The Vice-Presidency: The Happy Warrior

It was drizzling when Hubert Humphrey awoke in Minneapolis on Election Day morning, but nothing could dampen his spirits. “When we get to Waverly,” he told his wife Muriel during the 40-mile drive to their home town, “there’ll be no rain. This is St. Hubert’s day.”*

Humphrey was right. To vote, the Humphreys went directly to the one room township hall, where they stood in adjoining booths and marked their paper ballots with pencils. Afterward, talking with reporters outside, Humphrey said: “I woke up some time back and realized if I were elected Vice President I wouldn’t be Senator for Minnesota any more, and that made my heart ache a little.”

Mandatory Days. At his lakeside ranch house, Humphrey changed into sports clothes, whiled away the after noon talking to Minnesota friends by phone. Later, he and Muriel returned to Minneapolis, went to a Sheraton-Ritz Hotel suite to listen to returns. There the South Dakota druggist’s son who had always wanted to be President, or at the very least Vice President, told a crowd of well-wishers: “I would be less than honest if I didn’t say I am very happy and quite excited.”.

Humphrey had every reason to be happy and excited, for he had waged a bold and joyous campaign, and in the aftermath he could validly claim that he had made a considerable contribution to the size of the Democratic victory. Soon after his nomination, Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Karl Rolvaag dubbed Hubert “the happy warrior of our generation,” and throughout the campaign Humphrey lived up to the title. He had “The Happy Warrior” painted on the chartered Electra that carried him some 52,000 miles back and forth across the U.S. Aboard the Warrior, happy days were mandatory. West Virginia Folk Singer Jimmy Wolforcl twanged his guitar, and campaign aides joined in verses from The Hubert Humphrey Sing-Along Book. Presiding over the festivities was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate himself.

Diverted Attention. On the stump, Humphrey counted the countless mis-deeds of Barry Goldwater. “He wouldn’t vote yes for Mother’s Day,” he cried in Peoria, 111., and in Decatur he added: “I imagine that Abraham Lincoln would be called a socialist by the present pretender to the presidency of the Republican Party.” As for his own speeches, Humphrey chortled: “I never know whether the audience likes them, but I sure do.” He even had fun with his hecklers, smiling down on groups of sign-waving Goldwaterites and saying: “They carry their badge of political sin as if they come to repent.”

Even when Hubert got carried away —as he did at a Cleveland steer roast, when he urged his audience to “send up to heaven” a resounding Democratic victory that John Kennedy could hear —it didn’t seem offensive.

But along with all the fun, Humphrey worked tirelessly, often hitting as many as three states in one day to hammer home the main themes of his campaign. In his gibes he diverted Goldwater’s attention from Johnson to himself, and at times Barry, in his criticisms of Humphrey’s Americans for Democratic Action affiliation, often sounded as though Hubert, not Lyndon, were his chief opponent. And there were indeed some newsmen who felt that Humphrey was perhaps the most popular of the four major campaigners.

But Hubert, though ebullient, was not upstaging anybody. Late on election night, he talked of Lyndon, who reminded him “of that mythological god Atlas, who, when he became weary and tired and lost his strength, would come back to touch the earth, and he would gain strength.” In Johnson’s case, Humphrey said, “whenever he came out and he touched the people, literally touched them, he became strong, and he was filled with the love of his work and the love of his country.”

* ln honor of an 8th-century European bishop known as a healer of hydrophobia, besides being a patron of huntsmen.