Possibly the most cherished quote to come out of New Hampshire was Eugene McCarthy's epitaph for George Romney, the Michigan governor whose highly-rated candidacy had fallen apart after he admitted being "brainwashed" by the Pentagon on Vietnam. Did McCarthy think the August 1967 remark had destroyed Romney's chances? "Well...er no, not really," replied the Senator. "Anyway, I think in that case a light rinse would have been sufficient.'" (Romney "kept on campaigning in the same way a dead man's fingernails keep growing," wrote Timothy Crouse '68 in The Boys on the Bus--but withdrew shortly before New Hampshire voted.)
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This year, the formula changed somewhat when the Iowa caucuses, held January 21, firmly established two frontrunners before New Hampshire had its say. But while losing a little of its thunder, Tuesday's race has attracted the intense media coverage political observers have come to expect.
David L. Halberstam '55 once called New Hampshire the "land of journalist overkill," and few would disagree. For politicians, pundits and mere voters groping for some tangible indication of which would-be Wizard of Oz to follow down the yellow brick road to the White House, New Hampshire fills a psychological void. New Hampshire takes the vague preconceptions and sets them in bold type; where conflicting polls lose meaning, the neat, unchanging rows of figures give everyone something to latch on to as gospel. "The people have spoken, the fools."
To capture those people, the has-beens, stillares, will-bes and never-weres spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, degrade themselves in public, shake the hands of people they don't know or care to know, plaster friendly if sickly grins on their faces and fit themselves into a mold designed to "maximize" appeal. Little is sacred, because though the sacrifices are great, the reward--a pot of political gold--casts a spell not easily resisted.
Jimmy Carter couldn't resist. A "personal and confidential" memorandum from Hamilton Jordan, dated August 4, 1974, helped finalize Carter's decision to run and captured New Hampshire's significance in, as it were, a nutshell:
The press shows an exagerated interest in the early primaries as they represent the first confrontation between candidates, their contrasting strategies and styles, which the press has been writing and speculating about for two years. We would do well to understand the very special and powerful role the press plays in interpreting the primary results for the rest of the nation. What is actually accomplished in (the) New Hampshire primary is less important than how the press interprets it for the nation. Handled properly, a defeat can be interpreted as a "holding action" and a victory as a mediocre showing.
It worked. Carter, already encouraged by the reception given his showing in Iowa, escaped with 30 per cent of the vote and 13 delegates, seven points and nine delegates ahead of liberal Arizona representative Morris Udall. Birch Bayh, Fred Harris and Sargent Shriver trailed behind, while Henry Jackson missed the boat by not running. His credentials validated, Carter had broken out in front to stay.
Private citizen Richard Nixon, trooping through Keene and Concord and Durham and Manchester with his USC Mafia, in the winter of '68, also knew what he had come for. His media barrage tried to portray a "New Nixon," matured from the days of Checkers and "last" press conferences, a wise and respected statesman well-suited to deal with a changing and complex world. But what about sex appeal? That could be a problem. Harry Treleaven, Nixon media mastermind and anti-hero of Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President 1968, touched on this area in a memo entitled, "Why Richard Nixon Should Utilize Magazine Advertising in the State of New Hampshire Primary":
Warm, human, four-color magazine illustrations depicting Dick Nixon the family man, perhaps even surrounded by his beautiful family, will allow the women of America, and initially, the women of New Hampshire, to identify with him, and his home life. This exposure will break down the current cold barrier he projects to women. This warm visual image will be supported by strong reader copy that, point by point, will sell his qualifications to voters who can study the advertisementleisurely in their own home.
Some didn't fall for it. Ed DeCourcy of the Newport, N.H., Argus-Champion, wrote: "There is no New Nixon. What we have here is the old Nixon, a little older." New or old, Nixon swept to a virtually uncontested victory in the Republican primary. Attention was focused elsewhere in the winter of 1968.
A very weird year. "There was a sense everywhere, in 1968," Garry Wills wrote in Nixon Agonistes, "that things were giving. That man had not merely lost control of his history, but might never regain it." That feeling permeated the New Hampshire campaign of Eugene McCarthy. Seeing a chance to "change the world, rearrange the world" and drive Lyndon Johnson back to the ranch, hundreds of student supporters invaded the state. Huntley-Brinkley brought Vietnam home every night in living color, and the McCarthy kids knocked on doorfronts to remind New Hampshire that now was the chance to stop it. The Johnson write-in effort functioned in a stupor; McCarthy's army--which the Senator bemusedly termed "the government-in-exile"--pulsed with energy. "Those people were angry," remembered Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.
The other side of the "Clean for Gene" coin was a nervous sense of truce that hung over the New Hampshire campaign. In backroom late night talks at the Wayfarer there was no shortage of McCarthy staffers who said this would probably be their final trip "within the system." There were some who didn't mind admitting that, personally, they'd rather throw firebombs or get heavy into dope--but they were attracted by the drama, the sheer balls, of McCarthy's "hopeless challenge."
McCarthy received 23,380 votes (42 per cent) on a snowy March 12, Johnson 27,243 (49 per cent). After New Hampshire, the incumbent, who gained a victory in name only, knew his popular support had eroded. On March 31, Johnson announced that he would not seek another term.
In 1972, George McGovern played the same numbers game McCarthy had, with equal success. The first to declare for the Democratic nomination--more than a year before New Hampshire--McGovern quietly built a youthful but highly efficient organization even as poll after poll showed negligible progress. Facing an ostensibly weak field, front-runner Muskie was