This is a brief profile of Humphrey with highlights from his life and times.

Editor's Note: We want to have many articles on Hubert Humphrey at this website. If you know of other articles please let us know. And/or if you know of persons who you think could write about Humphrey let us know that too. I am also interested in reviews of books on Humphrey, or his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man. The item below just provides some basic facts of the time.

Hubert Horatio Humphrey was Vice President to Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 - 1969. He was a Democrat from Minnesota. He was born in 1911 and died in 1978 at 67 years old.

He ran with Johnson in the 1964 presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Senator. The main campaign issue in 1964 was Barry Goldwater himself. The Far-Right Senator steam-rolled onto the national stage with his reactionary resentment over all the recent Civil Rights legislation. He represented the old-line Conservatives fighting back against the rise of Liberalism in America. He preached a seperate-but-equal message regarding the issue of racial integration, called for the dismantling of much of the New Deal-spawned government programs, and for increased defense spending. He managed to spook older Americans by proposing to make Social Security voluntary, but maintained much of their support by calling for America to use all means at its disposal to finish the job in Vietnam. This included such ideas as "conventional nuclear weapons", which resulted in the Democrats airing one of the most famous TV commercials ever: showing a little girl counting flower petals in a garden while a mushroom-cloud rises ominously behind her, implying that this awaited America if Goldwater was elected. Goldwater made it easy for Johnson to appear as the candidate for peace, which he did. He had not sent many US troops to Vietnam yet at this point, and he pledged to limit America's role there. Goldwater, he argued, would send American boys overseas to fight a war that should be left to Asian boys to fight themselves. Goldwater lost by a large margin, but his staunch Conservative message would reappear some 16 years later through another Western candidate - Ronald Reagan.

Notable Facts about Hubert Humphrey:

• Religious affiliation: Hubert was raised in a Lutheran household, but was known to sneak into a Methodist church every now and then. His public comments on religion were almost soley related to his childhood, with rarely any comments that revealed his adult beliefs. He once said, "I attended church as a boy, primarily at mother's insistence, but also because I liked it and because Julian Hartt, the minister's son, was a close friend". Beyond that, religion was either absent from his adult concerns, or he was very good at keeping them secret.
• Humphrey originally held 2 jobs simultaneously, that of a Pharmacist and a teacher of Political Science, holding college degrees in both subjects.
• He began his political career by organizing a new political party in 1944 called the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party.
• In 1945 he was elected Mayor of Minneapolis, when he was 34 years old, serving from 1945 - 1949.
• During his term as Mayor, in 1947, he founded a group called the Americans for Democratic Action. The following year he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, in 1948, giving an impassioned speech on Civil Rights, saying "The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of States' Rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of Human Rights!"
• In 1949 Humphrey was elected to the US Senate, representing Minnesota from 1949 - 1965, serving as Senate Majority whip from 1961 - 1965.
• In 1960 he campaigned for the Democratic nomination for President but lost out to John F. Kennedy.
• He was nominated for Vice President on President Johnson's 1964 ticket due to his strong record of Civil Rights support and overall Party loyalty.

As VP, Hubert was a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War, publicly defending the Administration against the growing numbers of anti-War activists. After touring Southeast Asia in 1967, Humphrey publicly supported the war, calling it "our great adventure", an adventure that would make the world a far better place. Privately, however, he grew to have doubts as the war dragged on and domestic support vanished.

Johnson worried about Humphrey's vacillating support for the war effort and suspected he might be sympathetic to the concerns of the anti-war demonstrators.

During a visit to Berlin in 1967, several members of a German Commune were arrested for supposedly plotting to assasinate Humphrey. Their tools of assasination were apparently custard, yogurt, and flour. The so-called "Custard Assasination" plot involved 8 members of a commune in Munich called "Kommune 1", whose members were Socialist hippies trying to change the world through peace, love, and revolution. They were arrested on April 5, 1967, the day before Humphrey's arrival in Berlin and charged with plotting to assassinate the US Veep. The nature of their plot was never clear, since they had planned on simply throwing food at him, which indicated that they were only planning to make a statement of some kind. They were released from jail after one day, and Hubert safely avoided any incidents involving custard during his visit. (The job of Vice President involves many perils...)

