Remembering Lane Dwinell

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, April 16, 1997

The last time I saw Governor Dwinell was when we made a date for lunch. I picked him up at Kendal, and we went to Murphy's pub on Main Street.

The Governor began over drinks by saying that he had come through 'a nervous breakdown' over his wife Elizabeth's affliction with Alzheimer's. The old-fashioned term 'nervous breakdown' is pretty vague. I assumed he meant severe depression.

But, that subject put aside, he seemed to grow younger, fully alert to nuances of today's politics in New Hampshire, producing newspaper clippings to document his points. Intellectually, it was a vigorous lunch.

Governor Dwinell was an instructive figure in New Hampshire politics, and indeed in the national evolution of the Republican party, and, derivatively, even of the Democratic party.

When he first emerged in politics in New Hampshire, he was firmly in the
'Eisenhower wing' of the Republican party. In New Hampshire, that meant that then Governor Sherman Adams vigorously fought to win the Republican presidential nomination for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, ultimately a successful effort.

What this meant in policy terms was that the 'Eisenhower Republican' a) was internationalist in foreign affairs and supported NATO, the 'Marsh Plan' and so forth, while his rival Senator Robert Taft's loyalty to the ventures was suspect; and that b) Eisenhower Republicans would slow down the expansion of the New Deal into further territories of government intervention, but would not repeal the New Deal itself.

Dwight Eisenhower was a spectacularly successful president. NATO and the Marshall Plan put Europe back on its feet as a functioning bulwark against Stalin. In fact, the extension of the New deal was halted until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

In New Hampshire politics, derivatively, Eisenhower Republicanism dominated the party from Sherman Adams, chief of staff in the White House, through Eisenhower Republican Governor Walter Peterson, a popular figure in the state.

Yet something happened intellectually in the nation in the wake of the Great Society, as the vast extension of the New Deal went forward again under Lyndon Johnson.

New Hampshire elected a Southerner, Meldrim Thomson, as governor — and Thomson, with historical resources said, 'No broad-based tax.'

In California, Ronald Reagan defeated the incumbent Governor Pat Brown by one million votes in 1966. In university departments of economics, one Nobel Prize after another went to 'free market' economic theory.

At that point, Lane Dwinell 'crossed the aisle.'

I remember him telling me sometime in 1968 that 'Mel Thomson was right,' and that the last thing that New Hampshire needed was more taxation.

That is, further transfer of money from the private sector to the public sector.

At about the same time, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York announced publicly at a gathering that 'Reagan was right about welfare, and I have been wrong.' From a proud man like Rockefeller, this was an amazing mea culpa. Previously, so the joke went, 'Rocky' had been unable to utter a sentence in which the words 'billions' and 'programs' did not occur. 'Rocky' was crossing the aisle.

Our local newspaper in the Upper Valley, the Valley News, which harbors grave illusions about history and human nature, and is almost inevitably wrong in consequence, celebrated Lane Dwinell in a March 29 major editorial.

But, of course, celebrated him for the wrong reasons.

It liked the fact that he had never taken the pledge against new taxes.

The fact is that he was so intellectually committed against further transfers from the private to the public sector that no pledge was necessary.

The Valley News also celebrates the fact that he spent more money on 'education.'

At that point, it is possible that greater expenditures in New Hampshire were called for. But the Valley News — the culture of which is entirely coherent with the culture of Dartmouth College — always wants to spend more money on 'education.'

This, despite the fact that the U.S. spends more per pupil than any nation in the industrialized world — and has the worst record on standardized tests in the industrial world.

Governor Dwinell began as an 'Eisenhower Republican,' which was probably the right call in 1952, but by the time I knew him — when I was campaigning actively for Meldrim Thomson, Gordon Humphrey and not least Ronald Reagan — Governor Dwinell was a Reagan Republican. As the Valley News says, in celebrating him, he did have an open mind.

When the Valley News said that, it probably did not realize quite what it was saying.

Remembering Lane Dwinell

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