Chapter Two - Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Chapter Two - Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
While Eugene McCarthy was making off-the-record declarations to the press that he was willing to run against the President, another man was trying to find someone to do just that.
Allard Lowenstein was a political and civil rights activist who had been involved in various liberal causes since the late 1940s. His biggest political accomplishments to date had been investigating abuses against the black population of South Africa by its apartheid government, and taking part in the Freedom Summer to register black people eligible to vote in the South. He also had the credentials of having previously worked as a staff member on Hubert Humphrey's foreign policy team, and as a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy. Lowenstein was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, and, by 1966, had decided that Lyndon Johnson needed to be challenged for the Democratic nomination. Lowenstein was joined by Curtis Gans, a voting statistics analyst, and together they started what would come to be called the Dump Johnson Movement. Throughout 1966 and most of 1967, Lowenstein laid the groundwork for the as-of-yet-unchosen opponent to Johnson. Attending the 1966 annual convention of the National Students Association (NSA), Lowenstein had to contend with radicals in the organization who felt it was futile to operate within the political system as it existed, and felt that civil disobedience was the only way to challenge Johnson and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein's more moderate position won the internal NSA vote; a letter of protest was sent to the President, and a meeting was arranged between the hawkish Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the various student body presidents of the NSA. Unfortunately for Lowenstein, Rusk's dismissive attitude disillusioned many within the NSA to jump ship to the radical New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Next, Lowenstein approached Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), of which Lowenstein was the youngest board member. However, even the anti-war members of ADA questioned the feasibility, or even the rationality, of dumping Johnson, who, they said, had accomplished more for economic justice and civil rights than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
With the NSA divided and the ADA unwilling to help, Lowenstein was forced to create his own political organization to act as the grassroots foundation of the Dump Johnson Movement. That organization would become the Conference for Concerned Democrats (CCD), officially formed in August of 1967. Throughout the summer, Lowenstein and Gans had criss-crossed the country on a shoe-string budget, setting up local chapters of the CCD on college campuses, and asking for support and donations from political reform clubs and anti-war organizations. While many saw their work as a fool's errand, Gans' voter analysis indicated that Johnson had an incredibly fragile voting base for an incumbent president. As Lowenstein continued on, he began to get in touch with various other state-based groups opposed to Johnson: in New Hampshire, a minor local politician named Eugene Daniell was attempting to organize a Draft Robert Kennedy movement; in Wisconsin, there was an attempt to whip up support for a write-in of “No” on the ballot to signify a rejection of Johnson; and in California, a group of anti-war activists were putting together their own slate of delegates to challenge the pro-Johnson delegate slate in the primary. Despite their sympathies for the CCD, all of these groups had the obvious flaw of lacking a willing candidate, but Lowenstein knew just the man to ask...
Bobby Kennedy.
Johnson's paranoia of Kennedy had continued even after he had secured the nomination 1964. Kennedy left his position as attorney general to become the senator for New York, which Johnson believed was so he would be better positioned to challenge him in 1968. And indeed, Kennedy did plan on running for president, with it being a question of when, not if. During his time in the Senate, he became a champion of civil rights causes and progressive reform, and while privately opposed to the Vietnam War, he vacillated in public for fear that any criticism would be interpreted by the press as a challenge to the President. Before he had even been approached by Lowenstein, Kennedy's cadre of advisors were arguing over whether he should run in 1968, or wait until 1972. The '68 faction consisted of his younger staffers, his wife Ethel, and his widowed sister-in-law Jackie. Those of the '72 faction consisted of his brother Ted, as well as the old guard Jack Kennedy advisors such as Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The former argued that 1968 was the best chance to challenge the Vietnam War and heal the growing divisions in American society. The latter argued that challenging Johnson would be political suicide, especially with the powerful party bosses, like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, showing no interest in a challenge against the President. Kennedy was still undecided when he was first approached by his old speech writer in August of 1967, the same month the CCD was founded. Lowenstein laid out the plan that the basis of any challenge against Johnson would have to rely on building momentum in the early primary states where the President would not be directly competing. If Johnson was sufficiently weakened in the primaries, then the party bosses could be convinced that Kennedy would be the safer bet in the general against the Republican challenger. By the time of their second meeting in late September, Kennedy was still undecided. In a private gathering with Kennedy and some of his advisors, Lowenstein made an impassioned plea for the Dump Johnson Movement. Schlesinger proposed a compromise where Kennedy would not run for president, but would promote a peace plank at that Democratic convention. Kennedy rejected the plank idea as uninspiring, but also came to the decision that he would wait until 1972. As Lowenstein walked out the door, he derisively declared, “We're going to do it without you, and that's too bad. Because you could have become President of the United States.”
With Kennedy refusing to run, Lowenstein had lost the potential candidate with the highest name recognition and popularity of anyone opposed to the Vietnam War. With no clear second choice, Lowenstein went about asking different candidates. Kennedy himself had recommended Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, but McGovern declined, believing Johnson's nomination to be an inevitability, and fearing for his re-election chances in the Senate once he failed to beat the President. McGovern instead recommended, off the top of his head, Eugene McCarthy [1]. Lowenstein had only briefly met McCarthy once before, in the spring of 1967, when Kennedy was still the main choice of Dump Johnson and the CCD. Back then, McCarthy had agreed that Kennedy was the best candidate. However, with no other options left, Lowenstein got McCarthy to agree to a meeting in October. Giving his usual pitch on the feasibility and moral necessity of challenging Johnson, McCarthy, unexpectedly, agreed to run.
Lowenstein had finally found his candidate.
Allard Lowenstein: The liberal activist and Dump Johnson leader who was instrumental in laying the groundwork for McCarthy's presidential campaign.
Word quickly spread through the grapevine of liberal senators that Gene McCarthy of all people was going to challenge the President. The idea was not warmly received by his colleagues: sympathetic anti-war senators did not want to risk backing a guaranteed loser when their own re-election chances were on the line, and most of them saw McCarthy as snide and unreliable. Even one of McCarthy's best friends in the Senate, Philip Hart of Michigan, thought he was a political incompetent without any sense of commitment. Kennedy thought that he was only doing it to boost his book sales, and one Johnson loyalist thought he was doing it out of boredom, exclaiming, “It's not in his nature to be President. He doesn't even want to be Senator [2]!” To his credit, McCarthy was open about the fact that he was losing interest in politics, and intended to retire and return to academia. He figured he had nothing to lose in challenging Johnson over what he saw as a critical moral issue. However, as he did a pre-announcement tour of the country to various college campuses – mostly in New England and California – McCarthy tried to convince Kennedy to run, despite their mutual antipathy. They met only once during this time. In a meeting organized by journalist and mutual friend Mary McGrory, the two were supposed to have a one hour discussion about the logistics of McCarthy running in the early primary states. Instead, McCarthy arrived late, barely said anything for seven minutes, then left. McCarthy later sent a message to Kennedy telling him not to “throw stones on the track while I'm running out there [3]."
While he was doing all this, McCarthy had yet to confirm that he was running for president, merely saying that he was considering the option. Lowenstein was becoming increasingly concerned that McCarthy would try to back out, with weeks having passed since their meeting. However, McCarthy gained more behind-the-scenes support that seemed to convince him to enter the race. His daughter, Mary, had been a leading anti-war activist at her college, and constantly pressured him to challenge Johnson, while some in the ADA had changed their mind; John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Rauh Jr., both founders of the ADA and both members of its executive committee, had had a change of heart about challenging Johnson, after witnessing the growing strength of the Dump Johnson Movement. The duo approached McCarthy to encourage him to run, and promised they would work to convince the rest of the ADA to hold a vote to endorse him if he did. Finally, McCarthy acquiesced [4].
On November 30th of 1967, McCarthy held a press conference in the Senate Caucus Room. Reading off a prepared statement in a monotone, McCarthy announced that he would be “entering” the primaries in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, and California, and would decide later if he was going to enter in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Not once in his speech did he say he was running for president. In the question period that followed the address, he admitted that would rather have Kennedy run instead, “so that I wouldn’t have to do anything.”
