Hubert Humphrey obituary

A large photograph, four columns wide, appeared on the front page of our papers last Monday and I should guess it provoked more mixed emotions in more Americans than any single picture they've seen in a long time.

It was taken in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington and, at first glance, and if all the faces had not been so grave, you might have taken it for some political ceremony, perhaps the swearing-in of a new chief justice of the Supreme Court. That it was grander even than that was immediately obvious from the very rare assembly of important people present and facing us. 

What they were facing at an incline was a coffin draped with the Stars and Stripes. Almost on the left edge of the picture was an upright figure in uniform looking across the coffin to similarly upright men of the army, navy, air force and marines. But then moving across the front row we saw, standing side by side, Mrs Gerald Ford, former President Gerald Ford, Mrs Carter, President Carter and, peeking behind them, former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and then a small, white-haired, placid little lady, Mrs Hubert Humphrey, then the tall figure of Mrs Henry Kissinger and on the extreme right, Vice President Mondale. 

Behind them, there were, oh I suppose over a thousand people, more than half the Senate, congressmen, generals, admirals, diplomats and the children, grandchildren, friends and plain people who'd come a thousand miles and more, from Minnesota and beyond, from California and Hawaii to pay their last respects to Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota – the irrepressible American optimist, the incurable liberal, the most rollicking politician, the most forgiving political enemy of our time. And the most unflagging – you might say unflaggingly naive – believer in the gaudy promises that Jefferson and Franklin and company offered a new nation two centuries ago in the glow of independence. 

What I think was most likely to mix up the emotions of people seeing that picture was the face in the extreme left-hand corner of the photograph. It was the face of Richard M. Nixon. Tapping various friends about their first feelings when they saw that face, the responses came back in single words – gall, courage, pathos, simple shock. There was a prickly moment during the service when the minister quoted the Bible, 'In pardoning, we are pardoned'. Now nobody in his senses in that moment could have failed to think in a flash of that Sunday in mid-summer 1974 when the new President, Ford came back from church service and announced that he'd decided to pardon Richard Nixon and he thus set off a storm wave of picketing and protests around the country. 

In the rotunda there last Sunday, the moment the minister pronounced those words, very many people turned their heads and looked at Mr Ford and Mr Nixon, the pardoner and the pardoned. They both looked straight ahead and neither of them flexed his jaw muscles. 

The best testimony came from a very old friend and adviser of Senator Humphrey. He said, 'Hubert would have liked it. He had hated the man, if ever he hated anybody but that was all over long ago. He telephoned Nixon only a few days ago on Nixon's birthday and they talked. Hubert would have been pleased.' The key phrase in that brief confidence is 'if he ever hated anybody' and that phrase is really the tuning fork that alerted millions of people to regret the death but rejoice in the life of Hubert Humphrey. 

In my time, I can't think of another politician who was more strenuously in the thick of every big political battle of the past 30 years. He fought with appalling energy. It was appalling because he not only would stay up night after night, pleading and begging and arguing with his opponents – I remember the way he disrupted the Democratic convention in 1948 by demanding and drafting, for the first time in the history of either party, a full-fledged civil rights plank. Now every Democratic convention before then had given lip service to a phrase about 'irrespective of race, sex or religion', which was always tacked into the platform quickly and quietly and forgotten. 

Hubert Humphrey, the young Turk from Minnesota, they called him then, outraged the Southerners present on the resolutions committee by being bumptious enough and obnoxious enough to spell out and shout out such promises as fair and equal employment for blacks, equal housing, equal schooling. This had not been seriously suggested as law since the 1890s and then the Supreme Court had doomed actual equality with the famous judgement that all such facilities should be separate but equal. 

When I say that Humphrey disrupted that convention, I mean literally. The more traditional Southerners walked out, they left the party, they set up a new party called The Dixiecrats and put up their own presidential candidate, Humphrey's most incensed, most implacable enemy, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Senator Thurmond was there last Sunday. 

