Humphrey and Civil Rights: The Politics of Racial Progress by JOHN G. STEWART John G Stewart was Hubert Humphrey's legislative assistant for domestic issues in the U.S. senate from 1962 to 1965. He then served as executive assistant for domestic programs in the Office of the Vice President, 1965 thru 69. He presently resides in Knoxville, Tennessee. What would an eighty year old Hubert Humphrey think about the current state of civil rights in America? How would he perceive what he described as a never ending American Revolution toward equality of freedom and justice? Would he feel disappointment? Outrage? Indignation? I believe Humphrey could easily summon up all these emotions, and then some. Without question, Humphrey believed the burst of legislative success that occurred in the mid to late nineteen sixties represented a fundamental turning of the corner from a situation in which the nation's laws and governments allowed and even required racial segregation and discrimination to one in which laws and governments oppose and attack segregation and discriminations Humphrey nineteen sixty eight, number 185. From this perspective, the spectacle of the American president vetoing the Civil Rights Act of nineteen ninety, with the U.S. Senate failing by a single vote to override the veto, would be perplexing and disheartening to Humphrey. The use of racial fears for electoral advantage, as the Willie Horton commercial did so effectively in 1988, would likewise be been as slipping back to the darker days of race baiting during the 1940s and 50s. Humphrey would be upset. footnote one the feelings I project for Humphrey have been expressed by others. Republican Senator John C. Danforth Missouri, having, at that point, failed to work out a compromise with the White House on job discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, declared: I've given up on the administration unless there's a change of heart. I think the lawyers are in charge, and I think they're mistaken. They're turning the clock back 25 years on civil rights. Washington Post, August 2. 1991. Al-A7. However, for all his flights of rhetoric about freedom and equality, Humphrey was a political realist. He had few doubts about where the struggle for racial justice was headed in the aftermath of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. This is the time that most needs patient, practical, persistent work, Humphrey wrote, and the time when the public mood makes it most difficult to carry on such work. This is the hard period, the time of real testing Humphrey 1968, 185. Humphrey, in short, had no illusions. The end of legalized segregation and discrimination was only the essential my step toward achieving equality of opportunity in jobs, housing, education, public office holding, and other attributes of a democratic regime. From this perspective, a portion of Humphrey's outrage, scorn, and disappointment over the present state of affairs would be reserved for those political leaders of both parties who failed to maintain the political momentum and leverage that brought about the victories of 1964 equality of public accommodations, federal programs, employment, and voting rights, 1965 voting rights, and 1968 housing. Not only has national leadership in some respects doubled back around the corner Humphrey believed had been decisively turned in the 1960s, but the patient, practical, persistent work needed to attack the inequalities of economic and social opportunity also has flagged. It is true that Humphrey's civil rights efforts often were not associated in the public's mind with patience and the limitations of political reality. Humphrey rather enjoyed the label of bombthrower that some conservative opponents affixed to him. His ideas and proposals often were ahead of their time and suffered accordingly. Yet a careful examination of Humphrey's early political life, for example, his years as mayor of Minneapolis 1945 thru 48 and his advocacy of the minority civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, reveals a careful attention to the politics of what he was attempting to achieve. Humphrey understood that good intentions, taken alone, were not enough. Political muscle was always a necessary ingredient. As Humphrey dismissed in his little book Beyond Civil Rights. A New Day, of Equality, which appeared on the eve of the 1968 presidential campaign his overriding objective as mayor of Minneapolis concerned the city's serious human rights problems. "it may be a little hard for a person now living in Minneapolis to believe," Humphrey wrote, "but that city was then a center of bigotry, with an evil pattern of anti Semitism. The small number of Negroes were ignored altogether in the city's life" (Humphrey 1968, 23). Humphrey attacked the problem on a number of fronts: he created a Mayor's Council on Human Relations headed by the brother of the state's Republican governor, he started a community wide self survey and education campaign, and, ultimately, he created the riot municipal fair employment practices commission (FEPC) in the nation. Achieving the approval of