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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With the Democratic convention in Chicago this week, in a year when Democrats have been divided over a war and the sitting Democratic president was forced to end his reelection bid, people are making comparisons with 1968, when Lyndon Johnson dropped out and anti-war protests outside the Chicago convention of that year were a significant part of the events of that week.

The comparisons only go so far, however, as the politics of the two wars are different, the times are different in other ways, and the general vibe around the nominee is very different now that the convention is underway. With us now is journalist and college professor James Traub, who has published a book this year about that 1968 Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey. It's called True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for a More Just America.

Before we bring James Traub on, I want to play an archive clip from an earlier Democratic convention at which Humphrey helped build his national reputation, not from 1968, but from 1948, when Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis, delivered a history-making speech from the convention stage urging his party to go all in on civil rights.

Hubert Humphrey: My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them, "We are 172 years late."

[cheers]

Hubert Humphrey: To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this. The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

[cheers]

Brian Lehrer: Hubert Humphrey in 1948. We'll play a clip later by way of contrast from 1968 when he was the nominee. Boy, was the context different then. With us now is James Traub, longtime journalist who has published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other places, written eight previous books, and teaches foreign policy and intellectual history at NYU Abu Dhabi, though his permanent home is here in New York. James, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book and welcome back to WNYC.

James Traub: Well, Brian, thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Why in 2024 did you write a book about Hubert Humphrey?

James Traub: Well, actually, because of Donald Trump. It's kind of the answer to everything, isn't it? Ever since Trump was elected in 2016, I realized the thing I hadn't really understood before that this nice word, "liberalism," which I had grown up with, I was born in 1954, everybody was a nice liberal in those days, was profoundly endangered, couldn't be taken for granted. Its future couldn't be taken for granted. Liberal democracy couldn't be taken for granted. A lot of the writing I've done since then is, in some way, on that subject. I wrote about Hubert Humphrey because if you want to understand what this thing was, mid-20th-century American liberalism, also sometimes called "Cold War liberalism," he's the man.

Brian Lehrer: We played that clip from his 1948 convention speech that skips over his early life, but would you start there as a defining moment for Humphrey on the national stage and one of the most memorable speeches, I think it's accurate to say, from any Democratic convention?

James Traub: Yes, people afterwards said the only speech they could think to compare it to was William Jennings Bryan's famous 1896 Cross of Gold speech. That's an astonishingly high standard, but it's right. It's right not only because it was about a great burning moral issue, but because it changed the Democratic Party. Just briefly, to give the background of that speech. Hubert Humphrey, as you said, was the kind of boy mayor of Minneapolis, very admired in Minneapolis, with a growing national reputation, but still not a person whose name most Americans knew.

As a great liberal, he and others thought the time had come to force the Democratic Party, which at that time was controlled, very much controlled by the South, as it had been forever, really, to take a stand on civil rights. There was a plank in the Democratic platform, which, more or less, used the exact same language as the 1944 plank, which said, in very anodyne words, Black people should be treated with the full panoply of rights that all other citizens have. It was very blah, blah, blah.

The South could live with that because it meant nothing. The liberals decided, "No, we have to take this stand." They proposed a minority plank, which would commit the party to anti-lynching legislation, to the desegregation of public facilities, to the creation of a civil rights commission, a whole series of things. Humphrey was the point man for that. He had been sitting with that clip that your listeners just heard.

Humphrey had been sitting in the back of the convention hall listening to the other speakers on the subject, including the Southerners, who basically were defending states' rights. If you look at his manuscript, which I was able to do, you'll see that it was all typed up, double-spaced, so to make it easy to read. Then at the bottom, he started writing things in pencil. The stirring passages that people came to know and that really made Hubert Humphrey a national figure were ones that I think came to him as he sat there in that moment and thought about the immensity of the stakes of that decision or that issue.

After he gave the speech, which is probably the shortest speech he ever gave in his whole life, at nine minutes or so, there was pandemonium in the hall. People were raising their standards and marching around in the way that they did in those days at conventions, and then they took a vote. Incredibly, I don't even think that Humphrey and his allies expected this, they won. At that moment and thenceforward, the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights in America, which, of course, it had not been before.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anybody remember Hubert Humphrey? Anybody want to say anything about Hubert Humphrey? Anybody want to ask journalist and college professor James Traub a question about Hubert Humphrey with his new book just out? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Very relevant conversation during this convention week, both for the 1948 clip that we just heard and the 1968 clip from that contentious convention that we're going to get to. Before we get to 1968, James, you mentioned Humphrey in the context of a certain kind of a certain generation of American liberalism. How would you describe that liberalism in more words? Then I'm going to ask you about where you think it stands today.

