“The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her powerful good, and endanger her very existence. Leave her to march freely through the centuries to come, as in the years that have gone. Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance; this great land of ordered liberty. For if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.”
—Ladies and Gentlemen, my mans Henry Cabot Lodge
Non-Candidate Henry Cabot Lodge Wins the New Hampshire GOP Primary in 1964
A small group of supporters mounted an impressive write-in campaign for then-U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, in the New Hampshire Republican Primary of 1964.
With 36 percent of the vote, Lodge, a former Senator from Massachusetts and Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign running mate, defeated frontrunner Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (22 percent) and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller (21 percent) – both of whom spent a good deal of time and money campaigning up and down the state – without ever setting foot in New Hampshire. He learned of his win while on a flight to Saigon.
Though Lodge never declared his candidacy, he won two more primaries: Massachusetts and New Jersey. But Goldwater would go on to win the GOP nomination, only to lose in a landslide to incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson.
How The GOP Gave Way To The Kennedy Political Dynasty
cognoscenti.wbur.orgIf one is of a certain conservative Republican political bent, the name Kennedy evokes the same kind of emotional response that Boston sports fans usually reserve for the likes of Lebron James and Alex Rodriquez: intense hostility and irrational hatred. Yet, 60 years ago, Republican Party conservatives played a decisive role in creating the very thing they have since come to gnash their teeth over, the Kennedy family political dynasty.
