As the inauguration approached in January 1965, Humphrey’s concerns over Vietnam placed him in a difficult and contrarian position vis-à-vis the president and most of the administration’s key foreign policy advisers. Throughout 1964, the administration had recognized that the deteriorating situation in Vietnam would require additional U.S. efforts—including, perhaps, the introduction of combat troops to supplement the 16,000 “advisers” on the ground. Detailed plans for such an escalation had been discussed and developed for months, with the domestic political implications of the election in November 1964 standing as the only barrier to a decision from the White House.[65] Humphrey’s reluctance to follow the conventional wisdom in the administration on Vietnam derived from his fervent belief that escalation would be a serious mistake. Acting on that conviction would lead to his exile from LBJ’s inner circle for most of the year that followed. But it would be his loyalty to Johnson that would trump Humphrey’s principles and subsequently lead him to mount a full-throated defense of the administration’s policies in Southeast Asia and begin a sequence of events that would end with the vice president’s loss in the 1968 presidential election.
1.
Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 147.
2.
Newsweek, November 9, 1964; Chester, Hodgson, and Page, An American Melodrama, 147.
3.
New York Times, August 25, 1968.
4.
Americans for Democratic Action was founded on January 3, 1947, by leading anticommunist liberals from academia, labor, and politics, including theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, labor organizer Walter Reuther, civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh, and Humphrey. It advocates progressive policies and social and economic justice. See Clifton Brock and Max Lerner, Americans for Democratic Action: Its Role in National Politics, rev. ed. (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2012).
5.
Christian Science Monitor, November 23, 1956; Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1958.
6.
Humphrey’s friend Bill Moyers, who had served as LBJ’s press secretary from 1965 to 1967, recalled in a speech on June 23, 1998, that Humphrey earned the nickname “The Happy Warrior” because “he loved politics and because of his natural ebullience and resiliency.” See Speech Transcript, June 23, 1998, https://billmoyers.com/1988/06/23/the-happy-warrior-june-23-1998/, accessed October 19, 2019.
7.
Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1958; Charles Lloyd Garrettson III, Hubert H. Humphrey: The Politics of Joy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 276.
8.
Robert Mann, A Grand Delusion: America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 226; Arnold A. Offner, Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 105–7. The McCarran Internal Security Act was enacted over Harry Truman’s veto in 1950. See Public Law 81-831, 53 Stat. 987, September 23, 1950. The Communist Control Act of 1954 (Public Law 83-637, 68 Stat. 775) was passed by Congress on August 24, 1954. While the Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of the act, a federal district court in Arizona did hold that it was unconstitutional. See Blawis, et. al. v. Bolin, et. al., 358 F. Supp. 349 (D. Ariz. 1973), May 8, 1973, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/358/349/1412503/, accessed August 15, 2019. Humphrey’s support of the CCA led left-wing journalist Murray Kempton to say in 1955 that the ADA should “unfrock” Humphrey as its vice chairman. In 1964, Humphrey would admit that the CCA was “not one of the things I’m proudest of.” See Offner, Hubert Humphrey, 107.
9.
Fredrik Logevall, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 2004): 108.
10.
Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 181. Because of this interest in international affairs, Humphrey was always sensitive to and cognizant of the domestic political implications of U.S. foreign policy—both for his own political prospects and in terms of how the two realms interacted.
11.
For example, Dulles had written the 1952 GOP platform plank that referred to containment as a “futile, negative, and immoral” policy. Quoted in Offner, Hubert Humphrey, 107.
12.
Transcript, Hubert Humphrey Oral History Interview, August 17, 1971, by Joe B. Frantz, p. 8, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX (hereafter LBJL).
13.
Time, September 4, 1964, 20. Humphrey’s formal speeches were clocked at an astounding 250 words a minute. The Humphrey-Khrushchev conversation occurred after repeated requests by Humphrey to meet while he visited Moscow in the wake of Khrushchev’s ultimatum to the Western powers that they transform Berlin into a demilitarized free city. See Offner, Hubert Humphrey, 138–42.
14.
William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbot Gleason, Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 219.
15.
Offner, Hubert Humphrey, 140–41. Herter and Dulles were so impressed with Humphrey’s report and insights that they asked him to repeat the briefing to their subordinates, especially focusing on the success of Humphrey’s “informal diplomacy” techniques.
16.
The Point Four program was a technical assistance program announced by Harry Truman in his inaugural address on January 20, 1949, taking its name from the fact that it was the fourth foreign policy objective mentioned in the speech. It was the first U.S. plan for international economic development. See Thomas G. Paterson, “Foreign Aid under Wraps: The Point Four Program,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 56, no. 2 (Winter 1972–1973): 119–26. Public Law 480 (or Food for Peace) was the colloquial name for the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954. It permitted the president to authorize the shipment of surplus commodities to “friendly” nations either on concessional or grant terms and established a broad basis for U.S. distribution of foreign food aid. See Thomas J. Knock, “Feeding the World and Thwarting the Communisists,” in David F. Schmitz and T. Christopher Jespersen, eds., Architects of the American Century: Individuals and Institutions in Twentieth-Century U.S. Foreign Policymaking (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 2000). The Alliance for Progress was designed by the Kennedy administration to establish economic cooperation between the United States and Latin America in an effort to blunt the appeal of communism. It was a public relations success in the short term but is generally regarded as a failure. See, for example, Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
17.
Speech, Humphrey at Yale University, December 7, 1959, 310.G.11.9B, Hubert H. Humphrey Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN (hereafter HHHP, MHS). In the speech, Humphrey discussed a wide range of topics related to disarmament, including the need for a test-ban treaty, regional arms control conferences, and the importance of inspections.
18.
William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Part I, 1945–1960