March 12, 1968: New Hampshire (Almost) "Goes Clean for Gene"

March 12, 1968: For the 1st time, the New Hampshire Primary is more than just a formality. Former Vice President Richard Nixon runs away with the Republican side, with 77 percent of the vote. But that’s barely noticed, because of what happens on the Democratic side.

Officially, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson was not yet a candidate for a 2nd full term, even though the 22nd Amendment would have allowed it. (If successful, he would have been President for 9 years and 2 months, longer than anyone except Franklin Roosevelt.) So he was a write-in candidate only.

Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota was a single-issue candidate, the issue being the U.S. role in the Vietnam War. Announcing his campaign to challenge Johnson in the Democratic Primaries on November 30, 1967, he said:

I run because this country is now involved in a deep crisis of leadership; a crisis of national purpose, and a crisis of American ideals. It is time to substitute a leadership of hope for a leadership of fear. This is not simply what I want, or what most of us want. It is, I believe, the deepest hunger of the American soul.

Tired of LBJ dragging things out and lying about how well we were doing, hundreds of young activists joined his campaign, having cut their hair and worn suits, using the slogan "go clean for Gene." And they hit the snowy ground of New Hampshire, doing "retail politics" for their new hero.

Okay, by the standards of 1963, this would still have been "long hair."

Not by 1968, though. Notice that even the women in the photo

have short hair, and the black woman doesn't have an Afro.

And they had lots of star power campaigning along with them. Actors Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Dick Van Dyke, Alan Arkin, Tony Randall (not yet the co-star of The Odd Couple, but already well-known), and Star Trek's Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy. Actresses Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Myrna Loy, Eva Marie Saint and Jill St. John. Playwrights Arthur Miller and Neil Simon. Married actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. Comedians Carl Reiner, Steve Allen and Woody Allen (no relation, and Woody hadn't yet started directing films). Singer-actress Barbra Streisand. Broadway composers Alan Jay Lerner, Adolph Green and Betty Comden.

The results stunned everybody. Contrary to legend, LBJ did win this Primary, with 50 percent of the vote. But McCarthy went beyond his wildest dreams, and finished a strong 2nd, taking 42 percent of the vote.

Suddenly, everyone knew that LBJ could be beaten, that the "Dump Johnson Movement" had to be taken seriously. Four days later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York got into the race. And 15 days after that, Johnson got out.

But those 2 events revealed something: The McCarthy campaign was built on a house of cards. A lot of the people who voted for him weren't voting for him so much as they were voting against Johnson. With Bobby Kennedy in the race, supporting both peace and civil rights -- McCarthy hardly mentioned civil rights -- a lot of voters moved over to the more glamorous campaign of RFK.

McCarthy, who hated both RFK and his brother, the late President John F. Kennedy, and supported former nominee Adlai Stevenson over JFK at the 1960 Democratic Convention, had one head-to-head win over RFK, in the Oregon Primary, but that was it. RFK won the California Primary, but was immediately assassinated. McCarthy told his fellow Minnesotan, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, that he no longer had the heart for the campaign, and the nomination was his.

There's also an urban legend that a lot of Republicans in New Hampshire temporarily registered as Democrats in an attempt to sabotage Johnson. This is compounded by a sub-legend that some people -- including some Democrats -- were so dumb, they thought they were voting for Senator Joseph McCarthy, the famous (and completely unsuccessful) Communist hunter of the early 1950s. Who was from Wisconsin, next-door to Minnesota. And was a Republican. And was an alcoholic. And was completely exposed as a liar in 1954 by both Edward R. Murrow of CBS News and U.S. Army general counsel Joseph Welch. And had died in 1957.

*

March 12, 1968 was a Tuesday. Tammy Duckworth, who went on to become a Senator herself, representing Illinois, was born. So was actor Aaron Eckhardt.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 4 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Baltimore Bullets, 107-104 at the brand-new Madison Square Garden. Willis Reed led the Knicks with 30 points, while Earl "the Pearl" Monroe scored 37 for the Bullets.

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 139-123 at Cobo Hall (now Huntington Place) in Detroit. Eddie Miles of the Pistons led all scorers on the night with 39 points.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Chicago Bulls, 139-115 at the Chicago Stadium.

