THE CAMPAIGN: The Liberal Flame

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Milwaukee was muffled in the stillness of a 14-in. snowfall when the Hiawatha slid into the Milwaukee Road Depot one morning last week. In the parlor car someone roused the Senator from the exhausted sleep that had seized him as soon as he had boarded the train in Chicago one hour and 15 minutes earlier. Groggily, he shrugged into his overcoat, smiled wanly while his wife scolded him for having left his galoshes behind. Then, spotting a cluster of photographers on the platform outside, his eyes took on a ballpoint gleam, and he headed for the vestibule with a big hello-everybody smile on his face. On the train steps he paused, scooped up a snowball and threw it at the photographers. Hubert Horatio Humphrey, 48, was off and running as only he can run, down the tortuous course of the 1960 presidential primary elections. And he was in crucial Wisconsin, where the voters next April 5 will rule upon his race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Humphrey pace would have put a less eupeptic man in the hospital. In the previous four days he had flown from Washington to New York to Ketchikan, Alaska, and back to Seattle, Chicago, and then trained into Milwaukee. At every stop there were speeches, dinners, press conferences, strategy meetings. He was almost always in motion (in Ketchikan, it included dancing with the local ladies). In the four days sleep was something to be snatched on planes and trains, fatigue was countered with vitamin pills and the sheer momentum of Hubert Humphrey's astonishing vitality. At times the strain showed on Humphrey's face, but energy invariably won the day. After a quick shower and a change in Milwaukee's Pfister Hotel, he was refreshed and ready to go again.

"Madison Square Garden." At General Electric's X-ray division, he lunched with company officials. When the 3:30 afternoon whistle blew at the giant International Harvester plant, Humphrey was waiting at the gate to greet the workers and shake scores of hands as the men headed for home. Hurrying back across town in the dusk, he stopped off at a press conference to explain his candidacy ("The Democrats need someone to meet Nixon head on"), then paused in his hotel room long enough to mull over the script of the address he was to make on television that night. Later, he slipped upstairs to join 40 of his top campaign workers, who were just sitting down to dinner. Humphrey had no time to eat, left his followers with a fast pep talk. "Wisconsin, as you know, has been selected by the communications media as the battleground," he said. "This is the Madison Square Garden of politics."

In a police car Humphrey whizzed to the television studio for his speech—the opening round of his official Wisconsin campaign. As he talked, he made clear his special role in the 1960 campaign: of all the leading candidates and contenders, he is the only one unashamedly setting himself out in the fine old-fashioned role of the poor boy* who values above mother's milk the purest, hundred-proof liberalism, bottled 25 years ago in the bond of the New Deal. Says he: "Liberals are waiting for a leader—one who stands out from the rest. My job is to go to the convention keeping my flame alive."