Читать книгу The Price of Loyalty - Andrew L. Johns - Страница 5

Foreign policy is really domestic policy with its hat on.

—Hubert Humphrey

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

—Niccolò Machiavelli

Brilliant. Gregarious. Optimistic. Eloquent. Ambitious. Emotional. Loyal. Inquisitive. Loquacious. Empathetic. Driven. These are just a few of the adjectives that have been used by contemporary observers, friends, political allies, and historians to describe Hubert Humphrey. The Minnesotan was a political polymath, interested in a wide range of domestic and international issues and willing to fight with passion and commitment for causes in which he believed. Like any politician, he had his share of successes and failures throughout his career, all of which were magnified by his national reputation and stature. He lost his first mayoral race in Minneapolis, suffered through being passed over by the Democratic convention to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1956, and tearfully lost the 1960 presidential nomination to John F. Kennedy after a poor showing in the West Virginia primary. But almost every time he faced an obstacle or lost a political engagement, he jumped back into the fray, working harder and more diligently than ever to see his vision of the country realized. The one issue on which he failed and from which he would not recover would be the war in Vietnam.

That Humphrey would grapple futilely with the Vietnam conflict as he ran for president may not be surprising in retrospect, but in real time it could be considered an anomaly in an otherwise impressive career of public service. Hubert Humphrey was one of the most intelligent men to ever serve in the U.S. Senate. Few senators have ever tackled such a broad spectrum of domestic and international issues and still managed to achieve the understanding and level of detailed engagement that he did. He excelled as “a stand-up, hip-pocket diplomatist” in the Senate, “a technician in the wooing and wheedling and all-around negotiation with which majorities are put together.”^[1] Only a few twentieth-century politicians accomplished as much of lasting significance as did Humphrey. He played perhaps the crucial and decisive role in the complex parliamentary maneuvering as the Democratic whip in the Senate that resulted in the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Humphrey, not JFK, first proposed the Peace Corps. It was Humphrey who was responsible for the ideas that led to the Food for Peace program in the 1950s and Medicare as part of the Great Society, and he was an early proponent of federal aid for education. Internationally, Humphrey advocated for the negotiation of a nuclear test-ban treaty years before it was consummated and supported foreign aid and economic development programs across the globe. A champion of scores of liberal causes, he was virtually without peer in the Senate during the early Cold War. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “Most Senators are minnows. Hubert Humphrey is among the whales.”^[2]

In addition to his legislative prowess, Humphrey in many ways personified the Cold War consensus. He burst onto the national political scene as a fire-breathing liberal zealot, “the aboriginal New Dealer,” whose impassioned speech electrified the 1948 Democratic convention and persuaded the delegates to adopt a tough civil rights platform without regard for the Dixiecrat political secessionists.^[3] He was a founder of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), served as its chairman in 1949, and was a perennial vice chairman until 1964.^[4] Throughout his years in the Senate, he focused on issues of social welfare, fair employment, and civil rights and displayed an idealism that earned him a devoted following among those on the left. To be sure, Humphrey was a political animal, a partisan Democrat who loved a good fight. After the 1956 election, for example, he declared that Democrats would be “digging their own graves” if they did not adopt a militantly liberal position—this despite his willingness to work closely with the Southern leadership of Lyndon Johnson in the Senate to work out a “middle way.” That approach had cost him at least some of his progressive following, which complained that Humphrey was “induced into compromises regarded as treasonable by strong left-wingers.”^[5] Yet he gained widespread respect on both sides of the aisle for his forceful advocacy for the issues he embraced, his integrity, and his (often-long-winded, rapid-fire) eloquence. His consistently cheerful demeanor garnered him the nickname “The Happy Warrior.”^[6]

Humphrey’s loquaciousness was legendary. In a single week in February 1958, for example, he spoke on the Senate floor on (among other topics) disarmament and the recession (repeatedly), dairy supports, disaster loans, trade development, antitrust laws, British and French politics, international civil aviation, Lithuanian independence, North African policy, regulatory agencies, unemployment, Adlai Stevenson, Soviet-American cultural exchanges, space exploration, and the federal reserve system. One newspaper account of his extensive remarks that month noted that he spent more time speaking in the Senate than most of his Democratic colleagues combined—an astonishing statistic. His rhetorical excesses also led to many good-

natured jokes. Henry Kissinger, for example, would often describe how when Humphrey began speaking at the dedication of a grove of trees named in his honor in Israel, the trees were only knee-high. By the time he finished, however, he was speaking in the shade.^[7]

