AUGUST 29, 1968 Democrats' Energetic Leader Hubert Horatio Humphrey Special to The New York Times CHICAGO, Thursday, Aug. 29 — Three months ago the men around Hubert Horatio Humphrey looked at 1968 with satisfying perspective. "He is a man whose time has come," they told each other with nods of approval. Today, at the age of 57, he is at last his party's nominee for President, and it seems that indeed his time has come. But behind the bright smiles in the news pictures there is, in the Humphrey entourage, a tone of soberness that approaches resignation. It is not just that he faces the greatest odds in 20 years against retaining the White House for his party, thanks to circumstances at home and abroad. Beyond the harshness of the political landscape is an air of portent that is largely personal. It springs from the person of the candidate, from a knowledge, painfully acquired, that the world does not end when Hubert Humphrey loses. He expressed this knowledge briefly one night last spring, a few days before he announced, on April 27, that he would enter the race for the nomination. He was in an airplane somewhere over the upper South. He had been talking brightly of the political year. Of the joy of being once more in the arena, of how he and Mrs. Humphrey had made up their minds to have one final try for the top prize. "She knew she would never really have any more private life," he said. Mrs. Humphrey sat sewing a few feet away. But there are other compensations," he went on. He turned from his wife to look for a moment out the darkened window. Then he turned back to the interviewer and smiled and said, "I had the feeling that if I did run and didn't get the nomination, there was still time for a lot of good fun." A Calmer Man Now Hubert Humphrey is a calmer man than he once was. He still has energy and hope, and he still wants very much to be President. But he has also constructed a protective shell around whatever vital part it is that makes a man care to the point of recklessness and then plunges him into agony when he fails. Now that an accident of history has placed him in striking distance of the Presidency, he must decide how much of his harnessed hope he can set free, how much of his ego he can afford to commit to the rigors of so hurtful a process as an American Presidential election. Hope was probably the main part of the Humphrey political philosophy when he came out of the remote Midwest 20 years ago. "Who could have guessed," he asks his friends sometimes, "that the son of a small-town druggist from the plains would end up as Vice President of the United States?" The Protestant ethic was fully in charge where he came from, teaching that with hard work and a little luck anybody could make it. That must have seemed reasonable to the son of Hubert Horatio Humphrey Sr. and Christine Sannes. The Humphreys had four children. Hubert was born May 27, 1911, in an apartment over his father's drugstore in Wallace, S. D. Young Hubert grew up in nearby Doland, S. D., and there the Humphreys were "somebody." Harsh Early Life Mr. Humphrey likes to talk now of the harshness of his early life during the Depression years. Without quite saying it, he suggests that he rose out of poverty. It is true the family suffered reverses during the Depression. But probably the essential fact of his early years is that he grew up on the right side of the tracks, with all the self-respect that comes of knowing that one's standing is secure. His father was one of the half-dozen men in Doland who made the town's important decisions. And through the teachings of his parents and the simple act of coming to adulthood in a small, Protestant town in middle America, he came to the notion that with hard work and luck, everything around a man could be made better. Mr. Humphrey continues to believe devoutly in the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of life. He has a compulsion for order. It reveals itself in large ways and small. He has been known to spend all day in the Government trying to arrange the affairs of mankind, then go home at night and scrub the kitchen walls. At his home in Waverly, Minn., he can be found frequently cleaning the garage. The same quality appears in his public life. He used to be accused quite regularly of being a socialist, or of being soft on Communism. But it is not Marxism that drives him but a compulsion to set things straight. Actually he appears to have been frightened of Marxism most of his life. One of his earliest political battles in Minneapolis, where he was elected Mayor in 1945 at the age of 34, was over Communist influence in his political party. Mr. Humphrey's early rise in Minneapolis politics had been helped along by a variety of radicals. But when he and his friends put together a merger of the Democratic and the Farmer-Labor parties in 1944, they began to fear that Communists were about to take control. They systematically purged the Communists from the party, along with an undetermined number of other radicals who were suspected of being sympathetic to the Communists. Mr. Humphrey first moved to Minnesota to attend the University of Minnesota, after graduating from Doland High School. The Depression forced him out, and he returned to his father's drugstore — then in Huron, S. D. — and married Muriel Fay Buck. He returned to the university six years later