Historical Figures Series: The Remarkable Career Of Hubert Humphrey, Part 6
His Second Act: His Return to the Senate and Presidential Politics
After Richard Nixon’s inauguration, Hubert Humphrey had every right to believe his political life was over. Such is almost inevitably the case for all defeated Presidential candidates; in the half-century since Humphrey’s defeat, it is considered an inevitability that a defeated nominee leaves politics altogether and is never considered for the Presidency again. There have been recent exceptions of course; John Kerry and Mitt Romney have since gone on to part of political life again. (We shall leave the former President out of the conversation for the moment.) Some had returned to public life; Barry Goldwater had won reelection to the Senate in 1968, but he was considered dead as a Presidential candidate going forward.
Humphrey’s political fortunes changed due mainly to an outside factor. In the spring of 1970 Eugene McCarthy, who had been both ally and bitter rival, announced that he would not seek reelection to the Senate. In a desire to hold a seat that had been Democratic for 12 years Walter Mondale, who had taken over Humphrey’s seat when he had gone on to serve as Vice President, was among those who persuaded Humphrey to run for the vacancy. Humphrey was initially reluctant but the desire to return to the public eye over came and he announced his candidacy.
The 1970 midterms were a mixed bag for the Republican party. The Democrats would make major gains in the House of Representatives, adding twelve seats to the majority. But in the Senate, the Republicans managed to make some surprising gains. The Republicans won seats in Maryland, Ohio and Hawaii as well as defeating Al Gore Sr, in Tennessee. However, Charles Goodell, the Republican appointed to fill the interim of the assassinated Robert Kennedy, lost election in his own right to a member of New York’s Conservative Party James Buckley. Harry Byrd, who had been a Democrat when he’d won election, ran as an independent in Virginia and ended up winning. Humphrey’s victory in Minnesota had won of the few real triumphs for a Democrat in the Senate.
Humphrey was back in the Senate but he had lost all of his power for seniority on major committees. And his time as LBJ’s Vice President had diminished much of his reputation among liberals and the youth of America. Nevertheless as the rumblings for the 1972 election began, Humphrey’s name came up in Democratic circles as a possibility. Nixon himself still considering Humphrey a formidable candidate.
I’ve already discussed in my series on Wallace how the Democratic field began to shape up prior to the 1972 nomination. Most political pundits believed Edmund Muskie, senator of Maine and Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. The fact that he had been one of the few Democrats to win reelection in a landslide gave many the idea that he was the most likely candidate. Not even the stirrings of George McGovern caused many to think otherwise.
But in the fall of 1971, political speculators put up the money for surveys and found just how weak the support for Muskie was. Because many feared a repeat of a clash between the insurgency and traditionalists that had led to disaster at Chicago, the traditionalists decided that they had to lean on Humphrey.
The problem was that so many of the press considered him a political cartoon. Hunter Thompson, the leading figure for Gonzo journalism who was radically in the tank for McGovern, went out of his way to invent ‘facts’ about anyone who rivaled the man he believed. He freely lied that both Muskie and Humphrey were taking both speed and cocaine to get through their campaigns, did everything he could to argue that the two men — particularly Humphrey — were tools of the establishment and that ‘they’ were trying to steal the election from McGovern. He would argue that the old guard stole the Ohio primary from McGovern for Humphrey and that dirty money was being used to find funding for Humphrey at the critical California primary. McGovern’s defeat, he eventually believed, was not so much due to McGovern’s clear incompetence at certain levels, but because the old guard — and anyone who wasn’t McGovern was part of that — thought he was dangerous. There was some truth to this but Thompson and the truth were barely relatives.
The larger problem for Humphrey was that of perception. He truly had one of the great records of a liberal Senator but at this point so many others — the Kennedys and the Johnson’s among them — had taken all the credit for it. The voters of America saw him only as the face of the war, and he would not be able to shake it.
