The Vice-Presidency: Available for Foreign Service

One of the triumphs of Hubert Humphrey's Senate career was his 81-hour interview with Nikita Khrushchev in 1958. As Vice President, he would like nothing better than to repeat such for eign policy triumphs, but some frustration has already set in.

The election results were scarcely in before a rumor flew that Humphrey was about to be dispatched to Europe to mend NATO fences and to talk with Charles de Gaulle. Nothing has come of that. Next came a rumor that Humphrey would visit India and Pakistan and help patch up their differences.

Nothing has come of that either.

Though they may respect his abilities, State Department officials find un settling the idea of talkative Hubert becoming a foreign policy force. In deed, the story making the rounds of the department is that Secretary Dean Rusk wrote a letter congratulating Humphrey on his election, but suggesting that he limit his foreign policy activities to ribbon-snipping ceremonies and the like; an aide persuaded Rusk to delete the suggestion from the letter and send a more tactful oral message.

Humphrey has suffered other disappointments. He had been tentatively selected as head of the U.S. delegation to the inauguration of Mexican President-elect Gustavo Diaz Ordaz this month. But Senator Mike Mansfield complained that, as the President's legislative leader, he needed the assignment to demonstrate his high standing with the Administration. That made sense to Johnson; he canceled Humphrey's appointment and put Mansfield in his place.

But Humphrey's foreign policy interests are not easily discouraged. After a one-day visit to Huron, S.D., to see his invalid mother and drop into his brother's drugstore (where he collected, as Brother Ralph put it, "enough bathroom supplies for six months"), Humphrey last week flew into Manhattan for conferences with Ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson and lunch with members of the Security Council. One evening Humphrey and his wife Muriel saw Robert Preston in Ben Franklin in Paris, a musical show about the diplomatic old American who charmed the French into helping the U.S. in the infancy of its independence.