Three days later, McCarthy flew to Chicago to give the keynote address at the CCD national convention in the Chicago Hilton ballroom, where Lowenstein hoped that he would start his campaign in earnest.
It did not go as planned.
McCarthy was still writing out his speech in his hotel room at the time the event was supposed to start. There was a record turnout of six thousand people, with the ballroom only being able to hold four thousand, with the rest waiting outside. Seeing their growing impatience, Lowenstein went on stage to get the audience warmed up. With the attention of the audience, Lowenstein gave the best, most passionate speech of his career, riling the audience up into a hysteria, booing Johnson, and cheering the anti-war movement. McCarthy watched in shock from the closed-circuit TV in his room, and sprinted down to stop Lowenstein. To McCarthy, the whole campaign was supposed to be about the issues, and a peaceful, orderly demonstration against the war. Instead, Lowenstein was firing off at Johnson personally in a demagogic monologue, and if there was one thing McCarthy absolutely hated, it was demagoguery. Even once McCarthy arrived, Lowenstein insisted on finishing his own speech, in perhaps the most spectacular example of stealing someone’s thunder in American political history. Regardless, by the time McCarthy took to the stage, the audience was screaming in adulation.
He began with a discussion of the degradation of Roman morality following the Punic Wars, before giving an extended anecdote about the Dreyfus Affair, and only then firmly settling on the topic of Vietnam. McCarthy dutifully listed the reasons why the war was unconstitutional or immoral in the style of a cerebral academic lecture, rather than a pumped up campaign rally. By the time he finished, the excitement in the room had completely deflated. McCarthy decided not to go outside to speak to the two thousand attendees who had not been able to hear the speech, and declined to meet with any of the CCD state caucuses. McCarthy never forgave Lowenstein for co-opting his night, and refused to ever take a stage after him again. They rarely met after that, with Gans becoming the chief representative of the CCD for the campaign. McCarthy was panned in the media. The weak showing hurt his support in the ADA, with many in the anti-war faction thinking that he was such an anemic candidate that he was making Johnson look good by comparison. The McCarthy campaign had stalled before it was even out of the gate [5].
Curtis Gans at the mic: Following Lowenstein's estrangement from the campaign, Gans was the main link between Dump Johnson, the CCD, and McCarthy, and served in senior roles for the rest of his campaign. His voting pattern analysis was the first proof that Johnson would be vulnerable in 1968. A hastily put up McCarthy poster is peeling off the wall in the background.
After its rough start, McCarthy’s campaign struggled to coalesce. The entire campaign staff was made up of volunteers, with no official appointments having been made. Many politicians and lobbyists who had promised to support McCarthy if he ran suddenly went quiet, instilling a distrust of ‘professionals’ for the rest of the campaign. Gans continued to act as a liaison, but was often blocked by Jerry Eller, McCarthy’s personal aide, who was incredibly territorial about the Senator’s schedule. The various anti-Johnson electoral efforts were confederated into McCarthy’s campaign, but there was barely any communication between the regional offices (which McCarthy scarcely visited) and the central office (which McCarthy never visited). While money had indeed poured in from Adlai Stevenson’s old supporters on Wall Street, it was largely unaccounted for; the finances of the campaign had not been prepared, and donations were spread out over different banks and different accounts, without a way to quickly withdraw it for campaign needs. McCarthy’s brother-in-law Stephen Quigley, a surgeon by trade who had previously served as Minnesota’s comptroller, was put in charge of the budget. Seeing that the position was still vacant, Blair Clark, a sympathetic journalist and business executive, offered to act as the campaign manager until a professional could be found for the job. McCarthy never looked for a replacement, and Clark – who had never run a political campaign in his life – almost accidentally took on the position permanently [6].
Clark knew that challenging an incumbent president would be an uphill battle without any other factors, but the press had already begun to write off McCarthy’s campaign as amateurish, and losing press interest was something that the campaign could not afford. While all but the most optimistic volunteers expected to lose, they needed a strong enough showing to push Johnson into adopting a peace plank at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Clark also knew that with the campaign so far behind, they needed to do something flashy to get things re-energized. To that end, Clark tried to convince McCarthy to enter into the New Hampshire primary.
An undated photo of Blair Clark. A journalist and businessman, Clark served as McCarthy's campaign manager despite having no prior political experience.
Even before McCarthy had entered the race, New Hampshire had been one of the states with an active Dump Johnson Movement. Eugene Daniell, a state politician and former mayor, had been working on a Draft Robert Kennedy effort. Daniell was calling on voters to write in Kennedy’s name on their ballot, in an attempt to emulate the success of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. in 1964 [7]. In the Republican primaries of that year, a draft effort for Lodge had seen him win the primary, despite not being an active candidate and not once setting foot in the state.
New Hampshire politics were in a state of flux at the time. The state was considered conservative and hawkish, with it having been a one-party state for the Republicans up until recently. Due to a centre-right ideological consensus, politics were mainly based off of personality, ethnicity, and the preferences of the local media rather than policy. It was for these exact reasons that McCarthy was hesitant to enter the New Hampshire primary. However, there was a small but active anti-war scene as well. In a preliminary scouting tour, Gans had recruited a local professor with experience in politics and who was opposed to the war: David Hoeh. Hoeh was receptive to the idea of running a campaign in the state for an anti-war candidate, but only if it was an active candidate, rather than a draft movement. After his October meeting with McCarthy, Lowenstein himself went to New Hampshire to meet with Hoeh and his compatriots to let them know they had a candidate, and that it was time to beginning laying the groundwork. Much like Blair, Hoeh was chosen as the temporary chairman of the New Hampshire McCarthy for President Steering Committee, but without anyone under consideration to take the job as permanent chairman after him. Hoeh was also joined by Gerry Studds, a former legislative assistant in the State Department during the Kennedy Administration, and the de facto co-leader of the New Hampshire operation. Both were working for the campaign on a part-time basis.
Hoeh had seen McCarthy campaign for Jack Kennedy in the state in 1960. Rather than being discouraged, he was convinced that McCarthy’s slow and steady style would be uniquely appealing in the state. Hoeh and Studds had thorough analysed the layout of the state, and had created a long list of reasons for McCarthy to run. They essentially boiled down to the facts that the state was cheap and easy to campaign in, had a disproportionately powerful impact on news coverage, and that even a meagre showing in the hawkish state would garner legitimacy. However, according to New Hampshire law, in order to officially file as a campaign organization they needed to be backing a declared candidate, and could not get started until McCarthy officially declared he was running in the state. Informed by Clark that McCarthy did not like heavy canvassing or front work, Hoeh and Studds offered to cut down on the campaign schedule.
When McCarthy met with the New Hampshire team in mid-December, he told them he was still undecided, but likely to enter. By late December, he was telling the press that he would be skipping the New Hampshire primary. This was a disappointment for Hoeh and Studds, especially since they had not been told about the decision directly, and instead had found out by reading a copy of the Boston Globe. The cautious McCarthy had apparently been convinced that the possibility of a catastrophic, embarrassing defeat in New Hampshire was not worth the risk of perhaps doing modestly well. He would instead focus his energies on the second primary in Wisconsin.
But, McCarthy changed his mind again. On January 2nd of 1968, he sent Clark on a secret mission to Hoeh’s house to tell him that he would be running in New Hampshire. A little while after Clark had arrived to deliver the news, McCarthy phoned Hoeh and did it himself. Clark was confused why he would be sent in person when McCarthy intended to call the entire time [8].
Regardless, with McCarthy as a declared candidate, the New Hampshire team was finally able kick into action.
A handshake in the Granite State: Before officially announcing that he would be participating in the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy briefly visited the state at least twice.
