November 13, 1969: Vice President Spiro Agnew's "Media Speech"

November 13, 1969: Vice President Spiro Agnew delivers a speech at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Des Moines, Iowa, as part of the Midwest Regional Republican Conference, an annual meeting of campaign strategists.

The speech was written by William Safire, later a Pulitzer Prize-winning longtime conservative columnist for The New York Times. Ten days earlier, President Richard Nixon had delivered a speech written by Safire, outlining his policy of "Vietnamziation," a process of slowly but surely turning the responsibility of defending South Vietnam over to the country itself, and pulling U.S. troops out.

Nixon appealed to what he called "the great silent majority of Americans" for support, and he did gain support for the plan in opinion polls.

But not everyone agreed, and Nixon thought that he was being undermined by the national networks' news broadcasts: The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, The Huntley-Brinkley Report with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC (not yet NBC Nightly News), and The ABC Evening News (not yet World News Tonight) with Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds. Nixon thought the newsmen, their correspondents, and their interviewees weren't giving him a fair shake.

Nixon had been through this before: When he ran for Governor of California in 1962, he lost badly, and blamed the media, telling them the next morning, "Just think of how much fun you'll be missing. You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." He lied, running for President in 1968, and winning.

He took Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland as his running mate. Agnew had been Baltimore County Executive, and won the Governorship as a liberal Republican against a segregationist Democrat. At first, Agnew was seen as tough but fair. But his response to the riot in Baltimore after Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968 got Nixon's attention, and he was nominated for Vice President. His image as a moderate would soon be shattered by remarks of what we would now call "casual racism," and he very nearly cost Nixon the election.

As Vice President, he tended to give speeches that showed he had an acute affinity for alliteration. Safire, who later wrote a column titled "Language Maven," enjoyed writing for him, giving him the phrases "the nattering nabobs of negativism," "the professional pessimists," "the troubadours of trouble," and "the 4-H Club: The Hopeless, Hysterical Hypochondriacs of History."

Safire was Jewish, and it was more likely one of Nixon's other speechwriters, the Catholic Patrick J. Buchanan, who gave Agnew the line "the vicars of vacillation." And, while this phrase didn't reflect anyone's religion, or offer any alliteration, I suspect it was also Buchanan who had Agnew call the media "an effect corps of impudent snobs."

Agnew did not use that line in this speech, which all 3 networks broadcast live, an unprecedented forum for a sitting Vice President who, at the time, was not also a candidate for President. Among his remarks:

No nation depends more on the intelligent judgment of its citizens. And no medium has a more profound influence over public opinion. Nowhere in our system are there fewer checks on such vast power. So nowhere should there be more conscientious responsibility exercised than by the news media. The question is, "Are we demanding enough of our television news presentations?" "And are the men of this medium demanding enough of themselves?"

Monday night, a week ago, President Nixon delivered the most important address of his Administration, one of the most important of our decade. His subject was Vietnam. My hope, as his at that time, was to rally the American people to see the conflict through to a lasting and just peace in the Pacific. For 32 minutes, he reasoned with a nation that has suffered almost a third of a million casualties in the longest war in its history.

When the President completed his address -- an address, incidentally, that he spent weeks in the preparation of -- his words and policies were subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism. The audience of 70 million Americans gathered to hear the President of the United States was inherited by a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed in one way or another their hostility to what he had to say.

It was obvious that their minds were made up in advance. Those who recall the fumbling and groping that followed President Johnson's dramatic disclosure of his intention not to seek another term have seen these men in a genuine state of non-preparedness. This was not it.

One commentator twice contradicted the President's statement about the exchange of correspondence with Ho Chi Minh. Another challenged the President's abilities as a politician. A third asserted that the President was following a Pentagon line. Others, by the expressions on their faces, the tone of their questions, and the sarcasm of their responses, made clear their sharp disapproval.

To guarantee in advance that the President's plea for national unity would be challenged, one network (meaning ABC) trotted out Averell Harriman for the occasion. Throughout the President's address, he waited in the wings. When the President concluded, Mr. Harriman recited perfectly. He attacked the Thieu government as unrepresentative. He criticized the President's speech for various deficiencies. He twice issued a call to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to debate Vietnam once again. He stated his belief that the Vietcong or North Vietnamese did not really want a military takeover of South Vietnam. And he told a little anecdote about a "very, very responsible" fellow he had met in the North Vietnamese delegation.

