would rise higher)—but that they would be on the mountain-top together. Once, on the Senate floor the day after one of the huge Democratic Jefferson-Jackson dinners, he told Humphrey in a low, confidential voice that he was tired of “the same old phonograph records of yesterday” that had been played at the dinner. “We’ve many fine governors and members of Congress, fresh faces, who weren’t heard from,” he said. “We need new voices. Someday we’ll give our own party.”
In letters he wrote to Humphrey from Texas during the long Senate recesses, he used over and over again the word Humphrey wanted to hear. “I have been sorely missing your wise advice and friendly counsel,” he wrote in 1953. “I am looking forward to many more years of service with a good friend,” he wrote in 1954. In a letter at a crucial point in their relationship, in 1956, he wrote assuring him, “You will be on the scene as a national leader long after the others are forgotten.
“And you are my friend.”
“You are a wonderful friend, and I will never forget it,” he wrote in 1957, and, also in 1957, “My deep thanks go to you for … being my everlasting friend.”
And Humphrey responded with the same word. “The privilege of your friendship is a priceless gift,” he wrote. “Thanks so much for your warm words of friendship,” he wrote.
And there was one further key element in the Humphrey text, one element that to Lyndon Johnson, to whom personality was all-important, may have been the most important of all. It was a quality that could have been discerned, at this stage of Hubert Humphrey’s career, only by an unusually gifted reader of men, for at this stage Humphrey was regarded as a very strong man, strong and tough enough to have stood up to the South. But Lyndon Johnson was just such a reader. Hubert Humphrey may have been strong and tough, Johnson saw, but he wasn’t strong enough or tough enough. Most importantly, he wasn’t as strong, as tough, as he himself was.
At the bottom of Humphrey’s character, as Johnson saw, was a fundamental sweetness, a gentleness, a reluctance to cause pain; a desire, if he fought with someone, to later seek a reconciliation, to let bygones be bygones, to shake hands and be friends again. And to Lyndon Johnson that meant that at the bottom of Humphrey’s character, beneath the strength and the ambition and the energy, there was weakness. Years later, he would define this crucial difference between them with Johnsonian vividness of phrase. At the time, they were both in a dispute with labor leader Walter Reuther, whose right arm had long been permanently crippled by a would-be assassin’s gunshot. Reuther had come to Washington to meet with them individually, and Johnson told an assistant: “You know the difference between Hubert and me? When Hubert sits across from Reuther and Reuther’s got that limp hand stuck in his pocket and starts talking … Hubert will sit there smiling away and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get his hand out of his pocket so I can shake it?’ When Reuther sits across from me,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I’m smiling and thinking all the time, ‘How can I get that hand out of his pocket—so I can cut his balls off!’”
Hubert Humphrey was trying to use him, just as he was trying to use Hubert Humphrey. Lyndon Johnson knew that. But he knew something else, too. If two men were each trying to use the other, the tougher one would win—and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the tougher.
LYNDON JOHNSON BEGAN, although he was still only Assistant Leader, to prepare the way for the time when, as Leader, he would be able to make use of what he had learned about Hubert Humphrey. Of all the political science lessons taught in SOB 231, the most important, for the teacher’s purpose, was about the need for compromise.
To convince Humphrey of the efficacy—indeed, the necessity—of compromise, Johnson played on one of the Minnesotan’s deepest desires: his wish not only to fight for social justice, but to win; to help, instead of merely talking about helping, the poor and underprivileged, the “people! Human beings!” that he saw as the main issue of the twentieth century; on Humphrey’s desire for genuine accomplishment.
As Humphrey would later relate, Johnson would often telephone him in his office at about seven-thirty in the evening. “Hubert, come over. There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he would say. If Humphrey protested that his family was waiting, Johnson would say, “Damn it, Hubert, you’ve got to make up your mind whether you’re going to be a good father or a good senator.” And when Humphrey arrived, Johnson would, evening after evening, play variations on the same theme: “Your speeches are accomplishing nothing,” he would say. Humphrey should learn to compromise. “Otherwise, you’ll suffer the fate of those crazies, those bomb-thrower types like Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman. You’ll be ignored, and get nothing accomplished you want.” Humphrey, the man who had refused to compromise, not only came to believe this—“Compromise is not a dirty word,” he would say. “The Constitution itself represents the first great national compromise”—but to believe it with all the fervor of the convert, the convert who is the most enthusiastic of believers. Not only, he was to say, was compromise not a dirty word; those who refuse to compromise are a threat; “the purveyors of perfection,” as he came to call them, “are dangerous when they … move self-righteously to dominate. There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right. They will compromise on nothing…. These rigid minds, which arise on both the left and the right, leave no room for other points of view, for differing human needs…. Pragmatism is the better method.” The fact that some of his fellow liberal senators were to come to look upon him as, in his own words, one of the “unprincipled compromisers” bothered him for a while, he was to say; “it doesn’t bother me any more at all. I felt it was important that we inch along even if we couldn’t gallop along, at least that we trot a little bit.”