Ever since his non-announcement that he was running for president, McCarthy had been an object of mockery and suspicion in the White House. The capture of the American spy ship USS Pueblo off the coast of North Korea had prompted a hawkish mood in the country, and Johnson was polling in landslide numbers in the early primary states. McCarthy’s former friend (and still the Secretary of Agriculture) Orville Freeman wrote him off as “a footnote in history,” while Humphrey was hurt that his old friend would betray him in an act of vindictive political suicide. Johnson dismissed him completely in public, but he was privately worried that McCarthy was working as a stalking horse for Kennedy, who he believed would be the real threat to his renomination. To the extent that he was worried of McCarthy, it was from the possibility if he gained the support of black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. that it would irreparably split the party by the time of the general election [9]. For the primaries, Johnson decided to adopt a Rose Garden strategy. In New Hampshire, he sent Bernard Boutin as his agent in the state. Boutin had previously been a candidate for governor in New Hampshire, narrowly losing in 1959. Following that, he had occupied various middle management positions in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Chosen as the Johnson loyalist who knew New Hampshire best, Boutin was responsible for orchestrating a landslide victory for the President in the state's primary, with the implied reward of a cabinet position in his future. Joining Boutin's efforts were Governor John King, a hawkish moderate-conservative, and Senator Thomas McIntyre, a more liberal supporter of Johnson [10].
The challenge facing the Johnson team was that the President was not officially running, and therefore his name would not appear on the ballot. Their job was to whip up a suitably impressive number of write-in votes for Johnson as a show of support from the state, with Boutin confidently announcing to the press that the President would win as high as ninety percent of the vote against the upstart Senator. In order to achieve this, Boutin, King, and McIntyre had had the New Hampshire Democratic Party committee endorse Johnson, effectively merging the re-election campaign and the state party in a legally questionable move. The Johnson team also sent pledge cards to every Democrat in the state, which one could sign and mail to the White House in a promise that they would write in Lyndon Johnson on election day.
Both of these initiatives backfired spectacularly.
Many New Hampshire Democrats complained that they did not necessarily want their membership dues to go towards Johnson's re-election fund, and the Johnson team was dogged by demands to show proof that the finances of the state party and the re-election campaign were being kept separate. They were also met by accusations that they were violating the party's policy of official neutrality in the primaries by siding with Johnson. Likewise, Hoeh and the McCarthy campaign attacked the pledge cards as an example of the overbearing Johnson trying to browbeat voters into submission, and began to cast the election as Washington authoritarianism against New Hampshire free-thinking. Refusing to acknowledge the McCarthy campaign for fear that it would legitimize it, the Johnson team never came up with a convincing rebuttal, and the pledge cards remained a viciously effective talking point of the McCarthy campaign long after they had been discontinued. Further problems emerged for the Johnson team through Daniell's frequent legal challenges against the state party in his continued effort to draft Bobby Kennedy. Daniell had begun assembling Kennedy supporters to run in the state's forty-eight delegate slate. However, he had been blocked by the state's attorney general, who had interpreted the New Hampshire law that prevented a draft movement from having an official campaign as also preventing the allowance of delegates specifically supporting a draft candidate. Daniell claimed that the attorney general had only done so on Governor King's orders, and challenged it in the local press, threatening to pursue it into the courts. The problem became moot, however, when Kennedy sent a letter asking Daniell to discontinue the write-in campaign, and followed it up by sending Ted Sorenson to encourage Kennedy supporters to vote for an active candidate, reaffirming Kennedy’s statement that “I will not be a candidate against President Johnson this year under any foreseeable circumstances.” The Draft Kennedy effort folded shortly after, and released a statement endorsing Eugene McCarthy, thereby uniting New Hampshire’s doves without any acrimony [11].
Meanwhile, the Johnson team were having their own troubles with their delegate slate. Each candidate was supposed to run forty-eight delegates (twenty-four active delegates and another twenty-four as an alternate slate). Not expecting a primary challenge when the slate candidates had first been assembled, the top-heavy Johnson team had not strictly reviewed the delegate process, and they had nearly double the number of delegate candidates than their were positions. On the other hand, Hoeh and Studds had tightly organized the McCarthy slate so that they had exactly forty-eight candidates.
Four years later: McCarthy on Meet the Press in 1964, when he was under consideration for the vice presidency, and in 1968, when he was under consideration for the presidency.
After a fundraising tour in Boston, McCarthy arrived for his first day of New Hampshire campaigning in late January. McCarthy opened the campaign in the town of Nashua, in front of a memorial statue to Jack Kennedy. McCarthy elucidated the various reasons he was running, describing in his usual, calm, deliberate way why he believed the Vietnam War was immoral, ineffective, and unconstitutional. The national press was nonplussed however; when McCarthy was asked how he thought his campaign was doing, he replied “all right,” and when he was asked why he did not use a more forceful campaigning style, he retorted that “I don't intend to shout at people around the country.” When asked, McCarthy said that he thought he would be an “adequate” president [12]. With that, he began his canvassing of downtown Nashua, with the press following behind. McCarthy moved at a brisk pace through the area, shaking hands and making conversation, but refused to enter or spend much time in several of the stops Hoeh and Studds had planned. McCarthy breezed through a busy restaurant, believing that people would not want to talk long while they were eating, and refused to enter a salon, claiming that women would not want to be seen by the national press without being made up first [13]. Running well ahead of schedule, McCarthy began to overtake his advance men, and arrived at a factory so that he could meet the workers as they left their shift. Unfortunately, the advance man had been wrong about the time the workers let out, and McCarthy and the press had arrived five minutes after everyone had already left. The situation got worse when the advance man arrived after McCarthy, and started complaining that he was canvassing a non-unionized factory. Following the mid-day disaster, McCarthy held a rally in the evening at a high school gymnasium in Manchester which was well received by the audience. However, McCarthy's national headquarters had not printed off copies of the speech for the national press, leading them to focus more on the factory fiasco in their coverage, and writing off McCarthy's campaign as an amateurish disaster, with many leaving the state to focus on other stories. Despite this, McCarthy was nearly unanimously well-received by New Hampshirites, and left the state eager to return for more campaigning. McCarthy’s family also became involved; Abigail began organized a massive mailing campaign by Women for McCarthy almost singlehandedly, but was considered incredibly touchy and overprotective of ‘her Gene’ by the staff [14]. The McCarthy children, Ellen, Mary, Michael, and Margaret, helped as volunteers, with Mary in particular being praised as an effective youth coordinator and liaison to her father.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Western world, North Vietnam had witnessed a brief power struggle in the upper echelons of its leadership. The President of North Vietnam (and also the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam), Hồ Chi Minh, had been marginalized from power along with General Võ Nguyên Giáp. Lê Duẩn, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, had taken control of the North Vietnamese Politburo with his hawk faction. Hồ and Võ had both preferred a strategy of guerrilla warfare and negotiations with South Vietnam and the United States. Lê Duẩn preferred a more militaristic approach, believing that a series of large-scale assaults in support of the South's communist guerrillas (the National Liberation Front, also known as the NLF, or Viet Cong) would eventually overrun the South and inspire its people to revolt. This culminated in the Tet Offensive: a simultaneous assault on nearly every major city in South Vietnam. Americans watched on the evening news as the fighting raged stronger than ever, and the NLF nearly took control of the American embassy in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. While the Tet Offensive was a tactical defeat for the North, as it failed to inspire a revolution or conquer the South outright, it was a strategic and political catastrophe for Lyndon Johnson. His assurances that victory was in sight were proven to be false, and his support plummeted overnight, empowering McCarthy's campaign.
The New Hampshire campaign became energized by a fresh flow of volunteers and donations at the same time that Hoeh and Studds whipped up a more organized quality to the campaign [15]. Emulating the state-based confederated campaign structure of the national McCarthy organization, Hoeh and Studds created a largely autonomous McCarthy committee in nearly every town in the state. However, unlike the national campaign, the headquarters office in Concord had clearly defined organizational structure, and a filing system that was able to accommodate a large number of volunteers. Most notably, students came on weekends and breaks, with many of them cutting their hair and dressing formally so as to not scare off the average conservative suburban New Hampshirite. Operating under the slogan “Get Neat and Clean for Gene,” often condensed into “Get Clean for Gene,” Hoeh was nearly obsessed with preventing a media disaster that played into the public's fears of the youth. However, no such disaster emerged, and the number of student volunteers seemed to vindicate McCarthy's objective to bring young people's faith into the nation's institutions and political process, while at the same time closing the generational gap through canvassing. McCarthy's relatively quick and infrequent visits made it so he took on an almost mythic quality to the young volunteers of his own campaign, who had a greater appreciation for his professorial nature than the national press. There was an uncomfortable, silent understanding between McCarthy and his student volunteers that the only reason they were working together was to end the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, they grew on each other, and McCarthy, initially put off by their youthful exuberance, began to call them ‘his kids.’ Additionally, the arrival of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy loyalist and speechwriter, implied at least implicit support from Bobby Kennedy [16]. As the New Hampshire campaign went on, the national press also slowly caught on that something might actually be happening. McCarthy's young volunteers grabbed particular interest, as did the string of celebrities who swung through the state to campaign, canvass, and record ads for McCarthy, most notably Paul Newman. Since the start, offers of support had poured into the national office. After a few months, they finally got someone to start replying to mail.