At the same time, Humphrey's ardent anticommunism rivaled that of anyone on the right. In fact, opposition to communism would become one of Humphrey’s defining political positions throughout his career and would actually cause problems for him with some of his supporters on the left. As mayor of Minneapolis from 1945 to 1948, he led the successful fight to drive communists out of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party that had elected him. Like several other liberal internationalist senators in the Democratic Party, Humphrey occasionally went “overboard in trumpeting [his] strong opposition to communism.” His sponsorship of the Communist Control Act in August 1954 is a prime example. Humphrey supported an amendment to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 to outlaw the Communist Party in the United States as the agent of a hostile foreign power. His position on the bill dismayed many of his liberal friends, who characterized the legislation as a “low grade partisan maneuver” that would “widen the witch hunt.” The senator’s goal was “to thwart the Republican attempt to seize the high political ground on anti-Communism” since he was “tired of reading headlines about being ‘soft’ toward communism.”^[8] Humphrey most assuredly was not. Rather, the Minnesotan was “as immersed in the politics and ideology of the Cold War as any Democrat,” a committed cold warrior who hounded communists at home and abroad.^[9]

Given Humphrey's unyielding opposition to both domestic and international communism, it is not surprising that Vietnam was far from the first foreign policy issue on which he had an interest and influence. Even before he won election to public office, Humphrey displayed a keen interest in international affairs. As he rose to prominence in Minnesota, he spoke to a wide variety of audiences about the importance of the League of Nations, collective security, and taking a strong stand for democracy against fascism.^[10] He overcame an initial reluctance to go overseas—rooted in his concern for his political reputation in Minnesota—and traveled extensively in the search for solutions to U.S. foreign policy dilemmas, turning himself into a nationally and internationally recognized figure. During the early Cold War, he became perhaps the leading Democratic spokesperson in the Senate on a wide range of international issues during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), Humphrey not only employed his expertise in international affairs but also served as his party’s primary counterpoint to the incendiary rhetoric and brinksmanship of Republican Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.^[11] In an interview in 1971, Humphrey recalled that Lyndon Johnson had asked him to serve on the SFRC after the 1952 election. According to Humphrey, LBJ “said the reason he wanted us over there—he was going to put Mansfield and myself—he said he wanted some new young blood on the committee. Secondly, he said that he was worried about John Foster Dulles becoming Secretary of State, and he wanted to have some good scrappers, battlers, over on that committee.”^[12] The senator challenged Dulles consistently throughout the 1950s, which only enhanced Humphrey’s national profile on foreign policy issues. Humphrey’s prodigious intellect and interests led him to engage with a wide range of policies, such as arguing for Ukrainian independence, pushing for a foreign aid agreement with Sri Lanka, and championing self-determination for the nations behind the Iron Curtain.

Humphrey also seized on opportunities to engage world leaders, utilizing his experience, position, and personality to further U.S. policy goals and his own political fortunes. An incident in 1958 is both instructive and indicative of Humphrey’s international acumen. A “torrential talker,” he spent over eight hours in an interview with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in December 1958 that “left interpreters reeling.”^[13] In the meeting, Humphrey sparred with the Soviet leader on a variety of topics related to Soviet-American relations and the Cold War. At one point, the Soviet leader asked Humphrey where his hometown was. When Humphrey replied Minneapolis, Khrushchev drew a thick blue circle around the city on a map and said, “I will have to remember to have that city spared when the missiles start flying.” The senator reciprocated, asking Khrushchev where he was from. When the premier answered Moscow, Humphrey quickly retorted, “Sorry, Mr. Khrushchev, but I can’t do the same for you. We can’t spare Moscow.” Both laughed loudly.^[14] The next day, Humphrey dictated a long memorandum for the Department of State; upon his return to Washington, D.C., he briefed Undersecretary of State Christian Herter, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and other officials on Khrushchev’s comments and desire for a summit meeting with Eisenhower.^[15] The publicity and notoriety that Humphrey gained from this conversation with the Soviet leader helped pave the way for his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960.

Humphrey’s steadfast anticommunism, uncommon even among the most ardent cold warriors in the Democratic Party, informed his approach to international issues. Yet if one looks beneath the surface, it is easy to discern a duality in Humphrey’s approach to foreign affairs. While he supported the Truman and Eisenhower Doctrines and the Marshall Plan as part of U.S. containment strategy, he believed strongly in peace and the brotherhood of man. He supported Truman’s decision to fight in Korea but did so primarily because the president chose to act through the auspices of the United Nations, an organization whose raison d’être he avidly promoted. Humphrey supported the ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but he also lobbied for Point Four and Public Law 480 funds for underdeveloped areas around the world and championed the Alliance for Progress.^[16] He never voted against a military budget appropriation, yet he also helped to create the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961 and led the fight for the ratification of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In fact, in a speech at Yale University in December 1959, Humphrey asserted, “Disarmament should be the core of American foreign policy.”^[17] Humphrey’s liberal and anticommunist principles remained consistent throughout his career. The disconnect arose when those two impulses clashed or when other political imperatives interceded. When that occurred, the resulting decisions and rhetoric could make him appear to have adopted contradictory positions. Nowhere would this be more apparent than in dealing with Vietnam.