All in all, Mr. Harriman offered a broad range of gratuitous advice challenging and contradicting the policies outlined by the President of the United States. Where the President had issued a call for unity, Mr. Harriman was encouraging the country not to listen to him.

A word about Mr. Harriman. For 10 months, he was America's chief negotiator at the Paris peace talks, a period in which the United States swapped some of the greatest military concessions in the history of warfare for an enemy agreement on the shape of the bargaining table. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Mr. Harriman seems to be under some heavy compulsion to justify his failures to anyone who will listen. And the networks have shown themselves willing to give him all the air time he desires.

Now, every American has a right to disagree with the President of the United States, and to express publicly that disagreement. But the President of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds, and form their own opinions, about a Presidential address without having the President's words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested.

Agnew was underestimating the intelligence of TV viewers. He believed they were incapable of making up their minds about what Nixon said before any opposing views could be aired. He also underestimated their ability to decide for themselves about what Harriman, also a former Governor of New York, and others opposing Nixon had said.

Agnew continued:

When Winston Churchill rallied public opinion to stay the course against Hitler's Germany, he didn't have to contend with a gaggle of commentators raising doubts about whether he was reading public opinion right, or whether Britain had the stamina to see the war through. When President Kennedy rallied a nation in the Cuban missile crisis, his address to the people was not chewed over by a roundtable of critics who disparaged the course of action he'd asked America to follow.

And when those speeches were given, they were on the subject of existential threats to the countries involved. North Vietnam was not Nazi Germany. Nor was it the Soviet Union. And there had already been plenty of doubt about what America was doing in Vietnam. Americans were very much used to questioning their leaders on that subject. If they hadn't been, Nixon -- and, by extension, Agnew -- could never have been elected.

So for Agnew to suggest that Nixon's words should go unchallenged was an authoritarian gesture. And the American people didn't like that. He wrapped up:

In tomorrow's edition of The Des Moines Register, you'll be able to read a news story detailing what I said tonight. Editorial comment will be reserved for the editorial page, where it belongs. Should not the same wall of separation exist between news and comment on the nation's networks?

Now, my friends, we'd never trust such power, as I've described, over public opinion in the hands of an elected Government. It's time we questioned it in the hands of a small and unelected elite. The great networks have dominated America's airwaves for decades. The people are entitled to a full accounting of their stewardship.

At the conclusion of the speech, all 3 network's anchors interviewed their own network's president, to give their own response. Frank Stanton of CBS gave the best one, calling the speech "an unprecedented attempt by the Vice President of the United States to intimidate a news medium which depends for its existence upon government licenses."

The networks were not intimidated. As the years went on, all 3 would be rather harsh toward Nixon -- and Agnew. They couldn't convince people not to re-elect the Republican ticket in 1972. But when Agnew fell under investigation for tax fraud and bribery, the networks covered it as a serious news story worthy of investigation, keeping whatever glee they may have had to themselves.

Agnew resigned his office on October 10, 1973, cutting a plea deal to avoid prison time. That same month, the Watergate scandal that had engulfed Nixon got worse, and ABC's Smith became the 1st network anchor to issue an on-air editorial calling for Nixon's resignation.

Early the next year, Dan Rather, then CBS' White House correspondent, stood up to ask Nixon a question during a press conference. Upon introducing himself, he got a round of applause from his colleagues. Nixon, smiling, asked him, "Are you running for something?" Rather, not smiling, answered, "No, Mr. President. Are you?"

The Republicans hated Rather for the rest of his career, and hated CBS above all networks, until the 1990s, when NBC spun off the network MSNBC, which frequently challenged the conservative movement's own favorite network, Fox News Channel.

Speaking of which: Spiro Agnew died on September 17, 1996, at the age of 83. Exactly 20 days later, Fox News Channel went on the air. Something tells me he would have been just fine with the way they have conducted themselves since then.

*

November 13, 1969 was a Thursday. Scottish actor Gerard Butler was born on this day.

Baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. There were 3 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the Chicago Bulls, 114-99 at the new Madison Square Garden.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Phoenix Suns, 124-110 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.

* And the Seattle SuperSonics beat the Detroit Pistons, 117-113 at the Seattle Center Coliseum.

There were 2 games played in the American Basketball Association. The Indiana Pacers beat the Miami Floridians, 115-109 at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. And the Kentucky Colonels beat the Denver Rockets, 109-104 at Freedom Hall in Louisville.

And there were 2 games in the NHL. The Boston Bruins beat the Detroit Red Wings, 3-1 at the Boston Garden. And the St. Louis Blues beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-0 at the St. Louis Arena.

