"The Politics of Joy": John Bartlow Martin and Hubert Humphrey's 1968 Presidential Campaign

In late August 1968 John Bartlow Martin, a former Indiana newspaperman, freelance writer for national magazines, and speechwriter for a number of Democratic presidential candidates for the previous sixteen years, was walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago with a friend. Martin, who lived in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, was in the city for the Democratic National Convention at the International Amphitheater.

Martin came across a limousine stalled in a traffic jam near the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Inside was Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who stuck his head out of the window and called out to him. “We shook hands,” Martin recalled, “and he said, grinning but his jaw thrust out at the same time . . . ‘I’m going to get it [the presidential nomination] and I want you to help me in the fall.’”

At first, Martin demurred, responding to Humphrey with, “We’ll see how this one comes out,” meaning the convention. Martin had known the vice president since the 1950s and had appreciated Humphrey’s support for him when he had been unjustly attacked in Congress as a communist sympathizer during his service as President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic. 

With Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination after winning the California primary, Martin, who had been an invaluable part of the Kennedy campaign, especially here in Indiana, believed he was through with politics for good. His revulsion at the possibility of the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, sitting in the Oval Office, however, galvanized him into action. He put aside his writing projects and joined Humphrey’s campaign staff as a speechwriter. Martin said he would only be able to live with himself during the next four years if he knew he had “done everything possible” to prevent Nixon from winning the election.

To cope with his grief over Robert Kennedy’s death, Martin, in late June, had retreated to a place that had been for him for several years a place of comfort and solace—the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He had tried to start again on a project he had been working on before he joined Kennedy’s campaign—a biography of Illinois governor and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, the person responsible for getting Martin involved in politics by serving on his speechwriting staff for his 1952 race against Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Martin found, however, that he could not concentrate on his manuscript, feeling nothing but “bleak despair.” After all, the only three politicians he had ever cared about—Stevenson and the Kennedy brothers—were dead. “There is a point in working for the principles of Robert Kennedy,” said Martin, “but no Robert Kennedy.”

In the days leading up to the Democratic convention, Martin received a request from his old friend from his days with Stevenson, George Ball, that he work directly for the Humphrey campaign. Martin declined the offer, but said in a July 10 letter to Ball that down the road he could do for the vice president what he had done for both Robert and John Kennedy—not writing set speeches, but doing a job he had created, “editorial advance,” which involved “going out ahead of the candidate, talking to local people, then advising him on what issues to discuss and what approach to take to them in each place” via detailed briefing sheets.

Martin also emphasized his role with the campaign’s schedulers to try and “make the schedule fit editorial and political needs rather than be devised arbitrarily by advance men, geographers, and local politicians.” Martin told Ball he thought these activities might be useful to Humphrey, if at all, more in September and October rather than in July. “In the meanwhile,” said Martin, “I gather that he [Humphrey] does have serious problems, not so much in winning the nomination as in getting nominated in such a way as not to lose the election.” He offered to produce memos from time to time leading up to the convention addressing possible problems facing the candidate and what he could do to solve them.

On August 4 Ted Van Dyk, a close assistant to Humphrey and the vice president’s chief executive officer during the upcoming presidential campaign, wrote Martin to say that his offer to write memos was “certainly a welcome one,” and told him to send them directly to him. Van Dyk also hinted at working something out with Martin’s offer for doing editorial advance work for the vice president in the fall campaign. Five days later, Martin crafted a four-page memo to Humphrey, through Van Dyk, offering some of the same advice he had given Robert Kennedy on what he should do after the California primary.

Martin wrote that the vice president seemed too much a creature of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Party machinery and needed to establish his independence without a direct break with the president. To do so, Martin suggested, as he had for Kennedy, a whistlestop railroad trip across the country before the convention, what he called a “whistle-and-listen” journey, staying out of large cities for the most part, and hitting instead small towns and suburbs. “You would not so much speak to the people as listen to them, find out what’s on their minds, what their concerns are, what they think should be done about them,” said Martin. “You should not meet with local political leaders but with private citizens—businessmen, workingmen, farmers, housewives, etc.”

As did many other Democrats who were in Chicago for the convention, Martin could not believe what he saw on the streets of the city he loved, calling the entire proceedings, where Humphrey received the party’s nomination, a disaster for his party. He noted that Johnson had been in many ways an admirable president, and Daley stood as the best mayor Chicago had ever had, but he had become appalled at the two men’s behavior at the convention. “As Daley’s police beat the kids in the streets, and as Johnson’s political operatives smothered the convention, one could only feel that two stubborn old men were destroying any chance the Democratic party had to keep the unspeakable Richard Nixon out of the White House,” said Martin.