Humphrey’s anticommunism and U.S. policy in Southeast Asia would collide in the 1950s. Given his visceral opposition to communism worldwide, Humphrey predictably backed U.S. policy in Indochina from the outset and consistently warned against the cost of losing ground to communism in the region in speeches on the Senate floor. On January 5, 1950, for instance, he said, “I want to stop communism, and I say that if we lose the south part of Asia, if we lose Burma, if we lose India, we shall have lost every hope that we ever had of being able to maintain free institutions in any part of the eastern world.” When Harry Truman decided to increase U.S. aid to Indochina in the wake of the invasion of South Korea, he was supported by both sides of the political divide. Humphrey called it a “most encouraging” decision on the part of the administration. Humphrey wanted to protect Indochina from “the Communist onslaught,” believing as did many in Congress that a communist victory in Vietnam would lead to the conquest of the entire region.^[18]

Yet Humphrey would exhibit uncertainty about the proper course of action in Vietnam. He embraced the idea of an independent Indochina while vocally opposing those within the Eisenhower administration who suggested using nuclear weapons to aid the French in 1954. Although he refrained from publicly criticizing the administration on Indochina, Humphrey did express some reservations about U.S. policy privately. In February 1954, for example, he complained to John Foster Dulles that “it is patently obvious that we just do not have any plan.” When the senator asked what the United States would do in the event that France abandoned Indochina, Dulles responded that the administration still had faith in the Navarre Plan: “I feel that the program upon which we are now embarked will probably hold the situation in Indochina.” Humphrey was not wholly convinced.^[19] On March 31, 1954, Humphrey declared that “the loss of Indochina would be a tragedy for the free world . . . [and] would mean the loss of all Asia and probably the subcontinent.” In April, following newspaper reports that the administration was considering deployment of U.S. troops to Indochina in the event of a French withdrawal, Humphrey and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) complained about the administration’s lack of consultation with Congress, suggesting that this proposal went far beyond U.S. policy as they understood it.^[20]

In the midst of the siege at Dien Bien Phu, Humphrey opined that he did not think that “anybody seems to have any plans whatsoever about Indochina” and that the odds of “getting anything very constructive toward the cause of the free nations” at the Geneva Conference was “very, very limited.” The senator also worried that the administration did not have any contingencies in place in the event that the French decided to withdraw from Indochina. Given the importance of the region, he argued, “we just do not have any plan.”^[21] On April 19, 1954, Humphrey asserted that losing Indochina “is unthinkable. It cannot happen. It will not happen.”^[22] Yet it did happen. The French withdrew from Southeast Asia, the international agreement reached at the Geneva conference effectively created two states in Indochina, and the United States quickly committed itself to the task of maintaining a Western-oriented, noncommunist government in Vietnam irrespective of the language of the accords.^[23]

As U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia entered a new phase, Humphrey continued to support efforts to oppose communism in the region. In 1955, it was Humphrey who made the motion that led to Senate ratification of the Manila Pact, more commonly referred to as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), by a vote of 85–1. That agreement would be used by many in Washington to justify an expanded presence in South Vietnam. But Humphrey—along with several of his Senate colleagues, including J. William Fulbright (D-AK), Mike Mansfield (D-MT), and John F. Kennedy (D-MA)—viewed the Eisenhower-Dulles approach in Vietnam somewhat skeptically. While they agreed about the need to construct a bulwark against communist expansion and supported the Diem government, they were not completely satisfied with the administration’s policy priorities. Humphrey later recalled, “When I spoke out in the fifties against what we were doing, mine was a relatively lonely voice. We narrowly avoided joining the French in the death throes of their Southeast Asian colonialism. This seemed absurd.”^[24] Hoping to prevent a recurrence of the French experience in Indochina, in September 1958 the senators asked the president to give more economic aid and less military assistance to the Diem regime in order to stimulate development and to bolster South Vietnam’s social stability.^[25]

During the Kennedy administration, Humphrey generally supported JFK’s policy on Vietnam but also urged caution in terms of expanding U.S. commitment. He told the Senate in 1962 that the United States should limit its participation in Vietnam to “military assistance, to supplies, and to military training” but remained steadfast in his commitment to preventing the spread of communism. Humphrey praised the administration’s efforts to develop counterinsurgency programs, stating that “in recent months, the tide may well have turned for the forces of freedom against the Communist guerrillas of the north,” and urged additional weapons and supplies to “put out these brush fires” in Vietnam.^[26] But as things got progressively worse in Southeast Asia, it became clear to Humphrey that different solutions would be required to achieve U.S. goals.

