The Vice-Presidency: Hubert's Holiday

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Just before Vice President-elect Hubert Humphrey left for his post-election vacation in the Virgin Islands, he taped a television interview during which he discussed the exhausting length of the U.S. presidential race. "What we really find ourselves doing with these long, extended campaigns of two and three months is replaying old material," said Hubert. "Therefore I think that you tend to become tired, the public becomes a little tired."

But even on vacation, Hubert acted as if he wouldn't really mind if the campaign went on twelve months a year. His Caribair plane had barely set down at St. Thomas Island's airport when Humphrey burst past his Secret Service guards and began grabbing hands in the enthusiastic crowd. He made a speech, then went with his family to Laurance Rockefeller's beach house at Cancel Bay Plantation, a resort on St. John Island. There, he changed into shorts, sports shirt and straw hat.

He looked enormously relaxed, but he still couldn't quite turn off the campaign juices. During a shopping trip to Charlotte Amalie, he bought a can of salted nuts, a tax-free wrist watch—and strode up and down the streets all but searching for more hands to shake. He went deep-sea fishing, boated a 6-ft. 6-in. sailfish, posed afterward for bare-chested photographs with his son Bob. 20. To prove "his prowess, Hubert proudly flexed his biceps too.

Thus, as tired of campaigning as he —and the public—might have been, Hubert on a holiday turned out to be little different from Hubert on the hustings.