The Bright Spirit

(See Cover)

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.