Word: humphrey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HUBERT HUMPHREY: A BIOGRAPHY by Carl Solberg
...shortly after Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. became mayor of Minneapolis, he got a call from his father. Hubert Sr. was shocked: his son had been seen dining with bankers. The small-town druggist delivered a warning against the lures of wealth, power and compromise...
That hardly seemed necessary at the time, or for a decade to come. As mayor and later U.S. Senator, Humphrey fought the good fight for civil rights, full employment and the whole postwar liberal agenda. But as Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, he became a cheerleader for the Viet Nam War, alienating many of his supporters, splitting the Democratic Party and losing his own 1968 presidential run. As Author Carl Solberg sadly but honestly notes, Humphrey had many liabilities: he talked too much, he thought too little, he let Johnson humiliate him. But perhaps his biggest mistake...
...failing was evident back in South Dakota, where Humphrey grew up struggling to save the family pharmacy from the Depression. Despite an early conviction that he belonged in politics, he stayed on to help his father. And stayed. At 26, on the verge of nervous collapse, he finally left to study political science at the University of Minnesota, then to teach the subject at a local college. He put his reformist ideas into practice as an officer of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but even then he was trimming his sails. The avowed leftist not only dined...
...Humphrey exploded onto the national scene with a powerful speech before the 1948 convention that put the Democrats irrevocably on the civil rights train. Winning a Senate seat that year, Humphrey continued brashly in Washington. He denounced the seniority system, accused his conservative colleagues of ties to special interests, introduced hundreds of progressive bills. He got nowhere. Something besides conviction was necessary, he decided, and he learned the Senate skill of log rolling. With it, he guided through nearly all the major liberal bills of the 1960s, some of which he had proposed years earlier: the 1963 nuclear test...