After Muskie’s ‘victory’ in New Hampshire, Humphrey officially began his campaign in Florida. Half a million was spent and he campaigned energetically, but as I reported in a different series, George Wallace trounced the field and Humphrey finished in a distant second with less than 20 percent of the vote. He skipped the Illinois primary (Muskie would defeated McCarthy, but the victory did little to stem his fortunes) for Wisconsin, and just as it had 12 years earlier against John Kennedy, it was a bitter disappointment. Humphrey finished third behind McGovern and a whisker behind Wallace. Only the fact that Wallace had failed to file for delegates kept it from being a total loss for his campaign. He had also managed a triumph at the Minnesota caucuses.
As April turned to May things began to go better. On April 25th, Humphrey notched his first win in a competitive primary when he managed to win Pennsylvania and receive 57 of the 137 delegates at state. May 2nd was even better: he defeated George Wallace in Indiana and narrowly defeated McGovern in Ohio, walking away with a total of 132 delegates. May 9th was a mixed bag; he defeated Wallace in West Virginia but was beaten by McGovern in Nebraska.
The rest of the caucuses and primaries did not go well. He finished third in Texas caucuses to Wallace and second to Wallace in Maryland while finishing third in Michigan. Michigan in particular was a huge disappointment, given his ties to labor.
Humphrey knew that everything turned on the California primary, which itself was a subject of controversy. Before the primary schedule the California primary had been winner take all, which had angered the McCarthy delegates after Kennedy had won it by a narrow margin. There had been fight over but it had been decided that it would remain the same. Now 271 delegates were at stake. If Humphrey were to win, McGovern who already had 560 delegates to Humphrey’s 311, might be stopped before the convention. The Humphrey campaign was understaffed and underfunded against McGovern and it was only due to the efforts of the campaign treasurer that the campaign was still solvent. On May 18th, polling showed that McGovern might win by as much as twenty points.
Humphrey’s campaign decided their own hope was to show McGovern’s fuzziness on the issues to the California audience. They would challenge McGovern to three televised debates in order to wreck him. Humphrey’s position was to attack on his campaign theme :’Right from the Start.” And that is what he did: “I believe that Senator McGovern, while having a catchy phrase…”Right from the start, that there are many times that you will find he was wrong from the start. We were both wrong on Vietnam. He has been wrong on unemployment compensation…on labor law. On taxation he is contradictory and inconsistent..”
McGovern froze and peddled water for several minutes. He told Theodore White that he had not expected such a ferocity of attack from a friend. He had been advised by his campaign to go after Humphrey had but he had not taken him seriously.
Humphrey came across as harsh while McGovern seemed nicer and few people actually saw the debates at the time. But time and the press were about to catch up. McGovern’s lead in California began to erode bit by bit. On primary night, McGovern underperformed by a huge margin. He ended up winning California by five points and that was enough to eliminate Humphrey — in theory But while the McGovern campaign considered the debates attack harsh, none of them yet knew how critical they had been. Before the primary McGovern had been within five points of Nixon. After that the gap began to widen and he never came that close to him again in the polls.
Humphrey’s candidacy, however, was not quite over. The Democratic National Convention the following month should have been a coronation for McGovern and his followers. The problem was the old guard could see disaster if McGovern was the nominee and was determined to stop it. And California was at the center of it.
The ABM (Anybody But McGovern) coalition insisted that the law of California contradicted the new rules of the Democratic Party and that McGovern was only entitle to 120 of the 271 delegates. The coalition had taken over the rules committee and by a six vote majority, McGovern had lost 151 delegates. Everything was being done to deny McGovern a first ballot nomination: once he lost control of them, the old guard could take the convention. Humphrey was more than willing to be quoted by the New York Times as part of that guard.
The McGovern managed to outmaneuver the ABM — and Humphrey — by a parliamentary maneuver. The McGovern campaign decided to vote against the seating of the South Carolina women’s Caucus in order to overturn a ruling that the McGovern seating had already won. This decision would eventually lead to the California delegation going for McGovern. The problem was, it appeared to the Women’s Caucus that McGovern had double crossed him. This would lead to the McGovern coalition beginning to fall apart. With the omission of so much of the old guard under the quota system, a platform that went too far for even the most loyal Democrats and the disastrous hunt for a Vice President, the McGovern campaign was doomed by the end of the convention.
