Vice President Hubert Horatio Hum phrey had never before been known to
lapse for long into total silence. Yet throughout 1965 he was
unwontedly and unhappily subdued in the shadow of a center-stage
President. Not until January did Humphrey finally find an effectual and
demanding outlet for his energies. It was then, at Lyndon Johnson's
behest, that the Vice President publicly helped shoulder the increasing
burdens of the war in Viet Nam.Since then, Humphrey has become the Administration's most articulate and
indefatigable exponent of U.S. Asian policy. From New Delhi to New
Zealand to New York, before sexagenarian Senators and teen-age Thais,
the pink-cheeked, peripatetic Vice President has rehearsed America's
aims and achievements in Viet Nam with all the evangelical fervor he
once brought to such causes as civil rights and dis armament.Seldom have man and mission been better mated. Humphrey may not, as the
President once boasted, be the world's “greatest coordinator of mind
and tongue.” He is nonetheless a man of artesian eloquence and visceral
conviction, of bright spirit—which his first name literally means. For
the President's purposes, moreover, Humphrey's fame as a liberal
crusader has assured him a respectful hearing from foreign governments
and segments of American society that had discredited the
Administration's motives in Viet Nam. As for Humphrey, he has risen to
the challenge with all the old gusto and with new-found gravity and
grace.Asian Sputnik. “Communism in Asia,” he told a union convention in
Washington last week, “is not a subject of academic discussion. It is a
matter of survival. Viet Nam today is as close to the U.S. as London
was in 1940.” At Georgetown University next day, he said: “Our problem
today in Asia is that we are abysmally ignorant of that part of the
world. Out of the tragedy of war comes an impetus and incentive for
knowledge.” On a flying trip to Manhattan, he alighted in the penthouse
of the Carlyle Hotel and, pounding the arms of John F. Kennedy's old
rocking chair, mused aloud: “The war is doing for us what the Sputnik
did in the space field. It's forcing us to come to grips with Asia.”For an audience of high school and college editors in New York, the Vice
President answered the rote objection that the Saigon government is
unstable, undemocratic and unpopular. “For many centuries,” explained
Old Teacher Humphrey, “the Vietnamese people lived under mandarin rule.
Then came generations of colonial domination followed by 25 years of
almost constant warfare. This is stony soil for democracy to grow in.”
He noted by contrast that there had been little protest from liberals
over U.S. support for Greece during its struggle against Communist
insurgency in the late 1940s. Yet, he pointed out, Athens' governmental
gyrations in that time exceeded even Saigon's changes of regime.
