After New Hampshire

"A most confusing--and most 'disturbing--presidential primary," said the New York Times. "You might as well be your own expert," said Scripps-Howard's Houston Press. These comments seemed a far cry from the usual confident election postmortems. But then, New Hampshire was no ordinary election; its results incited numerous misgivings and even more contradictions in the nation's press.

To the Detroit News, the message from New England seemed clear: "A triumph for a man who looks like a President, who is and has been deeply involved in the critical fight against the Communists, and who offers the Republicans an attractive alternative to Sena tor Barry Goldwater and Governor Nelson Rockefeller." But in the same city, the Detroit Free Press took quite an opposite view. "Here he is again," said the Free Press's political columnist, Judd Arnett, "the most successful political failure of our times, a sort of Harold Stassen with glamour, riding on a wave of publicity as the result of an epidemic of late-winter madness among the snowbound burghers of New Hampshire. They must have voted for Henry Cabot for kicks."

That sort of talk went on and on.

"We'd say 'God help the G.O.P.' if we believed that the result meant that Lodge would be the Republican presidential nominee," said the Chicago Tribune. "But we don't." The Baltimore Sun allowed that "Mr. Lodge is a good man" but added that his victory was only a "local phenomenon." In New Hampshire, the Manchester Union Leader's terrible-tempered Publisher William Loeb, who had backed Candidate Barry Goldwater, described the write-in vote for Lodge as "temporary political insanity."

But in Charleston, S.C., the News & Courier, swallowing its disappointment over its idol Barry Goldwater's indifferent showing, found room to rejoice, after a fashion, over the emergence of Lodge. Said that paper, in what was surely the weirdest political forecast of the year: "The size of Mr. Lodge's write-in vote, compared to the Democratic write-in for Robert F. Kennedy, suggests to us a Johnson-Lodge combination for 1964."

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