and, while both he and his wife worked, he earned his bachelor's degree. The first of their four children was born in Minneapolis during this period. After taking a master's degree in political science at Louisiana State University — where he met, among others, Russell B. Long, son of Huey — he returned to Minnesota and shortly afterward entered politics. His Mark on Legislation His friends around the university tended to be liberal, New Deal Democrats. He led a group of them to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and there made a speech so strongly urging an effective civil rights plank that he became nationally famous. He was elected to the Senate that year. Most of his Senate career is well known. With his New Deal impulse for reforming some of the nation's more decrepit institutions and making them work, he eventually put his brand on legislation for urban renewal, Federal aid to education, the Peace Corps, Food for Peace, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and almost every civil rights act passed during his 16 years in the Senate. He also continued to be a hard-line anti-Communist, as is reflected in his sponsorship in 1954 of legislation outlawing the Communist party and in his support of the cold war policy of containing Communism abroad. A Bid From Johnson In 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to be his running mate. Mr. Johnson had made it clear that he wanted a Vice President who would be an "instrument" of the executive branch. Mr. Humphrey not only has trained himself to become President if the need should arise — for example, by sitting as a member of the National Security Council — but he also has acted as Mr. Johnson's agent. He has worked with Mayors on urban problems and with civil rights leaders on racial problems. He has been the Administration's traveling salesman trying to explain the Vietnam war to the people. He has made more than 525 speeches outside the capital. He has visited 240 cities in all 50 states and has traveled to 35 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. He will travel on anything: a Boeing 727 jet, his own rebuilt Model T Ford, a horse at the LBJ Ranch or a limousine careering through the freeways of Los Angeles. Immersing himself in the work of President Johnson has not helped Mr. Humphrey's reputation in many quarters. Some believe that four years in the Johnson shadow has impaired Mr. Humphrey's effectiveness as a politician and has even damaged his personality. Many of his friends insist he will assert his own person once again, now that he is the standard-bearer of his party and owes a larger obligation to his own position than to Mr. Johnson's. Others say he will continue in the Johnson shadow, because he will not be able to do otherwise. It may be that Mr. Humphrey has changed during the last four years, as his critics say. But some qualities have remained constant. He is still a sentimentalist. Tears come easily (not always caused by emotion; his eyes sometimes water from a sensitivity to bright lights). He seems to cry as readily out of joy as sadness. One night recently in Washington he wept as he thanked 2,500 contributors to his Presidential campaign. They had given more than $1 million. He laughs as easily as he cries. He is the only one of the three major Democratic candidates who has a reputation for happiness. However, he is not all smile and bubble. He is capable of anger. There are many stories of explosions directed at his staff that make him sound almost Johnsonian in temper. The Issue of Gabbiness Mr. Humphrey's gabbiness may become a full-fledged campaign issue this year. Among people who dislike him, one often hears the criticism: "He talks too much." He does not pretend to be a reflective man. He gets his ideas not from books or contemplation but from conversation, from the endless shaping of thoughts bounced off other people. Mr. Humphrey's speeches tend to run especially long when he is tired or when he is speaking to an indifferent audience. He is reluctant to turn an audience loose without turning it on. In Akron a few months ago he told an aide before he got up to speak that he was tired and would probably talk too long. He did. He spoke for more than an hour, and as he walked away from the yawning audience he said to the aide that he had known he was talking too long but could not find a way to stop. But when he is good, he is very, very good. He so inspired an audience in Minneapolis recently that it gave him a ringing round of applause for reciting the Golden Rule. When he ended the speech with the last line of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, it gave him a standing ovation. Mr. Humphrey's critics on the left — the young, the Negro militants, the poor, the discontented whom he championed so long and fruitfully — contend he became a voice as well as an instrument for President Johnson and ruined himself by trying to justify the Administration's war policy. His problem is to establish, or re-establish, contact with the disaffected minority that seems somehow to have passed him in time. This minority would say that Mr. Humphrey's time has come, all right — but too late. Whether that is so is the question that he will puzzle out in the glare of the nation's vision between now and the election in November. [For more on Humphrey see Times02/08/70].