MANCHESTER, N.H. — Fifty years ago this week, he cried. Or maybe it was just the snow melting across his face. What happened that day on Amherst Street doesn’t matter now. It mattered then.
Two weeks before the 1972 New Hampshire primary, the front-running candidate, Edmund S. Muskie, stood before the office of the Manchester Union Leader to respond to a letter to the editor, which charged that he laughed about the characterization of French-speakers — an important constituency in the state — as “Canucks.”
Though the NHL’s Vancouver franchise today uses that term, it was regarded as a slur then, and the letter, planted by Richard M. Nixon’s “dirty-tricks” team, provoked the Maine senator into an angry response that might have doomed his presidential candidacy and surely changed the trajectory of the Democrats’ race to select a nominee to oppose Nixon’s reelection bid.
Today, Muskie’s campaign can be regarded as one of the most colossal busts in American history. Few political figures embarked on a presidential race with the assets, adviser talent and high hopes of the Muskie campaign, built on the senator’s strong showing as Hubert H. Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and his bravura performance in a televised pre-election speech in which he lacerated Nixon before the 1970 midterm elections.
But the Muskie campaign, which fizzled out weeks after the “crying” incident, today stands as a symbol of the emergence of a new brand of American politics, where press expectations ruled, where the endorsement of traditional political power centers lost their influence, and where rank-and-file voters rather than party bosses held sway.
Muskie, whose profile today is the very model of the old-style politician, was a transitional figure, trampled by the new folkways and new party procedures.
“Muskie was really one of the great American figures in the 20th century,” says Joel Goldstein, a Saint Louis University legal scholar who is writing a Muskie biography. “He was a far better government servant than a presidential-primary contender. He had a deep understanding of American constitutional principles and was widely respected by his colleagues.”
That was enough in 1952, when Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson won the Democratic nomination. It was not enough in 1972.
Muskie was a casualty of the change in the nominating system that emphasized primaries and caucuses and made it necessary to be a full-time candidate; he was, in short, the perfect smoke-filled room candidate of an era when national party leaders, union bosses and influential county chairs wielded extraordinary influence.
Muskie was more interested in polishing the Clean Air Act in the back rooms of a Capitol Hill committee chamber than in mixing with actual voters in a New Hampshire grange hall. He also had a visceral aversion to campaign promises.
Muskie’s failure grew out of his success in Maine, where, as a rare Democrat in a Republican state, he seldom faced party challenges, never had to deal with competing political factions and merely had to reassure the dominant GOP voter base that he would not break up the banks and destroy the country clubs.
“The real reason the campaign failed was the candidate,” says the commentator Mark Shields, at the time a Muskie strategist and organizer. “He wasn’t prepared for the land mines of the party. And he didn’t enjoy the politics of politics. Bill Clinton enjoyed them. Barack Obama didn’t, but got more out of it psychically than Muskie. Muskie would have made a far better president than a presidential candidate.”
Plus, Muskie had a raging temper.
“Underneath this image of the grave moderate were … two essential qualities not yet recognized by the public but more than casually troublesome to Muskie’s staff,” wrote the election chronicler Theodore H. White. “He had a tendency to emotional outburst; and an even graver disability — a lawyer-like, ponderous way of dealing with all issues and even the most trivial decisions.”
The brisk sound bite made its debut in the 1968 campaign. It was at the center of politics by 1972. Muskie did not do sound bites.
While there was deep disquiet in Muskie headquarters at 1725 K Street in northwest Washington, all that was masked by the high expectations for his candidacy — as a Maine man positioned to cruise in New England, as a Polish-American likely to prevail in early primary states that, by pure chance, had sizable Polish populations, and with the legions of endorsements he won.
“Muskie had signed up just about every Democratic politician in the country whose name was well known by more than a hundred people,” wrote the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, “and it did him about as much good as a notarized endorsement from Martin Bormann.”
Despite the tears, or the snow, Muskie did well in New Hampshire. He won that first primary in a field with Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota and the anti-communist, populist Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles.
No political powerhouse, Yorty had the backing of Union Leader publisher William Loeb, whose conservative newspaper published 71 stories, 38 photographs and 14 supporting editorials in favor of its chosen candidate.
Muskie took 46 percent of the vote, higher than any Democratic candidate who followed, with the exception of Al Gore (50 percent in 2000) and Bernie Sanders (60 percent in 2016). It was an impressive performance, outpolling McGovern’s 37 percent.
And yet the press, which set 50 percent as Muskie’s target, portrayed him as a loser, a theme his rivals swiftly adopted. “Even if he claims victory, as he will,” McGovern said on election night, “it’s not the sort of victory he imagined.”
Thus, expectations became the leitmotif of American politics.
“I think when you come from a neighboring state, when you are running virtually unopposed, and when you are the frontrunner to begin with,” Sen. Bob Dole, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, told me just before he died, “you could naturally be expected to get at least two-thirds of the vote.”
He understood the peril. The distance between Hamburg, Iowa, and Hiawatha in Dole’s Kansas is only 67 miles. Dole took 2.5 percent in the Iowa caucuses eight years after Muskie’s 46 percent in neighboring New Hampshire.
As for Muskie, he finished behind Humphrey and Gov. George Wallace of Alabama the next week in Florida, and won Illinois with 63 percent the following week. Then he faded into presidential political history.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