a predominantly conservative city council for an FEPC took painstaking preparation. Humphrey lobbied each city council member for more than a year, and he directed similar pressure from the prominent members of his Human Rights Council. A campaign based on civic pride gradually "lit a fire" under the council members. Recalling this early effort, Humphrey observed: "It is a continuing situation that always requires a most careful and thorough political strategy to translate broad moral conviction in the community into votes in legislature, overcoming the partly hidden resistance ofinertia, conservatism, fear of change, racial fears, racial prejudice" (Humphrey 1968, 25). Humphrey's successful political effort to create an FEPC caused a stir in Minneapolis. His subsequent campaign to win approval of a strengthened civil rights plank in the Democratic party's national platform in 1948 caught the attention of the entire nation. Again, Humphrey's concern for the political realities of the situation generally has been overlooked. As the 1948 campaign approached, President Truman was seen as critically weak. Few observers thought he could win; in fact, liberal Democrats (including Humphrey) briefly entertained the notion of dumping Truman in favor of General Eisenhower. Truman's only chance, the experts maintained, lay in maintaining a unified Democratic party, including the "solid South" of Franklin Roosevelt's historic coalition. In this environment of political uncertainty, Humphrey and his band of liberal supporters, largely associated with the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), began pushing for a strengthened civil rights plank within the party's platform committee (Humphrey 1976, 112; Solberg, 11-20). Humphrey worried constantly about the political backlash that would accompany adoption of the strong civil rights language and its impact on Truman's election chances, as well as his own. (Humphrey was the Democratic Farmer-Labor candidate for the U.S. Senate.) After the platform committee rejected the Humphrey version, the critical issue became whether to take it to the convention floor for a roll call vote. Humphrey recalled his uncertainty over the right course of action: " I was bothered by the arguments against making a floor fight; I didn't want to split the party or damage President Truman's chances" (Humphrey 1968, 33). Eventually the ADA upstarts decided to go forward. But Humphrey remained ambivalent and concerned. He "pressed his doubts along with his convictions as to why a strong civil rights plank was long overdue, to Ed Flynn, political boss of the Bronx, New York. Much to Humphrey's surprise, Flynn told him to offer the minority plank. "You go ahead, young man," Flynn responded. "We should have done this a long time ago. We've got to do it. Go ahead. We'll back you." Before Humphrey realized what had happened, Flynn had lined up additional support among some of the party's most powerful leaders, such as Jake Arvey, of Illinois, David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, and John Bailey of Connecticut. With this unexpected display of muscle among party regulars, Humphrey delivered one of his most remembered speeches in support of the minority plank. With the declaration that "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," the convention broke into a spontaneous floor demonstration that lasted for eight minutes. Millions of people watched the drama unfold on the first run televised coverage of a national convention. In short order, the minority plank was adopted, and southern delegations departed Philadelphia (subsequently to nominate Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on the Dixiecrat ticket) (Humphrey 1976, 114 15). Relieved of the pressures to maintain a united Democratic party at all costs, Truman went on the offensive against the do nothing Republican Congress, captured the country's imagination, and scored the most unexpected presidential victory in American history. Humphrey returned to Minnesota and ran a similar no holds barred campaign for the U S Senate, upsetting the Republican incumbent and becoming Minnesota's first Democratic senator. In retrospect, the politics of the situation could not have turned out better. Humphrey's experiences as mayor and at the 1948 Democratic National Convention constituted the formative period of his leadership in civil rights. The ingredient of success had been his abihty to link the morality of racial equality with a political strategy that transformed this vision into reality. However, as Humphrey prepared to move to Washington, D.C., in December 1949 to assume his Senate seat, his reputation as a firebrand liberal activist far outdistanced his record as a pragmatic political realist. Time magazine even portrayed Humphrey on its cover as a runaway prairie tornado sweeping out of the midwest. The southern democratic "inner club" that ran the Senate, in collaboration with conservative Republicans, knew Humphrey as the upstart who had caused all the trouble in Philadelphia. Even Majority Leader Scott Lucas of Illinois, a