Showing posts with label Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Show all posts

Thursday, April 30, 2015

THROWBACK THURSDAY

This one is a little fuzzy.


But it's a historial moment (for me at least). In a television studio at KFYR-TV in Bismarck, North Dakota, 1968, after an interview with presidential candidate and Vice-President Hubert Horatio Humphrey. 

From left to right, the late Bob MacLeod, Wes Haugen, yours truly, and Humphrey. 

We had an exclusive. 'Course there was only one other television station in town but still.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

THROWBACK THURSDAY

We now have two candidates for President of the United States as the campaign season begins to heat up. It's 9 months until the first primary election and 19 months until the general election but I guess it's never too early to begin boring the electorate with speeches and campaign commercials.

It took me back, on this Throwback Thursday, to 1968. President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he would not run for another term. His Vice President, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, then announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination. He did visit Bismarck, North Dakota, where I was news director of a radio and television combine but the picture I have of interviewing him is so faded that I can't reproduce it here.

But I did find a photo of me interviewing Humphrey's son Hubert Horatio Humphrey III,who went by the nickname of Skip. (In Googling him I learned that he gave one of his children the family monicker, making him HHH the Fourth. He went by the nickname of Buck!)

Anyway, Skip and his attractive wife came to Bismarck campaigning for his father and I interviewed him in the North Dakota Governor's mansion.



The older Humphrey did win the Democratic nomination for President that year but, unfortunately, was defeated in the general election by Richard Nixon.

Skip went on to a fairly illustrious career in Minnesota politics, serving as the state's Attorney General for many years but lost his bid for governor to an independent candidate, the former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura.

I went on to other adventures.

Friday, June 15, 2012

COMPROMISE

As I said the other day, I've been reading the four volume (so far) biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.  But late today, in Volume Three, I read something that I believe needs repeating here today.  It concerns conversations between Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1951 and 1952, both men then United States Senators.  Johnson had taken Humphrey under his wing and these conversations occurred.

"...Johnson would, evening after evening, play variations on the same theme:  "Your speeches are accomplishing nothing," he would say.  Humphrey should learn to compromise.  "Otherwise, you'll suffer the fate of those crazies, those bomb-thrower types like Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman.  You'll be ignored, and get nothing accomplished you want."  Humphrey, the man who had refused to compromise, not only came to believe this -- "Compromise is not a dirty word," he would say.  "The Constitution itself represents the first great national compromise" -- but to believe it with all the fervor of the convert, the convert who is the most enthusiastic of believers.  Not only, he was to say, was compromise not a dirty word; those who refuse to compromise are a threat; "the purveyors of perfection," as he came to call them, "are dangerous when they . . . move self righteously to dominate.  There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right.  They will compromise on nothing. . . . These rigid minds, which arise on both the left and the right, leave no room for other points of view, for differing human needs. . . . Pragmatism is the better method."  The fact that some of his fellow liberal senators were to come to look upon him as, in his own words, one of the "unprincipled compromisers" bothered him for a while, he was to say;  "it doesn't bother me any more at all.  I felt it was important that we inch along even if we couldn't gallop along, at least that we trot a little bit."

Could that not be read on the floor of the House during a joint session of Congress, read at every Tea Party meeting, published on the front page of every newspaper, recited on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News until the message gets through?

No, I doubt it.   But at least I'll do my part.