James Traub: Okay, so let me say a few things. One is that, really, the fountain head of this modern American liberalism was FDR. Humphrey, who was born in 1911, was probably first shaped actually by that very same William Jennings Bryan, whom we mentioned, the kind of prairie populace of that time. When he was a young man, the Depression hit and he lived through government inaction until along came Roosevelt, who did things, and especially in farm country where Hubert grew up. He did a great deal.

That sense that the government is not a leviathan, which is out to crush individual freedom and private initiative, but a compassionate body, which is there to help people in need, not to create an alternate system to our private system but to make that system work better and to help those people who hadn't succeeded through no fault of their own in that system, that was probably the essence of that modern American liberalism. Then after World War II, it took another turn, though in no way a contradictory one, which is this thing I called "Cold War liberalism."

If you'd asked Hubert what that meant, it wasn't really a word he used, but it was a word commonly in usage, he would have said, "The difference between us Democrats and those conservative Republicans is that we think the way to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union is to prove to people all over the world that our system, our system of democracy, capitalism, and an active government is better, not just for the people who have but for the people who don't have, so that we can say to people all over the world, non-white people, non-well-to-do people, of course, non-American people, our system works better than their system."

Well, how do you prove that? Well, you prove that through things like civil rights. You disprove the claim that the Soviets were making then that the American system depended on having a reserve pool of labor and all these other expressions they used that would imply that people are kept poor on purpose. No, our system can bring justice to even the disenfranchised and the marginalized. For them, these liberal programs were also a way of fighting the great ideological battle of their time.

Brian Lehrer: If we were going to fight communism on the world stage, we had to make the point that progress toward social justice was possible in the United States. Humphrey was one of the people who articulated that. That helped spur the civil rights movement to its successes in the context of the Cold War. How do you see the state of that kind of liberalism today? It's obviously after the Cold War, but it's also what's considered the center-left branch of the modern Democratic Party that gets criticized as not strong enough or not going far enough towards justice from the more progressive wing.

James Traub: It's funny. I've just been having a discussion with friends of mine about these two words, "liberal" and "progressive." Do they have any content anymore? Should we use them? Liberalism to me is a good word even though it doesn't have a very exact definition because we have these traditions. We have this history that we can refer to. You can ask yourself, "What does it mean today?" Joe Biden, who overlapped with Hubert Humphrey in the Senate, is very much a product of that tradition.

As you say, Brian, there are people now who say, "No, that's a word for being tepid. That's a word for not being willing to make drastic-enough change." This word "progressive" has come back into use in recent years as a kind of rebuke to liberalism. Progressives are more willing to upset the applecart. Well, first of all, I think the progressives have actually, in some ways, won parts of this battle.

Joe Biden is a much further-to-the-left figure when it comes to economic policy than he was when he was vice president. Maybe Hubert Humphrey would be too. It's true that liberals by their nature are incrementalists. They have this optimistic notion, which Humphrey very much had, that things will ultimately bend towards justice, to use that phrase that Barack Obama likes so much.

It's true that there was a kind of liberal optimism, which I suppose is hard to sustain nowadays. It's much easier to think, "No, you need a more radical critique if you're ever going to get anything." Liberals recognize that the people of good faith have different views. You have to bring those people along. It won't do any good just to stamp your foot and insist on the absolute truth. Hubert always said it wasn't even that you accept half a loaf.

He once famously said to the civil rights movement after the 1957 civil rights law, which was very, very minor. He said, "You have to be willing to accept a crumb." You're willing to accept that because you think the day will come for the half a loaf and the day will come to the whole loaf. That to me, that aspect of liberalism is attractive and real and very much part of our lives today.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get to 1968 Hubert Humphrey. We're going to get to the relationship between the 1968 Chicago convention during an anti-war movement and this year's Chicago convention during an anti-war movement. I want to stay on 1948 for a minute. We played that clip of Humphrey at the 1948 Democratic Convention as the mayor of Minneapolis, urging his party to adopt a more aggressive stance in favor of civil rights. We have another journalist calling in who's very relevant to this. You probably know who he is, James. It's Samuel Freedman, who also wrote a book about Hubert Humphrey, and I know had a lot to say about that 1948 speech clip. Samuel Freedman, thank you for calling in.