August 17, 1992: Conservatives Declare a "Religious War" On Liberals

August 17, 1992: The Republican Convention opens at the Astrodome in Houston. Despite the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was never any question that the incumbents, President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, were going to be nominated for 2nd terms.

However, that recession, and Bush having broken his promise from the 1988 Convention of, "Read my lips: No new taxes!" angered the archconservative wing of the Party. This led to an insurgent candidacy by Patrick J. Buchanan, who had served as a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and as White House Communications Director under President Ronald Reagan. Now a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist with a populist-conservative bent, Buchanan was one of the few people still willing to publicly support the disgraced Nixon.

He challenged Bush in the Primaries, getting a surprising 37 percent in the New Hampshire Primary. Bush and Quayle got the message: Double down on the attack of, "The Democrats will raise your taxes, we Republicans will not."

But the other main Republican message was now useless: With the Cold War over, the Republicans could no longer run on "The Democrats are soft on Communism." Or... could they? They would do their best to link the Democratic nominee, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, his wife Hillary, and the Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, to "Communism" and "Socialism."

And then came the race riot in South Central Los Angeles. Instead of blaming it on the anger that black people faced over police officers getting away with police brutality, and other economic issues -- including, but not limited to, the recession that Bush's dedication to Reaganomics had caused -- they decided to blame it on "the breakdown of the family."

On May 19, Quayle gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club, a conservative outpost in normally liberal San Francisco. He said fathers leaving the home was a problem, which it was. He said women raising children as single mothers was a problem, as if it was their fault.

The previous night, CBS aired the season finale of Murphy Brown, in which the fictional TV journalist Murphy had her baby, and Quayle said that the show "glamorized single motherhood," was "mocking the importance of fathers," and "calling it just another lifestyle choice."

It did none of those things. Quayle wasn't lying: He was simply too stupid to recognize that he was wrong. The national media, which had mocked Quayle so many times before, did so again, the best headline being in the Philadelphia Daily News: "MURPHY HAS A BABY, QUAYLE HAS A COW!"

But the Republican Convention dug the hole deeper, with more speeches saying that liberals, dominant in the Democratic Party, were insulting "family values" by promoting single mothers -- and, worse still, by promoting gay rights. Signs were held up, reading, "FAMILY RIGHTS FOREVER GAY RIGHTS NEVER." Baltimore Sun political columnist Jules Witcover recalled that one delegate stuck his finger in his face and said, "You cannot be a Christian and a Democrat."

Buchanan gave a speech on the opening night of the Convention. He assured the Bush campaign that, in his speech, he would endorse Bush wholeheartedly. He did. But he also went out of his way to praise Reagan, and then...

There would be steps along the way. Newt Gingrich's "Revolution" in 1994. The Administration of Bush's son, George W. Bush, saying in 2001, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," and then being a bunch of draft-deferred Republican politicians insulting the patriotism of Democratic war veterans. The rise of the "Tea Party" in 2009. And the 2016 embrace of Donald Trump by evangelicals, seeing that incredibly immoral man as their best chance to overturn abortion rights. Each time, the conservative movement seemedg to get angrier, crazier, and more ignorant.

If you want to know when the Republican Party lost its mind and decided that bigotry -- against women, against nonwhite people, against non-Christian people, against LGBT people, against immigrants, etc. -- was okay, this was the moment: Pat Buchanan's speech before the 1992 Republican National Convention. Here are some of the "highlights":

My friends, like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden – where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists – in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history...

This was a major misinterpretation: At their Convention, the previous month, the Democrats were completely open about their liberalism.

As President, George Bush presided over the liberation of Eastern Europe and the termination of the Warsaw Pact. And what about Mr. Clinton? Well, Bill Clinton couldn’t find 150 words to discuss foreign policy in an acceptance speech that lasted almost an hour. As was said of another Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes...

Really, Pat? I don't recall George H.W. Bush being the President of the Soviet Union. Or of East Germany. Or of Poland. Or of any country other than the United States. He didn't preside over any of those things. Although the IHOP line was a good zinger.

George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and a champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded. Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda. At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish Catholic Governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.

The reason there was no speech for Governor Casey at the Democratic Convention was because he refused to endorse Clinton. Except for former Governor Jerry Brown of California, himself a candidate for President up until that moment, every single speaker at that Convention endorsed Clinton in his speech. Casey wouldn't -- true, because he disagreed with Clinton on abortion, and on guns -- but that refusal was why he was not allowed to address the Convention.