George McGovern’s coalition, which would end up winning the working women, the Latino and what was referred to as ‘the gay vote’ (if they mentioned it at all in 1972) would eventually become a winning formula for the Democrats in future years. Barack Obama would credit it to his 2008 victory. In 1972, however, in large part to the wounds Humphrey had inflicted in his debate, compounded by the Nixon campaign, McGovern would suffer the most disastrous defeat by a Democrat candidate for President to date. Nixon would receive over 60 percent of the popular vote and would carry every state save for Massachusetts and D.C.
Since we might very well be facing a similar situation in the next year, one might do well to ask the question: how would Humphrey have faired in a rematch against the man who had defeated him four years earlier?
One of the major factors that must be considered is that of George Wallace. Nixon was concerned that Wallace’s presence as a third-party candidate would end up costing him Southern votes and in certain Northern cities. After Wallace’s elimination, the Nixon campaign assumed they could build a landslide against McGovern. Could they have done the same against Humphrey if he had ended up being the nominee?
It would have been far easier for the Democratic regulars to unite around Humphrey considering that they were more than willing to do so when it came time to fight against McGovern. Could Humphrey have managed to bring the McGovernites aboard had he managed to wrest the nomination from them? There had been what amounted to a guerilla war at Chicago that had essentially eviscerated his campaign but he had been hampered by the fact that the Democratic Convention took place almost at the end of August. The Miami Convention ended in mid-July so it is possible he would have been able to rebuild a lot quicker than he had in the previous cycle which had almost ended in victory.
He almost certainly would have avoided the mistakes McGovern ended up making when it came to failing to acknowledge the faces of the Old Guard when it came to managing the campaign, and he certainly would have done a better job coming up with a Vice Presidential candidate than McGovern did, in what was a mess long before the decision ended up on Thomas Eagleton. Interestingly after Eagleton had to leave the ticket McGovern did sound out Humphrey and Humphrey had very publicly turned him down. Would Humphrey have been willing to have McGovern serve as his running mate had the tables been turned?
Humphrey had been tested against Nixon before and no doubt would have been able to campaign far better against the man. He had chosen not to make public the machinations Nixon had done against LBJ in the final days of the 1968 campaign; it’s very hard to think that the gloves would have remained on after four more years of war. There would have been lot for Humphrey to sink his teeth into; the dirty tricks of the Nixon campaign were already apparent against his colleagues and he would have been less vulnerable to the tricks Nixon had pulled four years ago.
I still think a Democratic victory in 1972 would have unlikely whoever was heading the ticket. But its hard to imagine it being anywhere near the disaster it was for McGovern.
And just as the Gulf of Tonkin would lay the undoing of LBJ landslide in 1964, a month before the disastrous Miami Convention an event would take place that would undo the Nixon landslide. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested breaking into the Watergate hotel where the Democratic National Committee had its headquarters. The events did make the papers and the scandal began to unfold, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference at the time.
(In his book on the 1972 campaign, Theodore White devotes a thirty page chapter called ‘The Watergate Affair’ but not even he seems to have realized the true magnitude of what has happened even though he had a far larger access to Nixon than almost any other journalist. While he believed that the Affair may have ended up hurting voter turnout and diminishing Nixon’s mandate even further, not even seems to have suspected just how deep or far the conspiracy truly went. When the revelations became public, it had a profound effect on White. His 1972 book on The Making of the President series was the last one he would write and he almost entirely gave up on political journalism altogether not long after Nixon’s resignation.)
Within a matter of months after Nixon’s landslide, his mandate began to become undone. Spiro Agnew would end up being forced to resign and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford was made Vice President under the 25th Amendment. The Watergate hearings would dominate America for the next year and a half, eventually forcing Nixon to resign. American politics was completely rearranged — and the Democrat party had life again.
In the epilogue to this series, I will deal with Hubert Humphrey’s final years in office and the last time he was considered for the White House.