Word: humphrey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...learned that I don't have to be President to be happy," says Hubert Humphrey. It's an extraordinary irony to hear him say that after all those years of struggling to get the job. Sitting in his brown clapboard home on the icy edge of Minnesota's Lake Waverly, he adds: "I don't hunger for it like I used to. I've got my pride back, and I'm not going to lose it again...
...unaccustomed role as a noncandidate, Humphrey is so popular he can scarcely believe it. Democrats rate him far ahead of the field, and his political support is already extremely powerful. Big labor wants him. So do many Congressmen and Governors. Even some of the liberals who showed contempt for him in 1968 and 1972 now point out carefully that they never were really comfortable being against him. He has renewed his ties to Chicago Boss Richard Daley. "People are happy to see me wherever I go," he says. "I've never had it this way before." He seems almost...
...that prospect brings a groan from voters who are tired of windy old Hubert, it's surely understandable. Even by 1968, Humphrey seemed an exhausted, overexposed candidate, a veritable Swiss cheese of political wounds. John Kennedy had riddled him through and through in the 1960 Democratic primaries, and Lyndon Johnson had mauled him for four years as Vice President. He had become an outcast to youth and liberals, two of his natural constituencies. He remembers people spitting on him and his wife during the 1968 campaign...
...from all that now in Waverly, Humphrey rises restlessly from his chair to pull a few dead leaves from a bouquet of flowers on the table. His face is somewhat puffy, his sensitive eyes watery at times, his neck baggy now under the thrusting jaw. But at 64, he looks fit -surprisingly so. Three years ago, Humphrey underwent a series of debilitating X-ray treatments for a bladder tumor that seemed precancerous. He had a severe reaction to the treatments and was flown from Waverly back to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. One staffer says he thought Humphrey was surely going...
Birch and Evergreens. Humphrey's illness reordered his life. He looks out over his four acres of waterfront land, dotted with birch and ash and evergreens that he planted as long as 20 years ago. His four children all live within 50 miles. "Why does a man stay in politics?" Humphrey asks...