Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [116]
Hughes would pursue Johnson to his last days in office, but his focus had already shifted to another national leader who had proven himself far more cooperative.
*Gillis Long, former congressman and new Hughes lobbyist.
8 Poor Hubert
“Here we are, the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, the politics of joy! And that’s the way it’s going to be, too, all the way from here on out!”
The voice, so overripe with good cheer, was unmistakable. Bobbing and weaving, flapping his arms, barely able to contain his own high spirits, Hubert Horatio Humphrey launched his presidential campaign. It was April 27, 1968. Almost a month had passed since Johnson’s sudden abdication, and now the vice-president finally felt free to declare himself a candidate.
“And so my friends and fellow Americans,” he told a national television audience and two thousand supporters jammed into the ballroom of a Washington hotel, “I shall seek the nomination—” Before he could finish, the crowd stood to cheer, shouting, “We Want Humphrey! We Want Humphrey!” the chant drowning him out, and Hubert, beaming, shouted back, “You have him!” and the crowd roared.
Always effusive, the Happy Warrior had never seemed quite so exuberant as now—with his band playing “The Minnesota Rouser” and his people waving their plastic Humphrey hats—he stood ready to enter the White House, proclaiming “the politics of happiness, the politics of joy.”
It was a peculiarly inappropriate campaign theme in that wretched year of war, riots, and assassinations. And at that moment it could not have seemed more inappropriate to anyone than to the man who would soon become one of the vice-president’s chief backers: Howard Hughes.
For there was no joy in the penthouse. Humphrey’s announcement came bubbling over the billionaire’s television set just one day after the “Boxcar” blast, and the shaken but determined recluse was plotting a very different kind of campaign.
The politics of money, the politics of graft.
“Bob,” wrote Hughes, “we have to act fast or we will be right up against another deadline, making last-minute desperate attempts to abort another threatened blast. The A.E.C. is not going to let this thing rest.
“Now I am no political expert, but I can readily see that we have only one assett of really important value, and I dont have to spell that out, I am sure.
“So, it seems to me we have to lead off with our best shot. I think we must decide which candidate we intend to support and then support him till hell wont have it, but only if he will do something for us on the bomb.
“Now, if Humphries is the man, fine.
“Anyway, as I say, we have only one kind of markers to use in this game, and I think we should decide through whom, and how much, and then go to work.”
Howard Hughes could never spell Hubert Humphrey’s name correctly—he usually called him “Humphries”—but he had reason to place his bets on the vice-president.
Theirs was a curious relationship. The two men seemingly had nothing in common. Humphrey, the quintessential public man, loved a crowd, was outgoing, garrulous, almost embarrassingly emotional, a complete extrovert. Born in a room above the family drugstore, he grew up poor, had to drop out of college to return to work, and his political career had always been and still was plagued by a chronic lack of money. A classic old-line liberal, a farmer-labor populist, he had championed every social cause from civil rights to arms control to Medicare.
Only three weeks earlier, Hughes’s reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King had dramatized how different the two men were. Humphrey had first come to national prominence leading the fight for a strong civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention, where he declared, “There are those who say, ‘We are rushing this issue of civil