By Tom Brennan
This spring has seen the passing of two presidential candidates who sailed against prevailing winds in their parties, trusting the independence of Granite State voters.
Joe Lieberman once had stature in the Democratic party, but found himself “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!” He passed away March 27th.
Former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey of California died on May 8th at age 96. His 1972 stand in the GOP presidential primary in the Granite State seemed preposterous at the time and he lost heavily. His political isolation was pronounced for a time, and while his warnings about Nixon, Vietnam, and what came to be known as Watergate were quickly vindicated, the party he stubbornly clung to for decades never said thank you.
McCloskey and the Granite State were a good fit. Independent & gritty, as a decorated combat Marine in Korea he led more bayonet charges than anyone since the Civil War. The Stanford trained attorney was no flower child. He detested what the war was doing to the Marine Corps he venerated, became convinced the national policy in Southeast Asia was erroneous, and grew concerned about the ethical standards at the Nixon White House, even as it was staffed by more than one close personal friend. He sought to recruit a more prominent challenger to Nixon and charged up the hill himself when nobody else would.
At the time of the New Hampshire presidential primary of 1972, Presidential Nixon was at the peak of his popularity and power. He and his team also had a vindictive streak. Few people stood with “Honest Pete” in what looked like a suicide mission. One who did were Bob Reno, another marine/lawyer. Another supporter was the mayor of New Hampshire’s capitol, Malcolm McClane of Concord. McClane spent time in a German POW camp after his plane was shot down during the Battle of the Bulge. He embarked on a business and political career after World War ll. His adherence to the now extinct liberal brand of Republicanism manifested in an independent run for governor later in 1972. His daughter would work in McCloskey’s congressional office as a young woman, and later represent New Hampshire in congress — as a Democrat.
I interviewed Congressman McCloskey at length in December of 1977, at his Capitol Hill office. It was almost ten years to the day from when he went to congress, after upsetting former child movie star Shirley Temple in a special election. This was McCloskey’s only flirtation with fame prior to his New Hampshire venture.
McCloskey’s passing this month leaves me thinking a lot about that 1977 interview. I was 20. I worked for a small newspaper. He seemed distracted at first, and I imagined him planning to fire the press secretary who I pestered into scheduling 90 minutes with the congressman. By the end of the interview McCloskey was animated, and asked for a copy of the tape. The wide ranging interview covered the first half of his career. He was one of the most engaging political figures of the 1970s, his story combining insouciance, integrity, independence, and a gift for friendship and reconciliation with adversaries. McCloskey was warrior who respected other warriors. Like two lawyers who ride the circuit together, tearing into each other in court, then travelling together congenially to the next stop.
McCloskey come from a long line of lawyers. His grandfather was mayor of San Bernardino. His ancestors sailed around Cape Horn from Ireland to escape the potato famine. He worked his way through school as a coach and semi pro ball player. He married and settled in northern California after the World War, and first earned local renown as an environmental lawyer. His legal career was periodically interrupted by dangerous tours of duty in the military. As a congressman he co-chaired the first Earth Day in 1970, landmark environmental legislation was as large a part of his career as his opposition to the Vietnam war and Nixon era corruption. One friend from law school was John Ehrlichman. He and his wife looked after McCloskey’s pregnant wife while Pete was off on one of his dangerous tours of duty. One tour in Korea saw 58 of 61 men in his platoon killed or wounded. Ehrlichman recruited McCloskey for Young Lawyers for Nixon/Lodge in 1960. McCloskey agreed, but quietly voted for Kennedy. Ehrlichman would become one of Nixon’s most hard nosed White House staffers, would go to prison after Watergate, but maintained a warm lifelong friendship with McCloskey.
In 1964 McCloskey was a lead organizer against a ballot initiative to strike down a California open housing law. The moderate California Republican consensus, which produced figures like Earl Warren, was in decline in this year of Goldwater. Hollywood right wingers were the tip of the spear. Song and dance man George Murphy was elected to the senate that year. McCloskey supported his opponent, Pierre Salinger, ex press secretary to the recently slain President Kennedy. In 1966 Ronald Reagan stormed into the governorship.
