The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics

America’s longest-distance also-ran set out to tell his story as it was. As with practically everything else he ever attempted, he succeeded—almost. At its best, the Minnesota senator and former Vice President’s memoir reflects the man’s virtues: good humor, good nature, good works. But too often it is the willing instrument of the author’s renowned gift of gab. In his cheery resilience, he fails to probe very deeply into just how it was that, time and time again, his stars were crossed. Of his nomination at the bloody Chicago convention in 1968: “Should I have kicked [Mayor Richard] Daley beyond what I believed? Trying to be fair, I looked weak.“ He pulls his punches in dealing with old adversaries such as Eugene McCarthy and various Kennedys, but has enlivened the record of campaigns past with an unbuttoned account of the late Richard Cardinal Cushing’s version of how JFK beat HHH in the 1960 West Virginia primary:

“I keep reading these books by the young men around Jack Kennedy and how they claim credit for electing him. . . . You-bert, I believe you should know that the decisions on West Virginia were made here, in [my] library. Joe Kennedy and I sat and discussed the strategy of that campaign in this room. We decided which of the Protestant ministers would receive a contribution for their church.“

Humphrey’s story is bittersweet. The moral ought to be that a fighting faith and honorable ambition are attributes that enable a decent man to confront the challenges of the political battlefield and come out ahead. The pathos of Hubert Humphrey’s tale is that, as he put it in a stream-of-consciousness recollection of the last thirty-six hours of the 1968 presidential campaign,

I’ve climbed that damn ladder of politics, and every step has been rough. I’ve slipped so many times and almost fallen back. . . . That top rung is never going to be mine. My fingernails are scraping it, but I don’t have a grip. . . . It’s so damn close. I am so tired.

The Cardinal and old Joe, young Jack and “Bob,” Gene McCarthy, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, George McGovern; somehow one or another of them was always one rung up on him. And always in his way, or running with him, or looming ferociously over him, was the man who alternately taught, tempted, and punished him in his pursuit of power, Lyndon Johnson. “Call me whenever there’s trouble or anything you want me to do,“ said President Johnson to Senate Majority Whip Humphrey early in 1964, after dressing down “you bombthrowers.“ (“You [liberals] spread yourselves too thin making speeches to the faithful.”) Humphrey, in full and friendly candor, invites the reader to conclude that however good and happy a warrior he is, he has been too often bested. —Michael Janeway