Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Philip Roth, The Plot against America (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 2004).

  Wendell Willkie, One World (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and London, 1966).

  HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

  1968

  Hubert H. Humphrey was vice president, one of our nation’s most influential and productive senators, the Democratic nominee for president in 1968 (losing to Richard Nixon), and three other times a serious candidate for his party’s nomination. His most important contribution to the nation occurred, however, while still a young mayor of Minneapolis. At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Humphrey changed the course of the Democratic Party and the nation when, against all odds, he persuaded the Democrats to finally adopt a platform strongly in favor of civil rights for African Americans, an issue Humphrey would champion throughout his career.

  Humphrey was an unusual choice to lead the cause of civil rights. Born above his father’s drugstore in a small town in South Dakota where there were few African Americans and only slightly more Democrats, young Hubert inherited his father’s gift of gab and a commitment to help the underdog. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Humphrey pursued his graduate studies at Louisiana State University. There, he was “dismayed” by the discrimination he saw—“stately homes on manicured lawns in the white sections, the open sewage ditches in black neighborhoods.”

  One biographer likened Humphrey’s awakening to that experienced by young Abraham Lincoln, when he had rafted down the Mississippi and witnessed a New Orleans slave auction. “My abstract commitment to civil rights was given flesh and blood during my year in Louisiana,” Humphrey said, adding that the experience “also opened my eyes to the prejudice of the North.”

  Humphrey parlayed his experience as assistant director of the Minnesota War Manpower Commission and a strong relationship with organized labor into election as mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 when he was only thirty-four years old. Franklin Roosevelt had died weeks before Humphrey’s election, making Harry Truman president. Truman had appointed a civil rights commission but, for fear of alienating the South and ruining his chances for election in 1948, he dragged his feet in implementing the commission’s recommendations, including a call to desegregate the armed forces.

  Attending the Democratic National Convention in 1948, Humphrey was on the platform committee, but his bid to include a strong civil rights plank, opposed by the Truman administration, was rebuffed by a vote of seventy-eight to thirty. Despite fears it would split the party and doom his own senatorial race that year, Humphrey pledged to bring the issue to the floor of the convention the next day.

  Having lost fifteen pounds that week from not eating, Humphrey stayed up all night to lobby convention delegates, consult with allies, and craft an eight-minute address that would become the most dramatic speech given at a convention since William Jennings Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech in 1896. In a stroke of political genius, Humphrey and his friends decided not to criticize Truman for inaction, but to credit Truman for the action he had taken to date.

  Sweating profusely in the ninety-three-degree heat in the Philadelphia convention hall, Humphrey put forward his four proposals: outlaw lynching, ensure black voting rights, guarantee fair employment, and integrate the military. He told the crowd:

  To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights—I say to them, we are 172 years late. To those who say this bill is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this. . . . The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

  A raucous demonstration followed, and when the roll was called, even though minority planks are always doomed to failure, Humphrey’s proposal was approved by a vote of 651½ to 582½. Southern delegates from four states, led by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, walked out to prepare an independent presidential campaign.

  Twelve days later, Truman embraced the Democrats’ new position on civil rights and finally issued his executive order, directing the armed forces to integrate. The process was laborious, and the real catalyst to integration was the Korean War. Large numbers of African-American enlistments proved vital in plugging holes in previously segregated units that had suffered appalling casualties. By October 1953, the Army was finally able to announce that 95 percent of African-American soldiers served in integrated units. It took a long time, but it would have taken much longer without Humphrey.

  Lewis L. Gould, 1968: The Election That Changed America (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 1993).

  Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man: My Life and Politics (Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, N.Y., 1976).

  Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (W. W. Norton and Co., New York, 1984).

  WALTER MONDALE

  1984

  A wag once said Walter Mondale was born to be vice president. Unkind, perhaps, but Mondale’s legacy is tied to the vice presidency, both for his own role in redefining the office while serving as Jimmy Carter’s vice president and for picking the first woman vice presidential candidate during his own campaign for the presidency in 1984.

  When Daniel Webster was offered the vice presidential nomination, he quipped, “I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.” Webster’s belief that the vice presidency was a dead end was well founded. While nine vice presidents have succeeded to the presidency upon a president’s death or resignation, after Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson in 1836 it was another 124 years before a former vice president even received his party’s nomination for president.

  Mondale agreed to be Carter’s vice presidential running mate only after Carter agreed to make it “a useful instrument of government.” Mondale, son of a poor Methodist minister, was well aware of the abuse and humiliations suffered by his fellow Minnesota liberal and mentor Hubert Humphrey when Humphrey served as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president.

  Mondale became the first vice president in history to have an office inside the White House. He regularly participated in administration policy meetings, was granted access to the same intelligence the president received, and he and Carter lunched together weekly. Every vice president since has followed the “Mondale model.”

