True Believer

"The defining moment of Hubert Humphrey‘s life occurred on the evening of August 29, 1968, as he rose to accept the nomination as Democratic candidate for president at the International Amphitheater in Chicago. As Humphrey recited what he hoped would be healing verses from St. Francis--"where there is hate, let me sow love"--a contingent of National Guardsman began firing tear gas at thousands of demonstrators outside. "The whole world is watching," the kids chanted--and alas for Humphrey, it was true. For years he had been revered as the foremost champion for racial justice in the U.S. Senate after forcing a 1948 vote committing the Democratic party to support for civil rights. But accepting the job of Vice President to Lyndon Johnson made Humphrey a political captive to the pro-war establishment. His shattering loss in the presidential election of 1968 exposed how weak the party of FDR and the New Deal had become. Cutting against conventional wisdom that remembers Hubert Humphrey as a political casualty of the upheavals of the 1960s, veteran journalist and historian James Traub depicts Humphrey as a political warrior who spent his career fighting for the great liberal causes of his day--civil rights above all, but also anti-poverty programs, public education and the Peace Corps. He also offers a new understanding of the great turning point in Humphrey‘s trajectory--the 1968 Presidential election was lost not because the hippies and mainstream parted ways, but because the white working class abandoned the New Deal coalition for a resurgent conservativism. It was an epochal political shift that Humphrey saw clearly. In his final political act, Humphrey returned to the Senate and passed an act to guarantee full employment for American workers, showing a path forward that today‘s Democratic party is only just beginning to embrace. This book elegantly presents the definitive life story of liberalism‘s most dedicated defender, and most public and tragic sacrifice. Traub‘s portrait of Hubert Humphrey reveals not only one man‘s rise and fall but the possibility of restoring the liberal dream of social democracy"--