In 1968 Humphrey was named the Democratic candidate for President. He narrowly won the Party's nomination against Eugene McCarthy, also from Minnesota, who had opposed the war in Vietnam from Kennedy's initial commitments years earlier. Bobby Kennedy, brother of John F. Kennedy, would also have been a serious contender for the nomination but he was killed that June by an Iranian man named Sirhan Sirhan who was unhappy over America's support of Israel.

The Presidential race of 1968 pitted Humphrey against a resurrected Richard Nixon, who had previously retired from politics, and George Wallace, a third-party candidate from Alabama who represented Southern resentment over all the recent Civil Rights legislation. Humphrey lost to Nixon by a significant Electoral margin.

After losing, Humphrey took a teaching job at the University of Minnesota for a while. He then returned to political life in 1971 by being re-elected to the Senate, represending Minnesota till his death 7 years later.

He tried to run for president again in 1972, but lost the Democratic nomination to George McGovern.

Humphrey died of cancer in 1978, while still serving as Senator. His wife was appointed to complete his term.

Of dubious relevance, during the 1980 Democratic Convention, when Jimmy Carter gave his acceptance-speech as the candidate for that year's presidential race, he gave a short tribute to Humphrey's past leadership in the party. However, he mispronounced his name, calling him Hubert Horatio Hornblower. Carter claimed it was a mistake. Humphrey had died 2 years earlier, so he missed his new name, but it was a mistake that the Media happily re-broadcast endlessly for several weeks.

Notable Events during his Vice Presidency:

• Medicare and Medicaid created, in 1965. Medicare was a program funded by Social Security which provided health and medical insurance for people 65 and older. Medicaid was a program that guaranteed hospital and medical assistance to impoverished people of any age.
• Environmental Protection initiatives, in 1965. These were a series of Clean Water and Air acts that required states to abide by water and air quality standards defined by the Dept. of the Interior.
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965. This made it illegal to require literacy tests for black people before they would be eligible to vote and called for the Federal government to promote voter registration.
• US occupation of the Dominican Republic, April 28th, 1965. US Marines were sent to the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean following a military coup in the country. Johnson justified the action by claiming US residents in the country were in danger, but the real concern was the possibility of a second Cuba, since the trouble in the country involved Socialist groups. The Marines remained until October of the following year.
• Founding of the Black Panthers, in 1966. Despite President Johnson's flurry of Civil Rights Acts, the greatest number of federal Civil Rights initiatives since the post-Civil War Reconstruction, many black people in the inner cities still felt disenfranchised and became increasingly militant. The Black Panthers was one of the more visible of these militant groups, founded in Oakland, California in 1966, calling for the armed resistance of blacks against the white Establishment. They had several run-ins with the FBI, who viewed them as groups involved in treason.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1968. This banned racial discrimination in housing and created harsher penalties for violators or the Act.
• Martin Luther King Jr. killed, in April 1968 creating outbreak of riots in cities across the nation.
• The Tet Offensive, 1968. On January 10th, 1968 the Viet Cong armies launched the Tet Offensive, a massive ground attack against South Vietnam that took the US forces by surprise. The US fought hard and kept the Communists at bay, but it sapped at the confidence of the US Administration that had been predicting a quick end to the war. As Truman had feared a larger escalation with the Soviets if the US used all of it's military strength in Korea, Johnson also feared a wider war if the US pulled out it's heavy guns, since some more hawkish politicians were beginning to talk of using America's nuclear arsenal against the Viet Cong. Johnson appeared on national television again and announced his decision to not run for re-election, and offered to initiate peace talks in Paris with the North Vietnamese. The Viet Cong accepted and the US temporarily halted its air raids, but the Paris Peace Talks went nowhere.
• The My Lai Massacre, on March 16, 1968. Unarmed South Vietnamese civilians are rounded up by US troops and are slaughtered. News of the incident won't leak out in the US until several years later.
• During the 1968 Presidential election campaign Abbie Hoffman, spokesman for the Yippies (politically-minded hippies), ran a pig as their candidate for president. Despite getting several thousand votes the pig, named "Pigasus", lost. Its later career is not known.
• The 25th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1967, which specifically defined the transfer of power from President to Vice President in the event of the President's death or resignation. It also allowed for the President to appoint his own Vice President, instead of having him be nominated by the Party. This latter clause was used twice in quick succession; by Nixon when he nominated Vice President Ford and by Ford when he nominated Vice President Rockefeller. No more would the US have a President without a Vice.

Source: Christers