Nation: SOME FORWARD MOTION FOR H.H.H.

NOT long after an advance text of Hubert Humphrey’s Viet Nam speech reached the White House last week, Lyndon Johnson spent half an hour on the telephone with Richard Nixon. The White House, naturally, did not discuss the conversation, but it is a safe assumption that the Democratic President and the Republican presidential candidate wasted little time talking about wheat sales or the World Series. By the time Humphrey phoned the White House, shortly after delivering the speech, the reaction from Johnson’s end of the line was, in the words of an aide to the Vice President, “very cool.”

Washington has long hummed with rumors of a Johnson-Nixon “understanding”on Viet Nam—something along the lines of “don’t rock the boat.” To be sure, the President has pulled the rug out from under Humphrey every time he has deviated from the Administration’s position on the war. Two weeks ago, during a heated meeting of the National Security Council, the President heard Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and then-Ambassador to the United Nations George Ball appeal for greater flexibility. Then Johnson delivered a choleric lecture against any gesture to mollify Hanoi. He argued that 1) Hanoi was in no mood to reciprocate; 2) the enemy would take advantage of such a halt to step up supply convoys to the South; and 3) it would be immensely difficult, politically speaking, to resume the bombing if Hanoi failed to respond.

Johnson’s hard line on the war is a problem that has dogged Humphrey. With his televised speech, the Vice President again tried, harder than before, to place some distance between himself and the President. During the week, Humphrey also made his first extended foray into the South, a region whose strong support for Nixon and Alabama’s George Wallace has been another major Humphrey headache. It turned out to be the most rousing tour of his disappointing campaign, topping off his most successful week to date.

Emblems of Service. In drafting his statement on Viet Nam, Humphrey chose his words with excruciating care. He went through seven drafts of the speech, taped it six times before he was satisfied. James Rowe, a Humphrey campaign aide and a factotum for Democratic administrations since the New Deal, said the wording of the crucial paragraphs “must have been changed 300 to 400 times.” When he was ready, Humphrey made certain that the vice-presidential seal and flag—emblems of his service to Lyndon Johnson—were nowhere in sight. “I wanted to speak as Hubert H. Humphrey, candidate for President,” he explained.

Said Humphrey: “As President, I would stop the bombing as an acceptable risk for peace because I believe it could lead to success in the negotiations and thereby shorten the war.” The Vice President added: “In weighing that risk, and before taking action, I would place key importance on evidence—direct or indirect—by word or deed—of Communist willingness to restore the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Viet Nam. If the government of North Viet Nam were to show bad faith, I would reserve the right to resume the bombing.”

Read literally, the Vice President’s pronouncement was at best an insignificant deviation from Johnson’s “San Antonio formula” of a year ago or the President’s New Orleans speech last month. In both statements, the President emphasized that some reciprocity from Hanoi was necessary before the U.S. could undertake a bombing halt.

Subliminal Message. Though the words were essentially the same in Humphrey’s speech, the music was different. Humphrey managed to convey to many, however subliminally, his readiness to take greater risks to settle the war. House Republican leaders argued that Humphrey’s position represented no departure. But Richard Nixon took the opposite tack. He implied that the Vice President was endangering the prospects for a settlement in Pans by breaking with the President, whose war policies Nixon generally supports, and by allowing Hanoi to think that it might get a better deal from Humphrey. Averell Harnman, the chief U.S. negotiator in Paris, promptly contradicted Nixon, insisting that Humphrey’s speech had done nothing to jeopardize the slow-paced peace talks.

With his speech, Humphrey succeeded in embarrassing Nixon slightly about his silence on the war. Writing in the Ripon Forum, magazine of the liberal Ripon Society, Oregon’s G.O.P. Senator Mark Hatfield pointedly noted: “The Paris peace talks should not become the skirt for timid men to hide behind.” But only a disastrous dive in the polls could persuade Nixon to risk a potentially dangerous fight on the issue. He still maintains that for candidates to discuss possible future settlements can only damage efforts to end the war.

If Nixon’s silence was beginning to cost him support, Humphrey’s statement won him some, particularly from dissident Democrats. Senator Ted Kennedy sent a wire applauding his “courage” and declaring: “To all who look for peace in Viet Nam, you have given great encouragement and hope.” Ten liberal House Democrats announced belated backing of Humphrey.

Silent Hecklers. Buoyed by the response to his Viet Nam speech—including more than $200,000 in fresh contributions—Humphrey plunged into his first round of genuinely successful campaigning since the convention. Ironically, the Vice President drew his largest and friendliest crowds in the South.

In Charlotte, N.C., the Coliseum was jammed by a crowd of 14,000 including many Negroes and students. In Salt Lake City, Nashville, Knoxville, Jacksonville, Humphrey savored cheers. After the Viet Nam speech, antiwar hecklers stilled their protests for the most part.

On turf that George Wallace considers his own, Humphrey tore into the Alabamian with unmatched savagery—and won applause. “I’ve been told one hundred and one times this may not be the place [to criticize Wallace], but I think it is,” Humphrey told a crowd of 10,000 in Knoxville. “He stands, and he has always stood, as the apostle of the politics of fear and racism,” cried the Vice President. “Some of his political managers and even some of his presidential electors are drawn from the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Councils, the John Birch Society, the armed Minutemen, or groups dedicated to the promotion of anti-Semitism.” Humphrey was just warming up. He called Wallace a demagogue and compared him to Hitler. “He has sought to inflame fear, frustration and prejudice,” he said. “He pretends to be the friend of the workingman, but he is the creature of the most reactionary underground forces in American life.”

Negroes, many of whom had talked about sitting out the race, seemed to agree. In any event, they were becoming sufficiently alarmed by the Wallace threat to start registering in numbers so that they could vote for the Vice President. “Negroes laughed at the Wallace candidacy,” said Field Jukes, a Humphrey aide. “Well, they aren’t laughing now.”

Richard Nixon also ventured into the South last week, but his treatment of Wallace was more restrained than Humphrey’s. Wallace, he said, “is against many things Americans are frustrated about; I’m against them too. That goes beyond saying, ‘If someone lies down before a limousine I’d run him over.’ Anybody who says that shouldn’t be President.” In fact, he told reporters, no man who talks that way “is even fit to be President.” Nixon’s crowds were uniformly large, but for the moment, it was Humphrey’s campaign that seemed livelier—if only in contrast to his dismal showing earlier.

“I feel good for the first time,” Humphrey told reporters aboard his campaign plane. “We’re not stepping on so many rocks or in so many holes as we were at first.” Nobody was convinced that the Vice President had completely cut his bonds with Johnson. Certainly nobody suggested that he had made anywhere near enough progress to cut appreciably into Nixon’s vast lead. But some polls taken by the Democratic National Committee showed that he was making progress, and that may be enough to give Humphrey’s campaign a shot of desperately needed confidence.