Humphrey: What a Lucky Guy, What a Life

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

It has been a crackerjack of a funeral, to borrow a term and an attitude from Hubert Humphrey's own exuberant life. How he would have loved it. Airplanes and military honors, the President and the pages, good old hymns badly but enthusiastically sung, organs booming and preachers praying mightily all across the country.

What a grand spectacle. Newspaper headlines and network specials, editors hammering their typewriters to new heights of deadline eloquence: everything being gloriously overdone -- at least a little. Friends from far and near in their dark suits standing around telling stories -- solemnly at first -- about their days and journeys with Hubert, beginning to chuckle and then to laugh out loud, and then reaching for an other bourbon to ease the long, low ache that comes from knowing a great man is gone. Had Hubert, like Tom Sawyer, been able to sneak under the back pews at his own services and witness the proceedings (and, who knows, he might have -- he sort of believed in those things), he would have swelled in the wonderment of tribute. But then he would have tip toed around and bussed Muriel, winked at his friends and told everybody to wait a minute. A few tears, O.K., he appreciated that. But what a lucky guy he had been, what a life he had led. Every day a joy, every week an adventure. "Come on, let's celebrate," he would have said.

The problem was always how to organize a heart like Hubert's. It beat harder than anybody's, compelling its owner to laugh, shout and run off into every corner of America, bubbling with mirth and his special prairie exaltation. Too often he loitered along the political byroads of America, gabbing and shaking hands and studying individual faces as if each were from the easel of Michelangelo. Of course, he lost the big elections. And he danced with all the fat old ladies in the union halls after the speeches and the first beers. When asked why he squandered the time and the energy, he explained that fat old ladies needed the attention and appreciated it the most. Besides, he said, it was his policy to spend as little time as possible sleeping. More people died in bed than anywhere else.

Hubert's heart was big and it worked overtime, but it was more tender than any heart found among the men of power. It was easily pierced by the tragedy and misfortune of others, but it possessed marvelous powers of recuperation. When the world thunked him hard, as it did that night in West Virginia when he lost the critical presidential primary to John Kennedy, he was an open wound for a few minutes. But then he gathered himself up in that moth-eaten room of the old Ruffner Hotel, went over and fixed himself a salami sandwich from the table of things he had personally bought for the victory celebration. He began right then to climb out of defeat back to his sunny pinnacle, a journey that he would repeat and repeat.

Hubert had an immunity to humiliation. When Lyndon Johnson imperially summoned him to the White House to tell him that he was to be the Democratic vice-presidential candidate of 1964, L.B.J. let Humphrey just sit in the White House limousine on the drive for half an hour. Hubert did not get angry. He took a nap. When Johnson, carrying his lesson of authority further, left him waiting outside the door of the Oval Office, Hubert plucked a book from a shelf and read about Thomas Jefferson.

How a man who wore suits with Italian cuffs, openly enjoyed his snowmobile and once was in love with a big, garish Cadillac with fins could ever espouse such an encyclopedia of urban and rural compassion is yet one more marvel in the Humphrey legend. "I'm not against those things," he once explained. "I just want everybody to get a little." And he relished a celebration. "If you think Andy Jackson had an Inaugural party, just wait until I get there," he promised when presidential hope burned bright. He missed that one by a few votes. So it is right and fitting he should have a good funeral now.

He would have loved it.

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