By 1967 Shirley Temple Black was all grown up. The curly haired child actress of the 1930s was now a handsome matron, talking about “taking big brother to the woodshed,” and a Vietnam hawk. She was heavily favored in a race that attracted national attention. She would later have a career as a diplomat. While Black had celebrity, McCloskey had the kind of charisma that always unsettled Nixon. He was a lean, square jawed combat marine with a thatch of black hair that looked like it was cut with a lawn mower, an intense but low keyed way of speaking, and a military bearing (except for a notable sartorial indifference). He was a Vietnam dove, but it was hard to portray him as wimp. In a crowded field, he trounced Black in the first round of voting, and easily easily took the runoff. The story of this campaign is well told by Rodney Minott’s book titled The Sinking of the Lollipop. The Good Ship Lollipop was young Shirley’s signature song.
McCloskey always seemed more bemused than bitter about the ostracism which came his way from the increasingly dominant Republican Right. A close friend in high school was Congressman John Rousselot, a member of the John Birch Society. In high school the two formed something called the Amalgamated Association of Virgins. I didn’t ask about this in the 1977 interview. Some things are best left not looked into. They remained friends in congress. Two other friends from the House were Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. McCloskey stumped New Hampshire for both of them in their 1976 and 1980 clashes with Reagan. He supported Rockefeller for president in 1964 and 1968. One of the few times Ford defied Nixon was when he stumped for McCloskey, who faced a Nixon orchestrated primary challenge. McCloskey was always endangered in GOP primaries but won in November easily.
While ramping up his challenge to Nixon, Watergate burglar and CIA man E. Howard Hunt kept trying to break into McCloskey’s safe to retrieve his copy of the Pentagon Papers. Hunt ran other dirty tricks to discredit McCloskey. Years later McCloskey’s son roomed with Hunt’s daughter in law school. The two parents met cordially. “Yeah, they ran some dirty tricks,” McCloskey observed in a 1998 interview, “but it was just their way.” In one memo, Nixon staffer Pat Buchanan suggested planting a cash contribution to the McCloskey campaign, ostensibly from the Gay Liberation Front, then taking the receipt over to the Manchester Union Leader. McCloskey would testify in favor of another old friend and Watergate alum, at Herb Kalmbach’s disbarment hearing. Substantial abuse was directed at McCloskey when Team Nixon was riding high. The California Republican Assembly invited McCloskey to leave the party. Nixon sent operatives to organizing meetings for McCloskey in Concord, in order to take down names for future retribution. In the 1977 interview McCloskey lamented that Reagan still would not even meet with him. McCloskey’s assistance to Ford may have tilted the close 1976 New Hampshire presidential primary to President Ford, blunting Reagan’s strong challenge. At the GOP convention that year McCloskey was booed by the California delegation. McCloskey recalled responding with “the happy high sign.”
His 1972 effort in New Hampshire is well described by a memoir written by his friend, long time Michigan Senator Donald Riegel, who left the GOP almost immediately after. McCloskey drove his staff crazy with self deprecating remarks to the effect that he needed “about ten more years of experience” to actually be president,” had no chance of being nominated, and still sought a challenger to Nixon with more stature. “I know I’m not a great man,” McCloskey said at the time, “but I look at Nixon and Agnew and know I’m not that bad.” He clomped through the New Hampshire snow with actor Paul Newman, and Granite State friends like McLane and Reno, while President Nixon was breaking the ice of the Cold War with his historic visit to China. He drew just shy of the 20% he said he needed in order to continue. It was all very Dean Phillips. By 2-1 McCloskey led another obscure congressman, backed by William Loeb’s splenetic Union Leader newspaper and challenging Nixon from the right. Most of the anti war energy that lifted up Gene McCarthy in 1968 was with George McGovern in 1972. Nixon carried 49 states in November. The following June, McCloskey was on the House floor, the first member to call for Nixon’s impeachment. Nixon was gone 14 months later.
McCloskey enjoyed telling a good war story, political or otherwise. The 1998 interview, conducted for the book ‘Hats in the Ring,’ had Pete recalling the 1972 GOP convention in Miami. His old friend John Ehrlichman stage manager that convention for Nixon. There were scripts for how long people would talk, and how long they would applaud. TV coverage was very important. McCloskey managed to elect just one delegate, from New Mexico. The party brass changed the rules so nobody with less than 25 delegates could speak, or have anyone speak for them. Anti war protesters stirred, but Chicago 1968 it was not. But McCloskey’s description of how he spent of his evenings at the three day confab will confirm every John Bircher’s conspiracy theory. He went out drinking with Walter Cronkite, and another guy from the Fake News. “You’ll get a kick out of this,” McCloskey promised. “It was so much fun talking to Cronkite that I got pretty smashed. I was feeling no pain.” He got back to the hotel around one in the morning, and as he opened the door to his room, it hit a young volunteer in the head who was in a sleeping bag on the floor. “Pete, you can’t sleep in your hotel room tonight,” the boy instructed. McCloskey asked “What do mean I can’t sleep in my hotel room tonight?” Daniel Ellsberg and his wife were in his bed. He would sleep in the other room. Nope. Jane Fonda was crashed there. Finally his administrative assistant made room for him down the hall. They really do all know each other. The glamorous life of political stardom.