* And the Boston Celtics beat the San Francisco Warriors, 124-121 in overtime at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

There were 4 games in the American Basketball Association:

* The New Jersey Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pipers, 126-112 at the Teaneck Armory in Teaneck, New Jersey. Hank Whitney of the Americans, the Nets-to-be, and Connie Hawkins of the Pipers each scored 34 points.

* The Kentucky Colonels beat the Houston Mavericks, 130-109 at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky.

* The Dallas Chaparrals beat the Minnesota Muskies, 122-107 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

* The Denver Rockets beat the Oakland Oaks, 112-92 at the Denver Auditorium Arena.

And there was 1 game in the NHL: The Detroit Red Wings and the Los Angeles Kings played to a tie, 2-2 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

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.

February 26, 1980: New Hampshire Saves Ronald Reagan

"I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!"

February 26, 1980: New Hampshire holds its quadrennial 1st-in-the-nation Presidential Primary. On the Democratic Party's side, the incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, wins 49 percent of the vote, to the 38 percent won by Senator Ted Kennedy.

Given the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the backlash against the boycott of the upcoming Olympics in Moscow, the slumping economy, the magic that the Kennedy name still had for millions of people, and the fact that coming from next-door Massachusetts meant that New Hampshire voters were very familiar with Ted's Senate record, it was widely expected that Ted might seriously challenge the President.

But questions about Kennedy's personal life, and perhaps a spillover of patriotism from the American victory over the Soviet Union in the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, pushed Carter to a solid victory -- though not a majority. Kennedy would win a few Primaries, but his chance at winning the nomination was over, and he never came so close to becoming President like his brother John again.

On the Republican Party's side, the favorite going in was George H.W. Bush. His resume including serving Texas in Congress, and serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Director of the CIA, he had just won the Iowa Caucuses. He claimed a great deal of momentum, or, as he called it, "The Big Mo."

Ronald Reagan, former actor and former Governor of California, had seriously challenged President Gerald Ford in 1976, but fell short of winning the nomination. Now, he was 69 years old -- at the time, considered old to be running for President -- and it seemed as though the time for him, and for his archconservative message, had come and gone.

The Nashua Telegraph newspaper offered to host a debate between Reagan and Bush, in the auditorium at Nashua High School. Worried that a newspaper-sponsored debate might violate electoral regulations, Reagan subsequently arranged to fund the event with his own campaign money, inviting the other candidates, regardless of how low they were polling, to participate at short notice.

The Bush camp did not learn of Reagan's decision to include the other candidates until the debate was due to commence. Bush refused to participate, which led to an impasse on the stage.

As Reagan attempted to explain his decision, Jon Breen, the editor of the Telegraph and the debate's moderator, ordered a technician to mute Reagan's microphone. When the technician refused, Breen repeated his order. A visibly angry Reagan responded, "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" The audience, not noticing that Reagan had gotten the man's name wrong, cheered wildly. Eventually, the other candidates agreed to leave, and the debate proceeded between Reagan and Bush.

Having seen Reagan stand up for himself, and having seen Bush act petulantly, the  Republican voters of New Hampshire decided they had seen what they needed to see. Reagan won a majority, 50.2 percent. Bush won just 23 percent.

Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the Senate Minority Leader, won 13 percent. Representative John Anderson of Illinois won 10 percent. Trailing far behind were Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Party's 1976 Vice Presidential nominee; former Governor John Connally of Texas, who had previously been a Democrat; and Representative Phil Crane of Illinois.

Reagan won all 10 Counties, and 213 out of the 239 towns and cities in the Granite State. Bush won 24, and Baker won 2.

Reagan had become the frontrunner, and remained so going into the South Carolina Primary. New Hampshire had turned him from a man about to see his political career come to an end into a plausible President once again. New Hampshire had saved him.

Lee Bandy, a writer for the South Carolina newspaper The State, disagreed, saying that it was South Carolina that saved him. He stated that, heading into that Primary, political operative Lee Atwater worked to engineer a victory for Reagan: "Lee Atwater figured that Connally was their biggest threat here in South Carolina. So Lee leaked a story to me that John Connally was trying to buy the black vote. Well, that story got out, thanks to me, and it probably killed Connally. He spent $10 million for one delegate. Lee saved Ronald Reagan's candidacy."