By forgiving everybody so genuinely, so guilelessly, Humphrey made it possible for everybody to forgive. But it took time with the Dixiecrats. Humphrey did break the party in two. By his unyielding tenacity, he shamed his fellow liberals into adopting a minority report at that 1948 convention and he made a speech there which announced to the country that a new force – a new nuisance to some people – and the new American orator in the old prairie, populist tradition had arrived. 

'There are those', he said, 'who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say we are 172 years too late! There are those who say this issue of civil rights is an infringement on the rights of the states, I say the time has come for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the sunshine of human rights. People, human beings, they are the issue of the twentieth century.' 

It took the Supreme Court another six years to change its 1890 mind and agree. It took Hubert Humphrey another 16 years, always of speechifying but also of cajoling and pleading and shepherding and bargaining and backroom begging, to get through the first, great civil rights bill, to get it through the Congress. And that was 1964. And that sparked the Black Revolution and, if you like, by showing where Roosevelt's new deal had been meant to go and hadn't, it fuelled the violence and turmoil of the succeeding years. 

I never admired Humphrey more than once at one of his presidential rallies in that year. He came into an auditorium packed with a couple of thousand of baying, chanting students and he walked with his wife to the podium through a downpour of awful insults and shouted obscenities and when he got up to speak, he couldn't make it. He was the man they might have revered, he was the man who'd made this turmoil, this freewheeling protest, possible. But they thundered him down and after 15 howling minutes, he gave up. It must have been very hard indeed then for even Humphrey to forgive and forget. 

He spoke years later before a big audience in Scandinavia somewhere, Norway, I think. He was defending America against the usual charge of restlessness and violence. 'Yes,' he shouted, 'we are a restless people. We are restless and violence comes out of it. But restlessness is a sign of growth and we've offered growth to the people we've received on a continent, refugees and struggling people, from a score of the nations of Europe. Yes, they are a burden. They are also a glory.' 

You have to imagine a small, solid, increasingly roly-poly man with high-polished apple cheeks, teeth bared in a semi-permanent grin and his blue eyes as dense and luminous as gumdrops. From the time he poured milkshakes and filled prescriptions in his father's drugstore there was never any question when Hubert was on hand. In a room full of a hundred people, he was as audible as a laughing man in the House of Nonsense. In a room of four people, three were listeners and Hubert talked in a rapid, elated, bubbling way as if he had a train to catch and there was only half an hour left to convert his listeners to the true faith. And in a room with only Hubert present, there was one voice chattering away with conviction. When there was nobody else around, he argued with himself. 

His wife once suggested to him, and he liked to quote her, 'You mustn't think because your speeches are eternal, they're immortal.' He was born in one room above the drugstore in a small town in South Dakota. His mother, the daughter of a Norwegian seaman. His father saved up and sent him to the University of Minnesota and he had to quit in the Depression. His wife worked, later, to send him back to the university. He took a degree and he went on to study and teach at Louisiana State and then he left teaching political science and began to practise it. 

Over 30 years ago, he was elected as reform mayor in the city of Minneapolis, a city much in need of reform. He was a very tough mayor and he left behind him the miracle, there and then, of an honest police force and the first municipal fair employment law for racial equality in jobs. Four years later he was in the United States Senate. And through cascades of eloquence and hundreds of battles and 42 bills that bear his name, the place has never been the same again. 

Six months ago, he learned he had inoperable cancer of the pelvis. His roly-poly frame withered, his face shrank into a long-jawed skeleton, but the eyes shone as always. He went on a round of speeches and receptions and tributes – and a month or more ago, the Congress had him speak finally before a joint session – 'to hear all the obituaries', he said, 'before they cover me over, may cut down on the funeral expenses.' He was brimming with good cheer and good jokes – and bad jokes – and abundant goodwill till the day he died. 

It is hackneyed to say, as people have said and written, 'we shall not see his like again.' For the sake of America, I hope it is not so.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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