The Democratic convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, nominated LBJ unanimously, and the president quickly selected Humphrey to join him on the ticket. After Johnson announced that he would officially choose Humphrey as his running mate, calling him the “best-qualified man to assume the office of the President,” Humphrey was nominated by acclamation.[52] In Humphrey’s acceptance speech at the convention, he attacked Goldwater on foreign policy, suggesting that the GOP candidate had failed to learn that “politics should stop at the water’s edge.”[53] It was an enthusiastic, inspiring, and powerful speech, a sharp contrast to Johnson’s remarks that “had neither vitality nor a memorable phrase and left television viewers in their late-night lethargy.”[54] The contrast between the dour LBJ and the charismatic Humphrey underscored Johnson’s insecurities and would influence the way the president treated his running mate throughout the campaign.
The election energized Humphrey, who did most of the national campaigning for the ticket, as Johnson largely spoke from the White House in an effort to appear presidential and above the political fray. Conservatives saw Humphrey as “a decoy for the GOP’s firepower, an ideological magnet by which Johnson hopes to draw abuse away from his Person, and so remain above the battle. . . . One look at Hubert, or so LBJ probably supposes, and they’ll be turned to stone.”[55] In mid-September, Humphrey evinced his concern about the Democratic campaign strategy, worrying that it had become simply “anti-Goldwater.” Humphrey wanted to deliver a “thoughtful and substantive speech” on key topics like the Alliance for Progress and world peace. He believed that the Johnson-Humphrey campaign needed “to develop some substantive matter, to proclaim this administration, to show that we know what we are doing” if the administration hoped to take advantage of an electoral victory in November.[56]
Humphrey’s reluctance to be the ideological attack dog—the traditional role for a vice presidential candidate—can partially be explained by his evolution as a politician during his senatorial career. His status as a fire-breathing liberal icon had, by 1964, shifted to that of a pragmatist who was satisfied to win what he could rather than to go down to defeat in an uncompromising, all-or-nothing mentality. “I am not a theologian; I’m a politician.”[57] But despite his reluctance, he was effective. In October 1964, Richard Reston of the Los Angeles Times described how LBJ (primarily through Humphrey) had used foreign policy in “a conscious political effort to isolate the more aggressive stand” of Goldwater. By celebrating bipartisanship and linking the policies of Eisenhower and Dulles to his administration while simultaneously highlighting Goldwater’s extreme view on the use of nuclear weapons, Johnson hoped to marginalize Goldwater as disconnected from mainstream foreign policy thinking. On October 26, Humphrey spoke in Wisconsin and told the crowd that a vote for Goldwater was a vote for war: “The ‘solutions’ he offers are not solutions at all. They are instead a sure path to widening conflict—and, ultimately, to a terrible holocaust.”[58] Robert David Johnson suggests that as a result, foreign policy emerged as the president’s “most potent political weapon” in the campaign.[59] While Humphrey may not have enjoyed his role, he was effective and contributed to the success of the campaign.
With Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, Humphrey became vice president. It was a new and substantially different role for the long-time legislator, but he considered it a singular honor to assume the country’s second-highest elected office, not to mention that it put him one step closer to his ultimate political ambition. As a senator, Humphrey had traveled extensively and had forged a strong reputation for foreign policy expertise. Thus, it is not surprising that U.S. News & World Report suggested shortly after the election, “It is considered likely, therefore, that President Johnson will consult his Vice President closely on foreign policy.”[60] That assumption would prove to be misguided. Humphrey would have little input or influence on foreign policy questions generally or on Vietnam specifically in the Johnson administration. This would be especially true once the decision for escalation occurred in early 1965 and LBJ ignored Humphrey’s advice on the trajectory of U.S. policy on the Vietnam conflict.
Moreover, while Humphrey had agreed to the boundaries regarding their relationship set by the president the previous August, in the aftermath of the election, the vice president “was brutally reminded by Johnson himself how completely—how abjectly—dependent on the president he was.” LBJ consistently demeaned and marginalized Humphrey in an effort to demonstrate his dominance.[61] Part of the ritualized humiliation was simply the president’s way of interacting with subordinates, a component of the infamous “Johnson treatment.” But it also reflected LBJ’s insecurities. In short, Johnson expected Humphrey to quietly stand by and give his full support to the administration’s policies, avoiding comment on issues unless directed by the White House and fulfilling those constitutional and traditional duties of a vice president—presiding over the Senate and attending state funerals—that Johnson himself had performed during his tenure in the nation’s second-highest office. With the new responsibilities came the recognition that Humphrey no longer served the people of Minnesota; he served the needs and whims of the president, and Lyndon Johnson had an undeniably specific job description in mind for his former colleague.
Despite his willingness to sublimate his views to those of the president in public, however, Humphrey shared the concerns of many of his fellow senators over the trajectory of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in late 1964. While Congress—including then-Senator Humphrey—had voted overwhelmingly to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, many members on both sides of the aisle expressed doubts about the direction in which the administration was heading in Southeast Asia. For example, when Frank Church spoke out against increasing U.S. presence in South Vietnam in an interview with Ramparts in December 1964, Humphrey wrote him and said, “You have performed a great service for American foreign policy.”[62] Yet the vice president–elect was not ready to speak out publicly against the burgeoning conflict, which separated him from opponents of escalation such as Church, Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR), and Senator John Sherman Cooper (R-KY). In addition, although Humphrey was “somewhat removed” from the inner circle of administration foreign policy in late 1964, he was worried about the optics of escalation. National Security Council staffer James Thomson, who had been “on loan” to Humphrey during the campaign, recalled that the incoming vice president did not believe that the administration would begin bombing due in larger measure to the possibility of an “adverse public reaction.” Humphrey, according to Undersecretary of State George Ball, expressed opposition to bombing in meetings with the president and other advisers in “forceful and frank” terms.[63] Humphrey understood LBJ’s preoccupation with domestic political considerations better than anyone; indeed, it would be this line of reasoning that would influence the memorandum that would irreversibly fracture the Johnson-Humphrey relationship in early 1965.
Unfortunately, the gradual disintegration of their friendship had already started. Although Humphrey may not have been totally aware of it, Johnson was “irritated by the way Humphrey communicated with him, which Johnson thought was inappropriate for any vice president.” Of course, the president’s views had been shaped by his experience as Kennedy’s vice president: “I . . . had a general policy of never speaking unless I was spoken to and never differing with him in public. Frequently, he and I would talk, and I would say, ‘We have this difference, and here