“We Can Be Decisive, Probably”

A far-flung group of old friends, all of whom love the Granite State for varied reasons, gather at their local AI woodstove and rehash memories of New Hampshire Primaries past. The first of two parts.

I sent an email to my friend Dave. Being Senior Citizens, we do emails back and forth, not Texts. Our kids are appalled.

“Hey Shrib,” I said, “I’m going to write a Substack post this week about my memories of primary season in NH. Some of it will deal with when we were both at Dartmouth, and then when I joined Profiles in Hanover. I might have stuff from earlier when I was up there with family at Hampton Beach in summers, skiing in winters, hiking — if I can remember that stuff. Not sure. Anyway, you’re my all-time-pro friend on the subject, of course.

“So in these posts, I’m trying to write light but interesting, tight but with a loose attitude, if that makes any sense. I’m trying to ease into a new kind of space. It’s fun; I’m enjoying these things a great deal; they’re doing what I hoped — provide an outlet, something to do — without the twin specters of tight deadlines and immutable word counts. I did a couple of football posts the past few days and they were a treat to do. Maybe a chore to read. Anyway, it helps me get to the finish line on things rather than just type.

“Anyway again, Shrib—about you, here’s my ask: What I’d love is three or four of Shrib’s favorite anecdotes about primaries past and who you were working for, just scribbled quickly as if voiced. Scribble as if you and I were two geezers chewing the fat and spittin’ tobacco juice at the hot stove at the general store in Moultonborough or Milton Mills, which of course we can virtually-almost-actually-in-fact be in the AI Age. I don’t want to co-opt columns you’re writing this week unless you want to put the same memory in there and have me link, which I think I can do. I can also have people link to past columns of yours if you have such links handy. Not that I can boost your readership; I’ve done nothing to promote the site/newsletter/whatever; I’m just loosening up in the Substack bullpen, as it were. So far, just trying to make these fun for myself and, I hope, my friends.

“Got a half hour to think on this and send me a little? I feel like a low-rent version of T. Edsall going to his roster of Ivory Town eggheads to fill out one of his Times columns. Do you know him?

“All best. We should be getting snow on Black Mountain out of this latest. No more rain! Thanks, Sull”

[A note for any who are innocent of the great Thomas B. Edsall: His op-eds are routinely bolstered by the expertise of sharply targeted academicians. One quick example from yesterday’s paper: In a skeptical piece about whether God Himself has indeed anointed Donald J. Trump to be the latter-day Savior of America and whether Trump, as Trump Himself claims, might in fact rival Jesus Christ Himself in global fame, Edsall solicited extensive testimony from a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer, another prof at Messiah University in Georgia and the founder and CEO of P.R.R.I. (formerly, Public Religion Research Institute). This indicates a very well-stocked Rolodex . . .  or its 21^stCentury Rolodex equivalent.]

Dave Shribman wrote back 11 minutes later, well under deadline, per his usual standard super-pro behavior:

“I actually started covering the NH Primary when I was 18. I persuaded the editor of The Salem (MA) Evening News, where I had worked the previous two summers as a go-fer and part-time reporter, to let me go up to NH to see the candidates. And so, during an exhilarating day up in NH, I interviewed Pat Paulsen, the comedian who was running a phony campaign. I asked him what would be the first thing he would do as President. He said he’d ask where the men’s room was.

“During my undergraduate years at Dartmouth I went to an event for Ronald Reagan in Thompson Arena. At the time I was taking a course in the literature of the Bible. I left Baker Library and went to the arena, where a security agent picked up my Bible and thumbed through it, presumably to see if I was hiding a weapon in there. (I wasn’t.) The next day I told Professor Harry Bond about the incident. ‘Oh David,’ he said. ‘The Bible has always been a dangerous book.’

“My favorite NH event came on a gloomy afternoon in one of the Lakes Region towns in 1984. I was the New York Times’ guy on the John Glenn campaign, and the mood amongst his staff matched the weather. We were walking downtown when a mom stopped with her twins. She introduced them to the candidate. One of them was named John. The other was named Glenn.”

Shrib, or Dave,— or, CV-wise, David M. Shribman, Dartmouth Class of 1976 (I was ’75); veteran of The Boston Globe (where he won his Pulitzer) as well as the Times; former executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; currently a teacher of American political history to nice, curious Canadian kids at McGill; still a writer of regular columns for the Pittsburgh paper and the Toronto Globe and Mail as well as many other syndicated features and book reviews for such as the Globe and Washington Post — Shrib has been a good friend and occasional collaborator in our private writing-editing/editing-writing interrelation since the late 1970s, even though we’ve only met twice in person, each time in a semi-formal setting. Shrib always comes through, and he did here, causing me to nod my noggin in regular recognition of what he was describing, even though I do quarrel with his terming Pat Paulsen’s campaigns “phony.” I think we in America today would be grateful for such sensible, clarifying phoniness as Paulsen offered during his announced Presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1996, and his several soft campaigns in the intervening years. I’m sure Tom Edsall would agree with me. We would point out to Shrib, as I do right now by handing him some statistics across the hot stove: In the 1992 Democratic primary Paulsen got nearly a thousand write-in votes challenging Bill Clinton. In ’96, on the other side of the aisle, he garnered 10,984 votes overall during the Republican primary season.  

