New Book Review: Humphrey and Me

Title: Humphrey and Me 

Author: Stuart H. Brody

Date: 2023

Publisher: Santa Monica Press

ISBN: 978-1-59580-766-3

Quote: "EVENTS IN THIS NOVEL were drawn from my real-life relationship with Hubert Humphrey or otherwise documented by credible historical accounts. Certain events, dialogue, and characters were fictionalized in service of the story, but might well have occurred as depicted."

In real life Stuart Brody was a student volunteer with Hubert Humphrey's campaigns. He still maintains that "Hubert Humphrey was an eminently good man" today. He wrote this novel, which has an authentic 1960s romance in it too, as a study of the role of hero worship, real fathers and ideal fathers and father-figures, in the life of a young man. The fictional Ray Elias has some conflicts with his real father, who dies first, and some with his father-substitute Hubert Humphrey, for whom he works and whom, of course, he also outlives. 

I think the novel shows, especially in chapters told from the fictional vice-president's point of view, that Brody is still projecting a lot of his feelings for his father onto the memory of Vice-President Humphrey. The question I would most like to ask the author is, "So, did the sitting Vice-President ever actually visit you in your dorm room, or is that the part you only wished had happened?" 

President Lyndon Johnson was...shall we say a very polarizing man? I find him utterly repulsive, but my husband, whose memories of his career were clearer, said "But he was a charmer. I can't say why, but people did seem to like him." Since I was just learning to read during the Johnson Administration, and my husband was an undergraduate at McGill, I have to give some value to his insights. Certainly the image of LBJ and his relationships with Humphrey, and other people, found in this book was a widespread one--thanks in part to Stuart Brody! The soap opera villain, J.R. Ewing, was also based largely on tis characterization of Johnson. The President who got us into Vietnam was hated in the way President Trump was hated. Like Trump, Johnson gave the nation a follow-up administration of unbelievable blunders--including allowing the price of rice to exceed the common man's ability to pay!--because some people would have voted for a dog if the other major party had nominated a dog to run against that awful person. 

Anyway, it's historical fiction about the lives of the non-voting but politically active students of the 1960s. A man would be better qualified to judge how well it's written. If you are a baby-boomer who wants a good long nostalgia trip, or a younger reader who wants to know what older people may be comparing you to when they say your generation is clueless and apathetic, you will want to read this book.

For others, it may be comforting to remember how endangered our civilization seemed to be during the Johnson Administration. That evil passed. So also may this.