Word: humphreyism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more promising. Yet efficiency is a means, not an end, and can become meaningless in the absence of a creative policy-and worthy policymakers. Despite his image as a hardheaded selector of talented men, Nixon chose the mediocre Spiro Agnew as running mate to avoid antagonizing Southern Republicans, while Humphrey picked the better-qualified Edmund Muskie. "Agnew is not a racist," said Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, last week. Then, in an extraordinary burst of candor, he added: "I hope I'm right. I hope for the good of the country I'm right." Nixon, too, must be hoping...
Nixon is apt to be a shrewder and more adroit diplomat-in-chief than Humphrey, whose impetuosity and trustfulness could prove to be serious liabilities. Humphrey often seems too ready to believe the last person he has talked to and too easily impressed by foreign leaders. Though Nixon has never been particularly popular among America's allies (or foes), he would be cooler, more concerned with basic geopolitics than with the feeling of the moment...
...Humphrey began as the mayor of Minneapolis, soon possessed an exaggerated reputation as a radical. Eventually he chose to fight liberal fights from the front bench, sacrificing individualism for advancement in the Sen ate and then to the vice presidency, losing old friends and associations and gaining new ones along the way. Now he has the backing of George Meanv and Henry Ford, Lyndon Johnson and Edward Kennedy, Richard Daley and George Ball...
...same time, he has become a kind of middle-class everyman, relatively devoid of regional associations. Humphrey retains a geographic identification with Minnesota that is more traditional in American politicians...
...real" man? In common with oth ers who have devoted much of their adult lives to politics, Humphrey and Nixon are like geological formations, created, stratum upon stratum, by deposits of history and evolution-their own and the world's-over decades...