As the United States faced increasingly difficult and limited choices in South Vietnam, Humphrey’s views on U.S. involvement in Vietnam were shaped by General Edward Lansdale, the counterinsurgency expert who had been Ramon Magsaysay’s chief adviser in the Philippines in the 1950s and who later became a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. After Kennedy’s assassination, Humphrey “tried to educate myself on Vietnam. I turned to Colonel (later General) Edward Lansdale . . . [who] urged a political approach. . . . After the election I became a conduit for his ideas to President Johnson.”^[27] Lansdale’s theory, which Humphrey came to support enthusiastically, was that conventional military techniques were useless against a rural-based communist insurgency and that the only way to succeed would be to adopt similar tactics and demonstrate the potential benefits of democratic government through a rural reconstruction program. Humphrey embraced Lansdale’s ideas in 1964, even sending LBJ a memorandum in the spring recommending against withdrawal of the 16,000 U.S. advisers in Vietnam but arguing that “direct U.S. action against North Vietnam, American assumption of command roles, or participation in combat of U.S. troop units are unnecessary and undesirable.”^[28] What is clear is that by early 1964, while Humphrey remained committed to opposing communism in Vietnam, he did not support the idea of a major escalation of U.S. military presence on the ground. That reluctance would inform Humphrey’s advice to LBJ in the months of decision that followed.

The relationship that Humphrey had with Lyndon Johnson looms as a significant and indispensable part of the story. The two had been friends since the early 1950s. Johnson had mentored Humphrey in their early years in the Senate, helping to transform and legitimize Humphrey from an impulsive liberal zealot into a seasoned and effective legislator who understood that politics is the “art of the possible.” Yet the relationship could not be described as balanced. Humphrey, for his part, considered Johnson to be a close friend and confidant. The Minnesota senator was a big fan of LBJ and defended him to other Senate liberals in the 1950s. In fact, Humphrey thought Johnson was “a lot more liberal” than he appeared, telling his allies, “On minimum wage he’s with us; on health measures . . . he’s with us; on agriculture measures he’s with us; on all the public works programs he’s with us; on public employment measures when we had recessions he was with us.” It helped that the two men shared a common background. Both were from small-town rural communities, both had worked as teachers, and both came from impoverished backgrounds that left them suspicious of the far-off power of financial elites.^[29]

Johnson, on the other hand, was friends with Humphrey “the same way a grave digger is friends with his shovel.” Although they got along well personally, the friendship might be best described as superficial—if genuine—because it was grounded largely in what Humphrey could do for Johnson politically. Politics took precedence in everything in LBJ’s life; indeed, lurking just beneath the veneer of his civility was Johnson’s penchant for instinctive and visceral political calculation. Ambitiously aiming to be king of the Senate, Johnson “systematically manipulated Humphrey to make the Minnesotan believe he was the Texan’s friend and would deliver the northern liberal Senate votes” the majority leader needed. While LBJ rewarded Humphrey’s support with seats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and other important committees, the fact remains that Johnson trusted his colleague “no more, and probably a good deal less, than he did other northern liberals.”^[30] Humphrey’s impeccable progressive credentials would serve the same purpose in 1964 when the president asked the Minnesota senator to join him on the Democratic ticket, but when Humphrey ran afoul of liberals due to his staunch defense of administration policies in Vietnam over the next four years, LBJ found that he had little use for his vice president and essentially cast him aside—especially during the 1968 presidential campaign.

It is worth taking a moment to pause and explore Johnson’s personality further, as it is central not just to understanding his decisions that led to the Americanization of the war in Vietnam but also to appreciating his relationship with Humphrey. David Halberstam provides one of the most insightful descriptions of LBJ in his magisterial, albeit imperfect, account of the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest. For Halberstam, Johnson was “a relentless man who pushed himself and all others with the same severity and demanded, above all other qualities, total loyalty.” That loyalty had to be “first and foremost to Lyndon Johnson. Then Lyndon Johnson would become the arbiter of any larger loyalty. Those who passed the loyalty test could have whatever they wanted.” LBJ, Halberstam continued, “was ill at ease with abstract loyalty, loyalty to issue, to concept, to cause, which might lead one to occasional dissent, a broader view, and might mean that a man was caught between loyalty to civil rights and loyalty to Lyndon Johnson.” But unlike others, Johnson demanded loyalty out of insecurity. Why was LBJ, who had risen to the heights of political power in the United States, insecure? According to Halberstam, it was Johnson’s sense that he was an outsider—he was not part of the Eastern establishment, he lacked an Ivy League pedigree, and he was not among the country’s financial elite. That sense of not belonging was only magnified by the fact that those cohorts were so prominent in the Kennedy administration. That feeling “was a profound part of him. . . . He was haunted by regional prejudice, and even the attainment of the Presidency did not temper his feelings.”^[31]