midwest Democrat, had referred to Humphrey as a "pipsqueak" during the platform committee deliberations. Humphrey compounded the situation with several ill advised statements and actions soon after his arrival. For several years, he found himself on the outside looking in, with few opportunities to piay a significant role in the Senate's proceedings (Humphrey 1976, 121-131). During these difficult early years, Humphrey directed his prodigious energies into designing a new civil rights agenda, in concert with the dozen or so liberal senators, Democrats and Republicans, who shared his views. It was a period of legislative incubation that, in essence, lasted until the early 1960s. Humphrey introduced bills to enact the four major provisions of the 1948 Democratic platform: to outlaw lynching, to establish a federal fair employment practices commission, to guarantee voting rights, and to achieve equality of opportunity in the military services. (Indeed, during his freshman year, Humphrey introduced no less than fifty seven bills, covering topics from national health insurance to federal aid to education.) Through these early years, as Humphrey slowly recovered from his disastrous entry into the Senate, he continued building his civil rights legislative agenda, introducing bills in each Congress and waiting for the circumstances that could transform these dormant proposals into live legislation with the potential to become law. FOOTNOTE 2 In the early 1950s, Humphrey also struck up a friendship with a fellow freshman senator, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Unlike Humphrey, LBJ had immediately gained access to the Senate's ruling councils and was selected Democratic whip in 1951, an amazing accomplishment for a junior senator. Johnson liked Humphrey and saw him as a potentially useful channel to the small but vocal liberal Democratic contingent. He helped Humphrey to get to know other southern Democrats, such as Walter George, Georgia's senior senator and one of the Senate's most respected members (Humphrey 1976, 161-65). Over time, Humphrey's colleagues began to conclude that perhaps he wasn't such a radical windbag after all. And, as my former colleague William Welsh points out in these pages, Humphrey came to provide an important channel to the liberal wing that Lyndon Johnson used frequently as Senate majority leader (1955-61). One major change that appeared to be essential in bringing Humphrey's civil rights agenda out of the incubator was the discovery of a way to control the Senate's practice of unlimited debate the infamous filibuster used by southern forces to block floor action on any civil rights legislation. During the 1950s and into the 1960s, Humphrey and his band of civil rights activists attempted to modify Senate Rule 22, which delineated the procedure for invoking "cloture," a cutting off of the unlimited debate. Every two years at the beginning of a new Congress, the civil rights forces would propose amendments to invoke cloture by simple majority vote instead of by the two thirds majority required by Rule 22. Every two years the Senate establishment, usually led by Lyndon Johnson, would defeat them, thus dooming the civil rights agenda to another two years of legislative obscurity (Humphrey 1976, 134). The period of incubation continued into the 1960s, even though Johnson managed to pass civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960. These laws represented the best Johnson could (or would) do given the limitations on his power as Senate majority leader caused by the filibuster (or threat of a filibuster) and by the positions of power within the Senate still occupied by southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. The agenda of the civil rights activists equal employment, access to public accommodations, voting protection, power for the attorney general to intervene to stop civil rights violations, implementation of school desegregation remained sidetracked. Outside the Senate, however, actions on various fronts were changing the imperatives that would govern the Senate's (and the nation's) view of what needed to be done. Growing militancy among civil rights leaders in the aftermath of the nineteen fifty four desegregation decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott had escalated by the early nineteen sixties to freedom rides and lunch counter sit-ins. Attempts to register black voters in the deep South produced violence and intimidation, even murder, of civil rights workers. A. Philip Randolph's idea of a march on Washington, first considered but not acted upon in nineteen forty one, was revived, and a mammoth biracial contingent marched to the Lincoln memorial in August nineteen sixty three. The gradualist legislative strategy advocated by Lyndon Johnson, but also endorsed initially by President Kennedy (who was concerned lest rapid change on civil rights alienate southern Democrats who still controlled key congressional committees), gave way by June nineteen sixty three. President Kennedy announced to the nation his decision to send to Congress a comprehensive civil