THE CONVERSATIONS IN 231 were in a way a testing—a test (of which Humphrey was evidently unaware) of whether Humphrey could and would be the means to Johnson’s ends—and Humphrey evidently passed. Slowly but steadily Johnson began to move Humphrey into a position where he could one day be a bridge between liberals and conservatives, and an instrument of compromise.
During that 1951 session, Johnson began telling Walter George, “Senator, Hubert isn’t such a bad fellow, you know.” He told George how interested Humphrey was in foreign affairs. When Humphrey walked into the cloakroom, Johnson would bring him over to George’s armchair and begin discussing foreign affairs; Humphrey by this time had realized the necessity of listening when George was pontificating, and he listened. And when he himself occasionally interjected a thought, George listened, too; it was difficult to be in a conversation with Hubert Humphrey and not be aware of his intelligence. And of his warmth; the more Walter George saw of Humphrey, the more he began, despite himself, to like him. Simultaneously, Johnson was working on Russell, telling him that Humphrey’s views on agriculture were remarkably like his own—which was, in fact, the case; “the South and the Midwest have always been together on farm legislation,” Humphrey would say. “We needed each other.” Once or twice, when Johnson invited Humphrey over for a drink and a talk, Russell would be there, too. Then Johnson told Russell that Hubert would appreciate having his opinion on an agricultural bill he wanted to introduce. “Humphrey utilized this opportunity to show deference by his repeated ‘sir’ to Russell when they discussed the measure,” Steinberg relates. Russell, too, as John Goldsmith puts it, “came to appreciate Humphrey’s intelligence.” And he came to appreciate his sincerity; Russell had a passion to help the poor farmers of the South, Humphrey had a passion to help the poor farmers of the Midwest, and this shared passion brought them a little closer together. And always Johnson was putting in a good word for Hubert with Russell.
“Johnson was actually becoming a bridge for me with some of the more conservative members of the Senate,” Humphrey was to say. Their feelings about him had eased to a point at which Russell Long of Louisiana, his neighbor in Chevy Chase, felt able to bring him one day to the round table in the senators’ private dining room. “Since there was seldom talk of issues or legislation, lunch was usually a relaxed social hour of storytelling, chatter about the sports page, whatever was not political or controversial.” The southern senators started to get to know Hubert Humphrey not as a fighter for civil rights but as a human being. And, like most people who got to know Hubert Humphrey as a human being, they liked him. And Humphrey knew who had gotten them to like him. “My apprenticeship of isolation drew to a close as I got to know Lyndon Johnson,” he was to say; it was Johnson who brought even “Dick Russell around to look with some favor on me.” He knew that his relationship with the southerners—his key to acceptance in the Senate, to the end of his time as a “pariah”—was due to Lyndon Johnson. He knew that Johnson had given him a great gift. And, being an intelligent man, he knew that what had been given could be taken away.
IF IN 1951 AND 1952, Hubert Humphrey was charmed and impressed by Lyndon Johnson, friends with him and eager to stay friends, he was nevertheless still the dominant figure in the Senate’s liberal bloc and not at all disposed to relinquish that role. His loyalty to that bloc was as undivided as ever. On controversial issues, his views and those of Johnson and the conservatives were not similar, and Johnson didn’t try to modify his views. Nor did Johnson make any attempts during those two years, the years when he was only Assistant Leader, to make use of Humphrey’s new understanding of the virtues of compromise, nor of Humphrey’s new, easier relationship with the southerners, a relationship that would have made it easier for Humphrey to deal with them on the liberals’ behalf. And if Johnson had made such attempts, they would not have succeeded. Humphrey was aware that whatever Johnson’s true philosophy might be, the Texan was very much part of the southern bloc and represented its interests. While during those years, Johnson, as Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, “seemed to foresee that someday Humphrey might be useful to him,” that day had not yet come. For it to come, an additional, final ingredient would have to be added to the relationship between the two senators: power, more power than an Assistant Leader possessed.