Complicating matters was Johnson’s experience as JFK’s vice president. Kennedy kept the former Senate majority leader—who was accustomed to power, control, and prestige after dominating the legislative process on Capitol Hill for so many years—busy with a series of seemingly insignificant, although traditionally vice-presidential, tasks.^[32] LBJ never forgot his own miserable years spent one heartbeat away from the presidency, later admitting that he “detested every minute of it.”^[33] That helps to explain why Johnson, who did not speak up in cabinet meetings about civil rights despite his strong feelings on the issue, probably wondered why Humphrey spoke up so forcefully on Vietnam early in his tenure as vice president and treated him poorly as a result. Indeed, that attitude comes through clearly in the interactions between the two men. Early in 1965, LBJ told Humphrey, “I had none [power], ’cause Kennedy wouldn’t give me any. He didn’t just assign it to me. . . . Kennedy felt if I did it . . . they’d say I was the ‘Master Craftsman’ and so forth.”^[34] President Johnson would show Humphrey even less consideration over the next four years than he had received from JFK.

Given that perspective, and despite the fact that Humphrey shared Johnson’s outsider background, LBJ’s treatment of Humphrey becomes more understandable, if not excusable. Johnson had “always viewed Hubert Humphrey as something of a convenience, to be used at times for his own and the country’s greater good,” but the Texan never held the kind of respect for Humphrey that he did for people like Richard Russell. Humphrey was “too prone to talk instead of act, not a person that other men would respect in a room when it got down to the hard cutting.” The relationship was “almost completely one-sided, Johnson using Humphrey on Johnson’s terms,” whether on civil rights, the Great Society, or the conflict in Vietnam.^[35] Understanding this dynamic on both a personal and institutional level is absolutely vital to grasping how the LBJ–Humphrey relationship influenced Humphrey on the issue of Vietnam during his vice presidency.

While Vietnam loomed large for the new president, Lyndon Johnson also had to focus on the impending 1964 presidential campaign and the question of who he would select as his vice president. Although he vetted several possibilities, Hubert Humphrey stood out in Johnson’s calculations because Humphrey possessed a number of potential campaign assets: the senator was a Northerner, an intellectual, and a certified liberal, all electoral weaknesses for a Southern Democrat like Johnson. Those qualities made for a tempting set of ticket-balancing credentials for LBJ. It helped that Humphrey and Johnson worked well together, their unequal relationship notwithstanding. In his memoirs, Johnson characterized Humphrey as “a strong contender” along with Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) for the vice presidency but eventually concluded that Humphrey “was the best choice in the light of all the circumstances.”^[36] Still, the president continued to have reservations about Humphrey throughout the first half of 1964. At one point, LBJ told White House aide Bill Moyers, “I would have lots of problems with him. He’s so exuberant, so enthusiastic; he’d get off the reservation all the time”—not exactly what Johnson was looking for in a vice president.^[37]

The president’s concerns may have been exaggerated and certainly betrayed LBJ’s insecurities. The reality is that after nearly two decades in the Senate, Humphrey’s sharp liberal edges had been softened. While still energetic, garrulous, and firmly committed to his causes, he had learned to be “a half-a-loaf pragmatist instead of an all-or-nothing martyr.” Even though the Minnesota senator still possessed the “instincts of a brawler,” he was no longer brash, and he understood the etiquette demands of the Senate to be “no less pointed but far more genteel.”^[38] To his arsenal of rhetoric and passion, Humphrey added the quiet skills of conciliation and negotiation that allowed him to become effective in coalition building, compromise, and political maneuvering, the critical components of legislative success. That being said, Humphrey still spoke truth to power and advocated for his causes, but he did so in a more mature and measured way. Of course, speaking one’s mind as a member of the Senate is one thing; it would be entirely another to be candid as vice president—especially to Lyndon Johnson.

Nevertheless, according to journalist Kenneth Crawford, Humphrey possessed the most important qualification to be vice president: “he is essentially a contented man” who would “not be chafed by subordination to the President or by the degree of anonymity this imposes. He already has adjusted gracefully.” Crawford also observed that Humphrey understood the ground rules of the relationship with LBJ most importantly that Humphrey would “speak for the President only when the President specifically authorizes him to do so,” despite the fact that Humphrey “has never been one to sit quietly for long in a back seat.” Crawford believed that the two men shared a “mutual respect and understanding and finally trust and affection.”^[39] It was an optimistic perspective but a mostly accurate assessment in mid-1964. Unfortunately for Humphrey, those bonds would fracture over the next four years.