In our interview he recalled stumping for Ford in the 1976 New Hampshire primary. A voter accosted him to say he should be running. “Ford and Reagan aren’t much,” the man said. “Four years ago you were up here warning us about Nixon, and too much dirty money in politics, and we didn’t listen. You should run for President.” McCloskey then proceeded to tell the man his issue positions. “I’m for abortion. I’m for amnesty. I’d legalize homosexual conduct, victimless crimes. Oh, and I’d ban handguns.” McCloskey laughed and recalled that “the man rolled his eyes, and said ‘my god, you couldn’t get elected to anything!’ I suppose that is my fate.”
It was his fate, more or less. In congress he remained a maverick. He was an early advocate of fair play in the Mideast. He championed the cause of the crew of the U.S.S. Liberty, an American ship shelled by the Israeli military shortly after the Six Day War, the reasons for which remain not fully resolved. He left congress in 1982 to run a respectable second to Pete Wilson in a senate primary in a crowded field that also included Barry Goldwater Jr, and President Reagan’s daughter Maureen. He was fine with it. “If you hang around congress too long you start thinking everybody owes you a salute.” “I was lucky,” McCloskey added, “that I entered electoral politics after I was secure in my profession. You worry a lot less about losing this job, and can follow your conscience.” When his friend Allard Lowenstein was struggling to regain his seat in congress from the New York City area, paying a heavy price for spearheading the Dump Johnson and Dump Nixon movements, McCloskey offered to make way for Lowenstein to move west and take his seat, which was more hospitable territory. Ultimately Lowenstein declined. McCloskey was awarded several Purple Hearts for military heroism, and donated one of them to Congresswoman Jackie Speier. As congressional staff member serving the late Congressman Leo Ryan, Speier was seriously wounded as Ryan’s party fled the People’s Temple death cult compound in Guyana, which they were investigating in 1978. Ryan was killed.
In 1988, McCloskey helped derail the presidential campaign of the late Pat Robertson. The son of a racist U.S. senator from Virginia, Robertson found fame and fortune as a smarmy, hate mongering TV preacher. He attempted to parlay this into a presidential campaign that marked the growing political influence of cultish and authoritarian evangelicalism, in which he misrepresented himself as combat marine. Robertson served in Korea as a supply officer far from combat. McCloskey knew Robertson then, and recalled his boasts that his senator father would pull strings to keep him out of combat. Others corroborated. Robertson sued for libel. McCloskey stood his ground. Robertson settled the suit on terms favorable to McCloskey, as his campaign fizzled.
While he held George W. Bush’s father in high regard, McCloskey was unhappy with W’s presidency. He opposed the Iraq war, and detested the government deception that got us into it. He was also unhappy with the environmental record of Congressman Richard Pombo. In 2006 an elderly McCloskey lost a GOP primary to Pombo, endorsed the Democrat (who won) and finally switched to the Democratic party the next year. In his later years McCloskey taught part time, ran an onion farm in rural Yolo County, and made a late and unconventional marriage to an ex congressional staffer, Helen Hooper. McCloskey expressed regret, as early as 1977, about the toll politics took on his first marriage. He was slow to accept feminism, but accept it he did. The second marriage was the focus of the documentary, “Helen and the Bear.” Paul Newman also made a documentary, about McCloskey’s political career, titled “Leading from the Front.”