Atwater may have ruined Connally in 1980, but Connally was already no threat. From New Hampshire onward, it was going to be either Reagan or Bush.

Reagan went on to win the nomination, took Bush as his running mate, and won the election. After being re-elected in 1984, Bush ran on his own in 1988. His candidacy would be saved by Atwater, through disgustingly racist tactics. But what saved Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a tough-guy act in New Hampshire.

The microphone is so much a part of the Reagan myth, it was preserved, and is on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

*

February 26, 1980 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There was 8 games played in the NBA:

* The Boston Celtics beat the Atlanta Hawks, 108-97 at the Boston Garden.

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz, 105-85 at the Chicago Stadium.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the San Diego Clippers, 122-88 at the Milwaukee Exposition, Convention Center and Arena, or "The MECCA." Since 2014, it has been named the UW-Panther Arena.

* The Denver Nuggets beat the Phoenix Suns, 121-112 at the McNichols Arena in Denver.

* The Kansas City Kings beat the Golden State Warriors, 117-99 at the Kemper Arena (now the Hy-Vee Arena) in Kansas City.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Indiana Pacers, 93-88 at The Summit in Houston. (It's now the Central Campus of Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church.)

* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 131-108 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

* And the Philadelphia 76ers beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 98-96 at the Portland Memorial Coliseum.

And there were 5 games played in the NHL:

* The Quebec Nordiques beat the Hartford Whalers, 9-5 at the Colisée de Québec. Brothers Réal Cloutier and Roland Cloutier each scored for the Nords. For the Whalers, Gordie Howe, age 51, and his son Mark Howe each had an assist. 

* The Washington Capitals beat the Los Angeles Kings, 5-3 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Montreal Canadiens and the Atlanta Flames played to a tie, 3-3 at The Omni in Atlanta.

* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Vancouver Canucks, 5-4 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

* And the St. Louis Blues beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 5-2 at the St. Louis Arena -- or the Checkerdome, as it was known during the team's ownership by St. Louis-based Ralston Purina, with their "Checkerboard Square" logo.

February 26, 1972: Ed Muskie vs. William Loeb

February 26, 1972: Two Saturdays before the New Hampshire Primary, the frontrunner for the Democratic Party's nomination for President, Senator Edmund S. Muskie of neighboring Maine, delivers a speech in front of the offices of the State's largest newspaper, the Manchester-based Union Leader.

A U.S. Navy Lieutenant in World War II, Muskie had led the building of the Democratic Party in his State. Maine and Vermont were the only States that refused to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt in all 4 of his runs for President. In 1954, after serving in the State House of Representatives, Muskie became the 1st Democrat elected Governor of Maine in 22 years. In 1958, he became the 1st Democrat that the State sent to the U.S. Senate in 48 years.

In 1968, having won the Democratic nomination for President, the outgoing Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, asked Muskie to be his Vice Presidential nominee. Comparisons between Muskie and the Republican nominee, the bumbling, bigoted, and eventually revealed to be crooked Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, were among the factors that nearly swung the election to Humphrey, but former Vice President Richard Nixon won in a squeaker, anyway.

On the eve of the 1970 Congressional elections, Muskie delivered a speech that served as a nationally-televised half-hour campaign commercial. It was widely seen as helpful, as the Democrats gained 12 seats in the House of Representatives and, despite a heavy effort by Nixon to get more Republicans in the Senate, the Democrats held them to a net gain of only 2.

Muskie's tall, lean physical appearance and plain speaking began to gain him comparisons to Abraham Lincoln. While Humphrey returned to the Senate (from Minnesota) in 1970, it wasn't clear that he was going to make another run for the Presidency, and so Muskie was widely seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for it for 1972.

But the Union Leader was run by William Loeb III, a man ahead of his time as far as the conservative movement was concerned. The son of William Loeb Jr., an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Loeb III was a hardline anti-Communist, the godfather of the anti-tax activism of New Hampshire Republicans, and a self-appointed moral arbiter.

William Loeb

Never mind that he was a draft dodger, claiming ulcers to avoid serving in World War II; that he always carried a gun, and once shot the family cat; and that he was married 3 times, and in 1949 was caught cheating on his 2nd wife with his eventual 3rd wife, Elizabeth "Nackey" Scripps-Gallowhur, granddaughter of E.W. Scripps, founder of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain and what eventually became United Press International (UPI).

