The American Vice Presidency (66 page)

Many advocates of the “butter” part still admired the domestic agenda but were dead against the “guns” portion. A couple of University of North Carolina alumni, Allard Lowenstein and Curtis Gans, approached Robert Kennedy to head a Democratic dump-Johnson effort. Kennedy declined. They also courted Gene McCarthy, who first told them, “I think Bobby should do it.”
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But he later agreed, announcing his candidacy on the last day of November 1967.

Fueled by the anti-war protest and a sizable army of college dropouts and graduates, McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary. Johnson loftily declined to campaign, sending surrogates instead. Then, on the last day of January 1968, the lunar New Year celebration of Tet in Vietnam, the supposedly decimated Viet Cong forces suddenly swarmed over major South Vietnamese cities, shattering assurances of Humphrey and others that the war was going well. Despite U.S. claims that the enemy had suffered major casualties, the Tet Offensive had a demoralizing effect on American public opinion at home.

In New Hampshire on Election Night, the absent president “won” but with only 49.4 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary compared with a surprising 42.2 percent for the little-known senator from Minnesota. The result was widely reported as a huge upset and a ringing denunciation of Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Kennedy had been following McCarthy’s run and now was reconsidering. He had been saying he wasn’t challenging Johnson because he didn’t want any of his own efforts to be seen as a personal vendetta or to be accused of splitting the Democratic Party. But the vote in New Hampshire, he said, had shown there already was “deep division” in it. Kennedy thereupon entered the presidential race.
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In the next Democratic primary, in Wisconsin, it was too late for Kennedy to get on the ballot, and McCarthy was on the verge of defeating the president outright. Two nights before Wisconsin Democrats voted, Johnson went on nationwide television and, after telling the country he had decided to restrict the bombing of North Vietnam in the hope of encouraging peace talks, declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
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In the wink of an eye, Hubert Humphrey’s longtime dream of the presidency suddenly had been resurrected, at least as the likely heir to the support of much of the Democratic establishment.

Johnson summoned Humphrey to the White House and told him he did not intend to take sides in the race. Considering the low state of LBJ’s popularity, it wasn’t the worst news Humphrey could have heard. He made a key strategic decision. It was too late to develop a campaign from scratch through the primary-election process, so he would stay out of the primaries and rely on his longtime connection with party leaders and the labor
movement. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in April brought the campaign to a sudden halt, and it was not until later in the month that Humphrey finally declared his candidacy and continued to pile up delegates without entering a single primary.

The climax came in California. Kennedy, rebounding in Oregon from the only defeat a Kennedy had ever suffered anywhere, got back on track by defeating McCarthy there. But his Election Night celebration in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles was suddenly shattered by more assassin’s bullets, as Robert Kennedy was departing through a kitchen passageway. He died about twenty-six hours later in a nearby hospital after surgery.
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From it all Hubert Humphrey now emerged as the Democratic hope to salvage the White House from the grasp of the anointed Republican nominee, Richard Nixon.

The honor, however, had come at a heavy price for Humphrey. In July, Johnson resumed the heavy bombing of North Vietnam as Humphrey continued to stand uncomfortably behind him, and angry protesters at his rallies chanted, “Dump the Hump!” A pro-Humphrey committee wrote a Vietnam platform plank designed to be acceptable to LBJ. But when Humphrey showed it to him, Johnson warned, “Hubert, if you do this I’ll just have to be opposed to it, and say so.”
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He said it could jeopardize developments in the Paris peace negotiations. Humphrey submitted a rewrite of the plank, and Johnson rejected that one as well.

At the convention in Chicago, for which Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered out the full city police force, the plank supporting Johnson on Vietnam beat the anti-war plank by a ratio of three to two, setting off more protests in the streets in what a postconvention investigation later said had turned into a “police riot.” Many angry and disruptive protesters created mayhem, shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?”
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But on the one roll call for the presidential nomination, Humphrey won easily. Having failed at a last-minute effort to persuade Ted Kennedy to be his running mate, he settled on Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.

The convention did not mark an end to Humphrey’s torment. Kicking off his fall campaign against Nixon and running mate Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, Humphrey was a man walking on eggs in any discussion of Vietnam, for fear of incurring the further wrath of Johnson. When
he said in Philadelphia he thought some American forces could start coming home later in 1968 or early 1969, Johnson interjected, “No man can predict when that day will come.”
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Nixon meanwhile, ready to exploit the slightest daylight showing between Humphrey and LBJ, offered, “It would be very unfortunate if any implication was left in the minds of the American people that we were able to bring home our forces now because suddenly the war was at an end.” He went on, “I for one don’t want to pull the rug out from our negotiations in Paris.”
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By now, Humphrey’s campaign manager for the fall campaign, the Kennedy veteran Larry O’Brien, told Humphrey regarding Vietnam, “You have to prove you are your own man. You’re not going to be elected president unless people are convinced you stand on your own two feet—and this is the issue you can prove it on!” An irate Humphrey replied, “Damn it, I’m on my own two feet,” and set to work with his advisers on a tougher speech on the war.
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The next night, fifteen minutes before airtime, Humphrey phoned Johnson and told him what he was going to say: “As President I would be willing to stop the bombing of North Vietnam as an acceptable risk for peace,” adding, “If the government of North Vietnam were to show bad faith, I would reserve the right to resume the bombing.”
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He wrote later that Johnson just listened and then said, “I gather you’re not asking my advice.” Humphrey told him that what he would say would “in no way jeopardize” what the president was trying to do. Johnson replied, “Well, you’re going to give the speech anyway. Thanks for calling, Hubert,” and he hung up.
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The speech delivered in Salt Lake City liberated the vice president, answered the hecklers, and was an immediate spur to desperately needed fund-raising. Joseph Califano, a key Johnson White House aide, wrote later, “Humphrey’s speech turned the campaign into a horse race but Johnson never forgave him for it.”
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Nixon demonstrated his concern by suggesting in his fashion that Humphrey ought to clarify his statement “and say he is not undercutting the United States position in Paris.”
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In the next days on the stump, the crowds grew larger, the hecklers desisted, and the Nixon lead in the polls began to narrow. The ADA executive board endorsed Humphrey and, tardily, so did McCarthy.

Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson increased his efforts to achieve a
breakthrough in the peace negotiations in Paris. On television he reported that the Hanoi regime had agreed to have the Saigon government participate, and the National Liberation Front would be permitted a role. Humphrey was jubilant. But suddenly the Saigon regime was boycotting the Paris talks after all, rejecting any participation by the NLF. Humphrey obviously was crushed.

Johnson was furious. He turned over to Humphrey pertinent classified information garnered in wiretaps at the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, including a phone call from Anna Chennault, the Chineseborn widow of the World War II flying ace General Claire Chennault, who was a friend of the South Vietnamese leaders and a strong Nixon supporter and confidante. She was heard, according to Clark Clifford’s memoir, conveying “a simple and authoritative message from the Nixon camp” that Thieu would get a better deal in any peace negotiations if he were to wait until Nixon was elected and in office.
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The reason Johnson didn’t make use of the information himself, Clifford wrote, was that he did not want to further disrupt any negotiations, because “he was really ambivalent about whether he really wanted Humphrey to be elected” and was more concerned about “what his place in history would be.”
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As for Humphrey, he wrote later in his memoir, “I wonder if I should have blown the whistle on Anna Chennault and Nixon. He must have known about her call to Thieu. I
wish
I could have been sure. Damn Thieu. Dragging his feet this past weekend hurt us. I wonder if that call did it. If Nixon knew. Maybe I should have blasted them anyway.”
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Joe Califano wrote later that Humphrey’s refusal to use the information “became the occasion for a lasting rift” between him and LBJ.
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In any event, no firm evidence became public about the Anna Chennault caper, and in an extremely close election, Nixon won with 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for the former Alabama governor George C. Wallace, running as an American Independent. Nixon got 302 electoral votes, 32 more than he needed, compared with 191 for Humphrey and 45 for Wallace, all from the South. In his memoir Johnson argued that the failure of the Saigon regime to go to the Paris peace talks “cost Hubert Humphrey the presidency.”
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Beyond that, the defeat of Hubert Humphrey meant the end of Johnson’s Great Society, embodying some of the most innovative ideas for
implementing liberal social goals since the New Deal. Despite Johnson’s personal pettiness and often ill consideration of his vice president, Humphrey served LBJ well, if often uncomfortably and torn by his own doubts about Johnson’s policies on the war.

A committed public servant who reveled in “the politics of joy” even when it was joyless, Humphrey returned to the Senate in 1971, winning the Minnesota seat being vacated by Eugene McCarthy. He sought the presidency in 1972, winning some state primaries, but lost the Democratic nomination to George McGovern, with the Vietnam War still a centerpiece of the campaign. He was reelected to the Senate in 1976 and served into the next year, when he was hospitalized with terminal bladder cancer. He bid a tear-inducing good-bye to his decades of colleagues with dramatic speeches to the Senate and the House. He died on January 13, 1978, at the age of sixty-six, beloved in his own party and respected outside it, despite allowing his sense of loyalty to Lyndon Johnson to cloud his political judgment on the war in the most critical moments of his political life.

SPIRO T. AGNEW

OF MARYLAND

U
ntil Spiro Agnew’s time in office, probably no American vice president had brought more attention to it, was more controversial during his incumbency, or left it in greater disgrace. As the governor of Maryland, “Ted” Agnew was relatively unknown nationally when he was unexpectedly chosen by the presidential nominee Richard Nixon as his running mate in the tumultuous year of 1968, but Agnew rose like a rocket in that campaign and thereafter. His climb was fueled by his aggressive yet entertaining rhetoric against a variety of political targets. But after nearly five years of Agnew’s controversial prominence, his career imploded in a personal scandal that ended in resignation to avoid impeachment and imprisonment.

Agnew’s childhood and early adult years gave no hint of the controversies that eventually would envelop him. He was born of a Greek immigrant father and a western Virginia mother in a second-floor rear apartment over a florist shop in Baltimore on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice ending World War I. He was an average child, not particularly athletic, and an average student, winning acceptance in his Forest Park High School crowd as a piano player. The school being highly rated, young Agnew was admitted to Johns Hopkins University, majoring in chemistry, but didn’t do well and dropped out. Later, while taking law school night classes at the University of Baltimore, he worked as an assistant insurance underwriter, where he met his future wife, Judy. Three months before the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the army, six months later he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and three days after that, he and Judy were married. He was shipped overseas in March 1944 and that winter took part in the Battle of the Bulge in France, his unit then pushing into Germany by war’s end. He returned with a Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
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