  After Carter and Mondale lost decisively to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in 1980, Mondale had high hopes for his own presidential run. Reagan seemed vulnerable in 1982 with unemployment near 10 percent and a majority of Americans believing Reagan should not run for a second term. But the economy improved, and Mondale led a fractured Democratic Party, fending off a challenge for the nomination from Colorado senator Gary Hart, of whose policies he famously asked: “Where’s the beef?”—though Mondale had never seen the television ad from which the quip was taken.

  Mondale hoped candor might carry the day. He said the federal deficit needed to be brought under control no matter who was elected. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I,” Mondale said. “He won’t tell you. I just did.” A pledge to raise taxes did not improve his standing in the polls, so Mondale was determined to make a bold choice, either a woman or a minority, for his running mate in order to prove he was a bridge between the old and the new in Democratic politics.

  Mondale was pained when the National Organization for Women publicly demanded he pick a woman. Now, instead of looking bold, it would look as if he had caved to a special interest group. Still, he chose New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, not only the first woman but also the first Italian-American to be on a major party ticket. He liked her résumé. She epitomized the American dream, a schoolteacher who had attended law school at night and then become a tough criminal prosecutor before her election to Congress. But Mondale almost immediately regretted the choice.

  Ferraro declined to study issue papers, wanted to take a vacation instead of campaign in California, accused Mondale’s staff of con
descension and chauvinism, and then drew unwelcome headlines when her husband’s messy financial dealings were made public. When she complained she would be treated differently if she were a white male, Mondale later told aides she was right: If she had been a man, he would have dropped her from the ticket.

  Given America’s general prosperity, Reagan’s landslide re-election was a foregone conclusion. Mondale carried only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Following a stint as U.S. ambassador to Japan, in 2002 the seventy-four-year-old Mondale was hastily drafted to run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Paul Wellstone. But for the first time in a forty-two-year public career, Mondale failed to win a statewide race in Minnesota. It was a disappointing end to a distinguished career best captured by the sentiment of a poor Hispanic man in Texas who, during the 1984 campaign, brought his daughter just to “see Walter Mondale. He is the last of a dying breed. The breed that cares for people.”

  Steven M. Gillon, The Democrats’ Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994).

  Finlay Lewis, Mondale: Portrait of an American Politician (Harper and Row, New York, 1980).

  MICHAEL DUKAKIS

  1988

  Michael Dukakis disappeared from the public arena as completely as any losing candidate since Alton B. Parker. His low profile was partly by choice and partly by circumstance. Because he was the only governor to be a presidential also-ran since Adlai Stevenson, Dukakis did not, as a senator would, return to the national media spotlight in Washington, D.C., after his loss to George H.W. Bush. Instead, he finished out the remaining two years of his gubernatorial term in Massachusetts.

  Voters like executive experience. Seven of the nine presidential elections from 1976 to 2008 were won by governors, and many felt that Dukakis should have won in 1988, as he held a seventeen-point polling lead over Bush coming out of the Democratic National Convention in July. Of course, the country was relatively prosperous and at peace in 1988, which always helps the incumbent party, but Bush, tainted by the Iran-Contra scandal, was having trouble improving his favorable ratings with voters. So, he decided to drive down Dukakis’s favorable ratings instead.

  Dukakis, who served as governor when Massachusetts experienced a tremendous burst of economic growth known as the “Massachusetts Miracle,” insisted the 1988 election would be “not about ideology, [but] about competence.” Bush and campaign manager Lee Atwater, however, found a host of “wedge” issues with which to paint Dukakis as a wild-eyed liberal. Dukakis was attacked for declining to support constitutional amendments that would ban the burning of the American flag or allow prayer in the public schools. He was attacked for once vetoing a bill that would have required the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in Massachusetts’s classrooms. Most famously, he was attacked because a Massachusetts prison inmate named Willie Horton had raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé while on furlough under a program that predated Dukakis’s tenure as governor and that was common in most other states.

  The barrage of negative advertising was “ugly, brainless,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in his epic study of the 1988 campaign, What It Takes. Even Atwater, who lay dying from a brain tumor three years later, felt obliged to publicly apologize for some of the “naked cruelty” of the attacks made against Dukakis.

  When Bill Clinton was under the same type of attacks from Bush’s re-election campaign in 1992, Dukakis volunteered to defend Clinton as a campaign surrogate. But the Clinton campaign viewed Dukakis as a loser. They never found a time or a place for Dukakis to speak, not even at that year’s Democratic National Convention. The irony is that Clinton went on to win the presidency with only 43 percent of the popular vote, while the shunned Dukakis had won nearly 46 percent of the vote in 1988.

  Dukakis had loved being governor. An unassuming man, he was the only governor in America who took public transportation to work, paying the sixty-five-cent fare to ride the trolley and arriving every day by 8:15 a.m. The day after his presidential defeat in 1988, Dukakis was back at work, arriving by 9:00 a.m. and preparing for next year’s Massachusetts budget. A few months later he announced he would not run for elective office again.