rights package that contained most of the civil rights agenda that had been simmering for the prior fifteen years. By this time, moreover, Humphrey had completely overcome his initial ostracism by the senate elders. His natural instincts for politics, including legislative compromise, along with his infectious good humor and outgoing manner, had transformed Humphrey from outcast to power broker. He had evolved into one of the Senates most effective and well liked members. Indeed, by 1961, his fellow Democrats elected him assistant majority leader or whip and, in this role, he served as a major legislative advisor and tactician for the Kennedy administration. He was ideally positioned to lead the newly invigorated civil rights legislative offensive, now that its hour had finally arrived. It was not surprising, therefore, when Majority Leader Mike Mansfield asked Humphrey to assume command of the legislation that eventually cleared the House of Representatives in early February 1964 in the aftermath of President Kennedy's death. Note 3 One harsh reality clouded this moment of opportunity. Rule 22 still remained unchanged in any significant way. The southern filibuster could still block the Senate's majority from approving any meaningful i e enforceable legislation unless a two thirds majority voted to limit debate. In 1963, the civil rights forces had once again tried, and faded, to modify the rule. Sixty seven votes in support of passing a strong, enforceable civil rights bill needed to be rounded up because this was the number needed to invoke cloture and limit debate. In view of this reality, the political arithmetic was compelling. In a study conducted by Senate staff prior to the bill's consideration, fifty five senators were considered ready to invoke cloture on a strong bill; thirty three were viewed as reasonably sure against including the nineteen Southerners who were unquestionably against, leaving a group of twelve senators identified as crucial. Of this group, nine were Republicans and three were Democrats. All had opposed invoking cloture most of the time when it had been attempted in recent years on other bills. Yet the vote of every one of these twelve senators would be needed, all other considerations remaining unchanged. To look at the same situation from the perspective of the civil rights opponents, if Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, leader of the southern Democrats, could round up just fifteen votes from the ranks of conservative Republicans and border and far west Democrats, a group of approximately twenty six, and add these votes to the nineteen he could count among his fellow southern Democrats and Republican John Tower of Texas, he could filibuster the civil rights bill indefinitely. Seen from either direction, the challenge facing Humphrey as floor leader was formidable. In preparation for this task, Humphrey asked himself why the civil rights forces had always failed in the past. A crucial weakness seemed to be their lack of internal organization and discipline needed to withstand the months of debate occasioned by the filibuster. Moreover, the filibuster blocked action on all other Senate business. This usually resulted in senators pressuring the Senate leadership to withdraw or water down the pending legislation so that the filibuster would stop and regular business could resume. Humphrey pondered how he could reverse these internal pressures to favor the invocation of cloture rather than to weaken or withdraw the bill. How could the burden of obstructionism be shifted to the southern Democrats? Following consultations with Majority Leader Mansfield and other civil rights prononents principally Democrats Philip Hart, Joseph Clark, and Warren Magnuson, and Republican Thomas Kuchel, Humphrey devised the following strategy: 1. Win the support of Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Without Dirksen's support, it simply would be impossible to line up all twelve crucial votes. Humphrey subsequently wrote in a private memorandum summing up the debate: "On my first T V appearance I praised Senator Dirksen, telling the nation that he would help, that he would support a good civil rights bill, that he would put his country above party...I did so because we needed him and we couldn't possibly get cloture without Dirksen and his help." 2. Encourage a reasoned and searching debate of the bill itself. If the advocates failed to make a solid substantive case, or attempted to restrict the parliamentary rights of the opponents, pressures to withdraw or water down the bill would surely build over time. Humphrey explained in his memorandum: ". . . I made up my mind early that I would keep my patience. I would not lose my temper, and that if I could do nothing else, I would try to preserve a reasonable degree of good nature and fair play in the Senate. I had good working relationships at all times with the Southerners, even on some of the more difficult days. . . ." Accordingly, Humphrey led the civil rights advocates into a detailed discussion of the House passed bill that consumed the initial two