While McCloskey came to a dovish position on Vietnam, he could distinguish North Vietnam from North Korea. Korea was McCloskey’s war. In the 1977 interview he made a point to distinguish between the two, calling the North Koreans “especially vain and brutal, with no regard for international law.” In 1968, when North Korea seized the U.S.S. Pueblo international waters, brutalizing the crew for almost a year, McCloskey expressed support for a declaration of war. His medals, and his most searing experiences, derived from that conflict. Throughout his political life, McCloskey expressed a special contempt for old men eager to send the young to war. In old age McCloskey recalled the fear and courage of the young soldiers he fought against in Korea, and expressed the desire to meet some of them to personally express his respect for their courage and sacrifice. He seized the chance a decade ago, as a part of a non governmental delegation to North Korea led by the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, Donald Gregg. The old warrior McCloskey, and his old adversaries embraced, expressed mutual respect, and joined in declaration that war is never a glorious thing.
Joe Lieberman was long a centrist senator from New England. A documentary about his storied career is set to be released in November. The late U.S. senator took an apartment in the Granite State twenty years ago, part of a forlorn bid for president, having been the VP nominee four years earlier. Times had changed. His apartment was in Manchester, not far from a bar called The Wild Rover. His passing leaves me thinking about a visit by him to that bar, which I happened to witnessed, and thinking about him, about the disappointments that can attend political life, and about the blurred line between constructive adherence to principle, and mere frustrated personal ambition.
Dr. Howard Dean’s anti Iraq war crusade fired an angry appeal to what he called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” The Vermont Governor’s netroots driven crusade marked the end of progressive patience with two decades of what they regarded as Dem establishment appeasement of increasingly militant right wing politics, an approach often associated with Lieberman.
It was John Kerry, not Lieberman, who put down Dean’s progressive insurgency. By the weekend prior to the New Hampshire primary, Lieberman was not a factor. This undoubtedly rankled Lieberman as he and his wife made a quiet visit to the Wild Rover the Saturday night prior to that primary 20 years ago.
Kerry had trounced Dean in Iowa a week earlier, after Dean had for months, after which his Dean’s effort to rally his disappointed troops with a rowdy war whoop seemed unhinged on TV, played endlessly on cable news. Dean built his insurgent campaign mostly on the internet, and had a famously prickly relationship with legacy media. This may have been the last election cycle where “Old Media” would dominate.
There is always electricity in the air in Manchester on the Saturday night prior to the primary. In one corner of the Rover a crew of Fire Fighters for Kerry made time with a teacher named Lola. Preppy looking Edwards supporters were razzing Dean volunteers, with taunts of “how’s your head, Deaniacs?” I was at the bar with a young man about to ship out to Iraq. He’d thought the peace time reserves a good and safe way to pay for school. The war was starting to sour 9 months after George W had proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” My drinking companion was apprehensive.
Into this scene walked the Liebermans. Granite Staters are not star struck about pols, but heads turned. Lieberman didn’t glad hand. He looked older in person than on TV. He certainly knew by then that his effort had failed. He would run fifth in NH, with just 9% of the vote. He had to be chagrined. He was clearly out of step with a party he had once helped lead. He was at odds with old friends. He felt betrayed by his old comrade in arms, Al Gore, who supported Dean, even after Lieberman delayed his own bid to wait for Gore to decide whether to run again. Lieberman had almost been elected vice president four years prior. He strongly supported the Bush position in the post 9/11 wars. His failed presidential bid would mark a turning point, and begin 20 years of estrangement from his party.
Lieberman spotted the soldier’s uniform and drew him aside. He spoke quietly with the frightened young man, my camera catching the pensive conversation. After about 20 minutes, whatever Lieberman had told the boy seemed to have calmed him and lifted his spirits. I have agreed with very little that Lieberman has said or done the past twenty years. But Lieberman’s sincerity and decency was evident in that incident, and his passing reminded me of it.
New Hampshire would move the party decisively to Kerry, a war hero who supported the war before he opposed it, and was thought better positioned than Dean to challenge George W on the war. Senator Kerry would run with Senator Edwards, the honey voiced southern trial lawyer, who charmed his way into the top tier of contenders. There was also a brief flirtation with Wes Clark, a general who also opposed the war. Again, George W. Bush would post a narrow victory. Within a year his political position would collapse.
Only four years earlier the Gore-Lieberman ticket actually defeated Bush in the national popular vote, with a disputed outcome in Florida delivering Bush the electoral college. Lieberman’s strength in south Florida was no small factor in that state being close enough to dispute. Lieberman was Jewish, and his presence on a national ticket was ground breaking. Lieberman famously taken to the floor of the senate to scold Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky peccadillo, and Gore thought that was just what he needed on the ticket to take the curse off of him.
