The dream that never faded
Henry Fairlie
Washington When we have praised Hubert Humphrey for being a good man, a decent man, a courageous man, a liberal, a champion of the oppressed and the underdog, of 'the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind'; there remains the politician. He was active — and for once one must give the word its full weight — in politics for thirty-five years. He lived politics, breathed politics, ate politics. He himself said: 'politics, more than most other careers, requires constant attention. Success requires monomania. Politics intrudes on and defines your life style'. To neglect this aspect of the man is to forget what most interested him: to use the political system to get things done by the exercise of political skills that the politician has learned by experience. 'Even the quiescent periods, between elections, are filled with power plays, choices, shifting friendships, new adversaries, constant loyalties'. These words are those of a complete politician.
In his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, he is repeatedly critical of the 'pure' liberals in Congress with whom he tried to work and it is worth saying in passing that this autobiography, which has all the marks of having been written by himself, with whatever assistance from others, is one of the few books by an American politician which gives an illuminating description of the actual working Of politics. It is perhaps one of the most lasting parts of his legacy. Some of the liberals in the Senate in 1948, he said, 'then as now, demanded a purity of performance that is virtually beyond human capability'. He accused such liberals of being happy only when they lost, and unhappy when they won, for their interest lies only in persuading themselves that they are always in the right. 'There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right. They will compromise on nothing. They insist that everyone follow their thinking', and 'the wrath of the intellectual liberal' at those who are willing to compromise to
secure some worthwhile gain 'is something unbounded'. Yet characteristically he added that these 'self-appointed moralists, the secular theologians who would create the heavenly city on earth by Fiat . . . are irritating but indispensable'.
The essence of the man's life is in such passages. He would get things done even if it was not all that he wished to be done, in the form that he thought was best. 'Compromise is not a dirty word. There are times, of course, when it is better to lose than to be partially successful, but to make losing a habit in the name of moral principle or liberal conviction is to fail to govern and to demonstrate the incapacity to persuade and convince and to develop a majority'. When the man speaks like this for himself, it is better to try not to speak for him. He wished the Senate to be 'a legislating body and not merely a debating society', and few men lived up to his ambition so completely.
That is where his achievement lay, and, more than any other, that is the lesson that his life has to teach — that it is possible to engage in the necessary compromises of political life, and thirty years later to have adequately clean hands. We need not falsify our tributes to him. His record stands as it is, not as eulogists imagine it, and shows an accumulation of achievement — of simply doing what he set out to do — which has very few parallels in our time. When he at last enjoyed a position of real influence as Senate majority whip, and was a member of John Kennedy's breakfast meetings to form legislative strategy, he felt that `to be involved at the highest level of government in fashioning these (social) programmes, to be there at their creation, made my juices flow. Objectives I had talked about for so long, I could, as part of that breakfast group, help to make real'.
The length of his political career also matters, at a time when political experience is not highly regarded, perhaps especially in the White House. He learned his lessons early, and learned them well. Between his first unsuccessful and first successful campaign to be Mayor of Minneapolis, he had turned his attention to 'understanding the people behind the (formal structure of the city government), those who caused the government to operate. . . then I set out to meet them — bankers, publishers, businessmen of other sorts — and, at the same time I strengthened my association with labour'. It was an extraordinary political achievement for so young a man to bring together the Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labour Party in Minnesota — the basis of his own election in 1948 as the first Democrat to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota since it had been made a state in 1858.
He had already learned his lesson in his first campaign for mayor. 'There were liberal aldermen who couldn't have cared less about helping, particularly when it appeared that I had no chance'. Some years later in the Senate, he was organising liberal support for a resolution opposed by the Democratic leadership, which meant Lyndon Johnson. When he showed to Johnson the list of Senators on whom he was relying, Johnson then agreed to at least one of Humphrey's requests, and told him to `go back and tell your liberal friends that you're the one to talk to me . . . and we can get things done'.
Here is 'the education of a public man': the complete politician being formed. He had already proved his skill when he drove his civil rights plank through the Democratic Convention in 1948. His idealism and determination were high, but, the eulogists forget what is equally important: that he worked closely and with patience to obtain the support of Ed Flynn, the boss of the Bronx, who then brought in the support of other bosses, David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, Jake Arvey of Cook County, and John Bailey of Connecticut. The whole eastern seaboard voted for the amendment moved by a young western mayor. 'Ed Flynn was delivering' says Humphrey in his description of the occasion. In arguing for his plank, he himself pointed out that the Republicans had already adopted a lukewarm civil rights plank in their own platform: to throw the issue to them would be the height of folly.
So he continued to the end. Conservatives and Southerners in the Senate took the trouble to know its rules — too many liberals did not. 'The code of behaviour (in the Senate) makes sense . . . you keep your word . . . you do not embarrass a man through trickery or double cross'. This applies as much to the opposition as to anyone: 'You work as openly and honestly with your opponents as you do with your own political colleagues', especially if there are votes to win. 'The southerners, more than most of us, operated with good manners, a sense of graciousness . . . graciousness and good manners do not excuse bigotry . . . but bad manners and ungraciousness make any resolution of differences far more difficult', and again there is the implicit criticism of some too selfrighteous liberals. If he was skilled in allaying opposition to a measure, he was no less skilled in organising the support for it when he was determined to drive it through. He attributed the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to 'organisation, morale, momentum'.
All of this is at least as interesting, and as deserving of praise, as the idealism and decency of the man. He worked at being a politician, dedicated his life to politics, and so wrought his achievements, 'brick by brick', as he says, not to build Utopia now, as he again says, 'but an approximation to Utopia'. But finally one must ask what held him straight to his course through all the compromises, so that at his death all were aware of a political life followed with unusual consistency? He tells of a remark made by his father: 'before the fact is the dream'. That might be his own epitaph. It ought to be his epitaph. Through all the shoals of political life, which he did not disdain to negotiate, seeking compromise here and reconciliation there, the dream never faded. This dream held him true for thirty-five years, and from it came the fact of his achievements as a politician.
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