THE CAMPAIGN: End of the Beginning

On election eve in New Hampshire, the big white clock in the cupola of Dover’s city hall glowed down on the wintry town, and the resinous vapors of a torchlight parade gave a tang to the crisp night air. The kilted Granite State Highlanders tootled The Blue Bells of Scotland on their bagpipes, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Democratic U.S. Senator from neighboring Massachusetts, marched behind them through the streets of Dover. In the city hall, 1,000 people waited to see Candidate Kennedy and to hear his last word in the first primary campaign of 1960. “Beginning tomorrow,” said he, “New Hampshire can fire a shot that will be heard around the country!”

Yankee New Hampshire (pop. 592,000) seemed hardly that important. Its voice in the national electoral college (four votes out of 537) is small; its registered voters (325,710) barely exceed those of the city of Milwaukee, are only half the number of the employees of General Motors and their families. Yet individualistic New Hampshire is traditionally 1) the first of the 50 states to indicate a presidential choice, and 2) a political Ouija board that fascinates politicians, and sometimes foretells political events to come. New Hampshire’s early primary elections mark the end of the beginning of any presidential election, the tingling time when the candidates actually begin to pile up their convention votes.

A Family Affair. No one had any doubts last week about the outcome of New Hampshire’s primaries: only two major candidates were in the race—Vice President Nixon, Republican; Jack Kennedy, Democrat.

After the dramatic withdrawal of Nelson Rockefeller as a G.O.P. presidential candidate (TIME, Jan. 4), Nixon had scrapped his plans for an active invasion of New Hampshire, relied on an intensive telephone campaign and the well-knit efforts of the state’s dominant Republican organization to put him across. Kennedy, on the other hand, had waged an all-out campaign, powered by his family, his own indefatigable youthfulness, and the strength and cunning of the Kennedy organization, which, months before, had virtually taken over the fledgling New Hampshire Democratic machine.

Both candidates won smashing victories and both made political history. Nixon, with 65,204 votes, polled an alltime high in New Hampshire—significantly ahead of Dwight Eisenhower’s previous high-water mark of 56,464 in the 1956 primary. Kennedy racked up 43,372 Democratic ballots, more than twice the previous record set by Democratic Winner Estes Kefauver in 1956. Neither candidate had hoped for anything approaching the final tabulations.

Other straws in the New Hampshire wind:

¶ Kennedy’s vote reduced the traditional Republican lead in New Hampshire from 2-to-1 to 3-to-2.

¶ The heavy write-in vote which had been predicted for Rockefeller failed to materialize, and the New York Governor got only 2,745 handwritten ballots, leading Nixon’s supporters to conclude that Rocky is no longer a threat in 1960.

¶ An election-eve denunciation of Kennedy as “soft on Communism” by rabidly right-wing Governor Wesley Powell was denounced by Kennedy and sharply repudiated by Nixon. Its possible effects on the election were hard to discern. Some analysts claimed that the unprecedented turnout at the polls was a result; others saw the 2,196 Republican write-in votes for Kennedy as a protest against Powell. Nixon aides interpreted the Vice President’s quick repudiation of Powell’s reckless charge as a big help in dissociating their candidate from the right wing of the Republican Party. But when the results were in, Nixon still congratulated Powell, his New Hampshire campaign manager, for a “great achievement.”

¶ Kennedy’s greatest pile-up of votes occurred, predictably, in the industrialized, Democratic and Catholic cities. Jacqueline Kennedy’s French blood may have been a factor in the heavy vote for her husband by New Hampshire’s 98,000 French Canadian citizens.

¶ Nixon won handily in the small towns, but Democratic strength was increased in many towns and counties. Politicians’ conclusion: Kennedy’s Catholicism did not hurt him in Protestant towns, helped him in Catholic cities.

¶ In the two barometer counties of Coos and Strafford (which have rarely failed to forecast the November outcomes in their March primaries, the Democrats won—5,059 to 4,893 in Strafford, 5,060 to 4,338 in Coos.

In Washington, the supporters of Democratic Candidates Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson and Stuart Symington assumed a public so-what attitude, but showed private signs of alarm at the strength of Jack Kennedy’s increasing thrust. The crucial primary for Kennedy will still be three weeks hence in Wisconsin, where he is running hard against Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic honors, and where Republicans can freely cross over to vote either ticket. But at the end of the beginning it looked more and more a campaign between Dick Nixon and Jack Kennedy.