Votes for Humphrey [Biden]

On (not) voting--and failed book projects

A few weeks ago, I wrote about why 1968 is a bad metaphor for the present. I thought I said what I needed to say about 1968, for now. But then I encountered this New Republic article by historian Michael Kazin: “I Opposed Humphrey in ’68. All I Did Was Help Prolong the Vietnam War.” Kazin recently reposted it on Twitter (X)—even though it was published in December 2023—as a response to those skeptical of voting for Biden given his policy toward Gaza and Israel. This got me thinking about protest votes, non-voting, the 2024 election, and the life and political legacy of Hubert Humphrey—which got me thinking about my failed book project on Humphrey.

If you haven’t read the Kazin article, the thesis is in the title. Kazin, a renowned historian of social movements and of the American Left, believes the anti-war Left cost Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey the presidency over Republican Richard Nixon in 1968. Kazin protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and he feels then and as he feels now that the anti-war Left had “a strong moral case for rejecting Nixon’s opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey” who championed the war for years alongside President Lyndon Johnson. Kazin joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and anti-war activists at the Democratic National Convention in August 1968 to denounce Humphrey’s nomination and stop the war. When Humphrey received the nomination as expected, Kazin decided not to support either candidate.

Kazin is now an avowed social democrat, a reformed SDSer who regrets his opposition to Humphrey. If he knew what he knows now, he would have held his nose and supported Humphrey’s campaign. Instead, we got Richard Nixon and a pox on all our houses. He writes:

I remain as committed to the ideals of the left as I was back in 1968. But back then, in my small, disruptive fashion, I may have helped elect a president who ended the era when liberals dominated American politics, enacting policies like the Civil Rights Act and Medicare that benefit tens of millions of people. Under Richard Nixon, the nation began to move rightward, a shift from which we are still struggling to recover. Before the Watergate scandal brought him down, he also took four long years to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam, after another 20,000 or so U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians had died.

Kazin is right about some of the counterfactuals. I do think Humphrey would have sought a quicker end to the war. I said as much in The New York Times in 2018 when I wrote about how Vietnam shaped Humphrey’s political legacy. And Humphrey was clearly a better choice for the Left than Nixon. Kazin is also right about the history that would not have been. No Nixon means no expansion of the war into Cambodia, no Watergate. I also think that Humphrey, like Nixon, would have sought an “opening with China” in the early 1970s.¹

To be honest, I’ve always found Humphrey a fascinating figure, much more interesting than the one-dimensional “Happy Warrior” who brought the Democratic Party “into the bright sunshine” of civil rights at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, or the hapless patsy of Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War. For me, Humphrey embodies the promises and limits of American liberalism, and why the Democratic Party remains embattled and beleaguered in 2024—why they have lost ground to the American Right and the Republican Party, the two increasingly synonymous after 1968.

In 2016, I planned to write a biography of Humphrey that emphasized his importance to American political history. I wanted it to be biography that used Humphrey to discuss the fall of New Deal liberalism and the legacy of Cold War liberalism. I had a literary agent who championed it, wrote huge portions of the book, and did a lot of research for it. I wanted to say something new about the Democratic Party and American liberalism, and thought others would want to read what I had to say.

I never published the book. But I still believe Humphrey is important. He remains, in my view, the quintessential Cold War liberal. Humphrey had a reputation as the most progressive liberal in American politics after he was elected to the Senate in 1948. But he never reconciled his social democratic policies (full employment, racial equality through civil rights laws, strong labor unions, a “Marshall Plan for the cities”) with his anti-communism (his consistent support for larger military budgets, an unrelenting belief in American primacy and military interventionism, his blinding hatred of communism). Humphrey saw no contradiction between his faith in the welfare state and the warfare state: both were essential to American security. This led to his support for Vietnam, which led to his undoing.

