Making Sense of American Liberalism

4. From Friends to Foes: George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, and the Fracture in American Liberalism

4 From Friends to Foes George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, and the Fracture in American Liberalism bruce miroff A few days after Hubert Humphrey died of cancer in January 1978, George McGovern drafted two tributes to him for publication in newspapers and magazines. In one of these tributes, McGovern took time to reflect on how much his own life was enmeshed in Humphrey’s: Sometimes I have thought that Hubert Humphrey’s life has been a testing ground for mine. Our lives have frequently moved along similar lines. We were both born and reared in depression and drought-scarred South Dakota. We both educated ourselves to become college professors. We both felt the lure of prairie politics and eventually emerged as the presidential nominee of our party—Hubert in 1968 and I in 1972.Although we were divided over the war in Vietnam and became presidential rivals for a brief time, the bonds of personal friendship survived that division. It was not possible to hold a grudge against Hubert. He healed the wounds of political rivalry with humor and love. The friendship of George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey was more than the normal bond of two midwestern progressives in the U.S. Congress. For a decade, these two men had been nextdoor neighbors in Chevy Chase, Maryland, “where our children grew up together, our wives visited daily, and Hubert and I rode together to Capitol Hill.” Humphrey was a political mentor to McGovern—and an exemplar of “the joy of being alive.” “Once on a warm summer night,” McGovern fondly recalled in this tribute, “I heard him singing happily at two o’clock in the morning while he scrubbed the walls of his kitchen.”1 As McGovern testified, it was the war in Vietnam that led to a rift between these friends and turned them into rivals in presidential politics both in 1968 and 1972.Yet the sources of the fracture in such a close personal and political friendship ran deeper and began earlier than the conflict in Vietnam. And despite the reconciliation of these old friends after the 1972 campaign, the reverberations of their rift have continued to affect the development of contemporary American liberalism. My article examines the McGovern-Humphrey relationship on two distinct levels, which have some intriguing interconnections. The first level is personal and psychological, while the second is ideological and political. That a close friendship between two major political leaders is shaken by their opposite reactions to a historical crisis is an interesting story in its own right. The story is given a larger significance in the development of contemporary American liberalism because these men became the leaders of two warring wings in the Democratic Party, were spokesmen for alternative liberal visions and coalitions that emerged in the 1960s, and were still perceptible in the struggle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. In this regard, the fracture in the McGovern-Humphrey friendship may cast new light on the most important fracture in liberal politics since the New Deal. Fracture Foreshadowed In the two memorials that McGovern wrote, there was only one critical remark about Humphrey, but it was revealing of what McGovern perceived as a fundamental difference between the two men: He had limitations, as we all do. He seldom read a thoughtful book and he was too much in awe of official briefers. But when it came to the great issues of social justice, Hubert’s instincts were not only sure, they were enunciated with a passion, earthiness, wit, and force that we are not likely to see exceeded in all the days of our lives.2 McGovern praised Humphrey’s warm heart but pointed out the limitations of his head (thinking). Humphrey, he was hinting, had absorbed the basic axioms of New Deal and Cold War liberalism as a young academic and politician, but had not exposed himself to the critiques of that liberalism that were published in later years. Perhaps even more important, Humphrey had become part of a governing liberal establishment that was thoroughly uncritical of its own official pronouncements. McGovern never doubted that from friends to foes · 91 Humphrey’s heart was in the right place, but he believed that Humphrey’s ideological stance was frozen in the past. It is to the past, specifically the 1940s and 1950s, that we must first turn to see the fracture between McGovern and Humphrey foreshadowed. In searching for sources of this...