(UPDATE: In 2022, his stepdaughter, known in adult life as Nackey Scagliotti, accused him of molesting her when she was 7, and also doing so with the daughter he and the elder Nackey had together, known as an adult as Edie Tomasko, who died in 2014. Edie's son subsequently backed this up, saying that his mother told her the same thing.)

Loeb had a habit of referring to politicians he didn't like by nasty names, well before the country at large ever heard of Donald Trump. He went after both Democrats and Republicans he considered insufficiently conservative, and it didn't stop with 1972:

* President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after a 1955 treaty with the Soviet Union: "Dopey Dwight" and "The Prince of Appeasement."

* President John F. Kennedy: "The No. 1 liar in the United States." JFK responded: "I believe there is probably a more irresponsible newspaper than that one right over there. But I've been through 40 States, and I have not found it yet. I believe that there is a publisher who has less regard for the truth than William Loeb, but I can't think of his name."

* Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, whose move from his 1st wife to his 2nd mirrored that of Loeb from his 2nd to his 3rd: "A wife-swapper."

* Senator Eugene McCarthy of Oregon, a Presidential candidate in 1968, later switching from Democratic to Independent: "A skunk's skunk's skunk."

* Muskie: "Moscow Muskie."

* Later, in 1976, President Gerald Ford: "Jerry the Jerk."

* President Jimmy Carter: "An out-and-out leftist coated over and disguised with peanut oil."

* And, in 1980, in what turned out to be the last Presidential campaign of his lifetime, he wrote an editorial telling Democratic Primary voters that their choice of Carter, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Governor Jerry Brown of California was, respectively, between "the stupid, the coward and the flake." 

Loeb's critics in New Hampshire called him "Mr. Low Ebb." But he loved Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. His biggest mistake may have been firing a young reporter from a paper The Union Leader absorbed, The New Hampshire Sunday News. His name was Ben Bradlee, and he went on to run The Washington Post, which led to Nixon's downfall.

On February 24, 1972, with Muskie still the front-runner in the Democratic field, The Union Leader -- on its front page, mind you -- published a letter, under the headline, "Senator Muskie Insults Franco-Americans."

The alleged author's name was Paul Morrison, of Deerfield Beach, Florida. He claimed to have met Muskie and his staff in Florida, where he asked Muskie how he could understand the problems of black people when his home State of Maine had such a small black population. (Black people make up only a little over 1 percent of Maine's population, slightly more than Asians, and a little more than Native Americans.)

According to the author, Muskie said, "We don't have blacks but we have Cannocks," and laughed about it, and said, "Come to New England and see."

The letter had several misspellings, including the key word itself, which is "Canucks." While an NHL team that began play in 1970 was proudly named the Vancouver Canucks, people of French descent in New England, nearly all of them having ancestors who came down from Quebec, then considered "Canuck" to be a slur.

New England in general has a large French-Canadian population: They made up about 17 percent of New Hampshirites, and 40 percent of Democratic Primary voters. They make up about 20 percent of Vermonters, 10 percent of Massachusetts residents and Rhode Islanders, 8 percent of Mainers, and 6 percent of Connecticut residents.

The letter was written by Ken Clawson, White House Deputy Director of Communications. (If you're a fan of the TV show The West Wing, this was Sam Seaborn's role, then Will Bailey's.) The letter was planted by Nixon campaign operative Donald Segretti.

Donald Segretti

The next day, February 25, The Union Leader reprinted an accusation made a few weeks earlier in Newsweek, claiming that Jane Muskie, the candidate's wife, was an alcoholic. This was also a lie. Attacking the candidate was one thing. Attacking his wife was another. Even Nixon hadn't done that until now, and hadn't authorized it himself this time.

The Senator decided that enough was enough. He had a flatbed truck driven up to the newspaper's headquarters in Manchester, stood on the bed to allow himself to be seen by a crowd of about 200, including one holding up a sign reading, "NOUS AIMONS MUSKIE" (French for "We Like Muskie").

Among those on hand to support Muskie were 3 Maine politicians of French descent, including Louis Jalbert, a State Representative from Lewiston. He said, "I got up at 4 AM to get here. I would go to Latrobe, Pennsylvania in my bare feet if I could be with this man."