Shrib’s stories were not only fun for me to read but had the desired effect of cracking open the old memory bank. I, too, had once attended a Paulsen stump event —in Hanover, in I believe 1973 or ’74, when he was not actually on any ballot but was giving campaign speeches nonetheless. I had forgotten about Paulsen, but I now promise to return to him later on.

Most of all, regarding this flurry with Shribman on a rare morning when flurries were floating outside: Merely the AI-suggested notion that we were sitting with balky knees by a warming fire, trying to trump one another (I won’t add “so-to-speak” there) — well, that put me in a fine mood for memories, and I smiled.

When I was a six-to-seven-year-old lad in Massachusetts in 1959-to-1960, I was aware that our handsome Senator John F. Kennedy, who had been in the Navy when Dad had been in the Army during World War II, was a Favorite Son candidate for the Presidency, so of course he would do well in the wintertime contest being staged just north in New Hampshire. My boyhood handicapping proved right. In the primary, running as a Favorite cousin, he trounced foreigners including Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, Floridian George Smathers and Ohioan Michael DiSalle. But O! those querulous contrarian New Hampshirites! In November’s general election, Richard M. Nixon, of all people, who was running on a ticket with Bay Stater Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of all people, took New Hampshire by nearly seven percentage points over JFK.

I remember nothing else of New Hampshire primaries until a midday in the fall of 1974 when I was a senior at Dartmouth in line to enter Memorial Stadium for a football game. I accepted a small bag of free peanuts from a man on the sidewalk wearing an uncommonly huge grin. He said he was “Jimmy Carter of Georgia” and that the peanuts were from his family’s farm. I was inexperienced in any and all nuances of electoral strategy, but even I knew Carter’s so-called Peanut Brigade was a pretty nifty retail-politics gimmick for someone on an “exploratory” mission, particularly when this someone was known to no one in New Hampshire. On February 24, 1976, Carter reaped his late-winter peanut harvest by winning the primary over a massive field of 16 other Democrats. He was on his way.

It's the kind of thing you remember from the New Hampshire Primary: the little thing, like a paper peanut bag, which I believe had a caricature of Carter’s toothy smile stamped onto it.

My friend Mike Padden, a classmate at Dartmouth who grew up in Manchester, recalls a little thing: “Nineteen sixty-four, and I was 10. Rode my Stingray bike up to the rope line outside the Carpenter Hotel in downtown Manchester and shook hands with LBJ. Biggest hand I had ever felt. Like a ham!”

Sharon Smith, who lives in Peterborough in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region, which is alternately called by local realtors “the Currier & Ives region,” is another dear friend and, like Mike, a Granite State native. She was the top editor of New Hampshire Profiles, a monthly magazine, when Profiles was based in Hanover, continuing later when it moved to Concord. As such, Sharon was my first boss in this journalism biz. She hired me in 1976, my first year out of Dartmouth. I was very available and super cheap.

Sharon had grown up in the North Country town of Whitefield and recalls a small but vivid primary moment up there: “When Nelson Rockefeller was running for President, he didn’t want to miss a single New Hampshire voter—and that included those in our town of Whitefield, with its population of 1,200, these including my mother. Mom rarely left the house without being relatively put together, and she rarely missed Sunday church, but on this particular Sunday, she was way behind, and she needed milk. So, she pulled a scarf on over her curlers, plunked my sister and me in the car, and ran down to the corner IGA with the goal of grabbing the milk and running home again before anyone saw her. All went well until she came out of the store and got back in the car. At that point a campaigning Rockefeller came over to meet her and shake her hand—followed by the camera crews of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Not a good way to win over a voter, Nelson!”

In 1977 Sharon was offered a job with Yankee, which was headquartered over in Dublin, and I, who still came cheap, was allowed to succeed her as Editor at New Hampshire Profiles, where I would remain until the end of 1979 before heading to New York. In that last year of my Profiles tenure, the 1980 primaries were heating up but good. As I was living in the state capital I got a strong dose of the Presidential Politics drug that can, as we’re seeing again in 2024, make a true mess of anyone. (Right, Governor Ron?) In Concord, signs sprouted everywhere. Up and down Main Street, formerly vacant storefronts were rented out to the Reagan, Bush, Brown or Baker campaigns. Jeeps cruised up and down, bullhorn messages blaring. When I dropped over to the Gaslighter for lunch I might see my pals Dougie or Dermot  having a burger and a noon beer, or, as likely, John Anderson or Walter Mondale. I never did see Ronald Reagan. I would have remembered that. I never saw Ted Kennedy. He might not yet have decided to formalize his run at Carter. But I’m betting he had, to himself.

 . . . Okay, then . . .

That finishes us through when I’m leaving New Hampshire in a flesh-and-blood sense, even if I have never left it spiritually. And: That’s, ouch, 2,200 words, plenty much more than enough for Part I of this.

I’ll post Part II tomorrow or perhaps Saturday morning. I still have some old friends malingering out there who may enter the store with their memories. I do know that Jim Collins, who edited Yankee magazine for several years, will weigh in with his reminiscences, and I know I’ll be taking a trip up to Dixville Notch, at the very top of the state, as well as nearby Colebrook. My sister and her husband, who have a getaway house in Alton on Lake Winnipesaukee, will file a report. My friend Jake promises to chime in. We’ll also revisit Pat Paulsen, and the meaning of the cryptic hed that I attached to this post — “We Can Be Decisive — Probably” — the meaning of that will be made clear, or clear enough. Promise.

But that’s anon. For now, we’re out of wood, it’s getting chilly, and Shrib and I are expected at home.