  Instead, he took up teaching public policy, splitting his time between Northeastern University in his native Boston and the University of California, Los Angeles. Dukakis called teaching “the best work I’ve ever done. It’s impossible not to have faith in the system when you work with these kids.” His only foray into public policy was to serve on the national board of directors for Amtrak, where he could continue to push for investments in rail and mass transit.

  No one has been harder on Dukakis for his defeat than Dukakis, the first Greek-American nominated for president. “I blew it,” he said many times. He shouldn’t have posed for photographs riding in a tank, he has acknowledged, which made the Army veteran look too much like Snoopy ready to battle the Red Baron. And asked at one presidential debate if his opposition to the death penalty would change if his own wife were raped and murdered, he has recognized that he should have shown some real passion in his response.

  Dukakis has said the legacy of his defeat stung even more when Bush’s son, George W. Bush, won the presidency in 2000 and served two controversial terms that included America’s war in Iraq, noting, “If I had taken care of the pop, we wouldn’t have had to worry about the kid.”

  Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes (Vintage Books, New York, 1993).

  Brad Koplinski, Hats in the Ring: Conversations with Presidential Candidates (Presidential Publishing, North Bethesda, Md., 2000).

  BOB DOLE

  1996

  Bob Dole inherited his deadpan sense of humor from his father and perfected it while a teenager, working as a soda jerk in a Russell, Kansas, drugstore. Times were tough in the Dust Bowl, and soda jerk was one of many odd jobs Dole worked to earn extra money for his family. Dole’s father, too, tried many means to provide for his family. He’d run a restaurant, operated a cream and egg business, and managed a grain elevator. Bob Dole dreamed of a life in which you did more than get by. He wanted to go to college and then medical school.

  He had a chance, too. A strapping six-feet-two-inches tall and weighing nearly two hundred pounds, he was the best athlete in town. The great Coach “Phog” Allen invited him to play basketball at the University of Kansas, but then the war came and Dole enlisted. As a lieutenant in Italy, he led his platoon on a raid to take out a German machine gun. They shot him up, nearly blew his right arm completely off, and he was left paralyzed for months. His weight dropped to barely 120 pounds, they took out one of his kidneys, and his life was touch and go. But thanks to the then-experimental drug streptomycin and the generosity of the good people in Russell, who raised eighteen hundred dollars for an operation to rebuild his arm with other body tissue, Dole recovered, though his right arm remained maimed. Dole used sheer force of will to hold it up across his chest during public appearances to hide its uselessness.

  Back in college on the GI Bill, Dole studied law instead of medicine. He discovered his drive, and the patter he had perfected back at the drugstore made him a pretty good politician. He was elected to the Kansas Legislature while still a law student, won his first congressional race in 1960, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1968. He was a conservative, but pragmatic and open-minded, joining George McGovern in sponsoring legislation to combat hunger and malnutrition.

  In 1976, President Gerald Ford, to appease the GOP right, dropped Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and chose Dole as his running mate. Dole’s tough style of campaigning and often sarcastic humor made him seem a hatchet man, and he caused an uproar when he labeled World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam “Democratic wars.” The day after he and Ford narrowly lost to Carter and Mondale, Dole claimed he had slept like a baby the night before—“Every two hours, I woke up and cried.”

  Dole ran for presi
dent in 1980 and lost the Republican nomination to eventual winner Ronald Reagan. He ran again in 1988 and lost the nomination to eventual winner George H. W. Bush. Dole became majority leader in the Senate, and in 1996, Republicans decided it was finally his turn. Like Henry Clay, Dole wasn’t nominated by his party until he was sure to lose. The nation was prospering and mostly at peace, and Bill Clinton was handily re-elected.

  Less than two weeks after the election, Dole went on the satirical television program Saturday Night Live, to spoof his loss and his alleged tendency to speak of himself in the third person, complaining, “That’s not something Bob Dole does. It’s not something Bob Dole has ever done, and it’s not something Bob Dole will ever do!”

  He wrote a memoir of his war experience and put together two books on political humor: Great Presidential Wit: (Wish I Was in the Book) and Great Political Wit: Laughing (Almost) All the Way to the White House. They sold well, and Dole’s second wife, Elizabeth, had a good job running the American Red Cross. But Dole never forgot the hardscrabble times of his youth, and perhaps he succumbed to the envy that many politicians feel as they solicit contributions from the rich and peek into their world while still earning a public servant’s salary. So, Dole became a spokesperson for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, and then he spoofed that spokesmanship in an ad for Pepsi in which the then seventy-eight-year-old politician feigned lust for teen pop starlet Britney Spears. A lot of people thought it was undignified, but if Bob Dole hadn’t earned the right to make a few bucks making people guffaw, who had?

  Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes (Vintage Books, New York, 1993).

  Robert J. Dole, One Soldier’s Story: A Memoir (HarperCollins, New York, 2005).