Samuel Freedman: It's great to be with you again, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Are you listening and what are you thinking?

Samuel Freedman: Well, I think that a lot of the conversation obviously with Humphrey hovering over the current convention is about '68, but there are some really important parallels to 1948. If your listeners heard the speech he gave, which was really the speech of his life in 1948, one of the concepts he assailed was states' rights. States' rights was the euphemism that segregationists used for Jim Crow system, basically for defying federal law to set up on a state-by-state basis through the South, a neo-confederacy.

I think that the kind of attack rhetorically Humphrey made on the anti-Democratic nature of states' rights and just the moral inconsistency of having two versions of constitutional rights or their lack within the same country offers a roadmap for the way Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and the rest of the speakers at this year's convention could be talking about states' rights in terms of reproductive rights.

There's been a really dubious argument made by Trump and the Republicans that by returning reproductive rights to the states, that's some kind of moderate position, but it isn't at all because we're talking about states' rights. It's not states having different drinking ages or sales tax rates or anything like that. In this case, it's about a fundamental constitutional right that was ripped away.

Now, that's being put back in states' hands to not only restrict abortion but potentially restrict IVF, restrict mifepristone, use the Comstock Act. I think also it would be a really important point for the Democrats to make at this convention to tie the battle about reproductive rights to what's one of the great American narratives, which is the success of the freedom movement, in which Humphrey's 1948 speech was one of the absolute landmarks.

Brian Lehrer: James, you want to talk to Sam?

James Traub: Well, yes, I hadn't said that that particular connection hadn't occurred to me. I think that's a very interesting point. I guess what Sam is saying is that a woman's agency over her own body is in the great line of civil rights' victories that have been hard won over the last several generations. That's so that if you think about the right to an abortion as a civil right in the same way as the right to equal access to public facilities or schools or so forth was a civil right, then, yes, you would say, "What does it mean to invoke this expression, 'states' rights'?" It means it's a device to deny people what is a fundamental civil right.

Samuel Freedman: Well, I think the parallel is so clear. What the Jim Crow system did was wipe away the rights that had been accorded to African Americans under the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Those amendments weren't revoked. The Supreme Court didn't rule them unconstitutional. In a de facto way, the South operated as if those were no longer the laws of the country, the constitutional rights of the country. Similarly, when Roe v. Wade was struck down, a constitutional right to abortion was taken away after 50 years. Again, there's such a Column-A-to-Column-B comparison here to be made.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. Thank you very much. Samuel Freedman, your book is called Into the Bright Sunshine. Do I have that right?

Samuel Freedman: Yes, Into The Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. As we continue with James Traub, whose book is called True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for a More Just America. We're going to stay on that 1948 speech for at least one more phone call. Mason in Crown Heights, you're on WNYC. Hello, Mason.

Mason: Yes, thanks very much. I certainly don't want to make this sound like I'm taking anything away from Hubert Humphrey in 1940, but I remember reading in the 1950s when he was trying to convince LBJ to be more and more progressive on civil rights. LBJ would get frustrated with him sometimes and say, "Hubert, how many Black folks do you have living in Minneapolis or Minnesota?" I think by that point, he was the statewide rep.

Again, I don't want to take anything away from Humphrey's legacy, but it's like you did on your segment on fracking. If you're from a state where there's no fracking, that's relatively easy for a political figure to say, "Let's ban fracking." Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. Again, I don't want to take anything away from Humphrey's courage. I don't know if your guest had any thoughts on any of that.

Brian Lehrer: James?

James Traub: Well, yes, I do actually. It's a very relevant thing to say because part of Hubert's idealism was that when he ran for mayor of Minneapolis in 1943 and then he won in '45, he made these issues of both anti-Semitism and racism really central. Well, there were no Black votes to be had. Jewish vote was more important, but the Black population of Minneapolis is very small.

That was Hubert's way of saying, "I'm in this as a matter of belief. These are universal principles which we must adhere to even if they're not politically useful for us." Now, LBJ came from a much tougher world. He thought Hubert was one of these hopeless bomb throwers, that was his word, who didn't think about political reality. They just thought about what was right.