Muskie said, "That letter is a lie," adding, "I remember as a boy being called a Polack. I hated it. I'd never use that kind of term with respect to another ethnic group."

Loeb was not on hand, and Muskie noted it: "This man doesn't walk, he crawls." He added, "By attacking me, by attacking my wife, he has proved himself to be a gutless coward!"

Then he lowered his voice, and lowered his head, and said, "Maybe I've said all I should." He paused, and said, "It's fortunate for him he's not on this platform beside me." The words look defiant, but, in sound, they seemed like a man who, rather than wanting to hurt someone, had been, himself, deeply hurt.

Muskie maintained that if his voice cracked, it cracked from anger. Some witnesses thought he'd started crying. Others suggested it was just the light snow melting on his face.

But between the letter and the editorials, Muskie was successfully sabotaged by conservative dirty tricks: He won the New Hampshire Primary, but with just 46 percent of the vote, winning 14 of the available Delegates. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the most openly antiwar candidate in the field, won 37 percent, and was awarded the other 6 Delegates. No other candidate took more than 7 percent.

Muskie came to be regarded as weak and emotional. Two weeks later, he won the Illinois Primary. But the only other Primary he won was in another New England State, Rhode Island.

Not content with getting Muskie out of the way, Segretti, having had some paper with Muskie's letterhead stolen, faked accusations (which were then wrongly attributed to Muskie) that Humphrey was guilty of sexual misconduct, and that another contender for the nomination, Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington State, had an affair and an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl. Both stories were quickly proven false.

McGovern ended up winning the nomination. Aside from serving as Secretary of State in the last 8 months of the Carter Administration, Muskie never got so close to the Presidency again.

Loeb died in 1981. Nackey Loeb continued to run The Union Leader in her husband's archconservative fashion until 1999, when she sold it due to failing health. She died the next year.

For most of 1974, including the transition from Nixon to Ford, Ken Clawson served as White House Director of Communications. He died in 1999.

After Nixon's resignation, Segretti was arrested, and pleaded guilty to 3 misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign literature. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison, and served 4. He returned to his native Orange County, California, and briefly ran for a local judgeship, before local outrage forced him to drop out. In 2000, he was co-chair of John McCain's Presidential campaign in Orange County. As of February 26, 2022, he is still alive, one of the last surviving Nixon insiders.

Muskie died in 1998. That night, on The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour on PBS, George Mitchell, appointed to the Senate seat Muskie gave up to become Secretary of State, said that if a politician cried while defending his wife from unfair attacks in a speech today, he'd be cheered.

Mitchell was right. There were moments in the 1992 Presidential campaign when Bill Clinton seemed to tear up, and nobody cared. While George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 could swear and act like petulant teenagers over an open microphone, and it didn't stop them.

*

March 4, 1972 was a Saturday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was in the off-season. There were 5 games played in the NBA that day:

* The New York Knicks lost to the Baltimore Bullets, 104-97 at Madison Square Garden.

* The Chicago Bulls beat the Golden State Warriors, 107-106 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena. Bob Love scored 33 points.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Phoenix Suns, 119-117 in overtime at the Milwaukee Exposition & Convention Center Arena, a.k.a. The MECCA. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 44 points and had 20 rebounds.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Detroit Pistons, 122-106 at the Hofheinz Pavilion (now the Fertitta Pavilion) in Houston. Elvin Hayes scored 36 points and had 18 rebounds.

* And the Seattle SuperSonics beat the Cincinnati Royals, 122-106 at the Seattle Center Coliseum. Spencer Haywood scored 38 points and had 21 rebounds.

There were 4 games played in the American Basketball Association:

* The New York Nets lost to the Virginia Squires, 121-119 at The Scope in Norfolk. Charlie Scott scored 45 points.

* The Carolina Cougars beat the Pittsburgh Condors, 146-130 at the Greensboro Coliseum. George Carter scored 34 points.

* The Kentucky Colonels beat the Memphis Pros, 123-100 at Freedom Hall in Louisville. Johnny Neumann scored 40 points.

* And the Indiana Pacers beat the Dallas Chaparrals, 115-113 in overtime at the Moody Coliseum in Dallas. George McGinnis scored 35 points.