With the March 12 voting day closing in, both the McCarthy and Johnson teams began to alter their campaigns. Hoeh and Studds draped the anti-war position in the language of conservatism, haranguing Johnson for raising taxes and causing rapid inflation to cover the costs of the war, and blaming the disproportionate conscription numbers of the black community for causing the race riots and lawlessness plaguing the nation. Having yet to be provided with any official campaign material or photographs by the national headquarters despite asking several times, Hoeh and Studds began making their own campaign material and distributing it around the state. They also hoped to gain an edge in cross-over voting. Republican anti-war moderate George Romney had dropped out of the presidential race following a gaffe where he had told the press that he had been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War; something that came off as tone-deaf considering the revelations two years earlier of the torture of American prisoners in North Vietnam. Hoping that McCarthy would make a sympathetic statement in order to gain Romney supporters, he instead stayed true to his caustic nature: when asked about Romney's brainwashing comment, McCarthy replied, for him, “a light rinse would've sufficed [17]." On the Johnson side, the early campaign plan of ignoring McCarthy and promoting a rally-around-the-flag mentality fell apart with the Tet Offensive. Boutin and King resorted to red-baiting, accusing McCarthy of being a communist sympathizer and of weakening America's negotiating position with the North Vietnamese. McIntyre, with his base in the state being more liberal urban Democrats, was reluctant to participate in throwing around accusations of communist sympathies, but was eventually forced to present a united front. The Johnson team's tactics backfired yet again, with Hoeh accusing them of engaging in (Joseph) McCarthyism out of desperation to try and trick the voters into not seriously considering the candidates [18].
As McCarthy swept the state on the eve of voting day, his campaign had turned around to become a media darling. The staying power of effort to Dump Johnson had eventually convinced the press of its seriousness, and Boutin and the Johnson team had been forced to constantly move the goalposts of victory. Because they initially set a Johnson win at ninety percent, the press decided that anything higher than twenty percent would be significant for McCarthy, and emblematic of a rejection of the President. As the campaign went on, the Johnson team eventually dropped their win condition to being in the high sixties, and by election day, sixty percent.
But they had not even made it to that.
On the snowy night of March 12, President Lyndon Johnson came in at a little under fifty percent of the vote, while Senator Eugene McCarthy had gotten forty-two percent. Including Republican write-ins, McCarthy came within three hundred votes of beating the President. But, what was more, McCarthy completely obliterated Johnson in the delegate count: the bloated number of Johnson delegates had cut into each others votes, leaving McCarthy with over eighty percent of the delegates, despite having lost the popular vote.
Even while technically losing, it was one of the greatest upsets in American political history [19].
Four days later, Bobby Kennedy finally announced that he would be running for president. While Kennedy had decided he would enter regardless of the results of the New Hampshire primary, his timing was denounced by McCarthy's supporters, who accused him of being a gutless opportunist. Kennedy was tarred and feathered in liberal editorials, while McCarthy's youth organizer, Sam Brown, recalled, “We woke up after the New Hampshire primary like it was Christmas Day. When we went down to the tree, Bobby Kennedy had stolen our Christmas presents.” McCarthy, elated by his pseudo-victory in New Hampshire, refused to drop out, his past pronouncements about Kennedy now forgotten, and his position against Johnson stronger than ever.
Regardless of who would win the nomination, they would be in for a fight.
[1] Before asking McCarthy in the fall of 1967, Lowenstein and Gans went through a myriad of different candidates, including Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas from the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana, former General James Gavin, and Representative Don Edwards of California, all of whom declined. McGovern also recommended Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana, a friend of McCarthy's, who declined as well. John Kenneth Galbraith, a member of ADA, ambassador, and famous economist was willing to run, but he was disqualified because he was not an American citizen by birth.
[2] While McCarthy might have deserved his reputation as a lazy senator, many of his colleagues were selling his competence short. The lowest percentage of the vote McCarthy had ever gotten was thirty-seven percent, which he won in the four-way 1948 Democratic primary for the Fourth Congressional District, his first ever election. After that, McCarthy won a landslide victory in every election he ever ran in, with his lowest margin of victory after that being fifty-nine percent. While he may not have been a very proactive senator – something that was not helped by the fact that he intentionally cultivated a reputation for aloofness – he had the uncanny ability to whip up huge margins from a Republican-leaning district in what was then considered a swing state.
[3] The Kennedy-McCarthy relationship was especially complicated at this point. McCarthy clearly disliked Kennedy, but also acknowledged that he would be a much better candidate to challenge Johnson. Yet, when McCarthy was trying to convince him to jump in, he kept being rude and dismissive toward him. Some thought that McCarthy was trying to intentionally aggravate Kennedy into running, so that he would not have to do it himself.
[4] Why did McCarthy wait so long to run for President after his meeting with Lowenstein? The most obvious answer would be that he was still waiting on Kennedy to enter the race, but it has been suggested that McCarthy did not take Lowenstein and Gans seriously, and that being approached by senior, well-known liberal lobbyists like Galbraith and Rauh convinced him of the feasibility.
[5] In the aftermath of the CCD conference, the highest ranking politicians willing to be publicly associated with McCarthy was Sandra Hoeh, the Chair of the 2nd Congressional District of New Hampshire for the State Democratic Committee, and Bronson La Follette, the Attorney General of Wisconsin.
[6] The position of campaign coordinator was also left unfilled by McCarthy. It would remain vacant for over a month before Gans was appointed to it in January of 1968. McCarthy also did not clearly appoint a Chief of Staff. His Senate aide, Jerry Eller, took on the position informally.
[7] When told about Daniell’s draft effort in New Hampshire, Kennedy replied, “Robert Kennedy spelled R-O-B-E-R-T-K-E-N-N-E-D-Y is not a write-in candidate.”
[8] What caused McCarthy to change his mind? Blair Clark, as it turns out. Clark was pushing for McCarthy to enter the New Hampshire primary harder than anyone. In late December, the two of them were going to take a plane on a quick trip to New York from Washington, but inclement weather caused the flight to be cancelled. Taking a train instead, Clark was able to lay out over several hours why entering New Hampshire was a good idea. Without that train ride, McCarthy would not have gone in on New Hampshire.
[9] Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed go on to support McCarthy, making a statement for him that was used in radio campaign ads in New Hampshire. However, King also told McCarthy that his political support would have to be kept quiet for the most part since he was still pressuring Johnson on various policy actions. King's political involvement in 1968 was cut short by his assassination, and it is unclear if he would have ultimately preferred McCarthy or Kennedy. However, his widow, Coretta Scott King, was personal friends with Abigail McCarthy, and may have privately preferred McCarthy over Bobby Kennedy, though this is unclear.
[10] In Johnson’s New Hampshire chain of command, King and McIntyre were officially co-chairs of his re-election campaign. However, Boutin was the de facto leader, and controlled most of the campaign's decisions.
[11] Kennedy did not go so far as endorsing McCarthy, saying that he did not think that it would “further the cause of peace.” The more likely reasons were that he was still deciding on whether he would enter or not himself, and he still very much disliked McCarthy.
[12] The national press frequently and negatively compared Gene McCarthy to George Romney, the moderate Republican Governor of Michigan who was also running for president. Romney was much more of a politician's politician, and while popular nationwide, came off as a tourist who did not really understand the Granite State and its people to New Hampshirites.