Yes, he ridiculed Hubert for this, and yet I think Humphrey, one of the things I say in the book, is a very unusual combination of idealism and pragmatism. God knows he learned a lot about how to be pragmatic from LBJ. I wish LBJ had learned a little bit more about how to be idealistic from Hubert, which God knows he didn't. That was what brought not only Hubert Humphrey but a whole generation of people into politics. That's why the title of my book is True Believer. That was his source of his strength, not his weakness.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to put you on the spot here on the air and ask you how your schedule is for the rest of the hour because we were supposed to run out of time in this segment in about five minutes, but our caller board is so rich and the discussion of the 1948 Hubert Humphrey was so rich. I'd like to spend enough time on the 1968 Hubert Humphrey and the relevance to today of the two Chicago conventions. Are you available till the end of the hour?

James Traub: Brian, I will make that sacrifice. Yes, I'm available to the end.

Brian Lehrer: Then let's take a break right now. When we come back, we're going to play a clip from Hubert Humphrey in 1968 at that contentious convention. George in Manhattan, we see you calling in about where you were in 1968. Happy in Manhattan, we see you calling in about where you were in 1968. Maybe we'll get to some others of you as well as we continue with James Traub, author of the book True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for a More Just America. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with James Traub, author of nine books, including his latest, True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for a More Just America. James Traub, you may know his work from The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, other books that he wrote. He also teaches intellectual history and foreign policy at NYU Abu Dhabi, though he lives permanently here in New York. We were talking about his Hubert Humphrey book in the context of Humphrey's first big national moment at the 1948 Democratic Convention and we played a clip.

In 1968, after Lyndon Johnson dropped out of his reelection bid, the dramatic events of that year, including the assassination of a leading alternative candidate, Robert Kennedy, of course, another Minnesotan senator, Eugene McCarthy, being the real darling of the anti-Vietnam War movement, but Humphrey eventually got the nomination at the 1968 convention. Before we play this clip, why did Humphrey emerge at all after being Johnson's vice president and Johnson having to withdraw over his war policy?

James Traub: Well, as with Kamala Harris, it's the natural thing that a party would do to turn to the number two person. That was both a blessing and a curse for Hubert because the party, the Democratic Party, was so disdained by the party's most activist group, by liberals in the left, because of the war and because of personal hatred towards Johnson, that being seen as the party's candidate-- By the way, we have to remember that at that time, there was still such a thing as bosses. Bosses meant big union leaders. Bosses meant the people who controlled the big urban party mechanisms.

Hubert was the candidate of the bosses. Gene McCarthy, therefore, was the candidate of the people. Bobby Kennedy, before his assassination, in a somewhat different way, was a candidate or let's say a somewhat different group of people as opposed to leaders. Humphrey was never able really to shake this sense that he was the legatee of this diminished and, in some ways, despised party. He was the proxy for Lyndon Johnson. He struggled mightily to separate himself from Johnson in the mind of the public, but Johnson wouldn't let him do it. Johnson basically throttled every effort on Humphrey's part to distinguish himself.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a clip of Humphrey at the '68 convention. If his speech in '48 was an aggressive moral cry for civil rights, in '68, as the nominee, he was forced to be more back on his heels, acknowledging how divided his party was even in nominating him.

Hubert Humphrey: This week, our party has debated the great issues before America in this very hall. Had we not raised these issues, troublesome as they were, we would have ignored the reality of change. Had we just papered over the differences between us with empty platitudes instead of frank, hard debate, we would deserve the contempt of our fellow citizens and the condemnation of history.

[applause]

Hubert Humphrey: Yes, we dared to speak out and we have heard hard and sometimes bitter debate, but I submit that this is the debate and this is the work of a free people, the work of an open convention, and the work of a political party responsive to the needs of this nation.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: "The work of an open convention." Wow, what a time and what a contrast with Humphrey's role in 1948, right, James?

James Traub: Yes, you have to work with what you have. Humphrey was trying to pretend that this weakness was a strength. Nobody wants to have a bitterly contested convention. God knows, people obviously were very worried approaching this one, that this would happen as a result of Israel and Gaza. Maybe it still will. I don't think so. That one was really painful.