And there were 6 games played in the NHL:

* The Montreal Canadiens beat the Detroit Red Wings, 8-1 at the Montreal Forum. Yvan Cournoyer scored 2 goals, and brothers Frank and Pete Mahovlich each had 1.

* On the CBC's nationally-broadcast Hockey Night In Canada, the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Vancouver Canucks, 7-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Paul Henderson scored 3 goals, Norm Ullman 2. In September of that year, Henderson would become one of the biggest heroes in Canadian history, in any walk of life.

* The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Philadelphia Flyers, 5-2 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* The Chicago Black Hawks beat the California Golden Seals, 3-0 at the Chicago Stadium.

* The St. Louis Blues beat the Minnesota North Stars, 3-2 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

* The Boston Bruins beat the Los Angeles Kings, 5-4 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

* And the New York Rangers and the Buffalo Sabres were not scheduled.

February 18, 1992: New Hampshire: Second Place Was the First Winner

February 18, 1992: The New Hampshire Primary is held. President George H.W. Bush wins on the Republican side. On the Democratic side, the winner is former Senator Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts.

But, in each case, you'd never know it from what the media said that night, and thereafter. For once, the old saying, "Nobody remembers who came in second place" was put aside.

George Herbert Walker Bush was running for a 2nd term as President. Things weren't going so well: He had a 91 percent approval rating in April 1991, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. As a result, many of the would-be Democratic Party candidates to defeat chickened out of the chance to do so.

Governor Mario Cuomo of New York began the race as the front-runner, but did not enter. He had a convenient excuse: The deadline for filing for the New Hampshire Primary, the first in the nation, came on the same day as the deadline for getting the State budget passed. He had a plane on the ground in Albany, the State capital, ready to fly him to Concord, also a State capital, so he could properly file the papers to be a candidate. The plane never left the ground, nor did his campaign.

Former President Jimmy Carter was eligible to return to office, but he would have been too easy a target. So would his Vice President, and the Party's 1984 Presidential nominee, Walter Mondale. So would former Governor of Massachusetts, and the Party's 1988 Presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis. None of them ran.

Civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson and former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, both candidates in 1984 and 1988, were damaged goods. Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, American politics' leading legacy figure, was even more so as calendar year 1991 wound down. Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the 1988 Vice Presidential nominee, and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, refused to run.

Those who were running didn't seem all that interesting. Former Governor Jerry Brown of California appeared to have had his chance in 1976, and his brand of liberalism, which led to Tonight Show host Johnny Carson nicknaming him "Governor Moonbeam," had long since been passed by.

Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a former Governor who had lost a leg fighting in Vietnam, seemed to have everything going for him -- except money and a First Lady. (He was between marriages.) Governor Doug Wilder of Virginia was the 1st black man elected Governor of a Southern State, but he didn't have much campaign money, either. He ended up being the first candidate who got in to drop out.

Tsongas didn't have much experience, didn't have much hair, had a speech impediment, and his ethnicity and regional origin reminded too many people of Dukakis. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was a "prairie populist" in the mold of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern and Mondale, and had the advantage of a stranglehold on the Iowa Caucus, which also meant that if he didn't do well in the New Hampshire Primary, it wouldn't be so bad. This would also free the other candidates from having to spend any money in Iowa -- but it made New Hampshire so much more important for them.

Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas seemed to excite voters: He was a good-looking guy, a Rhodes scholar, and despite having served 12 years as Governor, he was still young: At 45, he stood to become the 1st person of the Baby Boom generation to become President.

But there were drawbacks. He had not served in the Vietnam War, and while his means of avoiding service was legal, it seemed shifty. He badly mishandled the question of whether he'd ever used marijuana. And he had a reputation as a womanizer: In the month before the Primary, a singer named Gennifer Flowers told the media that she had a 12-year affair with him.

On January 26, CBS followed its broadcast of Super Bowl XXVI with an installment of their "newsmagazine" show 60 Minutes, with Steve Krofft interviewing Clinton and his wife, Hillary, a lawyer who'd worked for women's and children's rights.

Bill admitted, "I have caused pain in my marriage," but did not elaborate. Hillary responded to the question of Bill's infidelities by angrily saying, "You know, I'm not some little woman, sitting here, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette!"

