Word: humphreyism
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Unfortunately for Humphrey--and for the world--that impression cannot stand alone. The war happened, and if the intensity of the sympathetic outpouring of recent months suggests he left few if any enemies among politicians when he died, the question of whether anti-war liberals will eventually forgive him remains unanswered...
...political mistake of waiting until the Salt Lake City speech of October, 1968 before publicly separating himself from LBJ's war policies is indisputable and something Humphrey readily admitted to later. It is the larger question that will continue to stir debate: assuming Humphrey thought he had to support Johnson to win, was he justified in reversing Henry Clay's dictum--in deciding he'd rather be President than right--for the purpose of putting himself instead of Richard Nixon in office...
...some ways, those who take a hard-line on Humphrey's career are persuasive. His position on Vietnam was no small blot on an otherwise brilliant record--to the contrary, attitudes on the war must be considered central in the assessment of anyone who held high office during those years. Humphrey may not have been an architect of the war policy but in playing the role of supporter he implicated himself in some of its ugliest facets: fudging reports of fact-finding trips, referring to "our finest hour," condoning the clubbings in the streets of Chicago...
EVEN SO, it cannot now be argued, as the Left did in 1968, that the choice between Humphrey and Nixon was an irrelevant one. That lesson has been learned in the most painful way imaginable, particularly by the poor and disadvantaged who depended for survival on the kind of compassion Humphrey exemplified...
Moreover, once out from under the imposing shadow of Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey probably would have ended the war. In private he began to turn around relatively early. As a result of a 1965 memo he wrote to LBJ--unreleased until 1976--he was frozen out of the Administration's decision-making process. The memo read in part...