Fast-forward to 2008: The Governor's son, Bob Casey Jr., had been elected to the U.S. Senate, and was every bit as anti-abortion and pro-gun as his father. But he happily endorsed the Democrats' nominee for President, the pro-choice and pro-gun-control Barack Obama, and was given a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic Convention in Denver, and said that Party members need not agree with the nominee on every issue in order to endorse that nominee.

Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: "Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history." And so they do.

At that point, that statement was true. And in his Convention speech, Clinton said, to anyone willing to listen, "You matter to America. And don't you ever let anybody tell you can't become whatever you want to be. And if other politicians make you feel like you are not part of their family, come on and be part of ours." Now, that's family values.

Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.

Damn right, they need not apply. Says who? Says James Madison: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" -- which is exactly what the federal government promoting religious schools would be. And the federal government funding religious schools would be tantamount to promoting them, and their religion. There's a reason this particular Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was the First one.

Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation. Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Sounds like you're speaking for her, Pat. Hillary didn't say those things.

This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

You may call it "God's country," but the 1st Amendment calls you a liar. Of course, the Republicans had a litmus test for the Supreme Court, and no abortions (never mind that rich people, as they did before 1973, would still be able to get around the law), discrimination against gays, etc.

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. 

After a speech like that, a lot of people didn't want to be on Bush's side, knowing he was on Buchanan's side. Sometime later, after the bombing of an abortion clinic killed an innocent receptionist, even Buchanan admitted, "Sometimes, you don't want to be on your own side."

He closed with this:

My friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.

The cities were never yours, Pat. Nor was the country. As for your culture, please, yes, take it back, so the majority of America never has to see it again. There's a reason the 1960s happened, and it was that all that "freedom" you mentioned in that speech (in parts I haven't quoted here) didn't exist for women, for black people, for gay people -- as comedian Bill Maher would later put it, "which is why Little Richard was always screaming."

I remember watching that Convention, and while I can't say it got any worse than that, it certainly didn't get any better. Anybody who wasn't already for the Bush-Quayle ticket wasn't won over, the way many had been by the considerably more moderate affairs in Detroit in 1980, in Dallas in 1984, and in New Orleans in 1988. Buchanan and some of the other speakers had turned the Astrodome into a Nuremburg rally.

And when Bush, the last vestige of Reagan's "sunny optimism," lost badly to Clinton in November, those delegates and elected officials were now free to be who they always wanted to be -- which is to say, angry and mean, and bigoted to others who just wanted to be free to be who they always wanted to be.

Comedian Mort Sahl, who had been lampooning politicians of both parties since the Harry Truman Administration, said, "If anybody comes up to you and says, My kid is a conservative, why is that? You say, Remember in the Sixties, when we told you, if you keep using drugs, your kids will be mutants?"

Without Pat Buchanan's 1992 Republican Convention speech, the Congressional "revolution" that Representative Newt Gingrich led in 1994 would have been considerably harder to pull off. Without Buchanan's speech, there never would have been an Administration in which George Bush the son was much further to the right than George Bush the father. Without Buchanan's speech, there would have been no Tea Party to oppose President Obama from 2009 to 2014, before Donald Trump became the Party's standard-bearer. And without Buchanan's speech, Trump's philosophy of "Make America Great Again" through bigotry and unregulated capitalism would never have had a chance.

None of those things should have had a chance.

*

August 17, 1992 was a Monday. There were only 4 Major League Baseball games scheduled for that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Chicago White Sox, 4-2 at the new Comiskey Park in Chicago. (It was renamed U.S. Cellular Field in 2002, Guaranteed Rate Field in 2016, and just "Rate Field" in 2025.) Each team got only 5 hits, but the Pale Hose made more of theirs than did the Bronx Bombers.

* The Atlanta Braves beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-4 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Mark Lemke won the game with a ground-rule double in the top of the 10th inning.

* The Kansas City Royals beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Royals Stadium in Kansas City. (It was renamed Kauffman Stadium the next season.) George Brett went 1-for-4, and Mike Macfarlane went 3-for-4 with a home run and 3 RBIs.

* And the Los Angeles Dodgers beat their arch-rivals, the San Francisco Giants, 2-0 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Kevin Gross pitched a no-hitter. He walked Cory Snyder and Matt Williams in the 2nd inning, but got out of it with a double play. And he hit Mark Leonard with a pitch in the 9th. Those would be the only baserunners he allowed. Eric Karros hit a home run for the Dodgers in the 2nd inning.

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.