Some people liked that reference to country legend Wynette and her song "Stand By Your Man," but many didn't. The interview seemed to help him, but it hurt her image for the long term: It made her look like an angry woman who is unlikable and stands by a man she clearly doesn't love, to gain power by any means possible.

And Bush had problems, too: The economy had fallen into a recession in mid-1990, and the war didn't pull the country out of it. The economy got worse through 1991, and by the dawn of 1992, things had bottomed out. Many people were angry with Bush for the recession, angry with him for breaking his promise not to raise taxes, and angry with him for (from their perspective) not being conservative enough.

And so many Republicans got behind the insurgent campaign of Patrick J. Buchanan. He had been a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and White House Communications Director for President Ronald Reagan. It should be noted that he was never investigated for any of the crimes committed in those Administrations.

In between serving in the Ford and Reagan Administrations, he had a nationally-syndicated newspaper column, pushing his archconservative views, which struck some people as racist and anti-Semitic. He had also been an original panelist on the NBC weekly political program The McLaughlin Group, hosted by John McLaughlin, who had also been one of Nixon's speechwriters. Since the end of the Reagan Administration, Buchanan had resumed his column, and had co-hosted the politically-themed talk show Crossfire on CNN, in each case being as far to the right as a political pundit could safely be at the time.

When the votes were tallied on February 18, Bush won on the Republican side, but not by as much as he wanted: He got 92,271 votes, for 53.2 percent. Buchanan got 65,106, for 37.5 percent. Scattered other candidates got 3,779, for 2.3 percent.

No one seriously thought that Buchanan was going to take the nomination from Bush. But it now appeared that Bush's Party was not united behind him, and that he was going to have to make some concessions to get the "Buchanan Brigades" to back him in November.

On the Democratic side, Tsongas got 55,663 votes; Clinton, 41,540; Kerrey, 18,504; Harkin, 17,063; Brown, 13,659. Although he'd never entered the race, Cuomo got 6,577 as a write-in candidate. Although he had already dropped out, Wilder got 103. Percentage-wise, that was: Tsongas, 33.2; Clinton, 24.8; Kerrey, 11.1; Harkin, 10.2; Brown, 8.1; Cuomo, 3.9; Wilder, 0.06.

Among the more interesting features was the remaining part of the Democratic vote. It included some Republican crossovers. Bush got 1,433, for 0.86 percent; Buchanan, 1,248, for 0.74 percent. Tom Laughlin, the actor and civil rights activist who was the brains, such as they were, behind the Billy Jack movies, got 3,251 votes, for 1.94 percent. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader got 3,054 votes, for 1.82 percent, foreshadowing the role he would play in the election of 2000.

Former Senator Eugene McCarthy, who nearly won this Primary in 1968, and got 1 percent of the national general-election vote in 1976, apparently hadn't realized he wasn't famous anymore, but was still famous enough in New Hampshire to get 211 people to vote for him in this Democratic Primary. Perennial candidate and wacko conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche got 115 votes.

So not only had Buchanan come out of the New Hampshire Primary looking better than Bush, who actually won it; but Clinton came out of it looking stronger than Tsongas. He had taken some of the worst attacks that any Primary candidate had ever faced, and had finished 2nd behind a candidate with an enormous geographic advantage. He began calling himself "The Comeback Kid."

Both Bill Clinton and Pat Buchanan -- as far apart on the American political spectrum as two people could be at that point -- could both legitimately claim that finishing in second place had made them the "first winner."

*

February 18, 1992 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 5 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Sacramento Kings, 110-97 at Madison Square Garden. Patrick Ewing scored 34 points.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Dallas Mavericks, 94-90 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Orlando Magic, 117-95 at The Palace in the Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills, Michigan.

* The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Cleveland Cavaliers, 128-116 at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee.

* And the Portland Trail Blazers beat the Phoenix Suns, 129-116 at the Portland Memorial Coliseum. Kevin Johnson scored 40 points in defeat for the Suns.

There were 4 games in the NHL:

* The New Jersey Devils beat the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-3 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. Viacheslav Fetisov scored the winning goal with 3: 18 left in overtime.

* The Quebec Nordiques beat the Minnesota North Stars, 4-0 at the Colisée de Québec.

* The Quebec Nordiques beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 7-1 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* And the Washington Capitals beat the San Jose Sharks, 4-2 at the Cow Palace outside San Francisco in Daly City, California.