What Could Have Been.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights

Lyndon B. Johnsons presidency was a tragedy. Elected in 1964 in the greatest Democratic landslide since Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 re-election, LBJ had a mandate to renew the New Deal. The Johnson Administration achieved genuine progress with civil rights andvoting rights measures and the outlining of a war on poverty--only to squander the opportunity by pursuing a disastrous war in Vietnam. Yet, by every measure, the great tragedy of LBJ's tenure was found in the experience of his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey.

One of the great American liberals of the post-World War II era, Humphrey charted a course--as Minneapolis's mayor in the mid-1940s and then as a U.S. Senator--that made him a hero to millions of supporters of economic, social, and racial justice. His reputation was established by a 1948 speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia,where he called on his party--which was still deferring to its Southern segregationist wing--to "get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forth-rightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." Later, as a Senatorial champion of civil rights and a pioneering advocate for Medicare, Humphrey solidified his image as a liberal reformer. He traveled to Sweden with United Automobile Workers leader Walter Reuther to exchange ideas with European socialists, and, as chair of the Select Committee on Disarmament, Humphrey introduced a bill to establish a National Peace Agency in the thick of the Cold War.

Yet, after he joined Johnson's ticket in 1964, Humphrey fell in line as a defender of the administrations bloody escalation in Southeast Asia--squandering his reputation to such an extent that Hunter S. Thompson would eventually dismiss the Minnesotan as "a treacherous, gutless old ward heeler" so desperate for political advancement that he campaigned "like a rat in heat." The unflattering image stuck, as Humphrey's 1968 and 1972 presidential bids failed, and he eventually died in 1978 at age sixty-six.

What makes the end of his career so heartbreakingis that it began brilliantly--with Humphrey distinguishing himself as an outspoken and effective...