Happy birthday to an old Democrat, from this Republican

For today’s column, The Gazette’s most ardently conservative opinion columnist (that’s me!) is going to write something nice about a longtime liberal.

Do what you need to do after reading that: check your pulse, look up to see if any dead birds are dropping from the sky, whatever.

No, hell is not freezing over. I’ve written nice things about this person before — today, I’m once again honoring Norman Sherman, a longtime Democrat political insider who “has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.”

If you recall having read that part in quotation marks before, you were probably a regular reader of his weekly columns in The Gazette opinion page. Serving as Humphrey’s press secretary was one of many chapters in Sherman’s long and illustrious career in Democratic politics.

I wrote a tribute to Sherman early last December, right around the time he retired as a regular guest contributor. It was just a few weeks ago, though, that I got a call from a reader who told me it had made her cry.

I’m sure that happens a lot, actually, but I always assumed it’s because the writing’s so bad.

Not this time, though. The caller had cried because she liked what I had written about a man she admired for his wit and sarcasm and storied history. She liked it enough that she thought I might like to know of his upcoming birthday.

The caller was right. I was tickled.

That birthday is Oct. 19, which makes today the day Norman Sherman turns 98 years old. Unless fate intervenes at the cruelest (or at least the most inconvenient) time and circumstances are … different from they were when I turned this column in on Friday morning.

That remark alone will probably offend more than one person and get me into big trouble. But — stick with me, here — a flip comment that causes trouble is part of the birthday tribute to one of the most prolific storytellers in all of Democratic politics, who has been known by a great many people over the decades to be adept at making flip comments that would get him into trouble.

Sherman didn’t necessarily write the book on ill-received wisecracks, but he sure included a number of them in his memoir, “From Nowhere to Somewhere: My Political Journey,” which was released in 2016.

One such wisecrack was recently revisited in an August 2024 piece by Carl Leubsdorf, a columnist for The Dallas Morning News who had started his own decades-long career as a political writer with the Associated Press in the 1960s.

Luebsdorf had been a “junior member” of the AP staff assigned to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention, a tumultuous affair at which Sherman’s boss, Vice President Humphrey, became the party’s presidential nominee. Humphrey’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket was due to President Lyndon B. Johnson deciding not to seek re-election amid plunging popularity over his handling of the Vietnam War, policy that was causing serious fissures in the whole Democratic Party.

Unpopular or not, Johnson was still the president — and, despite his last-minute decision not to attend the convention at all, and still the symbolic head of the Democrat party, at least. So when the young Luebsdorf asked if Humphrey was considering “Lyndon” to be his VP running mate, Sherman’s snarky response of “Lyndon who?” was spoken a little too quickly and a little too freely.

Immediately after saying it, he added, “and that’s off the record,” which … well, let’s just say it doesn’t work that way.

Sherman’s flip response hit the wire. Soon after he had finished taking questions from the press, he returned to Humphrey’s suite at the convention, where his boss promptly asked, “Did some son-of-a-bitch just say, ‘Who’s Lyndon?’” Sherman responded, “You’ve got the right son-of-a-bitch, but the line is, ‘Lyndon who?’”

Humphrey, who was horrified, had just gotten off the phone with a major donor who Sherman described as “probably our most effective and important fundraiser” and a very close friend of the president. The donor had apparently made it clear that he would no longer raise money for the campaign if he employed staff so “disloyal to the president.” Humphrey later told Sherman that he could hear Johnson himself breathing on the line during the conversation with the donor.

Luebsdorf wrote last summer that Sherman jokingly blames Humphrey’s loss to Richard Nixon that year on his reporting. History, of course, has a few other suggestions, and Sherman devotes a whole chapter in his book to “the year from hell” in which he details the slew of events and circumstances that foreshadowed it.

Of all the humorous anecdotes Sherman shares in his memoir, the “Lyndon who?” one was among those I found most amusing. Sherman is arguably one of a kind — people with stories that anyone can tell don’t write books — but most everyone who’s ever spent time in the world of campaigns and elections and policymaking knows someone like him with an irreverent sense of humor and a sharp wit who has a knack for off-color comments.

What few people outside of that world know is that personalities like that aren’t merely tolerated. In politics, they’re vital — if, that is, the talent and the passion matches the penchant for jest. Behind every good candidate or elected official trying to do something good for the public is an inner circle of people with the candor and authenticity — not to mention the eccentricities — of someone like Sherman.

Sherman wasn’t made for public office. (He tried once for the Minnesota legislature in 1960 and got nowhere.) He nevertheless built a career out of politics because he was a true believer who loved the work it involves. That work is often, contrary to what we see during rallies and conventions, unglamorous. Not to mention humble.

My own work in Republican politics began in my late 20s when I signed up for poll watcher training, made a few friends and let them talk me into making phone calls in a campaign office. I met some people along the way — some who steered me toward work as an election official; a couple in particular who suggested I give journalism a try. Both became careers that I continue to this day. The two best friends I’ve ever had are people I’ve met through my work in politics, one of whom is currently working crazy hours for the next hot political candidate.

Sherman was bitten by the political bug during a conversation at a dusty print shop and a rally for a Progressive Party candidate. (Interestingly enough, that candidate was Iowa’s own Henry Wallace.) At a Christmas party in 1953, he met a little-known gubernatorial hopeful from a fairly new political party who asked him to volunteer for his campaign. That candidate, Orville Freeman, won. The rest … well, that’s in his memoir, which I read and enjoyed.

Sherman and I haven’t actually met. We remain on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum. But as I wrote last year after he bid farewell to Gazette readers, a background in politics can still make for kindred spirits.

One thing we have in common is the knowledge that on both sides of the political aisle, there is someone who is attending their first political rally or participating in their first campaign and falling in love with the same thing we did. Oh, what careers await those people.

Happy birthday, Norman.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com