POLITICS: Campaign Teardrops

Aside from trying out for the Olympic decathlon, there may be no more enervating enterprise in the U.S. than campaigning in the presidential primaries. Never before has the ordeal been more punishing than it is this year for the eleven major Democratic candidates, who have no fewer than 24 pre-convention primaries to contend with. It is enough to make strong men weep, and finally one did. The tears were all the more conspicuous because they were shed by the leading Democratic contender. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.

Standing on a flatbed truck in a snowstorm before the offices of the Manchester. N.H., Union Leader, Muskie defended his wife Jane against a snide bit of gossip about her in the newspaper. Its editor, the vitriolic, archconservative William Loeb, had reprinted a Newsweek item (itself a condensation of a story in Women's Wear Daily) detailing Mrs. Muskie's alleged penchant for predinner cocktails and an incident in which she supposedly asked reporters if they knew any dirty jokes. Muskie was particularly angered by the headline Loeb put on the Union Leader item: BIG DADDY'S JANE. As the Senator later complained:

"It made her sound like a moll."

In a voice choked with emotion, Muskie began to weep as he announced the title to the crowd. "This man doesn't walk, he crawls," sobbed Muskie. He tried to regain his composure, then said loudly: "He's talking about my wife." Muskie calmed himself; unfortunately for him, however, his breakdown was caught by CBS-TV cameras and shown round the country.

The moment of weakness left many voters wondering about Muskie's ability to stand up under stress. His aides were troubled by the performance, and one official of the Democratic National Committee observed: "You have Nixon in China meeting with the Communist leaders and you have Muskie having that difficulty in New Hampshire. I imagine the contrast would be somewhat harmful."

Expectably, there was some gleefully negative reaction in both parties. Washington Democratic Senator Henry Jackson asked: "If he's like that with Loeb, what would he do with Brezhnev?" Added Republican National Chairman Robert Dole: "I don't blame Muskie for crying. If I had to run against Richard Nixon, I'd do a lot of crying too."

As it happens, Muskie had not even intended to make an issue of the item about his wife in the address outside the Union Leader office. But en route to Manchester, he brooded over the article, then startled his aides by bringing it up after he had finished the first part of his speech. That part was devoted to answering charges in an earlier Loeb editorial that Muskie had laughed at an aide's sneering reference to Franco-American New Englanders as "Canucks." Someone named Paul Morrison had claimed that he had witnessed the incident while Muskie was visiting a drug treatment center in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and had sent a crudely written letter to Loeb castigating Muskie. By week's end Morrison had not been found. Reporters who had accompanied Muskie to the center recalled no such incident and agreed that the Senator had appeared somber and deeply moved by his visit to the center.