But Humphrey did not lose in 1968 because the Left stayed home. Most of the anti-war left consisted of white, middle-class, college-educated voters (you had to be 21 to vote in the U.S. until 1971) who went ahead and voted for Humphrey despite his record. Indeed, Humphrey won voters under the age of 30 with 47% to Nixon’s 38%. The ranks of the SDS were quite large, and reached about 100,000 at its height in the late 1960s. That 100,000 (let’s presume they all stayed home on Election Day) might give Humphrey the chance to win Ohio (where he lost to Nixon by about 90,000 votes), but not Nixon’s home state of California (where Humphrey lost by 240,000 votes). Humphrey needed at least both states to win the election.

In fact, Humphrey and his staff felt they neutralized the protest vote by the fall of 1968. They were more concerned with the Independent Party candidate and Alabama Governor George Wallace, whose racism, support for Jim Crow segregation, and opposition to the Civil Rights Act resonated with Southern whites, an essential constituency of the New Deal coalition. Wallace also appealed to working-class and middle-class whites across the country, but Humphrey’s campaign feared his appeal to blue-collar voters in particular.

When I interviewed Humphrey’s speechwriter Ted Van Dyk for my book, he told me how stunned he was by the support Wallace received among union workers. Wallace’s inroads on labor in the early fall of 1968, an essential constituency of the Humphrey campaign given Humphrey’s support for labor unions since the 1940s, surely cost him thousands of votes. Humphrey lost in part because Wallace (and Nixon) peeled the southern vote from the New Deal coalition. Humphrey tried to neutralize Wallace through coded “law and order” language, saying in September 1968 that Black Power activists such as “the Stokely Carmichaels—extremists of the left and the right—will not have their way and we will not allow them to terrorize or stampede Americans.” But this undermined his legacy as a civil rights champion and failed to wound Wallace.

Humphrey also came out against the war too late. Humphrey had warned Lyndon Johnson in February 1965 that the war would be a quagmire, that it would jeopardize his Great Society; but he fell in line and became the loyal vice president when American troops arrived in Da Nang one month later. Humphrey announced his candidacy on April 27, 1968, and up to the end of September, he remained committed to the war. Reeling from the fallout of the Democratic Convention, feeling his continued attachment to LBJ would cost him the presidency and needing the peace vote, Humphrey announced on September 30, 1968 his support for “a specific timetable” for an American withdrawal from Vietnam. While he rejected a “unilateral withdrawal,” it was the beginning of the end of Humphrey’s Vietnam.

Debate exists over whether LBJ tried to undermine his campaign after September 1968, whether he favored Nixon. Right-leaning historian Luke Nichter, who denies the validity of the Chennault affair that sabotaged peace talks between Vietnam and the U.S. (and potentially undermined Humphrey’s campaign), believes Johnson felt a Nixon win would solidify his legacy as the leading Democrat in the country, as the “elder statesman” of his party. I’m not so sure—LBJ felt Nixon’s campaign had committed “treason” with the Chennault affair, and was surely upset that Nixon prevented LBJ from achieving peace in Vietnam, his last effort to reform his legacy as a president known more for a disastrous war than an expanded New Deal.

Beyond the factors against him—Vietnam, LBJ, Wallace—Humphrey ultimately ran a terrible campaign. Humphrey could have listened to the anti-war left, he could have tried to attract the “peace vote” before the Democratic National Convention. He didn’t. Humphrey did not need his “law and order” rhetoric. Wallace’s campaign eventually imploded by October 1968 as his blatant racism, demagoguery, and threats of violence against protesters alienated voters outside the Deep South. After trailing Nixon in the polls for months, Humphrey rebounded and offered Nixon a sizeable challenge. But in the end, he came up short of his ultimate goal: the presidency. And he had few to blame but himself.