On Sunday, September 29, Martin went to Washington to begin his work with the Humphrey campaign. Although at first Martin believed he would be doing the editorial advance work he had pioneered, the situation had changed, and he worked as one of Humphrey’s speechwriters under the administrative leadership of John Stewart, a legislative assistant for the vice president. Adlai Stevenson III had written Martin on Monday, September 23, that he had talked with Humphrey and he had passed along a request that Martin give him “some desperately needed help with speech writing. Ted [Van Dyk] now knows that what Hubert really wants is rhetoric, not advance work.” Stevenson said he felt “terrible” about diverting Martin from his work on his father’s biography, but the situation called for him to do all he could for Humphrey.

To Martin, the vice president’s early campaign speeches sounded “wooden, more like position papers,” not surprising because the writers were not “professional political speech writers; they were issues men, legislative assistants and others from the VP staff.” After he arrived, and the campaign swung into full gear, the speeches got more political. They also got that way because Humphrey had begun to feel more like a candidate instead of the vice president. “He need not give statesmanlike addresses benefitting the high office he held,” said Martin. “He could get out in the gutter and slug . . . like any other candidate.”

Humphrey began becoming his own man again after a September 30 television broadcast from Salt Lake City, Utah, in which he had taken an independent stance from Johnson’s war policies by noting, “As President I would be willing to stop the bombing of the North as an acceptable risk for peace.” Contributions began trickling in and Van Dyk noticed the absence of major heckling during the vice president’s campaign appearances. “It was as if someone had turned off a switch,” he said. Martin watched Humphrey’s speech at the Washington home of his friend, journalist John Steele. “He [Humphrey] did not go as far on Viet Nam as I wished,” Martin recalled, “but he did open the door, I thought, to move away from LBJ a little at a time.”

The enormity of the challenge still ahead, however, hit Humphrey full force at a meeting with his advisers, Martin included, on Friday, October 4, at the vice president’s apartment in Washington. As they discussed the details of a national print advertising campaign, Humphrey interrupted, saying, according to Martin: “What I want to ask you is where the hell is the campaign? I’ve been going around the country, for 15 days, beating my brains out, making speech after speech; and after each somebody in the crowd comes up to me and asks me for some buttons, or bumper stickers, or something, and I say I haven’t got any but I’m sure my local organizer does have—then I turn to him and by God he hasn’t got any either. Now where the hell is the campaign?”

Finally, Humphrey’s campaign director, Larry O’Brien, gave the vice president the news that while the mockups of promotional materials had been prepared, the Democratic Party did not have enough cash or credit to produce them, could not even pay for the fuel for the vice president’s jet. (As of mid-September, the Humphrey campaign had only $200,000 in cash on hand. Humphrey had estimated that he needed $10 million to $15 million to run a proper campaign). The Democratic party also had little chance of raising any substantial contributions because of the public’s perception that Humphrey stood no chance of winning.

Humphrey sat in silence for a moment, Martin noted, before saying, “Well. All right. I can raise money. I’ll go out and make speeches at fund-raising dinners. We’ve got to do it.” As Martin furiously took notes for use in upcoming speeches, the vice president also set out the themes he wanted to emphasize as the campaign moved forward. Humphrey said, “Only three things matter. Number One, who can you trust? Number Two, who can get peace? Number Three, who can hold this country together?” Humphrey added that his opponent’s greatest weakness was that he was untrustworthy. “I’m compassionate. I’m not very smart. But I’m not tricky,” Humphrey reminded his advisers. “Nobody ever said that. They’ve said I’m gabby, I talk too much, said I wobble or try to please too many people. But they don’t think I’m a cheat or tricky.”

By the week of October 14 the Humphrey campaign had begun to catch fire as several things happened at once, noted Martin. Humphrey had staked out his own position on Vietnam and had begun to benefit from his underdog status, with Nixon’s campaign seemingly stagnant, stuck on its message of a secret plan to end the war. “Nixon ran a campaign of avoidance—he avoided the issues, he avoided Humphrey, and he avoided the people,” noted O’Brien. “We were never able to get a hand on him.” Martin viewed the election as different from the ones he had previously been involved in. Ordinarily an incumbent defends his record, he said, while his opponent attacks. “In this case the incumbent, HHH, swung to the attack, while his opponent, Nixon, merely talked about the need for new leadership,” Martin said.

