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This is the fifth installment of our NHPRC funded project to digitize Hubert H. Humphrey's speech texts. This month we focus on 1961-1963, the Kennedy administration. These three short years witnessed the establishment of the Peace Corps; the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis; increased United States involvement in the communist-controlled portions of Europe, Asia and the Americas; nuclear arms limitations; civil rights activism; increasing mental health awareness; and the assassination of President Kennedy.

On January 20, 1961 John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural presidential address. "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" he challenged America. Hubert Humphrey described the time in his autobiography:

There was simply a new step, a new cadence, to American life from the minute Kennedy gave his inaugural address. The whole country seemed to have awakened from the dormancy of the Eisenhower years, and the White House and the presidency served as a foundation of inspiration and a source of national revival (The Education of a Public Man, 1976, p. 177).

Humphrey was challenged by the new administration to become majority whip of the Senate and described the next four years as being: "one of the most productive periods of my senatorial life" (p. 179).

President Kennedy took Humphrey's advice on many things. On March 5, 1961 President Kennedy officially established the Peace Corps. In this introduction to the WTTG program Prospects of Mankind, Eleanor Roosevelt asked the President to introduce the topic. The President gave credit to Humphrey and others for creating the discussion that got him interested in promoting the program.

When asked to describe his job to a student, Humphrey used his weekly radio address in July of 1963 to tell his Minnesota constituents what kind of Senator he was.

I am not the type of Senator who specializes in a few, particular subjects, and then votes a 'party line' on all other issues. For me the responsibility to understand fully the issues involved applies to every vote and every decision I must make (p. 2).

He described the leadership involved in his position and the opportunity it afforded to create progress through programs that would strengthen America. He cited the Food for Peace program, the Peace Corps and the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as three examples of progress, all accomplished during the Kennedy administration.

Kennedy did not always ask Humphrey for advice, however, and that frustrated the Senator. In this speech on April 11, 1961 to the National Conference on World Disarmament and Development in Washington D.C. Humphrey said that "there is a new tone in American foreign policy. The quiet diplomacy of the new Administration is not designed to win a war of words. Its purpose is to attain peace with justice and to extend freedom and social progress throughout the world." President Kennedy, however, had already authorized the Bay of Pigs invasion in February of that year and within a week of Humphrey giving this speech Cuban airfields were bombed by U.S. forces and the beach invasion had begun.

On May 16, 1961 Humphrey gave this speech to the National Association of Social Workers in Minneapolis telling them that poverty, illiteracy, disease and hopelessness cause countries to turn to communism, not the strength of leaders like Castro and Khrushchev. In June of 1961, however, Kennedy held a summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna that seemed to prove that the Soviet leader was indeed a more powerful adversary than Kennedy had anticipated. Humphrey later speculated in his autobiography that arrogant miscalculation on Kennedy's part could have contributed to the Cuban missile crisis in October of that year and "wondered why some of us--Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, or I, for example--had not been asked for our views of Khrushchev and how he operated, since all of us had spent time with him" (The Education of a Public Man, p. 183).

On the last day of Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev an NBC radio program was aired. The host and guests speculated on which international topics were being discussed by the two powerful leaders. Speculation centered on the issues of communism in Southeast Asia, East Germany and Berlin, Cuba and Latin America and disarmament.

Calling Humphrey "long the most articulate American spokesman on disarmament" Chet Huntley questioned him about whether disarmament was "just a long-range dream for humanity" (pp. 24-28). Humphrey replied that it was a necessary dream, but maintained that it would require hard work and painful negotiations and must include international cooperation.

Just two years later in August of 1963, another NBC program was aired on television. Humphrey was able to tell the audience that he was in Moscow the previous Thursday with President Kennedy as representatives from United States, United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signed a treaty banning certain types of nuclear weapons testing. Humphrey quoted the President saying that this treaty was "a first step toward limiting the nuclear arms race" (p. 2).

While Humphrey was promoting disarmament abroad, important issues were also escalating at home. The rising crescendo of the civil rights movement was felt in places like Oxford, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama. Kennedy, while reluctant to propose civil rights legislation his first two years in office, was now persuaded to send a bill to Congress by June of 1963. On August 28 over 200,000 people marched on Washington, bringing the importance of civil rights to the Capitol. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous "I have a dream" speech to a crowd that included Humphrey. As Humphrey recalled that day in his autobiography:

If I had to pick one day in my public life when I was most encouraged that democracy could work, when my spirit soared on the wings of the American dream of social justice for everyone, it was that day.

That day and that event did more to bring the truth of human rights and civil rights to the attention of the entire nation than anything that had happened in all of our history (pp. 201-202).

It was with great shock that Humphrey learned that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas on November 22, the day after Humphrey had given this speech to the National Association for Mental Health. Humphrey and Kennedy had both worked diligently for new mental health legislation. Both had personal experience in their own families. The night Humphrey had been re-elected to his current Senate term was also the night he and his wife became grandparents for the first time. They learned the next day that their granddaughter was born with Down's syndrome. Kennedy’s younger sister Rosemary had experienced mental disabilities that eventually led to institutionalization. In a horrible coincidence, the man who assassinated the President less than a month after the Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act had passed also lived with mental health issues.

Humphrey was attending a luncheon at the Chilean Embassy with his wife the day the President died. In this NBC interview the next day Humphrey described the moment:

I stood alone in a hallway of the Embassy, and I am not ashamed to say that I just couldn't contain myself, I broke down and sobbed. Because it seemed like a bit of life had gone out of me. And then to try to tell others to come to the table and to tell the guests and the host that we had lost our President was very, very difficult (p. 2).

Less than an hour later Humphrey was in the White House. As he entered the West Wing he began worrying about his friend Lyndon Johnson who was now President. "Strong man that he was, I feared he might be shaken by the trauma of the day, a day designed to smooth over local Texas political problems, a day that had exploded into a national disaster" (The Education of a Public Man, p. 192). It took almost a year without a vice president for the administration to adjust and carry on after the assassination, but by the next November Humphrey and Johnson had both been elected to the highest two offices in the country and the Kennedy agenda continued to be one of their highest priorities.

These speech texts, as well as all of Humphrey's speeches from 1941-1963 are linked to the inventory of his Speech Text Files. More of Humphrey's speeches will be made available each month throughout this project. Look for the year 1964 in February!

This project was awarded the support of a $46,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) administered by the National Archives.

Learn more about how the NHPRC helps preserve records of enduring national historical value and promotes their public access and interpretation through archival and documentary programs.