weeks of the debate. They frequently responded to substantive points made by the opponents once the filibuster itself got under way. 3. Organize the civil rights forces in the Senate to enable them to survive the rigors of a southern Democratic filibuster for months, if necessary. These rigors included the proponents' answering quorum calls whenever an opponent "suggested the absence of a quorum" unless fifty-one senators could be rounded up quickly, the Senate would be forced to adjourn, defeating all compromise weakening amendments, and at all costs, avoiding the internal bickering that had characterized earlier civil rights battles. In short, a disciplined and resilient organization would generate confidence among the bill's supporters that victory was possible and help them resist the normal pressures for concession and compromise that were bound to spring up once the filibuster had run for several weeks or months. In addition, Senator Dirksen would be watching carefully to see whether the pro civil rights forces had the capacity to sustain the debate until a favorable outcome was achieved. Early signs of weakness would make it less likely for Dirksen to join as an ally down the road. To meet this challenge, Humphrey concocted a package of organizational innovations: bipartisan "captains" to manage each title of H.R. 7152 the House passed bill, a special whip system that assigned fiftyone senators each day to "quorum duty" and required each senator to secure a replacement if he could not be present as scheduled, rotating floor monitors to guard against unannounced parliamentary tricks by the southern Democrats, a daily newsletter distributed to each Senate office, and a daily strategy session with the bipartisan leadership, the Justice Department, and on occasion, external civil rights supporters. 4. Organize external supporters of strong civil rights legislation. The major lobbying organization was and remains today the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of labor and social activist groups with a distinctly leftward tilt. Although the Leadership Conference would necessarily play an important role, this was not the group likely to influence conservative Senator Dirksen or the twelve senators deemed crucial for cloture. Indeed, Humphrey worried a great deal about ways to keep the Leadership Conference lobbyists from driving away Dirksen and his Republican senators. Humphrey solved this problem by enlisting an unprecedented coalition of church and religious leaders to support passage of a strong bill through sustained grassroots, hometown lobbying. Senator Russell, in his closing speech right before the successful cloture vote, provided the most credible testimony on the success of this external strategy. "During the course of the debate," observed Russell, we have seen cardinals, bishops, elders, stated clerks, common preachers, priests, and rabbis come to Washington to press for passage of the bill ... day after day, men of the cloth have been standing on the Mall and urging a favorable vote on the bill." Humphrey's four pronged strategy worked. Dirksen eventually came aboard after some skillful rephrasing of the public accommodations and equal employment titles that actually produced a stronger bill than that passed by the House. After a difficult struggle with his own conservative supporters, Dirksen produced the crucial votes. The southern Democrats ended up looking, and acting, like obstructionists. This also was a key factor in lining up the votes to support cloture on a noncompromised bill. The pro civil rights forces performed with an unaccustomed display of parliamentary discipline and teamwork. Only one quorum call was missed during the entire three month debate. The Leadership Conference, although fearing a sellout for most of the debate, eventually agreed that the final version achieved all of their priority legislative objectives. Due to the confluence of external forces that had been building for a generation, coupled with the growth of Humphrey's legislative skills and his stature within the Senate that made him the ideal choice for floor manager, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law. President Johnson stayed in the background, an unaccustomed location, although he made it clear throughout that he would not be part of any strategy that ended up weakening the legislation. The bill has been called the most significant single piece of legislation to pass the U.S. Congress in this century. Whatever historical judgment is ultimately rendered on the bill itself, there is no question that its passage was the pinnacle of achievement for Humphrey. From the time of the bill's final passage in June 1964 until Humphrey's death in 1978, Humphrey never again was able to play the same kind of central, highly visible, and controlling role in a civil rights encounter. Why? There are a host of reasons. The civil rights victory of 1964 was undoubtedly a positive element in Johnson's decision to select Humphrey as his running mate. Once inaugurated as vice president, Humphrey was assigned as govemment wide "coordinator" for civil rights. Within less than nine months, however, Humphrey had landed in Johnson's dog house for expressing within White House councils grave doubts about the wisdom of expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In part as punishment for what Johnson perceived as disloyalty, Humphrey's civil rights role was taken over in a bloodless coup by Presidential Assistant Joseph Califano. Humphrey then tried, on several occasions, to proclaim the need for a "Marshall Plan for the Cities," only to incur Johnson's wrath once again for speaking out of turn. Much later, in mid 1968, Humphrey met quietly with selected cabinet members, such as Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, HUD Secretary Robert Weaver, and HEW Secretary John Gardner, to outline a positive response to the domestic turmoil that seemed about to overwhelm the country in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Humphrey was never able to get Johnson's attention, much less his support, for major new domestic initiatives. Footnote 4 As the Democratic party's presidential candidate in 1968, Humphrey tried to elevate civil rights concerns to high visibility in the unfolding campaign. In early September, Bill Welsh and I met with columnist Joseph Alsop at his Georgetown home to hear, off the record, his ideas of how Humphrey, then a decided underdog, could overtake and defeat Republican candidate Richard Nixon. The essence of Alsop's argument was that Nixon's famed "southern strategy," if successful, would drive the nation down the road to "apartheid," a situation leading to more violence, more hatred, more law and order repression, and an eventual separation of American society by both race and class. This is the direction that Nixon's campaign was leading, Alsop believed: "How can we expect the great legal progress on civil rights to pay off ... in a high tech society with one third of black children without a blue collar education?" Alsop said we needed jobs, tax credits, education; that these were the gut and moral issues the nation faced. "Humphrey needs to say the nation is at a crossroads. The nation has to choose which road it wants to travel." Footnote 5 Bill Welsh and I reported Alsop's strategy to Humphrey. Not surprisingly, Humphrey agreed both substantively and politically. With this thought in mind, Humphrey at the last moment amended the introduction of Beyond Civil Rights, which was being rushed into print for the campaign. Humphrey wrote: "I started writing this book long before I was a candidate for President, and I did not intend it to be a political document but now I find that its theme reflects a central issue of a presidential campaign. Will we go ahead to an integrated society, a land of equal rights or will we turn back? In this campaign of 1968 the American people will make their decision. . . . What will our choice be apartheid or democracy? Separation or community? A society of ordered liberty or a society of fear and repression?" Humphrey 1968, 3, 10). The American people did decide, by the most narrow of margins, but not over the issue of civil rights. Despite striking this theme in most of his early campaign speeches, Humphrey was never able to disentangle himself or his campaign from the issue of U.S. policy toward the war in Vietnam. His remarkable comeback, almost overtaking Nixon in the final days, was triggered by his Salt Lake City speech on the war, which appeared to offer a little more flexibility than the administration's position on steps to initiate peace talks. That "break" with Johnson, coupled with Humphrey's gutsy, never-say-die performance on the campaign trail, almost did it. Civil rights never played a part. One inevitably ponders the question that flows from these extraordinary events: What would have happened if Humphrey had won? What would be different for an expresident Humphrey to assess on his eightieth birthday? Would the same disappointment, outrage, and indignation be likely? Of course, no one can reconstruct the past. But a few propositions can be suggested, nonetheless. First, the war in Vietnam would have been concluded much earlier, with much less loss of life and a greatly reduced division within American society. All of this suggests the possibility, even the probability, of sustained attention to priority domestic issues related to economic and social equality. Second, Watergate, in all its ramifications, would not have occurred. The catastrophic loss of trust and confidence of the American people in their public institutions, which was a direct product of Watergate, more than likely could have been avoided. Third, Humphrey almost certainly would have sought new and innovative ways to continue the "never ending American Revolution." His most successful area of activity during the difficult years as vice president was his assignment as "laison" to the nation's mayors. Perhaps because he started his own political career as a mayor but also because he was smart enough to see that highly centralized "programs" managed from Washington weren't working very well, Humphrey, in