By 2004, the party was indeed moving away from the Republican Lite DLC model promoted by Gore, Lieberman, and Clinton, who was a friend of Lieberman’s at Yale Law School.
In his NH primary bid, Lieberman touted himself as a traditional “John Kennedy/Bill Clinton Democrat.” In 1981 he published an admiring biography of former Democratic National Committee Chair John M. Bailey, from his home state of Connecticut. Bailey was an old school pol who led the party in the LBJ era. The son of a liquor store owner in Stamford, Lieberman had gone to Mississippi to do civil rights work in 1963, when to do that was to put your life in danger. He escaped Vietnam with college deferments, courtesy of an early marriage and children. He was elected to the state senate as reformer at age 28. At 38 he lost a bid for congress to a Republican state senate colleague he had often collaborated with. He then divorced and remarried the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. In 1982, at 40, he was elected state attorney general.
His election to the U.S. senate offered an early clue to the road Lieberman would travel. By 1988, Lowell Weicker had been elected to the senate from Connecticut three times. If Lieberman would develop problems in his party for being insufficiently liberal, Senator Weicker had already well established problems in the GOP for being insufficiently conservative. Both men would later win statewide elections without a major party nomination. Weicker was grumpy and dismissive, caustic in his comments about the Bush and Buckley families, and probably best known for his harsh judgments about the Nixon administration as a member of the 1973 Senate Watergate Committee. Lieberman’s edge in that senate race came from an endorsement by William F. Buckley Jr., who edited the Yale Daily News a decade before Lieberman did. Weicker would be elected governor in 1990, running as an independent. Weicker died last year.
If Weicker was seen as grumpy but honest, Lieberman came to be widely seen as affable but sanctimonious. There was his posturing about the Lewinsky affair, which most of the country thought at the time was inappropriately and hypocritically made grist for a sham impeachment, which may mark the beginning of making that vital constitutional check on presidential excess less meaningful. Lieberman did not support impeachment, it is important to remember. Many felt Clinton might have resigned as a matter of self respect and integrity, but impeachment was not the remedy, and GOP hypocrisy in this matter was epic.
Lieberman’s relative moderation on social issues was soon crowded out by his fondness for right wing theocrat tropes such as “in America we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” This constructs a straw man, the purpose of which ought to have been better understood by a man so intimately familiar with the persecution of people whose theology might be out of fashion, or out of power.
The country was in no mood to split hairs after 9/11. Most Americans actually believed Saddam had a role in the attacks. The WMD excuse for the war in Iraq was a lie. The assistance this blunder rendered the terrorists in incalculable. When a sober discussion of this was imperative, Joe Lieberman veered into McCarthyism. He repeatedly questioned the patriotism of Iraq war skeptics. That was a bridge too far for too many Democrats. Smash and grab right wing political tactics since the end of the Cold War included the sham impeachment, the truly stolen election of 2000, revived voter suppression, the lie and buy Newt Deal congress, and crass partisan exploitation of 9/11, which led to Iraq.
If there was any doubt where Holy Joe was headed, subsequent events resolved the question. The netroots that failed with Howard Dean in 2004, took Lieberman down in the Dem primary for his senate seat in 2006. The Dems retook both houses of congress that year, led by the new DNC Chair, Howard Dean, who promoted a grass roots 50 state strategy, not GOP Lite quackery. Interestingly, Lieberman was reelected as an independent in November, largely thanks to GOP support. The Dem who beat him in the primary is now Governor. Lieberman endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008, was very nearly McCain’s running mate, and opposed Obama’s reelection.
He was active to the end, when a fall at home led to complications, as it often will with an 82 year old. At the time of his departure Lieberman was a lead promoter of another exercise in more misguided and destructive sanctimony — the No Labels movement — an effort to put a third or fourth candidate into this year’s presidential election. This project attracted opportunists of diverse views precisely because it was rooted in no clear program or priorities, but was widely understood to be helpful to Donald Trump once again becoming president despite being twice repudiated by the majority of voters.
Lieberman’s story, in the end, is a tragic one. He had differences with more progressive Democrats but they tolerated his approach when it dominated the party in the 1990s, without essentially bolting to the reactionary opposition party. His frequent and deliberate empowering of an increasingly extreme and nihilistic GOP is better understood as an expression of his own personal resentment and frustrated ambition than as any matter of principle. He had traveled some distance from his days as a freedom rider in Mississippi.