Remembering Humphrey's accomplishments
  Eric Black
   Star Tribune
   Sunday, June 3, 2001
   
   Civil rights. Medicare. The war on poverty. Federal aid to education.
   Name a major goal of U.S. liberalism during its heyday in the 1960s
   and '70s -- with the notable exception of opposition to the Vietnam
   War -- and Hubert Humphrey was for it, hammer and tongs and arms
   waving.
   
   But the liberal consensus that Humphrey helped create and rode to his
   greatest legislative achievements -- the belief that the power and
   money of the federal government should be deployed against our most
   intractable social problems -- shattered during the 1980s and '90s as
   many Americans became skeptical of government's ability to solve big
   problems at an acceptable cost.
   
   Humphrey's name is on our domed stadium and the charter terminal at
   our airport. A statue of him, his mouth open in characteristic
   full-throated argument, guards the entrance of Minneapolis City Hall,
   where he served as mayor.
   
   But the most famous of Humphrey's political proteges, Walter Mondale,
   worries that people who remember Humphrey's name are forgetting what
   Humphrey stood for, what a dominant force he was during his lifetime,
   what a stamp he put on Minnesota, how "he demonstrated what one person
   can do, if they are engaged, energetic and skilled, and how we need
   that today."
   
   Humphrey died in 1978, physically devoured by cancer and politically
   diminished by his unsuccessful quests for the presidency and by the
   fading of the liberal consensus. Now, as Mondale pursues a public
   project in autobiography featuring lectures and panels about his 50
   years in public life, he will devote the next chapter to his senior
   partner and friend. The chapter, called "Hubert," will be presented
   Thursday at the University of Minnesota.
   
   'He was the best'
   
   In an interview last week at his Minneapolis law office, Mondale
   recalled that he was a Macalester College student in 1946 when he
   first encountered Humphrey, the dynamic young mayor of Minneapolis,
   giving a speech.
   
   Humphrey was "the best speaker of his time," Mondale said. Later, when
   television became the dominant medium of political communication,
   Humphrey's long, fervent stemwinders were out of fashion and he was
   sometimes mocked for his verbosity. "Television, that was a corner he
   never turned," Mondale said. "But at moving an audience as it was
   movable at that time, he was the best."
   
   Mondale was sufficiently moved to join the ranks of Humphrey's
   supporters, handed out literature for Humphrey's 1947 reelection and
   was thrilled in 1948 when Humphrey made his national breakthrough, at
   the Democratic National Convention.
   
   The platform committee had adopted a mushy civil rights plank,
   designed to avoid offending Southern delegates. Humphrey argued for a
   much stronger plank.
   
   "There are those who say to you, we are rushing this issue of civil
   rights," Humphrey cried. "I say we are 172 years late. There are those
   who say, this issue of civil rights is an infringement on states'
   rights. 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."
   
   Humphrey's eight-minute speech, interrupted 20 times by applause,
   swayed the convention to adopt the stronger civil rights plank. As
   feared, it also inspired a walkout by Southern delegates, who formed a
   Dixiecrat Party and nominated Strom Thurmond, then the Democratic
   governor of South Carolina, as their presidential candidate.
   
   Later in his career, especially during his agonies over the Vietnam
   War and his own presidential candidacy, Humphrey tried to play the
   conciliator, seeking the words that would convince both sides that he
   was their ally. But the Humphrey of 1948 was the opposite.
   
   "Civil rights was perhaps the most important social revolution in our
   history," Mondale said. "You had to hit it straight on, and he did."
   
   When Humphrey was elected to the U.S. Senate, he became the leading
   advocate of civil rights and a prominent member of its growing liberal
   wing. The causes were many, but for Mondale, the key word that unites
   them is "community." Liberals wanted to marshal the resources of the
   community to help those who most needed it.
   
   Thanks to the liberal agenda, Mondale said, "millions of Americans who
   had been excluded from American society were finally given some chance
   to participate, particularly the minorities. We didn't eradicate
   poverty, but the lives of poor people were made far more tolerable. As
   part of this thrust, we completed the most comprehensive, dynamic,
   even incredible period of social change and legislative achievement in
   American history."
   