[13] Politically aware or lazy campaigner? McCarthy hated the politicking part of politics, and loathed the demagoguery of selling himself as a candidate. Sometimes this may have helped him, and other times it probably hurt him. For example, McCarthy typically refused to do any campaigning in the morning, frequently skipping opportunities to meet night shift workers as they left their jobs, since he thought they would not want to talk to anyone. Also, he liked taking his time to start the day in the morning and did not want to be disturbed.
[14] One ugly episode involving Abigail McCarthy recalled by McCarthy’s then-press secretary Seymour Hersh is that she complained there were too many “Hebrews” on the staff.
[15] Hoeh and Studds were initially promised a million dollars from the national campaign headquarters. Ultimately, they did not directly receive any money from the national headquarters, with Blair Clark and financier Howard Stein paying for many of the initial expenses. McCarthy's New Hampshire campaign floated almost entirely on donations and volunteer work, with final expenses coming up to around five hundred thousand dollars.
[16] Richard Goodwin's exact role in the McCarthy campaign remains something of a mystery. Some think that he came to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy because Kennedy refused to run, while McCarthy himself seemed to believe that Goodwin was a spy sent by Kennedy to keep tabs on him. Goodwin would later abandon McCarthy when Kennedy announced, but would return to work for McCarthy following Kennedy's assassination.
[17] Romney was also mocked by the colourful Governor of Ohio, Jim Rhodes, who commented, “watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.”
[18] The two McCarthys of American politics had a strange relationship. In the 1950s, Gene agreed to debate Joe in what the media taglined as McCarthy vs. McCarthy, with Gene arguing that communists should not be barred from any occupation except for those that would be handling top secret government files. However, Gene was in favour of banning the Communist Party of the United States of America in his early career, and went along with most anti-communist measures. Gene would be confused with Joe even past death, with the 2008 Democratic National Convention memorializing him as Joseph McCarthy. It did not help that his full name was Eugene Joseph McCarthy.
[19] So why is it that McCarthy nearly won in conservative, hawkish New Hampshire? Well, as it turns out, because most of McCarthy's voters were not actually voting for him, but were rather voting against Johnson. Exit polling in New Hampshire showed that the majority of voters actually wanted someone more hawkish on Vietnam, and most of those who voted for McCarthy said they did not know what his position on the war was. In fact, eighteen percent of all of McCarthy's voters in the primaries would go on to support the third party bid of archsegregationist Southern Democrat George Wallace in the general election. While Johnson was able to hold on to the 'default support' of more voters, Hoeh and Studd's decision to phrase things around fiscal conservatism and emphasizing leadership qualities rather than war policies paid dividends on election night. IOTL, both Hoeh and Studds would later run for Congress. Hoeh unsuccessfully in 1968, and Studds successfully in 1972.
While Eugene McCarthy was making off-the-record declarations to the press that he was willing to run against the President, another man was trying to find someone to do just that.
Allard Lowenstein was a political and civil rights activist who had been involved in various liberal causes since the late 1940s. His biggest political accomplishments to date had been investigating abuses against the black population of South Africa by its apartheid government, and taking part in the Freedom Summer to register black people eligible to vote in the South. He also had the credentials of having previously worked as a staff member on Hubert Humphrey's foreign policy team, and as a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy. Lowenstein was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, and, by 1966, had decided that Lyndon Johnson needed to be challenged for the Democratic nomination. Lowenstein was joined by Curtis Gans, a voting statistics analyst, and together they started what would come to be called the Dump Johnson Movement. Throughout 1966 and most of 1967, Lowenstein laid the groundwork for the as-of-yet-unchosen opponent to Johnson. Attending the 1966 annual convention of the National Students Association (NSA), Lowenstein had to contend with radicals in the organization who felt it was futile to operate within the political system as it existed, and felt that civil disobedience was the only way to challenge Johnson and the Vietnam War. Lowenstein's more moderate position won the internal NSA vote; a letter of protest was sent to the President, and a meeting was arranged between the hawkish Secretary of State Dean Rusk and the various student body presidents of the NSA. Unfortunately for Lowenstein, Rusk's dismissive attitude disillusioned many within the NSA to jump ship to the radical New Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Next, Lowenstein approached Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), of which Lowenstein was the youngest board member. However, even the anti-war members of ADA questioned the feasibility, or even the rationality, of dumping Johnson, who, they said, had accomplished more for economic justice and civil rights than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.
With the NSA divided and the ADA unwilling to help, Lowenstein was forced to create his own political organization to act as the grassroots foundation of the Dump Johnson Movement. That organization would become the Conference for Concerned Democrats (CCD), officially formed in August of 1967. Throughout the summer, Lowenstein and Gans had criss-crossed the country on a shoe-string budget, setting up local chapters of the CCD on college campuses, and asking for support and donations from political reform clubs and anti-war organizations. While many saw their work as a fool's errand, Gans' voter analysis indicated that Johnson had an incredibly fragile voting base for an incumbent president. As Lowenstein continued on, he began to get in touch with various other state-based groups opposed to Johnson: in New Hampshire, a minor local politician named Eugene Daniell was attempting to organize a Draft Robert Kennedy movement; in Wisconsin, there was an attempt to whip up support for a write-in of “No” on the ballot to signify a rejection of Johnson; and in California, a group of anti-war activists were putting together their own slate of delegates to challenge the pro-Johnson delegate slate in the primary. Despite their sympathies for the CCD, all of these groups had the obvious flaw of lacking a willing candidate, but Lowenstein knew just the man to ask...
Bobby Kennedy.
Johnson's paranoia of Kennedy had continued even after he had secured the nomination 1964. Kennedy left his position as attorney general to become the senator for New York, which Johnson believed was so he would be better positioned to challenge him in 1968. And indeed, Kennedy did plan on running for president, with it being a question of when, not if. During his time in the Senate, he became a champion of civil rights causes and progressive reform, and while privately opposed to the Vietnam War, he vacillated in public for fear that any criticism would be interpreted by the press as a challenge to the President. Before he had even been approached by Lowenstein, Kennedy's cadre of advisors were arguing over whether he should run in 1968, or wait until 1972. The '68 faction consisted of his younger staffers, his wife Ethel, and his widowed sister-in-law Jackie. Those of the '72 faction consisted of his brother Ted, as well as the old guard Jack Kennedy advisors such as Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The former argued that 1968 was the best chance to challenge the Vietnam War and heal the growing divisions in American society. The latter argued that challenging Johnson would be political suicide, especially with the powerful party bosses, like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, showing no interest in a challenge against the President. Kennedy was still undecided when he was first approached by his old speech writer in August of 1967, the same month the CCD was founded. Lowenstein laid out the plan that the basis of any challenge against Johnson would have to rely on building momentum in the early primary states where the President would not be directly competing. If Johnson was sufficiently weakened in the primaries, then the party bosses could be convinced that Kennedy would be the safer bet in the general against the Republican challenger. By the time of their second meeting in late September, Kennedy was still undecided. In a private gathering with Kennedy and some of his advisors, Lowenstein made an impassioned plea for the Dump Johnson Movement. Schlesinger proposed a compromise where Kennedy would not run for president, but would promote a peace plank at that Democratic convention. Kennedy rejected the plank idea as uninspiring, but also came to the decision that he would wait until 1972. As Lowenstein walked out the door, he derisively declared, “We're going to do it without you, and that's too bad. Because you could have become President of the United States.”
With Kennedy refusing to run, Lowenstein had lost the potential candidate with the highest name recognition and popularity of anyone opposed to the Vietnam War. With no clear second choice, Lowenstein went about asking different candidates. Kennedy himself had recommended Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, but McGovern declined, believing Johnson's nomination to be an inevitability, and fearing for his re-election chances in the Senate once he failed to beat the President. McGovern instead recommended, off the top of his head, Eugene McCarthy [1]. Lowenstein had only briefly met McCarthy once before, in the spring of 1967, when Kennedy was still the main choice of Dump Johnson and the CCD. Back then, McCarthy had agreed that Kennedy was the best candidate. However, with no other options left, Lowenstein got McCarthy to agree to a meeting in October. Giving his usual pitch on the feasibility and moral necessity of challenging Johnson, McCarthy, unexpectedly, agreed to run.
Lowenstein had finally found his candidate.