After Humphrey agreed to serve as vice president, Johnson warned him—presciently, as it would turn out—that the requirements and realities of their new working relationship would probably ruin their long-standing friendship. “There is something about the jobs and responsibilities that seem to get in the way of those friendships and understandings,” LBJ told Humphrey, speaking from his own experience. “You have to understand that this is like a marriage with no chance of divorce. I need complete and unswerving loyalty.” Humphrey assured Johnson that he accepted the parameters of the job, and the deal was done. Humphrey fully understood that his role as vice president would be, in his words, “what the President wants it to be.”^[40] The loyalty on which LBJ adamantly insisted and that Humphrey willingly proffered is an integral part of the story of Humphrey’s struggles with the Vietnam conflict. Humphrey’s conception of the role of the vice president, his personal fealty to Johnson, and the resulting compromises Humphrey would make with his principles for political reasons over the next four years would have far-reaching ramifications for his political ambitions, U.S. Vietnam policy, and the country’s future.

Humphrey’s defenders have argued that he was trapped by his position as vice president and that he only supported the war because of his misguided loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. Scholars have long recognized that roles can shape, influence, or even determine rhetoric for leaders in the U.S. political system, and perhaps nowhere is that observation more accurate than with the vice presidency.^[41] One of Humphrey’s oldest friends, civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh, suggested that “Hubert just had blinkers on. I said to him once, ‘If you were President, we’d be out of this war in ninety days.’ He said, ‘No.’ He really thought the war was right. But he was only thinking it through from A to B because of those blinkers he’d put on out of loyalty to Lyndon Johnson. If he’d let himself think it through, he’d have been against the war.” But, Rauh continued, “as it was, you have to say that he stayed and out-Johnsoned Johnson. You have to have forgiveness, though, because he is a really fine and noble man, and it was loyalty that made him do it.” Other observers suggest that such a conclusion is “untenable.” They point out that Humphrey’s rhetoric on the war in 1966 and 1967—which was passionate and overzealous, sometimes bordering on the fanatical—transcended what solidarity with the administration required. As one pundit commented, “One should do him the credit of believing him.”^[42] The truth, however, is that, regardless of his true beliefs, Humphrey never managed to deal successfully with the war from a political standpoint, regardless of what his loyalty or principles may have dictated.

Throughout the summer of 1964, the situation in Vietnam continued to deteriorate as the Johnson administration devoted its energy to avoiding any decisions that might undermine the president’s electoral prospects that fall. Meanwhile, Humphrey continued to express doubts about the trajectory of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. In June, for example, Humphrey spoke out in support of his colleague Senator Frank Church (D-ID), who suggested that the Vietnam conflict should be put before the United Nations and articulated his strong opposition to escalating the war. “What is needed in Vietnam,” Humphrey noted, “is a cause for which to fight, some sort of inspiration for the people of South Vietnam to live for and die for.” Shortly thereafter, he privately told LBJ, “No amount of additional military involvement can be successful” without providing “some hope” around which the Vietnamese people could rally. Military action against North Vietnam or intervention with U.S. combat troops, he argued, was “unnecessary and undesirable.”^[43]

Humphrey was being cautious. LBJ had asked him for his views on Vietnam, but John Rielly, Humphrey’s thirty-five-year-old Harvard University and London School of Economics–trained foreign policy adviser, had urged the senator to avoid discussing Vietnam with the president or becoming one of the administration’s spokesmen on the conflict. Rielly told Humphrey, “(1) Do not make any speech on the subject of Vietnam. (2) Do not present to the President any memoranda on Vietnam. (3) Do not permit yourself, if at all possible, to be maneuvered into the position by the President where you become the principal defender of the Administration’s policy in the Senate against critics like Mansfield, Church, Morse, Gruening and others.” That said, Rielly advised Humphrey to “raise certain questions” with the president about “the implications of certain alternative lines of actions.” Rielly argued that the United States had become “overcommitted” in Southeast Asia and counseled Humphrey that, while it had been “a mistake to intervene” in Vietnam in 1954, “our prestige is so committed that there can be no justification of an immediate pull out.” Yet a withdrawal achieved “gradually and gracefully” that would not leave South Vietnam vulnerable to domination by the North would be in the country’s best interest. He cautioned against introducing U.S. ground troops, arguing that “Once we land troops in a country, it is difficult to get them out. We find it difficult to disengage—and usually end up becoming more involved than ever.” Rielly did admit that in an election year, “it is politically dangerous to talk about any scheme for ‘neutralizing the area’” but argued that “a political settlement is our ultimate goal. You may not care to emphasize this at the present time (i.e., before November 1964).”^[44] Rielly’s advice would prove to be astute; the confrontation between Johnson and Humphrey in February 1965 would demonstrate just how accurate Rielly’s predictions and prescriptions had been.

