The human factor is always the least predictable element in covering politics. That is why the beat is so fascinating. Under the pressure of campaigns for high office, people react in ways that are always revealing and often unexpected. In this case, Muskie's strategists wanted him to show indignation and righteous wrath to regain the offensive in what they saw as an eroding effort to hold off the challenge of his major rival, Senator George McGovern. They focused on the impact of two Union Leader editorials: one concerned an alleged derogatory comment by Muskie about the important French-Canadian voting bloc, the other impugned the behavior and character of the candidate's wife.

I described Muskie's dramatic reaction:

"With tears streaming down his face and his voice choked with emotion, Senator Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) stood in the snow outside the Manchester Union Leader this morning and accused its publisher of making vicious attacks on him and his wife, Jane."

The Democratic presidential candidate called publisher William Loeb "a gutless coward' for involving Mrs. Muskie in the campaign and said four times that Loeb had lied in charging that Muskie had condoned a slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent.

In defending his wife, Muskie broke down three times in as many minutes-- uttering a few words and then standing silent in the near blizzard, rubbing at his face, his shoulders heaving, while he attempted to regain his composure sufficiently to speak.

[...]

Within 24 hours, Muskie's weeping became the focus of political talk, not just in New Hampshire, but everywhere the pattern of the developing presidential race was discussed. His tears were generally described as one of the contributing causes of his disappointing showing in the March 7 primary...

In retrospect, though, there were a few problems with the Muskie story. First, it is unclear whether Muskie did cry. He insists he never shed the tears we thought we saw. Melting snow from his hatless head filled his eyes, he said, and made him wipe his face. While admitting that exhaustion and emotion got the better of him that morning, the senator believes that he was damaged more by the press and television coverage of the event than by his own actions.

Second, it is now clear that the incident should have been placed in a different context: Muskie was victimized by the classic dirty trick that had been engineered by agents of the distent and detached President Nixon. The Loeb editorial that had brought Muskie out in the snowstorm had been based on a letter forged by a White House staff member intent on destroying Muskie's credibility. But we didn't know that and we didn't work hard enough to find out.

What does a political reporter do with this kind of insight? As in this instance, it is rarely written as a hard news story the first time the thought arises. Most reporters have a healthy reluctance to play amateur psychiatrist. Often, the incidents are trivial in themselves. Sometimes, as with the poker game, they occur in semiprivate settings, which many reporters--myself included-- feel uncomfortable in exploiting directly for journalistic purposes.

What we tend to do is to store such incidents in our minds and then use them to interpret major incidents when they occur.

Systematic sabotage

What Muskie did not know, and what I certainly did not know at the time, was that there was another set of facts that would have put the incident into a very different context. Those facts related to a series of actions, ordered and coordinated by the Nixon White House and designed to harass, to vex, and to embarrass the front running Democrat who was judged a serious threat to Nixon's re-election. The "Canuck letter' was part of that plot.

Had those facts been known, I might have described Muskie in different terms: not as a victim of his over-ambitious campaign strategy and his too-human temperament, but as the victim of a fraud, managed by operatives of a frightened and unscrupulous president. That story surely would have had a different impact.

Given Loeb's history, there was ample reason for skepticism about the origins of the "Canuck letter.' Indeed, in my story about the Manchester incident, I devoted seven paragraphs to that subject, noting that "the Deerfield Beach telephone company does not list a Paul Morrison among the 15 Morrisons in its directory,' and noting that Loeb, while promising "a very interesting followup' on the letter, had not yet produced the author.

The story also quoted at length the denials of the senator and others who were with him in Florida that any such thing happened. But regrettably, none of us reporting the story pursued the mystery of authorship. We were in New Hampshire, tracking the candidates through the final week of the primary campaign. Paul Morrison, if he existed, was one thousand miles to the south. And the story, in our eyes, was not the provocation but the reaction.

It was not until seven months later, when Nixonwas sailing toward a landslide victory over McGovern and Muskie was back tending to his Senate business, that the mystery began to unravel. Marilyn Berger, then a colleague at the Post, told me that Ken W. Clawson, a former Post reporter who had gone to work at the White House as deputy director of information, had told her that he was the author of "the Canuck letter.'

[...]

The coverage of the incident shows that when a reporter's information is incomplete, there is a great risk of misleading the reader. I put the Manchester speech into the context--accurately, I believe--of a campaign and a personality that were accessible to journalistic view. I did not put it into the context of campaign sabotage.

Unwittingly, I did my part in the work of the Nixon operatives in helping destroy the credibility of the Muskie candidacy.