Allard Lowenstein: The liberal activist and Dump Johnson leader who was instrumental in laying the groundwork for McCarthy's presidential campaign.
Word quickly spread through the grapevine of liberal senators that Gene McCarthy of all people was going to challenge the President. The idea was not warmly received by his colleagues: sympathetic anti-war senators did not want to risk backing a guaranteed loser when their own re-election chances were on the line, and most of them saw McCarthy as snide and unreliable. Even one of McCarthy's best friends in the Senate, Philip Hart of Michigan, thought he was a political incompetent without any sense of commitment. Kennedy thought that he was only doing it to boost his book sales, and one Johnson loyalist thought he was doing it out of boredom, exclaiming, “It's not in his nature to be President. He doesn't even want to be Senator [2]!” To his credit, McCarthy was open about the fact that he was losing interest in politics, and intended to retire and return to academia. He figured he had nothing to lose in challenging Johnson over what he saw as a critical moral issue. However, as he did a pre-announcement tour of the country to various college campuses – mostly in New England and California – McCarthy tried to convince Kennedy to run, despite their mutual antipathy. They met only once during this time. In a meeting organized by journalist and mutual friend Mary McGrory, the two were supposed to have a one hour discussion about the logistics of McCarthy running in the early primary states. Instead, McCarthy arrived late, barely said anything for seven minutes, then left. McCarthy later sent a message to Kennedy telling him not to “throw stones on the track while I'm running out there [3]."
While he was doing all this, McCarthy had yet to confirm that he was running for president, merely saying that he was considering the option. Lowenstein was becoming increasingly concerned that McCarthy would try to back out, with weeks having passed since their meeting. However, McCarthy gained more behind-the-scenes support that seemed to convince him to enter the race. His daughter, Mary, had been a leading anti-war activist at her college, and constantly pressured him to challenge Johnson, while some in the ADA had changed their mind; John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Rauh Jr., both founders of the ADA and both members of its executive committee, had had a change of heart about challenging Johnson, after witnessing the growing strength of the Dump Johnson Movement. The duo approached McCarthy to encourage him to run, and promised they would work to convince the rest of the ADA to hold a vote to endorse him if he did. Finally, McCarthy acquiesced [4].
On November 30th of 1967, McCarthy held a press conference in the Senate Caucus Room. Reading off a prepared statement in a monotone, McCarthy announced that he would be “entering” the primaries in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, and California, and would decide later if he was going to enter in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Not once in his speech did he say he was running for president. In the question period that followed the address, he admitted that would rather have Kennedy run instead, “so that I wouldn’t have to do anything.”
Three days later, McCarthy flew to Chicago to give the keynote address at the CCD national convention in the Chicago Hilton ballroom, where Lowenstein hoped that he would start his campaign in earnest.
It did not go as planned.
McCarthy was still writing out his speech in his hotel room at the time the event was supposed to start. There was a record turnout of six thousand people, with the ballroom only being able to hold four thousand, with the rest waiting outside. Seeing their growing impatience, Lowenstein went on stage to get the audience warmed up. With the attention of the audience, Lowenstein gave the best, most passionate speech of his career, riling the audience up into a hysteria, booing Johnson, and cheering the anti-war movement. McCarthy watched in shock from the closed-circuit TV in his room, and sprinted down to stop Lowenstein. To McCarthy, the whole campaign was supposed to be about the issues, and a peaceful, orderly demonstration against the war. Instead, Lowenstein was firing off at Johnson personally in a demagogic monologue, and if there was one thing McCarthy absolutely hated, it was demagoguery. Even once McCarthy arrived, Lowenstein insisted on finishing his own speech, in perhaps the most spectacular example of stealing someone’s thunder in American political history. Regardless, by the time McCarthy took to the stage, the audience was screaming in adulation.
He began with a discussion of the degradation of Roman morality following the Punic Wars, before giving an extended anecdote about the Dreyfus Affair, and only then firmly settling on the topic of Vietnam. McCarthy dutifully listed the reasons why the war was unconstitutional or immoral in the style of a cerebral academic lecture, rather than a pumped up campaign rally. By the time he finished, the excitement in the room had completely deflated. McCarthy decided not to go outside to speak to the two thousand attendees who had not been able to hear the speech, and declined to meet with any of the CCD state caucuses. McCarthy never forgave Lowenstein for co-opting his night, and refused to ever take a stage after him again. They rarely met after that, with Gans becoming the chief representative of the CCD for the campaign. McCarthy was panned in the media. The weak showing hurt his support in the ADA, with many in the anti-war faction thinking that he was such an anemic candidate that he was making Johnson look good by comparison. The McCarthy campaign had stalled before it was even out of the gate [5].
Curtis Gans at the mic: Following Lowenstein's estrangement from the campaign, Gans was the main link between Dump Johnson, the CCD, and McCarthy, and served in senior roles for the rest of his campaign. His voting pattern analysis was the first proof that Johnson would be vulnerable in 1968. A hastily put up McCarthy poster is peeling off the wall in the background.
Clark knew that challenging an incumbent president would be an uphill battle without any other factors, but the press had already begun to write off McCarthy’s campaign as amateurish, and losing press interest was something that the campaign could not afford. While all but the most optimistic volunteers expected to lose, they needed a strong enough showing to push Johnson into adopting a peace plank at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Clark also knew that with the campaign so far behind, they needed to do something flashy to get things re-energized. To that end, Clark tried to convince McCarthy to enter into the New Hampshire primary.
An undated photo of Blair Clark. A journalist and businessman, Clark served as McCarthy's campaign manager despite having no prior political experience.
New Hampshire politics were in a state of flux at the time. The state was considered conservative and hawkish, with it having been a one-party state for the Republicans up until recently. Due to a centre-right ideological consensus, politics were mainly based off of personality, ethnicity, and the preferences of the local media rather than policy. It was for these exact reasons that McCarthy was hesitant to enter the New Hampshire primary. However, there was a small but active anti-war scene as well. In a preliminary scouting tour, Gans had recruited a local professor with experience in politics and who was opposed to the war: David Hoeh. Hoeh was receptive to the idea of running a campaign in the state for an anti-war candidate, but only if it was an active candidate, rather than a draft movement. After his October meeting with McCarthy, Lowenstein himself went to New Hampshire to meet with Hoeh and his compatriots to let them know they had a candidate, and that it was time to beginning laying the groundwork. Much like Blair, Hoeh was chosen as the temporary chairman of the New Hampshire McCarthy for President Steering Committee, but without anyone under consideration to take the job as permanent chairman after him. Hoeh was also joined by Gerry Studds, a former legislative assistant in the State Department during the Kennedy Administration, and the de facto co-leader of the New Hampshire operation. Both were working for the campaign on a part-time basis.
Hoeh had seen McCarthy campaign for Jack Kennedy in the state in 1960. Rather than being discouraged, he was convinced that McCarthy’s slow and steady style would be uniquely appealing in the state. Hoeh and Studds had thorough analysed the layout of the state, and had created a long list of reasons for McCarthy to run. They essentially boiled down to the facts that the state was cheap and easy to campaign in, had a disproportionately powerful impact on news coverage, and that even a meagre showing in the hawkish state would garner legitimacy. However, according to New Hampshire law, in order to officially file as a campaign organization they needed to be backing a declared candidate, and could not get started until McCarthy officially declared he was running in the state. Informed by Clark that McCarthy did not like heavy canvassing or front work, Hoeh and Studds offered to cut down on the campaign schedule.
When McCarthy met with the New Hampshire team in mid-December, he told them he was still undecided, but likely to enter. By late December, he was telling the press that he would be skipping the New Hampshire primary. This was a disappointment for Hoeh and Studds, especially since they had not been told about the decision directly, and instead had found out by reading a copy of the Boston Globe. The cautious McCarthy had apparently been convinced that the possibility of a catastrophic, embarrassing defeat in New Hampshire was not worth the risk of perhaps doing modestly well. He would instead focus his energies on the second primary in Wisconsin.
But, McCarthy changed his mind again. On January 2nd of 1968, he sent Clark on a secret mission to Hoeh’s house to tell him that he would be running in New Hampshire. A little while after Clark had arrived to deliver the news, McCarthy phoned Hoeh and did it himself. Clark was confused why he would be sent in person when McCarthy intended to call the entire time [8].