his later years, increasingly spoke of the need for the federal government to serve as a catalyst rather than as a direct agent of change. He wrote: "The programs that show the greatest promise are those that permit the largest possible participation and responsibility on the part of those who are principally involved" (Humphrey 1968, 156). Footnote 7 Decentralization, neighborhood corporations, public private partnerships, revolving loan funds, entrepreneurial assistance myriad ways for helping people to help themselves I believe these kinds of flexible initiatives increasingly would have been the hallmark of a Humphrey presidency. And Humphrey would have been personally involved in their implementation, walking the streets, listening and, of course, talking with residents, encouraging, agitating, and motivating. It would have been a hands on presidency unlike any we have known. Footnote 7 Humphrey would have made his share of mistakes. But he would have kept civil rights on the nation's agenda. And he would have done everything possible to build the base of popular support required to act on the agenda. Absent the war and Watergate, I believe Humphrey had a chance to keep the country on a track of continuing progress geared increasingly toward concrete results brought about by local initiative and responsibility. Never, for a moment, would he have considered political strategies that played on racial or economic fears. Nor would the nation ever have doubted his personal committment to carrying on the civil rights struggle. "My record on this issue includes the proudest moments of my public career," Humphrey wrote in the introduction to Beyond Civil Rights. I would not deny that record, or change it, or tone it down, even if I could. And I want it to be said, then, of Hubert Humphrey: He stood by what he believed" (Humphrey 1968, 10). FOOTNOTES 1. The feelings I project for Humphrey have been expressed by others. Republican Senator John C. Danforth Missouri having, at that point, failed to work out a compromise with the white house on job discrimination in the civil rights act of 1991 declared "I've given up on the administration unless there's a change of heart... I think the lawyers are in charge and I think they're mistaken... They're turning the clock back 25 years on civil rights. Washington Post August 2 1991 A1-A7. 2. Solberg, 141. Professor Nelson Polsby has developed the notion of the Senate as serving as an incubator of policy. See, for example, his comments about Humphrey's activities during the 1930s in "Goodbye to the Inner Club," The Washington Monthly, August 1969, 30-34. As Humphrey's legislative assistant for domestic matters during the 1960s. I can testify to the enormous agenda of legislative initiatives that he carried along from Congress to Congress. (Simply staying ahead of the Humphrey juggernaut was a daily challenge.) Over time, many of these initiatives became law. 3. All material on the U.S. Senate's consideration of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is taken from John G. Stewart, Independence and Control.- The Challange of Senatorial Party Leadership (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1968), 170-288. 4. Humphrey's difficulties with president Johnson during his vice presidency are discussed by Solberg, 264-284. 1 can testify to the abrupt dissolution of Humphrey's civil rights responsibilities in 1965 because I was the principal vice presidential staff person monitoring these activities. See also the memorandum, "Proposed action program in the aftermath of Senator Kennedy's death," submitted to Humphrey on June 6. 1968 by Wiflad Winz, David Ginsburg, William Welsh, John G. Stewart, and Ted Van Dyk. 5. I am relying on my recollections of the Alsop meeting, September 3, 1968, and detailed notes taken by William Welsh. 6. The range of Humphrey's thinking about the next phase of the civil rights effort is illustrated in the final chapter of Hubert H. Humphrey, War on Poverty (New York: McGraw-Hill. 1964). 187-198. A more complete strategy for maintaining political support of domestic economic and social initiatives, based in part on conversations with Humphrey, is developed in John G. Stewart, One Last Chance.- The Democratic Party, 1974-76 (New York: Praeger Publishing, 1974), 131-167. 7. For example, Humphrey had the idea of moving the "White House" the immediate office of the president to various locations around the country in order to escape the insularity of the Capital beltway. "Why shouldn't we move the White House to Denver for a month and then later to other cities-Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago)" Humphrey once asked me. "It would do us all good to get out Where the people are," he observed. REFERENCES Humphrey, Hubert H. 1968. Beyond Ovil Rights. A New Day of Equality. New York: Random House. -. 1976. Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics. Garden Lity, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co. Solberg, Carl. 1984. Hubert Humphrey. A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Transcribed by Richard Altman