It wasn't only this bitter debate that was happening inside the convention, which, by the way, was terribly bitter, above all in Vietnam, but, of course, the bloodshed that was happening outside. When Humphrey's name was put into nomination, this was the climax of the battle between the protesters and the cops. The networks all cut away for a 17-minute tape that they had made of the bloodshed in the streets. They cut away from what was supposed to be this climactic moment of Hubert Humphrey gaining the nomination. It was terribly bitter.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think, even leaving Gaza out of it for the moment, although it may be relevant, that that's why the Democratic Party or one of the reasons that the Democratic Party coalesced so quickly around Kamala Harris when Biden dropped out, there was this other scenario that a lot of people were promoting as good for democracy, good for the party in the long run where Mark Kelly and Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer and Walz and maybe others might be in this mini-primary, maybe even mini-open convention for who would succeed Joe Biden at the top of the ticket? Do you think they look back to 1968 and how it weakened Humphrey ultimately against Richard Nixon as one of the reasons that everybody coalesced?

James Traub: Yes, I don't think so, Brian. That may have been in some people's minds. By the way, I should say that that was what I favored too until it became too late for it to be realistic. By the time Biden stepped aside, there couldn't be any question of doing that. If he had stepped aside a month earlier, maybe you could have. No, I think that the real reason is because in 1968, Richard Nixon was just a run-of-the mill Republican. It was as if they had nominated Mitt Romney.

There was no sense in the country or in the party that the stakes were existential. Democracy was not an issue. Maybe democracy had been an issue in 1964 when Barry Goldwater ran. Johnson, of course, had won a smashing victory against him. America had decisively reaffirmed its democratic bona fides. At that time, a lot of people would have said, "Come on, the Democratic Party is the warmonger party. They're prosecuting this evil war." It was all too easy to say, "What's the big deal about the difference between the two parties?"

Indeed many Democratic liberals said, "If we're going to have a bellicose foreign policy, let it be carried out by Republicans and not by Democrats." This time, I think what stilled all the debate and made every possible challenger subside in the face of Biden's endorsement of Kamala Harris was we cannot afford to lose that sense of personal ambition, cannot possibly be allowed to get in the way when the stakes are perhaps the survival of our democratic way of life. That, I think, is the big issue.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get a couple of 1968 memories in here, oral histories. Happy in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Happy.

Happy: Hi there. I was a volunteer for the Humphrey campaign at 11. I was 11 at that time, but we thought he was the most decent man out there.

Brian Lehrer: Was that only in the general election against Nixon or, as an 11-year-old, were you involved in the earlier months when Eugene McCarthy was in the race as the anti-war candidate even when Robert Kennedy was in the race?

Happy: My folks debated over that and they felt Humphrey was the realist or closest to being the realist. I think Kennedy at first didn't feel that McCarthy was quite broad enough over the rest of the world but good on the war.

Brian Lehrer: Happy, thank you very much. Contrasting memory, I think, from George in Manhattan. George, you're on WNYC. Hello.

George: Hello, Brian. I was a fairly naive 18-year-old college student in 1968. I remember vividly that my friends and I on the night that Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that he would not seek reelection primarily because of his support for the Vietnam War. We were all very hopeful because we too felt like his vice president was a very decent guy and he would end the war. Well, Hubert Humphrey came to our town, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and was making a speech right in the public square.

I was standing in that crowd amidst a huge throng of enthusiastic Democrats. I listened to most of his speech, but then I yelled out at the top of my lungs, "End the war now. Don't wait." A middle-aged woman, who was standing right in front of me and she was obviously a Democrat, thought I was being disrespectful to the vice president. She turned around and slapped me across the face as hard as she could. I nearly fell down. The crowd around her applauded her action. That's how divisive America was.

Brian Lehrer: Great story.

[laughter]

James Traub: People think that life is vehement today. It was a lot more vehement in '68 than it is today.

Brian Lehrer: What is it about Minnesota, by the way? Eugene McCarthy was from Minnesota as the main competitor to Humphrey in '68. Humphrey, of course, was the nominee. Walter Mondale from Minnesota became the vice president and then presidential nominee in 1984. Now, we have Tim Walz. One could add Al Franken just as somebody else who was a senator from Minnesota who wasn't running for president but became extremely prominent, not just because of Saturday Night Live. What is it about Minnesota?