Regardless, with McCarthy as a declared candidate, the New Hampshire team was finally able kick into action.
A handshake in the Granite State: Before officially announcing that he would be participating in the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy briefly visited the state at least twice.
The challenge facing the Johnson team was that the President was not officially running, and therefore his name would not appear on the ballot. Their job was to whip up a suitably impressive number of write-in votes for Johnson as a show of support from the state, with Boutin confidently announcing to the press that the President would win as high as ninety percent of the vote against the upstart Senator. In order to achieve this, Boutin, King, and McIntyre had had the New Hampshire Democratic Party committee endorse Johnson, effectively merging the re-election campaign and the state party in a legally questionable move. The Johnson team also sent pledge cards to every Democrat in the state, which one could sign and mail to the White House in a promise that they would write in Lyndon Johnson on election day.
Both of these initiatives backfired spectacularly.
Many New Hampshire Democrats complained that they did not necessarily want their membership dues to go towards Johnson's re-election fund, and the Johnson team was dogged by demands to show proof that the finances of the state party and the re-election campaign were being kept separate. They were also met by accusations that they were violating the party's policy of official neutrality in the primaries by siding with Johnson. Likewise, Hoeh and the McCarthy campaign attacked the pledge cards as an example of the overbearing Johnson trying to browbeat voters into submission, and began to cast the election as Washington authoritarianism against New Hampshire free-thinking. Refusing to acknowledge the McCarthy campaign for fear that it would legitimize it, the Johnson team never came up with a convincing rebuttal, and the pledge cards remained a viciously effective talking point of the McCarthy campaign long after they had been discontinued. Further problems emerged for the Johnson team through Daniell's frequent legal challenges against the state party in his continued effort to draft Bobby Kennedy. Daniell had begun assembling Kennedy supporters to run in the state's forty-eight delegate slate. However, he had been blocked by the state's attorney general, who had interpreted the New Hampshire law that prevented a draft movement from having an official campaign as also preventing the allowance of delegates specifically supporting a draft candidate. Daniell claimed that the attorney general had only done so on Governor King's orders, and challenged it in the local press, threatening to pursue it into the courts. The problem became moot, however, when Kennedy sent a letter asking Daniell to discontinue the write-in campaign, and followed it up by sending Ted Sorenson to encourage Kennedy supporters to vote for an active candidate, reaffirming Kennedy’s statement that “I will not be a candidate against President Johnson this year under any foreseeable circumstances.” The Draft Kennedy effort folded shortly after, and released a statement endorsing Eugene McCarthy, thereby uniting New Hampshire’s doves without any acrimony [11].
Meanwhile, the Johnson team were having their own troubles with their delegate slate. Each candidate was supposed to run forty-eight delegates (twenty-four active delegates and another twenty-four as an alternate slate). Not expecting a primary challenge when the slate candidates had first been assembled, the top-heavy Johnson team had not strictly reviewed the delegate process, and they had nearly double the number of delegate candidates than their were positions. On the other hand, Hoeh and Studds had tightly organized the McCarthy slate so that they had exactly forty-eight candidates.
Four years later: McCarthy on Meet the Press in 1964, when he was under consideration for the vice presidency, and in 1968, when he was under consideration for the presidency.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Western world, North Vietnam had witnessed a brief power struggle in the upper echelons of its leadership. The President of North Vietnam (and also the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam), Hồ Chi Minh, had been marginalized from power along with General Võ Nguyên Giáp. Lê Duẩn, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, had taken control of the North Vietnamese Politburo with his hawk faction. Hồ and Võ had both preferred a strategy of guerrilla warfare and negotiations with South Vietnam and the United States. Lê Duẩn preferred a more militaristic approach, believing that a series of large-scale assaults in support of the South's communist guerrillas (the National Liberation Front, also known as the NLF, or Viet Cong) would eventually overrun the South and inspire its people to revolt. This culminated in the Tet Offensive: a simultaneous assault on nearly every major city in South Vietnam. Americans watched on the evening news as the fighting raged stronger than ever, and the NLF nearly took control of the American embassy in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. While the Tet Offensive was a tactical defeat for the North, as it failed to inspire a revolution or conquer the South outright, it was a strategic and political catastrophe for Lyndon Johnson. His assurances that victory was in sight were proven to be false, and his support plummeted overnight, empowering McCarthy's campaign.
The New Hampshire campaign became energized by a fresh flow of volunteers and donations at the same time that Hoeh and Studds whipped up a more organized quality to the campaign [15]. Emulating the state-based confederated campaign structure of the national McCarthy organization, Hoeh and Studds created a largely autonomous McCarthy committee in nearly every town in the state. However, unlike the national campaign, the headquarters office in Concord had clearly defined organizational structure, and a filing system that was able to accommodate a large number of volunteers. Most notably, students came on weekends and breaks, with many of them cutting their hair and dressing formally so as to not scare off the average conservative suburban New Hampshirite. Operating under the slogan “Get Neat and Clean for Gene,” often condensed into “Get Clean for Gene,” Hoeh was nearly obsessed with preventing a media disaster that played into the public's fears of the youth. However, no such disaster emerged, and the number of student volunteers seemed to vindicate McCarthy's objective to bring young people's faith into the nation's institutions and political process, while at the same time closing the generational gap through canvassing. McCarthy's relatively quick and infrequent visits made it so he took on an almost mythic quality to the young volunteers of his own campaign, who had a greater appreciation for his professorial nature than the national press. There was an uncomfortable, silent understanding between McCarthy and his student volunteers that the only reason they were working together was to end the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, they grew on each other, and McCarthy, initially put off by their youthful exuberance, began to call them ‘his kids.’ Additionally, the arrival of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy loyalist and speechwriter, implied at least implicit support from Bobby Kennedy [16]. As the New Hampshire campaign went on, the national press also slowly caught on that something might actually be happening. McCarthy's young volunteers grabbed particular interest, as did the string of celebrities who swung through the state to campaign, canvass, and record ads for McCarthy, most notably Paul Newman. Since the start, offers of support had poured into the national office. After a few months, they finally got someone to start replying to mail.
With the March 12 voting day closing in, both the McCarthy and Johnson teams began to alter their campaigns. Hoeh and Studds draped the anti-war position in the language of conservatism, haranguing Johnson for raising taxes and causing rapid inflation to cover the costs of the war, and blaming the disproportionate conscription numbers of the black community for causing the race riots and lawlessness plaguing the nation. Having yet to be provided with any official campaign material or photographs by the national headquarters despite asking several times, Hoeh and Studds began making their own campaign material and distributing it around the state. They also hoped to gain an edge in cross-over voting. Republican anti-war moderate George Romney had dropped out of the presidential race following a gaffe where he had told the press that he had been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam War; something that came off as tone-deaf considering the revelations two years earlier of the torture of American prisoners in North Vietnam. Hoping that McCarthy would make a sympathetic statement in order to gain Romney supporters, he instead stayed true to his caustic nature: when asked about Romney's brainwashing comment, McCarthy replied, for him, “a light rinse would've sufficed [17]." On the Johnson side, the early campaign plan of ignoring McCarthy and promoting a rally-around-the-flag mentality fell apart with the Tet Offensive. Boutin and King resorted to red-baiting, accusing McCarthy of being a communist sympathizer and of weakening America's negotiating position with the North Vietnamese. McIntyre, with his base in the state being more liberal urban Democrats, was reluctant to participate in throwing around accusations of communist sympathies, but was eventually forced to present a united front. The Johnson team's tactics backfired yet again, with Hoeh accusing them of engaging in (Joseph) McCarthyism out of desperation to try and trick the voters into not seriously considering the candidates [18].
As McCarthy swept the state on the eve of voting day, his campaign had turned around to become a media darling. The staying power of effort to Dump Johnson had eventually convinced the press of its seriousness, and Boutin and the Johnson team had been forced to constantly move the goalposts of victory. Because they initially set a Johnson win at ninety percent, the press decided that anything higher than twenty percent would be significant for McCarthy, and emblematic of a rejection of the President. As the campaign went on, the Johnson team eventually dropped their win condition to being in the high sixties, and by election day, sixty percent.
