By Tom Brennan
As the 2024 New Hampshire primary winds up, it’s First In The Nation status faces the most serious threat it has ever faced, and the country is in a dark mood. The leading candidates in both major parties, an aging incumbent and his controversial predecessor, constitute a kind of finger trap. The public is deeply unhappy with the choice, but the harder they try to pull out the tighter the trap gets.
There is just enough uncertainty, NH has just enough history of late switches and other surprises, to keep it interesting. After a long preseason, Nikki Haley has cleared the field, secured the support of a popular governor, and closed the gap with her ex president opponent, but Mr. Trump took Iowa easily, and leads Haley by 14 points going into the weekend. The big question is whether this dynamic will be altered by the large number of voters not enrolled in either major party. Even Democrats are grumpy about the joyless contest on their side. Two earnest but obscure challengers to President Biden labor in obscurity amid little evidence they have connected. The Dem pros in the Granite State are annoyed by challenges they think will only strengthen Trump, who they view as an existential threat to US democracy itself. They are also privately enraged by a president whose agents seek to end the NH primary as we know it, but a president they feel they have no choice but to promote as write-in, despite Biden’s posture on FITN.
It is an unusual situation, but we have been here before. You can echos of the past in the current situation
Trump’s legal woes echo the constitutional crisis of the 1970s. The outcome was not clear then, just as it is not now.
Other states, jealous of the FITN institution NH built, have long eyed it’s destruction.
Write-in campaigns are difficult but they do well here. Take 1964. The NH GOP braced for an epic Left/Right clash between NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater, senator from Arizona, the primary was won by by a third person, promoted by an lighthearted write-in effort for a man not even in the country. Goldwater had crankily suggested making Social Security voluntary. Rocky, a Dartmouth man, had left his wife for a younger woman, also just divorced. This was racy stuff in 1964.
Henry Cabot Lodge was ambassador to South Vietnam. Carrier of an illustrious name, Lodge was a liberal patrician cold warrior. As a young journalist he had hung out with H.L. Menken. He quit his job as senator from the Bay State to fight in World War II, reclaimed the seat in 1946, and was so busy helping orchestrate Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 NH primary upset of isolationist Senator Bob Taft (Ike was also out of the country running NATO at the time) that a young JFK ousted Lodge from the senate. But Ike sent Lodge to the United Nations. UN Ambassador was a bigger deal then than when Haley was there. The new medium of television covered the UN heavily, and the handsome Lodge became a daytime TV heartthrob, giving the Ruskies Hell. Nixon made Lodge his running mate in 1960. Lodge campaigned casually, daily getting into his pajamas for an afternoon nap, and acting as if the scrappy Nixon would only be welcome in home via the servant’s entrance. Polls at the time showed Lodge to be more popular than any of the three future presidents on a national ticket that year. JFK won, and sent Lodge to Vietnam.
The merry band of Lodge amateurs did a couple of mailings, and recycled TV ads from 1960 that had Ike endorsing Lodge, a trumpet blast drowning out the word “vice” president. Moderate Republicans fled Rocky for Lodge, who Rockefeller would forever refer to as “Henry Sabotage.”
Harry Truman was an unpopular and embattled president in 1952. He had overcome this in 1948, but he was tired and cranky, wanted no part of the NH primary, and described primaries generally as “eyewash.” Privately his language was more colorful. Most convention delegates were not picked in primaries in those days, but they could make national reputations. Truman had saved the free world as the Cold War took hold, been roundly abused for his trouble, and was damned if he was going to chase a rustic senator around New Hampshire like a candidate for alderman.
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee liked nothing more than to shake hands. Lanky and slow talking, he played the hayseed but had an Ivy League law degree. He upended the Crump machine in Memphis to go to the senate in 1948. He was progressive on race, which took guts in 1950s Tennessee. He was an associate of Albert Gore, the elder, father of the baby boomer VP we all know. The elder Gore used to campaign by playing the fiddle at country stores. Once a redneck constituent phoned him to badger him for his support of integration. “I don’t want to eat with em. I don’t want sit with em,” the man complained. Gore, whose voice sounded like God’s, if God was a southern politician, asked “do you want to go to heaven with them?” Not to be outdone the redneck replied “no, I want to go to Hell with you and Estes Kefauver.”