Despite the many reasons for his loss, Humphrey still blamed the protesters above all. Journalist Seymour Hersh spoke with Humphrey in 1970 just as college students were protesting the Kent State shootings and the continuation of the war. Humphrey had lingering detest for the anti-war movement, “for those kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’.” Humphrey only had two words for them, repeated in staccato to Hersh: “‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’”  As I did my research for the book, it seemed clear to me that the protesters became both a reason and scapegoat for Humphrey’s loss, a way out of reexamining his campaign’s limits, of why he held steadfast to Cold War liberalism (to the belief that the U.S. needed to vanquish communism at all costs) when it no longer served his—or the country’s—interests.

So what does this mean for Joe Biden and 2024? Again, 2024 is not 1968—the New Deal coalition is gone, Biden faces no serious challenge from a third-party candidate, and American troops are not bogged down in a war in Southeast Asia.

But I do think that Biden is a Humphrey-like figure. Like Humphrey, who returned to the Senate in 1971 after losing the presidency (where he pushed to enact a full employment bill before dying in January 1978), Biden is now in his third act in public life; and like Humphrey, he is one of the last of a generation of Democrats. Whereas Humphrey was the last of the New Deal turned Cold War liberals, Biden is one the last Democrats in office that were shaped by Vietnam, Watergate, and “stagflation.” Similar to Humphrey, Biden has a strong labor record and a vision for a renewed welfare state—even if that vision cannot be realized out of a context of great-power competition with China.

Biden is also holding onto a war that is rapidly losing support among the American people, one that is fracturing his coalition and shaping his legacy for the worse. Indeed, Biden has choices that he needs to make between now and the election, ones similar to the choices Humphrey made. Biden has already called for a ceasefire to the Gaza war, but should he go further to distance himself from the Netanyahu government—as Humphrey distanced himself from Johnson? Will Biden revisit his vision for a pluralistic America that marked the early days of his presidency—or like Humphrey, retreat into “law and order” politics, as Biden has done with the southern border? Will Biden emphasize a domestic agenda that tackles inflation, works toward full employment, builds up the working class, and strengthens labor unions—or let foreign policy dictate domestic policy?

If Biden loses to Donald Trump, he will have to wonder if he made the right decisions on these and other questions. Biden and the Democrats may blame the Left—the protesters—if he is out of the White House in 2025, but he will have to wonder what could have been done differently, to contemplate the America we will not know. Even if Humphrey was elected in 1968, I am not sure his liberalism could hold back the forces that changed the Democratic Party, and the world, in the 1970s and 1980s: growing economic austerity, the erosion of the welfare state, the creeping privatization of public goods. Will Biden’s liberalism be able to move us toward a “post-neoliberal” America, to defeat Trump? It remains to be seen.

I didn’t complete my Humphrey book for a few reasons. I found that Trump’s victory in 2016 led publishers to want books about American conservatism and Trump’s origins in the far Right—fair enough. Few seemed to want a history of American liberalism, and Humphrey proved to be too obscure a figure to resonate with trade publishers, or even major university presses. I gave up on the project in 2020 after no one seemed to care (and I moved on to other projects), and after writing large portions of the manuscript. Then Biden became president. Biden’s presidency has now produced two books on Humphrey: one by James Traub and the other by Samuel Freedman. Both tell a familiar story of Humphrey the “Happy Warrior.”

Maybe I will return to the Humphrey project someday—I have thought of a book project on Henry Wallace and Hubert Humphrey, or moving forward with a narrative history of Cold War liberalism told through Humphrey’s life. But for now, my version of Humphrey’s life remains on my computer in draft form, waiting for a larger audience.

Perhaps Biden’s presidency—his re-election or defeat?—will inspire me, will breathe new life in the project. But who knows what the future brings.

1. I am currently working on an academic article with two political scientists that explores the counterfactual of whether Humphrey would have sought to normalize relations with China if elected president in 1968. We think he would have. Our working thesis is that HHH would have pursued a similar line as Nixon, that Humphrey supported the “opening” of China, and that dynamics in American politics and Cold War diplomacy would move Humphrey to engage in a rapprochement with the PRC. For a preview, see Pete Millwood, “No, Not Only Nixon Could Go to China.”