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Even so, Humphrey managed to leave behind a legacy of liberal legislation that has survived three Republican Administrations. In a 1977 poll of 1,000 leading Capitol Hill figures, he was named the top Senator of the past 75 years. (Humphrey, then fatally ill with cancer, responded to the news: "Jesus Christ, Lyndon Johnson's going to be sore as hell about this.") Solberg, whose biography is the first to benefit from Humphrey's papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, recounts his subject's career in impressive detail, but stumbles when he tries to explain Humphrey's self-defeating diffidence. The answer may lie in the other legacy Humphrey left behind: a certain sweetness, a corny, prairie-bred conviction that folks don't have to be mean and nasty to get what they want. That naiveté was his undoing but also his strength. Early in his career, the politician asserted, wide-eyed, "The proof that God exists is that all men are brothers." Hubert Horatio Humphrey never learned any different, or any better.
—By Donald Morrison