   Mondale said Humphrey ranks among the greatest, if not the greatest,
   senator of that era.
   
   In 1960, Humphrey sought the presidency for the first time, losing in
   the primaries to John F. Kennedy. Mondale was elected Minnesota
   attorney general. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson chose Humphrey as
   his running mate. Humphrey badly wanted the job, believing it would
   enhance his chance of becoming president someday.
   
   Actually, his election to the vice presidency in the 1964 Democratic
   landslide marked the end of Humphrey's most productive period as a
   public servant, Mondale said.
   
   Johnson was "generally dreadful toward Humphrey," Mondale said. He
   remembers a picture of Humphrey in a cowboy hat on a horse at LBJ's
   ranch that seemed to symbolize, for Mondale, Johnson's determination
   to humiliate Humphrey. The usually joyous Humphrey, nobody's cowboy,
   looks miserable in the picture.
   
   The war
   
   His liberal admirers like to believe that Humphrey harbored strong
   doubts about the escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam but kept them
   private out of loyalty to the administration and out of fear of what
   Johnson would do if he broke ranks. On the other hand, Humphrey had
   been a staunch Cold Warrior and firm anti-Communist.
   
   Mondale said he doesn't know Humphrey's true feelings about the war,
   but he knows that Humphrey gave Johnson a letter early in their term
   advising caution and urging rethinking of the war policy. Johnson,
   Mondale said, "turned on him," excluding Humphrey from the
   administration's inner circles.
   
   Humphrey's accession to the vice presidency was a big break for
   Mondale's career. He was appointed to serve out Humphrey's term and
   spent the next 12 years in the Senate. His relationship with Humphrey
   deepened during all these stages until "we were about as close as two
   politicians can be," Mondale said.
   
   Hobbled by the growing unpopularity of the war, Johnson decided not to
   seek reelection in 1968 and Humphrey sought the nomination, but
   Johnson's support for Humphrey was shaky, Mondale said. Johnson gave
   Humphrey no slack to act in the interests of his candidacy and warned
   that he would publicly denounce Humphrey if he strayed.
   
   Mondale said Humphrey searched for ways to enable anti-war Democrats
   to support him in the general election. Humphrey worked out a
   substitute plank for the Democratic platform that, while certainly not
   dovish, was an olive branch to the anti-war delegates, suggesting that
   Humphrey wanted to find an honorable end to the war and would look for
   new approaches, Mondale said.
   
   Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others had seen the language and
   approved it, but at the last minute "Johnson pulled it out from under
   us," Mondale said, forcing Humphrey to run on a platform that endorsed
   Johnson's war policy down the line.
   
   Delegations controlled by Johnson allies withheld their support from
   Humphrey in ways that left Mondale wondering whether Johnson might be
   plotting a last-minute comeback.
   
   In the end, Humphrey captured the nomination under circumstances,
   including violence between police and anti-war demonstrators outside
   the convention hall, that hurt him in the fall. Humphrey lost,
   narrowly, to Richard Nixon, who claimed to have a secret plan to end
   the war.
   
   Unhappy times
   
   Humphrey returned to the Senate in 1971 and served there until his
   death in 1978, but his second Senate career was not a happy period for
   him, Mondale said. He had lost his leadership position and his
   seniority, gained some political scars from the Vietnam issue and
   "some of his issues had lost steam," Mondale said.
   
   Humphrey's late-career frustrations were the beginning of a change in
   the country's attitude toward liberalism. Mondale speaks listlessly of
   these trends. "People got sour on government," he said.
   
   The landmark legislation of the liberal era has mostly survived
   attempts to dismantle it, he said, and still produces results.
   Mondale, for his part, hasn't changed his mind about the values and
   goals he shared with Humphrey.
   
   "I still think we were right," he said. "We were right to put these
   programs in place, and what we should be doing now is making them
   work."
   
   If Humphrey was still around, he might be searching for new ways to
   attack the problems that still exist, Mondale said, but "what I don't
   think we'd be hearing from him would be a message of retreating from
   looking on the nation as a community and trying to use government as a
   positive force to improve people's lives."
   
   -- Eric Black is at 
eblack@startribune.com