This is the year of the weeper, isn't it? Thinking about Congressman Anthony Weiner's tear-filled confession/press conference today, it reminded me of a couple of other public weepers on the other side of the aisle--Glenn Beck and Speaker of the House John Boehner.
When did it become OK for politicians to cry? It wasn't so long ago (it happened in the first election in which I could vote) when public boo-hooing ended Edmund Muskie's candidacy for President.
I guess Senator Muskie was just ahead of his time.
The "Canuck letter" was a bogus letter to the editor (the notorious William Loeb) of the Manchester Union Leader, published just two weeks before the 1972 New Hampshire primary. The letter implied that candidate Senator Muskie was prejudiced against French-Canadian Americans (an important constituency in Maine). The letter writer claimed to have met Muskie and his staff in Florida and asked The Senator how he could understand the problems of African Americans, given Maine's almost non-existent black population. According to the letter, a staffer responded, "Not blacks, but we have Canucks." Muskie laughed at the remark.
After the letter appeared, Muskie gave a speech in front of the Union Leader's office that came to be known in political circles as "the crying speech." In The Crying Speech, Muskie called publisher William Loeb a liar and took him to task for slurring the character of his wife Jane (the paper had also written that she was a heavy drinker and had a foul mouth). Network news and the newspapers reported that Muskie wept openly during the speech. David Broder, in The Washington Post, wrote that Muskie "broke down three times in as many minutes"; The CBS Evening News showed unflattering photos of Muskie's face at, or near, weeping. No doubt helping unhinge Muskie was the fact that William Loeb had previously baited Muskie, calling him "Moscow Muskie," and a flip-flopper. According to the Wikipedia (and I remember him saying this at the time), "Muskie later stated that what had appeared to the press as tears were actually melted snowflakes, the press reported that Muskie broke down and cried, shattering the candidate's image as calm and reasoned."
When The Senator was outed as a weeper, he was, natch, thought to be emotionally and dangerously unstable ("is this who you want negotiating the fate of the world with Leonid Brezhnev?"  New Hampshire Democrats began to defect to George McGovern. Although Muskie beat McGovern 46% to 37%, the margin was far smaller than his campaign had predicted. McGovern now had momentum, and by the time of the Florida primary, Ed Muskie, the one-time front-runner, was Dead Man Walking. |
Marilyn Berger, a Washington Post staff writer, wrote that White House staffer Ken Clawson once bragged to her about authoring the letter, which Clawson immediately denied. In October 1972, FBI investigators said that the Canuck Letter was part of a dirty tricks campaign against Democrats orchestrated by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP). Loeb, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, always said that the letter was not a fabrication (but he later had some doubts about its veracity). The alleged letter writer, one Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, FLA was never tracked down, if he ever existed at all.
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