As for the third person in the race that year, former Alabama governor George Wallace, the presidential candidate for the American Independent Party, Martin believe that once voters began to start paying attention to the election, sometime after the World Series had ended, Wallace’s support among what he called “blue-collar hillbilly Democrats in the North” would start to erode. “I had never thought Wallace could possibly retain the 21 point vote the polls showed for him in September,” Martin reflected. “I had always thought the unions and the Democratic party would bring those people home.” Although he believed Wallace’s vote percentage would end up being about 9 or 10 percent of the total; it ended up at 13.5 percent.

Martin developed a routine for his time with the Humphrey campaign. In the morning, he traveled with the candidate on his plane. When the plane landed at an airport for a rally, Martin remained onboard to write. “In the evening when we arrived at the overnight stop airport,” he recalled, “I would usually get a car and cut out of the motorcade and go straight to the overnight hotel to write.

While campaigning in Ohio, Martin secured a car and a driver at the first stop and had him take him to the town scheduled for the last appearance of the day, sometimes writing as the car sped on. Once he arrived at his destination, Martin would “hole up in a motel to work.” He usually saw the candidate “most often and at the greatest length while we were airborne together between stops; thought I sometimes saw him at night in his hotel room.”

Unlike Adlai Stevenson, who always wanted something new from his speechwriters for every appearance, Humphrey did not object to delivering the same speech twice, said Martin. The vice president always requested a set text when he made a speech. “But, except when he had TV or radio time, he deviated widely from it,” Martin said. “He would take a 20-minute speech and talk for a full hour. . . . He would take a well-structured carefully phrased speech and butcher it, rambling on and on.” Humphrey’s ad-libbing habit proved to be “very unreliable,” Martin added, as sometimes he was “very effective, more often than not a bore. He just talked too damn much. I told him so, so did everybody else; but it did not good.”

As Election Day neared, Martin believed that Humphrey had closed the gap on Nixon, helped in no small part by last-minute, vital financial and logistical support from organized labor. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations registered 4.6 million voters, distributed 115 million pieces of campaign literature, and spent millions of dollars aimed at stopping traditional Democrats from bolting the party for Wallace.

Before returning to Minnesota, where Humphrey would cast his ballot at a rural polling place near Waverly, Martin accomplished his final task for the campaign—writing three possible statements for election night, one if Humphrey won, another if he lost, and a third if the election were thrown into the House of Representatives. “The last was the hardest,” Martin recalled, as he pondered what Nixon and Wallace might do if no candidate won a clear-cut victory.

A few days earlier on the campaign plane, Martin had cornered Humphrey and said to him: “I want to say this before the election. Win lose or draw you’ve run a good campaign, an honorable campaign. You’ve said nothing you’ll ever regret, and this is important for you and the country. And you’ve kept the liberal cause alive.”

As voting results started to trickle in on Tuesday, November 5, Martin, watching the returns at the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis, believed his candidate just might pull off the impossible when voting in New York and Michigan looked good for Humphrey (he went on to win both states). The vice president’s victory in Pennsylvania had Van Dyk believing that the Democrats could defeat Nixon. “But then it hung. And hung,” Martin recalled. “I think I went to bed around 3 or 4 a.m., with California, Illinois, and Ohio still out.” Nixon won all three of those states and squeaked into office, winning 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for Wallace. The Republican candidate enjoyed a substantial triumph in the Electoral College, with 301 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace.

Although some Democrats believed that if the race had lasted another week Humphrey might have managed to pull off the upset, Martin disagreed. In his opinion, the vice president’s campaign reached its peak on Election Day and Humphrey would have lost votes in another week. “Where we needed the time was on the other end, at the start,” he said. The Republicans had their convention earlier than the Democrats, giving them a few weeks head start. The late August date had been set earlier, when Johnson was still a viable candidate, so the Democrats could celebrate the president’s sixtieth birthday on August 27. If the Chicago convention had not torn the party to pieces, Humphrey might well have been able to raise the money he needed—Martin claimed that $10 million in September would have swung the presidential election to the Democrats.

Humphrey’s spirited effort did make the 1968 presidential election far closer than anyone would have thought possible when the campaign began on Labor Day. Although frustrated and upset by the final outcome, Martin was not sorry he had spent so much of his time with the campaigns both Robert Kennedy and Humphrey. “I know I did everything I could in both,” he said. “Not enough; but all I could.”