Kefauver became nationally famous via TV. He conducted televised senate hearings into organized crime, with the help of New Hampshire’s intrepid Senator Tobey, and spotlighted mob alliances with numerous urban Democratic machines. Truman was the product of just such a machine. This was not the way endear yourself to those who controlled delegates to national conventions. They would see to it the man Truman called “Senator Cowfever” never got near a presidential nomination. Local pols barely convinced Truman to allow his own name on the NH primary ballot, and President Truman did not campaign. Kefauver was everywhere, shaking hands, and pulling cars out of snowbanks. He won easily. Truman retired. Kefauver swept the primaries. Truman and the big city bosses saw to it Kefauver was not nominated. swept the primaries. He tried again in 1956, and edged out JFK for the VP nod when Adlai Stevenson threw the choice open to the convention. They lost. Kefauver died of a heart attack at age 60, in 1963. Gradually the populist luster faded as stories surfaced about his drinking, womanizing, and ownership of stock in companies he investigated and sought to regulate.
Like Truman, like Biden, President Lyndon Johnson had reasons for staying aloof from the NH primary. Truman famously called all primaries “eyewash.” Senator Tom McIntyre (once a youthful supporter of Kefauver) and Governor John King headed up a write-in campaign for LBJ. The war in Vietnam was going badly. The tumult of the 196os peaked in 1968. Johnson most feared Bobby Kennedy coming into the race. An obscure legislator from Minnesota was making a principled long shot race to challenge war policy. He did so only after better known prospects declined to. Sound familiar? Gene McCarthy was bored in the senate, had a personal grudge against Johnson (who led him on about the VP nod in ’64) and little to lose by tilting at this windmill. King and McIntyre attacked McCarthy’s patriotism, which backfired. College kids flocked to NH, cut their hair to be “clean for Gene,” and the droll McCarthy compared LBJ’s use of numbered pledge cards to track voters, to branding cattle. LBJ won, actually, as a write in. But the 7 point margin was so narrow it drew RFK into the race, and LBJ retired.
What followed is familiar to anyone alive at that time. Kennedy was murdered. The convention in Chicago was marked by what a commission later called a police riot. The primaries were ignored, and Johnson’s VP was nominated. An embittered McCarthy became something of crank, making eccentric and futile runs for office. The liberal white knight of 1968 would endorsed Reagan in 1980. But his lonely effort in 1968, only possible really in NH, led to reforms of the nomination process that gave primaries much more influence.
There has been a lot of pearl clutching about the nerve of a junior member of congress running against a sitting president. Dean Phillips was hardly the first. An army of junior congresspersons ran ran last time. More improbably, the 38 year old gay mayor of South Bend Indiana trounced Biden in NH last time. Two obscure congressmen challenged President Nixon in NH in 1972, the peak of Nixon’s popularity. Nobody had ever heard of Pete McCloskey or John Ashbrook. They had no hope of winning, but they drew a combined 30% of the vote, actually cutting Nixon’s percentage from 1968 by 10 points.
Ashbrook’s father had been a Democratic congressman from Ohio. His son John was in the newspaper business, won election to congress in 1960, as a write-in, was a familiar figure in young conservative organizations, and thought Nixon had strayed too far from his conservative roots by going off the gold standard, and reaching out to Red China. The NH Union Leader endorsed him. Like Phillips first urging Newsom or Whitmer to run, Pete McCloskey sought out more seasoned GOP doves to challenge Nixon on the war, and on ethics. Like Philips, he offered to step aside for more formidable champions of the cause (which Gene McCarthy never considered). McCloskey was a decorated marine combat veteran, an environmental lawyer and open housing advocate in northern California. He won his seat in congress in 1967, upsetting former child actress Shirley Temple Black.
At the time, McCloskey and Ashbrook were considered eccentric figures. By 1976, Ashbrook’s cause was taken up by Ronald Reagan. McCloskey was seen as a prophet about Vietnam and Watergate. President Ford would bring McCloskey into NH to help fend off the challenge from Reagan, and his assistance was probably decisive.
There is a line Nixon used to quote. “You must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was.” The rich history of the Granite State FITN tradition offers many examples of this. Too many to tell here. We’re touching on a few of them that echo today.