The Price of Loyalty. Andrew L. Johns
convention for its failure to act on civil rights, Humphrey’s liberal credentials could not be questioned. To be fair, Humphrey’s fierce advocacy for the Great Society—both at home and abroad—harkened back to his reputation as a radical progressive. Yet when it came to the Vietnam conflict, Humphrey abandoned or ignored his principles out of a combination of political expediency, ambition, and allegiance to the president. Even as he faced cascading criticism from his liberal allies in 1966 and 1967, Humphrey privileged other considerations above his principles, leaving himself vulnerable to attacks from across the political spectrum on the issue of the war during the presidential campaign in 1968.
That truth is even more surprising given that Humphrey’s long career in politics honed his political instincts to a razor-sharp edge. During his vice presidency (at least after February 1965) and presidential candidacy, however, those same instincts seemed to vanish or were pointedly ignored as Humphrey placed LBJ’s political interests ahead of his own. Even when the obvious political calculation was to reject the administration’s stance on the conflict, Humphrey hesitated. More generally, nothing could be more obvious than the fact that Vietnam was a political war, which makes Humphrey’s choices even more perplexing. The U.S. decisions to support the Saigon regime from 1954 onward reflected the demands of anticommunism and the domestic political realities of U.S. presidential elections, the relationship between the conflict and the demands of the Great Society, and the personal political interests of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, among others. One cannot fully understand U.S. involvement in Vietnam without appreciating the degree to which decisions were made, delayed, or avoided due to domestic political considerations. That fact underscores the power that the nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy has had in the U.S. political context. That relationship, which played such a pivotal role during the entire U.S. involvement in Vietnam and would certainly have ramifications for Humphrey, represents a central theme in this book.[10]
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While Humphrey looms large in U.S. political history due to his five terms in the Senate (1949–1964 and 1971–1978), his four years as vice president (1965–1969), and his 1968 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, the scholarly literature on his life and career has been relatively sporadic for someone so influential in the events that played out during the Cold War. The three most detailed examinations of Humphrey’s life are biographies by Dan Cohen, Carl Solberg, and Arnold Offner.[11] The vice president’s memoirs, The Education of a Public Man, provide a retrospective of his career that is balanced, not overly self-congratulatory (unlike so many examples in the genre), and supported by historical documentation.[12] Additional personal and political details about Humphrey are recounted in memoirs by his friend and physician, Edgar Berman, and his adviser-cum-speechwriter, Ted Van Dyk.[13] Specific aspects of Humphrey’s political career and his involvement with issues such as civil rights have been explored by Timothy Thurber and Robert Mann, among others.[14] His rise in politics in Minnesota and his initial tenure in the U.S. Senate, which are discussed briefly in chapter 1, have received a modest amount of attention, particularly in terms of his staunch anticommunism.[15] The 1968 presidential election, however, boasts its own cottage industry of analysis, with scores of titles examining the close Humphrey–Nixon–George Wallace race and the issues that defined the election, including Vietnam.[16]
As far as Humphrey’s engagement with the Vietnam War, the historiography is even less complete. The Solberg and Offner biographies cover Humphrey and the war as a discrete part of the broader narrative of the vice president’s life, with Offner’s account being the more detailed and enlightening. The February 1965 memorandum Humphrey sent to Lyndon Johnson, which will be discussed in chapter 2, is referenced and assessed in numerous studies.[17] Humphrey’s exile and redemption from 1965 to 1967, the subject of chapters 2 and 3, make cameo appearances in a number of histories of that period, but most of the attention paid to his struggle with the Vietnam conflict is devoted to his efforts to grapple with the issue during the 1968 presidential campaign, which will be assessed in chapters 4 and 5. But no academic study has attempted to examine Humphrey’s positions on the war, his role in the Johnson administration, his Faustian relationship with LBJ, and his influence on the trajectory of U.S. policy over the course of the long U.S. involvement in Indochina in a comprehensive or holistic way until this book.
Of course, as significant as the Vietnam conflict was to Humphrey’s career, his legacy goes far beyond the war. His involvement with a myriad of crucial issues during the Cold War—nuclear nonproliferation, civil rights, education, and domestic and international anticommunism, just to name a few—makes him one of the most prominent U.S. senators of the twentieth century. It is ironic, then, that the man who pushed so relentlessly for disarmament and fought so valiantly for liberal causes would become the prototypical apologist for U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by 1966. How did that happen? What changed? This book explores how and why Vietnam loomed so large for Humphrey as vice president from 1964 through the 1968 election campaign against Richard Nixon. It assesses the price of Humphrey’s loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, who emerges as the villain of the story in many ways, and how that allegiance would negatively affect Humphrey's political ambitions. And it engages the disconnect between Humphrey’s principles and the intricate politics of his convoluted relationship with the president and his unsuccessful presidential campaign. It is a complex and frustrating narrative, the results of which would be tragic, not only for Humphrey’s presidential aspirations but also for the war in Southeast Asia and the future of the United States.
1.
Andrew L. Johns, Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 334. The list of prominent U.S. politicians whose career trajectories fell short of the White House or prematurely ended their tenure in the Oval Office owing to issues related to the Vietnam conflict includes Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, George Romney, Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, George McGovern, Gerald Ford, Pete McCloskey, Barry Goldwater, John Kennedy (if one believes the conspiracy theorists who argue that his Vietnam policies led to his assassination), Jimmy Carter, and John Kerry.
2.
Arnold A. Offner, Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
3.
See especially Robert Sherrill and Harry W. Ernst, The Drugstore Liberal (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968). For example, Sherrill and Ernst refer to Humphrey’s wavering on civil rights and shifting his position on labor as “his ambitions mounted. Nothing has made his beliefs so casual as the vice presidency.” They also criticize him on Vietnam, opining that with Humphrey and the war issue, “fickleness comes first.” See pages 12 and 174. Sherrill made similar comments about Lyndon Johnson, describing him as lacking any moral values whatsoever and characterizing him as “treacherous, dishonest, manic-aggressive, petty, spoiled.” See Robert Sherrill, The Accidental President (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1967), 4.
4.
Norman Ornstein, “Welcome to Another Golden Era of Liberal Senators,” The New Republic, January 8, 2013, www.tnr.com/print/blog/plank/111731/liberal-wave-senate-produces-third-golden-era-our-lifetime, accessed January 9, 2013.
5.
David Halberstam, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (New York: Random House, 1969), 165.
6.
Edgar Berman, Hubert: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Humphrey I Knew (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979), 101.
7.
Hubert H. Humphrey, Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 234.
8.
Quoted in William E. Schmickle, Preservation Politics: Keeping Historic Districts Vital (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2012), 93.
9.
Quoted in “The President Giveth and Taketh,” Time, November 14, 1969.
10.
On