March 11, 1952: The New Hampshire Primary Matters for the 1st Time

Estes Kefauver

March 11, 1952: For the 1st time, the New Hampshire Primary ends up making a difference.

On the Democratic side, President Harry S Truman hadn't even bothered to campaign, because he'd already decided, but hadn't yet announced, that he wasn’t running for what would have amounted to a 3rd term. He said if he'd run again, "Bess would have impeached me," meaning his wife.

Still, it is a shock that Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee – a Southern State – got 55 percent of the vote, to Truman getting 44 percent as a write-in candidate. Kefauver had become famous while chairing a Senate Committee on organized crime, with its hearings televised. And yet, he did not end up with the nomination. Despite his getting the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956, the 1952 New Hampshire Primary will be the high-water mark of his career.

On the Republican side, the election is won by an unannounced candidate. Retired U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower gets 56 percent. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, son of a President and the nation's leading active conservative icon, to the point where his nickname was Mr. Republican, only gets 31 percent.

Former Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota, a holdover candidate from 1948, got just 8 percent, and he never got so close to the Presidency again, despite running again and again until 1992, becoming a national joke. Both Eisenhower and Stassen were then Presidents of Ivy League universities: "Ike" of Columbia in New York, and Stassen of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Forcibly retired General Douglas MacArthur figured that all he had to do was get write-in votes in the Primaries, and a swell of support at the Republican Convention would "draft" him, and he would become the 34th President of the United States. He got 4 percent of the Republican vote in the New Hampshire Primary, and ended up losing the nomination and the White House to Ike, whom he once derisively called "the best clerk I ever had," but who had surpassed him in the public imagination.

This was the 1st time that New Hampshire, with its Winter tableaus, its hatred of taxes of all kinds, and its "retail politics," had seemingly changed the course of a Presidential election. It has saved eventual nominees: Republicans Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012; and Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992.

It has given hope to insurgent candidates that ended up not winning: Democrats Kefauver, Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020; Republicans Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964, Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, and McCain in 2000. And, in 1972, it ruined a front-runner: Democrat Ed Muskie.

*

March 11, 1952 was a Tuesday. Douglas Adams, writer of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, was born.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 2 games in the NBA. The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia Warriors, 88-84 at the Philadelphia Arena. And the Rochester Royals beat the Indianapolis Olympians, 82-81 at the Butler Fieldhouse (now the Hinkle Fieldhouse) in Indianapolis.

And there was 1 game in the NHL: The Boston Bruins beat the Detroit Red Wings, 3-2 at the Boston Garden.