But they had not even made it to that.
On the snowy night of March 12, President Lyndon Johnson came in at a little under fifty percent of the vote, while Senator Eugene McCarthy had gotten forty-two percent. Including Republican write-ins, McCarthy came within three hundred votes of beating the President. But, what was more, McCarthy completely obliterated Johnson in the delegate count: the bloated number of Johnson delegates had cut into each others votes, leaving McCarthy with over eighty percent of the delegates, despite having lost the popular vote.
Even while technically losing, it was one of the greatest upsets in American political history [19].
Four days later, Bobby Kennedy finally announced that he would be running for president. While Kennedy had decided he would enter regardless of the results of the New Hampshire primary, his timing was denounced by McCarthy's supporters, who accused him of being a gutless opportunist. Kennedy was tarred and feathered in liberal editorials, while McCarthy's youth organizer, Sam Brown, recalled, “We woke up after the New Hampshire primary like it was Christmas Day. When we went down to the tree, Bobby Kennedy had stolen our Christmas presents.” McCarthy, elated by his pseudo-victory in New Hampshire, refused to drop out, his past pronouncements about Kennedy now forgotten, and his position against Johnson stronger than ever.
Regardless of who would win the nomination, they would be in for a fight.
[1] Before asking McCarthy in the fall of 1967, Lowenstein and Gans went through a myriad of different candidates, including Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas from the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana, former General James Gavin, and Representative Don Edwards of California, all of whom declined. McGovern also recommended Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana, a friend of McCarthy's, who declined as well. John Kenneth Galbraith, a member of ADA, ambassador, and famous economist was willing to run, but he was disqualified because he was not an American citizen by birth.
[2] While McCarthy might have deserved his reputation as a lazy senator, many of his colleagues were selling his competence short. The lowest percentage of the vote McCarthy had ever gotten was thirty-seven percent, which he won in the four-way 1948 Democratic primary for the Fourth Congressional District, his first ever election. After that, McCarthy won a landslide victory in every election he ever ran in, with his lowest margin of victory after that being fifty-nine percent. While he may not have been a very proactive senator – something that was not helped by the fact that he intentionally cultivated a reputation for aloofness – he had the uncanny ability to whip up huge margins from a Republican-leaning district in what was then considered a swing state.
[3] The Kennedy-McCarthy relationship was especially complicated at this point. McCarthy clearly disliked Kennedy, but also acknowledged that he would be a much better candidate to challenge Johnson. Yet, when McCarthy was trying to convince him to jump in, he kept being rude and dismissive toward him. Some thought that McCarthy was trying to intentionally aggravate Kennedy into running, so that he would not have to do it himself.
[4] Why did McCarthy wait so long to run for President after his meeting with Lowenstein? The most obvious answer would be that he was still waiting on Kennedy to enter the race, but it has been suggested that McCarthy did not take Lowenstein and Gans seriously, and that being approached by senior, well-known liberal lobbyists like Galbraith and Rauh convinced him of the feasibility.
[5] In the aftermath of the CCD conference, the highest ranking politicians willing to be publicly associated with McCarthy was Sandra Hoeh, the Chair of the 2nd Congressional District of New Hampshire for the State Democratic Committee, and Bronson La Follette, the Attorney General of Wisconsin.
[6] The position of campaign coordinator was also left unfilled by McCarthy. It would remain vacant for over a month before Gans was appointed to it in January of 1968. McCarthy also did not clearly appoint a Chief of Staff. His Senate aide, Jerry Eller, took on the position informally.
[7] When told about Daniell’s draft effort in New Hampshire, Kennedy replied, “Robert Kennedy spelled R-O-B-E-R-T-K-E-N-N-E-D-Y is not a write-in candidate.”
[8] What caused McCarthy to change his mind? Blair Clark, as it turns out. Clark was pushing for McCarthy to enter the New Hampshire primary harder than anyone. In late December, the two of them were going to take a plane on a quick trip to New York from Washington, but inclement weather caused the flight to be cancelled. Taking a train instead, Clark was able to lay out over several hours why entering New Hampshire was a good idea. Without that train ride, McCarthy would not have gone in on New Hampshire.
[9] Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed go on to support McCarthy, making a statement for him that was used in radio campaign ads in New Hampshire. However, King also told McCarthy that his political support would have to be kept quiet for the most part since he was still pressuring Johnson on various policy actions. King's political involvement in 1968 was cut short by his assassination, and it is unclear if he would have ultimately preferred McCarthy or Kennedy. However, his widow, Coretta Scott King, was personal friends with Abigail McCarthy, and may have privately preferred McCarthy over Bobby Kennedy, though this is unclear.
[10] In Johnson’s New Hampshire chain of command, King and McIntyre were officially co-chairs of his re-election campaign. However, Boutin was the de facto leader, and controlled most of the campaign's decisions.
[11] Kennedy did not go so far as endorsing McCarthy, saying that he did not think that it would “further the cause of peace.” The more likely reasons were that he was still deciding on whether he would enter or not himself, and he still very much disliked McCarthy.
[12] The national press frequently and negatively compared Gene McCarthy to George Romney, the moderate Republican Governor of Michigan who was also running for president. Romney was much more of a politician's politician, and while popular nationwide, came off as a tourist who did not really understand the Granite State and its people to New Hampshirites.
[13] Politically aware or lazy campaigner? McCarthy hated the politicking part of politics, and loathed the demagoguery of selling himself as a candidate. Sometimes this may have helped him, and other times it probably hurt him. For example, McCarthy typically refused to do any campaigning in the morning, frequently skipping opportunities to meet night shift workers as they left their jobs, since he thought they would not want to talk to anyone. Also, he liked taking his time to start the day in the morning and did not want to be disturbed.
[14] One ugly episode involving Abigail McCarthy recalled by McCarthy’s then-press secretary Seymour Hersh is that she complained there were too many “Hebrews” on the staff.
[15] Hoeh and Studds were initially promised a million dollars from the national campaign headquarters. Ultimately, they did not directly receive any money from the national headquarters, with Blair Clark and financier Howard Stein paying for many of the initial expenses. McCarthy's New Hampshire campaign floated almost entirely on donations and volunteer work, with final expenses coming up to around five hundred thousand dollars.
[16] Richard Goodwin's exact role in the McCarthy campaign remains something of a mystery. Some think that he came to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy because Kennedy refused to run, while McCarthy himself seemed to believe that Goodwin was a spy sent by Kennedy to keep tabs on him. Goodwin would later abandon McCarthy when Kennedy announced, but would return to work for McCarthy following Kennedy's assassination.
[17] Romney was also mocked by the colourful Governor of Ohio, Jim Rhodes, who commented, “watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.”
[18] The two McCarthys of American politics had a strange relationship. In the 1950s, Gene agreed to debate Joe in what the media taglined as McCarthy vs. McCarthy, with Gene arguing that communists should not be barred from any occupation except for those that would be handling top secret government files. However, Gene was in favour of banning the Communist Party of the United States of America in his early career, and went along with most anti-communist measures. Gene would be confused with Joe even past death, with the 2008 Democratic National Convention memorializing him as Joseph McCarthy. It did not help that his full name was Eugene Joseph McCarthy.
[19] So why is it that McCarthy nearly won in conservative, hawkish New Hampshire? Well, as it turns out, because most of McCarthy's voters were not actually voting for him, but were rather voting against Johnson. Exit polling in New Hampshire showed that the majority of voters actually wanted someone more hawkish on Vietnam, and most of those who voted for McCarthy said they did not know what his position on the war was. In fact, eighteen percent of all of McCarthy's voters in the primaries would go on to support the third party bid of archsegregationist Southern Democrat George Wallace in the general election. While Johnson was able to hold on to the 'default support' of more voters, Hoeh and Studd's decision to phrase things around fiscal conservatism and emphasizing leadership qualities rather than war policies paid dividends on election night. IOTL, both Hoeh and Studds would later run for Congress. Hoeh unsuccessfully in 1968, and Studds successfully in 1972.
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