That counsel notwithstanding, Humphrey did reply to LBJ’s request in a memorandum—which was prepared with significant input from Edward Lansdale and Rufus Phillips, Lansdale’s protégé and a former CIA officer—in which he counseled restraint in U.S. policy toward Vietnam. Humphrey argued that the Vietnamese “must be skillfully and firmly guided, but it is they (not we) who must win their war.” Playing the domestic political card that the president understood so well, Humphrey went on to point out that a “political base is needed to support all other actions. . . . No amount of additional military involvement can be successful without accomplishing this task.” Indeed, Humphrey concluded that direct U.S. military action or assumption of control in Vietnam would be “unnecessary and undesirable.” Any U.S. involvement should be confined to supporting counterinsurgency efforts rather than airstrikes or other conventional responses. Humphrey recommended that a team of U.S. counterinsurgency experts be dispatched to Vietnam. Johnson’s military aide, Major General Chester V. Clifton Jr., responded to Humphrey’s suggestions negatively, and LBJ took Clifton’s advice.^[45] Clearly, Humphrey and Johnson did not share the same opinion on what approach to follow in Southeast Asia.

While the questions of how, when, and to what extent the United States should act in Vietnam remained fluid, the fall election campaign between Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) took priority. Although Humphrey seemed to be a lock for the vice-presidential slot, the Democratic convention would not be held until the end of August 1964, and LBJ’s decision had not yet been finalized. In fact, Humphrey’s nomination was nearly derailed in the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin attacks.^[46] On August 4, the president spoke with former campaign manager James Rowe in the middle of the crisis. He complained that Humphrey’s “garrulousness” was endangering national security. “Our friend Hubert is just destroying himself with his big mouth,” LBJ complained. “Every responsible person gets frightened when they see him. . . . Yesterday morning, he went on TV and . . . just blabbed everything that he had heard in a briefing.” Johnson called him a “damned fool” who “just ought to keep his goddamned big mouth shut on foreign affairs, at least until the election is over. . . . He’s hurting us!” The president concluded by telling Rowe that if Humphrey did not stop, he might reconsider the Minnesota senator as his running mate.^[47]

Johnson’s disapproval failed to prevent Humphrey from addressing the situation in Southeast Asia. During the truncated debate that preceded the overwhelming passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Humphrey said “the aggressor seeks to bite off piece by piece the areas of freedom . . . our objective is to achieve stability in the area so that we can then go to the conference table. But we ought to make it clear to the world that we do not intend to sit at the conference table with a Communist gun at our heads.”^[48] Humphrey made it clear he supported the administration’s request for authorization to retaliate for the attacks and defend both U.S. interests and South Vietnam. “It is my view that the minute we back away from commitments we have made in the defense of freedom, where the Communist powers are guilty of outright subversion and aggression, on that day the strength, the freedom, and the honor of the United States starts to be eroded.” He returned to his familiar anticommunist rhetoric and argued that he was “of the opinion that what is going on in Southeast Asia is a persistent attack on the part of the Communist forces to nibble away at certain areas in Southeast Asia which we can call free and independent, to take them one by one.” There was no question in Humphrey’s mind that the United States had to act. “A great power must be an honorable power,” he said. “A great nation must be willing at times to make great and difficult decisions. I would be the last to say that this decision did not have within it the possibilities of even greater troubles ahead. But I do not believe that we can duck these troubles. I do not believe that we can avoid them by pretending they are not there.”^[49]

The approval of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution effectively neutralized Vietnam as a campaign issue in the fall, but it did not stop Humphrey from expounding on his prescription for U.S. policy.^[50] At a town hall meeting in Los Angeles on August 17, 1964, he laid out what he saw as the goals for U.S. involvement in Vietnam: “We must stay in Vietnam—until the security of the South Vietnamese people has been established. We will not be driven out . . . the primary responsibility for preserving independence and achieving peace in Vietnam remains with the Vietnamese people and their Government. We should not attempt to ‘take over’ the war.”^[51] In addition to being consistent with his long-standing views on the Vietnam conflict, Humphrey’s statement fit perfectly with the administration’s focus on avoiding the question of potential escalation during the presidential election. Moreover, it was sufficiently restrained as to ease the president’s anxiety over the prospect of Humphrey as his vice president.

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 is my viewpoint.’ But I never thought it would be appropriate or desirable to debate differences of opinion in open meetings with others.” Ted Van Dyk, one of Humphrey’s aides, stated, “Johnson had talked to him at great length before he took office, saying he didn’t want Humphrey disagreeing with him at meetings and that they should discuss their differences privately. And right at the start Humphrey breached this. I’m sure this angered the hell out of Johnson—maybe even more than the fact that Humphrey disagreed with him.”^[64]

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 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 73; quoted in Mann, A Grand Delusion, 79–80.

19.

Quoted in Mann, A Grand Delusion, 129.

20.

Mann, A Grand Delusion, 158.

21.

Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part I, 166.

22.

Statement, Humphrey on Indochina, April 19, 1954, 150.E.14.10F, HHHP, MHS.

23.

On the transition from French to U.S. dominance in Vietnam in the 1950s, see especially Kathryn C. Statler, Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012).

24.

Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1991), 234.

25.

William C. Berman, William Fulbright and the Vietnam War: The Dissent of a Political Realist (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), 10.

26.

William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: Part II, 1961–1964 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 126.

27.

Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man, 235.

28.

Albert Eisele, Almost to the Presidency: A Biography of Two American Politicians (Blue Earth, MN: Piper Co., 1972), 230.

29.

Transcript, Hubert H. Humphrey Oral History Interview, August 17, 1971, by Joe B. Frantz, LBJL, 5; Transcript, Hubert H. Humphrey Oral History Interview III, June 21, 1977, by Michael L. Gillette, LBJL, 11.

30.

Walter LaFeber, The Deadly Bet: LBJ, Vietnam, and the 1968 Election (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 121.

31.

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 433–35.

32.

Mitchell Lerner makes a convincing argument that some of LBJ’s ancillary duties as vice president—specifically his extensive international travel (eleven trips to thirty-three countries, covering 120,000 miles)—were “not nearly as unimportant as many believed (and as the Kennedy people often tried to suggest).” See Mitchell Lerner, “‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice’: The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (April 2010): 357–93 (quote from 359). On the role of the vice president in modern politics and foreign policy, see, for example, Joel K. Goldstein, The Modern American Vice Presidency: The Transformation of a Political Institution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Paul Kengor, Wreath Layer or Policy Player: The Vice President’s Role in Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000).

33.

Quoted in Erik van den Berg, “Supersalesman for the Great Society: Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, 1965–1969,” American Studies International 36, 3 (October 1998): 60.

34.

Telephone conversation transcript, Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson, March 6, 1965, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/secret-white-house-tapes/conversation-hubert-humphrey-march-6-1965-0, accessed October 7, 2019.

35.

Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 531–35 (emphasis in original).

36.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 101.

37.

Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 137.

38.

Newsweek, April 13, 1964, 26.

39.

Kenneth Crawford, “HHH Anonymous,” Newsweek, January 11, 1965, 32.

40.

Randall B. Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 533; Newsweek, November 9, 1964, 30.

41.

In social science, role theory suggests that each role or office has a set of expectations, behaviors, and responsibilities with which a person must grapple and fulfill, which influences the locus of possible options for rhetoric and decision-making.

42.

Chester, Hodgson, and Page, An American Melodrama, 148.

43.

Mann, A Grand Delusion, 339.

44.

Memorandum, John Reilly to Hubert Humphrey, June 8, 1964, HHH Vice Presidential Files, 1965–1968, Foreign Affairs General Files, 150.E.14.1B, MHS.

45.

Quoted in Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, Part II, 278; Memorandum, Hubert Humphrey to Lyndon Johnson, June 8, 1964, 150.D.10.1B, HHHP, MHS. See also Van Dyk, Heroes, Hacks, and Fools, 29.

46.

On the Gulf of Tonkin attacks, see especially Edwin E. Moïse, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

47.

Telephone conversation transcript, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, May 28, 1964, quoted in Michael R. Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963–1964 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 499 (emphasis in original).

48.

Eisele, Almost to the Presidency, 229.

49.

Congressional Record (Senate), August 6, 1964, 17836-17837.

50.

On Vietnam and the 1964 presidential campaign, see, for example, Andrew L. Johns, “Mortgaging the Future: Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson, and Vietnam in the 1964 Presidential Election,” Journal of Arizona History 61, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 149–60.

51.

Speech, Humphrey at Los Angeles town hall meeting, August 17, 1964, 310.G.12.4F, HHHP, MHS.

52.

Robert David Johnson, All the Way with LBJ: The 1964 Presidential Election (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194.

53.

New York Times, August 28, 1964.

54.

Offner, Hubert Humphrey, 208.

55.

“Humphrey and Rauh,” National Review Bulletin 16, no. 37 (September 15, 1964): 1.

56.

Johnson, All the Way with LBJ, 243.

57.

Quoted in Time, September 4, 1964, 20.

58.

Speech, Hubert Humphrey, October 26, 1964, Thomson Papers, box 12, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA (hereafter JFKL).

59.

Johnson, All the Way with LBJ, 16.

60.

U.S. News & World Report, November 16, 1964, 58.

61.

Solberg, Hubert Humphrey, 265.

62.

Quoted in Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of the War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 287.

63.

Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 29; quoted in David M. Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 18.

64.

Quoted in David M. Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisors (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 19. Johnson’s recollections about his relationship with Kennedy are supported by William Bundy, George Ball, and others. Interestingly, however, Humphrey’s memoirs make no mention of Johnson’s strong desire for Humphrey’s “reticence in White House meetings.”

65.

There is a substantial literature on the planning that occurred within the administration throughout 1964, including Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983); Logevall, Choosing War; Mann, A Grand Delusion; and Brian VanDeMark, Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam (New York: Custom House, 2018).