James Traub: Well, before Hubert Humphrey came along, Minnesota didn't have this reputation. Wisconsin did more than Minnesota did. Really, it's Hubert. It's Hubert for several reasons. One is that Minnesota had then and has now this odd thing called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, not the Democratic Party. In Hubert's day, it was this weird amalgam of rather conservative Democratic farmers and extremely left-wing Democratic workers, union workers, miners, and others.

Hubert basically knocked the far left out of the party. It was kind of an early Cold War showdown and made the part into this fit instrument for liberals. He himself was the dominating figure of Minnesota Democratic politics. Really, the next generation of people like Mondale and McCarthy very much grew up under Hubert's shadow and, by the way, so did George McGovern in South Dakota.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, I love that. George McGovern. Oh right.

James Traub: No, McGovern was South Dakota.

Brian Lehrer: State next door.

James Traub: Next-door state and the two of them were very close. You can look today at this kind of lineal descent from Humphrey to Mondale and McCarthy and then to someone like Paul Wellstone and Amy Klobuchar and now Tim Walz-

Brian Lehrer: Klobuchar ran for president.

James Traub: -who all have this fundamentally liberal politics. You can use other words if you want like populist or progressive.

Brian Lehrer: Right.

James Traub: McCarthy, he doesn't fit in so well. The others are classic liberals in the Humphrey sense, that is, say, they're social democrats in their domestic policy and they are internationalists in their foreign policy.

Brian Lehrer: One more 1968 memory on the phones. That's going to bring us squarely to today for the last stretch of our conversation. Hugh on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hello, Hugh.

Hugh: Oh, thank you. In '68, Dick Gregory was running for presidency on the East Coast and Huey Newton was running on the West Coast. I voted for Dick Gregory. Only about 150,000 people nationally did that. Had those people not done that stupid, childish, dumb thing and voted for Humphrey, Humphrey would have won the election. It was that close. Well, I was pissed off over the issue of Vietnam. Today, it's the issue of Israel and Palestine. I'm waiting to see what Kamala Harris is going to say about that as to whether I vote for her or not. I've often wondered, what would have happened had Humphrey won? What would American policy have been? How would the history of the last 50, 60 years been like had Humphrey won?

Brian Lehrer: Did you say, Hugh, that though you considered your vote for a third -party candidate childish in 1968, you might do it again this year if Harris doesn't line up to your liking on Israel-Gaza?

Hugh: I struggle with that. I struggle very hard with that. If it comes down to that decision, I might vote for a third party again.

Brian Lehrer: Hugh, thank you for your call. James Traub, I see you wrote a Substack newsletter saying Gaza is not Vietnam morally or politically. You write this even believing Netanyahu is committing war crimes, but you also see it differently politically. In our last two minutes, where would you enter that conversation?

James Traub: Politically, it's different because Vietnam was really so straightforward. The United States was obliterating this country in the name of its Cold War interests. On behalf of an illegitimate regime, which it knew, it knew that it was a regime that didn't have the support of its own people. Gaza is different for several reasons. I don't, in any way, want to minimize not only the moral complexity but the moral horror of it. I'm an extremely severe critic of Israel's behavior in the war.

First of all, the United States is not only supplying Israel with bombs, it is also trying to end the war. The United States has a more complicated relationship to that war than it had before. Second, whatever you may think about the injustice of the Netanyahu regime, Israel is not an illegitimate state. Israel has the right to defend itself. It does not have the right to defend itself through any and all means.

I think it has committed war crimes, but it is still a different situation from Vietnam. I think that's the moral answer. Politically, I think it's not remotely a salient. It just can't be and that's for a simple reason, which is America is not fighting that war. American soldiers are not dying. Israel is killing innocent civilians. That's the great moral issue, but American lives are not at risk, which is why I have never bought the analogy with Vietnam.

Brian Lehrer: James Traub, his new book is called True Believer: Hubert Humphrey's Quest for a More Just America. Thank you for talking about so much history and the contemporary situation as well with us today.

James Traub: Brian, it was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Thanks for listening today. There, of course, will be more convention coverage throughout the day in various ways on the station, including live coverage tonight beginning at nine o'clock, NPR coverage of tonight's primetime speeches. Of course, we'll talk about them with excerpts and analyses and your reactions on tomorrow morning's show. That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen edits our national politics podcast. Our interns this summer are Sasha Lyndon Cohen and Lucinda Empson-Speiden, Juliana Fonda, and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Stay tuned for Alison.

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