I'm a Lutheran Baptist, too!

In his book entitled Old Faces of 1976, journalist Richard Reeves wrote --

------------------------[excerpt]---------- I am one of those Americans who can measure his entire adult life by one continuous event:  Hubert H. Humphrey running.  My agony of watching the long distance runner began with my first vote in 1960 when the senator from Minnesota was running against John Kennedy in the Democratic primaries; then came the run for vice president with Lyndon Johnson in 1964, the race against Richard Nixon in 1968, and the challenge to George McGovern in the 1972 primaries. 

My whole life flashes before my eyes when I think of Humphrey -- the thing that hits me first is that as my hair started turning grey, Hubert's was getting darker.

...The happy warrior -- "The Politics of Joy" was his 1968 rallying cry -- seemed ready to try it again in 1976.  An awful lot of people -- maybe it was just my tired generation -- reacted by saying "Ohhhhhh!" as if that were his middle name, Hubert Groan Humphrey!  But you had to take him, The Great Seal of American Politics, seriously.  And you had to like him -- after all, he's the same religion we are.

No matter what your religion is, it's Hubert's.  A. M. Keith, a Minnesota politician, used to tell a story about traveling the state with Humphrey, who was, a long time ago, mayor of Minneapolis.  Each time he met someone, Humphrey would ask about their family, then about their religion.  The first person said, "I'm a Lutheran," and Humphrey happily replied, "I'm a Lutheran, too."  If someone said, "I'm a Baptist," so was Humphrey.  Or a Methodist, or an Episcopalian.  Humphrey would always say, "Great!  So am I.   Glad to meet another."

Finally, Keith pulled aside Humphrey, who happens to be a Congregationalist, and said, "You can't do that.  You can't tell everybody you belong to their church."  Humphrey was bewildered:  "Why not?  I'm a good Christian."----------------- [end excerpt]
{Old Faces of 1976, by Richard Reeves.
Copyright 1976.  Harper & Row, Publishers.
New York, Hagerstown, San
Francisco, London}

= = = = = = = = = = =
Old Faces states on its cover:  "A few thousand fairly well-chosen words on Jerry Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Teddy Kennedy, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Ronald Reagan, Ed Muskie, Scoop Jackson, George McGovern, Hugh Carey, Abe Beame, Jack Javits, Jerry Brown..." etc.

There was one election year when someone (think it was Johnny Carson) joked that the Democrats hadn't learned that a democracy is a system where everybody votes,
not where
everybody
runs,

and I think 1976 might have been it.

----------more excerpts, same source:

-------------------------Ted Kennedy...manipulating the public attention that comes with his name to push his favored interests -- national health care; draft, tax, and campaign finance reform; world refugee problems; and the eighteen-year-old vote, which became law because his staff figured out a way to do it without a constitutional amendment.

..."They must have talked good sense around his kitchen table" is Kennedy's highest compliment about another political man....

Scoop Jackson would be just about a sure thing in 1976 if he didn't have to run.  He is the Institutional Candidate for President; he could be the candidate of the Congress, big labor, the military-industrial complex, Protestant morality, Jewish money, and Rotary Clubs.  He might even end up as the candidate of...anti-war Democrats who were cursing him only a few years ago....

"I regard the Soviet Union," Jackson has said, "as an opportunistic hotel burglar who walks down the corridors trying all the door handles to see which door is open."

Then Scoop Jackson appointed himself America's house detective. 

The senator traces his obsession with the Russians to December, 1945, when he was a 33-year-old congressman visiting Norway for the first time....The Norwegians were trying diplomatically but a little desperately to get rid of a couple of thousand Russian troops that had fought the Germans in northern Norway.  "They had a hell of a time getting the Russians out and I started thinking," Jackson remembers now.  Like hotel burglars the Russians hung around Norway for almost a year, jiggling doorknobs.

..."A stubborn people," he says of his Norwegian forebears.  "They don't care whether other people think they're right."
...The Argus, a weekly newspaper in Seattle, posed the Jackson dilemma in an editorial a couple of years ago:  "We don't know whether to applaud Jackson's consistency or condemn his stubbornness."-------------- [end excerpts, Old Faces of 1976]

==================
As we go forward into a new year -- 2013 -- I find myself most interested in looking back, and studying / analyzing what happened before, to try to see why we are "where we're at" now.  To get some understanding and perspective, rather than feeling self rudely repetitively battered by quote-end-quote "news." 

Feel like:  "Gimme - my - history!!!"

In Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960, Robert Dallek refers, in his Foreword, to --

"...Arnold Toynbee's observation that the historian trying to understand the present is like the man with his nose pressed against the mirror trying to see his whole body."

...maybe That's why I want it.

-30-