Hubert Humphrey

Hubert Humphrey put civil rights into the Democratic platform in 1948, drove the Civil Rights Act through the Senate in 1964, and lost the presidency in 1968 because he could not separate himself from a war he privately opposed. He was a pharmacist's son from South Dakota who became mayor of Minneapolis and desegregated its police force, and his speech to the 1948 Democratic convention - telling the party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and into the sunlight of human rights - split the convention and sent the Dixiecrats out to run Strom Thurmond. He was elected to the Senate that year and spent sixteen years there, sponsoring the Peace Corps, food aid, the nuclear test ban and Medicare, and was the floor manager who held together the coalition that broke the longest filibuster in Senate history to pass the Civil Rights Act. Johnson made him vice-president in 1965 and then punished him for privately opposing the escalation in Vietnam by excluding him from meetings for a year, after which he defended the policy in public with more enthusiasm than he felt. He entered the 1968 race after Johnson withdrew and Robert Kennedy was killed, was nominated at a convention in Chicago while police beat demonstrators outside, and lost to Nixon by seven-tenths of a per cent of the popular vote, having closed almost the whole gap in the last fortnight by finally breaking with the bombing. He returned to the Senate in 1971 and died of cancer in 1978. The Humphrey-Hawkins Act on full employment carries his name. He was known for talking at extraordinary length and was nicknamed the Happy Warrior. Johnson had extracted a promise of total loyalty before putting him on the ticket. His body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda and both Nixon and Carter attended the funeral.

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