David S. Broder covered every U.S. presidential race from Dwight Eisenhower’s defeat of Adlai Stevenson in 1956 to Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain in 2008. He reported and wrote columns for The Washington Post for more than 40 years, becoming known as “the dean of political reporters.” His column was nationally syndicated.
Broder won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. In this column from his winning entry, he focused not on a president but on a politician who wanted to be president as much as anyone.
The date was June 6, 1972, and Hubert H. Humphrey, a former vice president, was about to lose Democratic presidential nominating events in four states, including New Jersey and California.
End of the trail
By DAVID S. BRODER
Unless all signs and portents are wrong, today may mark the end of Hubert H. Humphrey’s hopes for the Presidency. The quest began a quarter-century ago, in his own mind, and has been actively pursued for 12 years, but it is hard to see how he can survive the predicted defeats in California and New Jersey.
If a man finds himself beaten by such diverse personalities as John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George McGovern, maybe the conclusion is that he was never meant to be President. Considering the chronic difficulty Humphrey has had in organizing all his campaigns for the White House, it may be that he was foredoomed to failure by his own shortcomings.
Campaign poster for Humphrey's VP run with Johnson.
But looking back at the Humphrey career, the fateful moment appears to have come that August afternoon in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson summoned him down from Atlantic City and offered him the Vice Presidential nomination.
Humphrey accepted, of course, just as any Democratic senator (except for Mike Mansfield) would have, had the prize been offered him. It’s forgotten now, but Gene McCarthy and Bob Kennedy were eager to be Johnson’s running mate in that year of Democratic destiny, and George McGovern would have jumped at the chance, too, had the President’s eye chanced to fall on the then obscure freshman senator from South Dakota.
If Johnson had passed over Humphrey and picked, say, the other passenger on the plane from Atlantic City, Tom Dodd, then the history of the last two Presidential campaigns might have been different.
Humphrey then would have been another senator from 1965 to 1968, free to make his own judgments about the Vietnam War and to join McCarthy, Kennedy and McGovern, if he wished, in their gradual shift to a position of vocal criticism of the President’s policies.
Instead, as Vice President, he embraced those policies with the unbounded enthusiasm he brings to any cause in which he is involved. They carried him down to defeat in 1968 and the memory of the 1968 travail dogged his campaign this year.
One can argue, as McCarthy did in 1968, that even as Vice President, Humphrey could have dissented by silence when Johnson attempted to sell the American public on the escalation of the war. But Humphrey has never found a way to be silent or half-hearted about any enterprise on which he embarks.
That enthusiasm betrayed him as Vice President, as it sometimes betrayed him in this campaign — in speeches that exhausted his listeners and rhetoric that promised far more than he could ever fulfill.
Humphrey can be faulted for his excesses, but they are the excesses of a generous spirit, not an angry or embittered heart. His exaggerations are like a lover’s lies — and at 61, Humphrey is still engaged in a reckless love affair with his country and, indeed, all of life.
Even in these last days of adversity, knowing as well as anyone what likely awaits him, his energy and spirit have been irrepressible. Helen Bentley, a San Francisco television interviewer, got him talking the other morning about what he’d like to do if he got a day off.
The answer, in typical Humphrey fashion, was that he’d like to see a baseball game, attend an opera, talk to a prize fighter and a scientist, and watch an actor at work.
“I enjoy life,” Humphrey told the stunned interviewer. “It’s a delight. You only live a short time. You ought to enjoy every fleeting moment.”
He means it, too.
Humphrey’s political life seems fated to end in disappointment, but it’s still been a remarkable career. He’s left his mark on this land he loves, and made it a better place for millions. Not even Humphrey has found a way to exaggerate his own contributions, from Medicare to civil rights to disarmament to education.
Fortunately, neither his service nor his enthusiasm is ended. He has more energy than most men half his age, and the voters of Minnesota, who long ago accepted Hubert Humphrey for the man he is, with all the faults and all the strengths of his free spirit, have the good sense to keep him working.