When Paul Newman, other stars campaigned in Wisconsin
In the weeks leading up to the Wisconsin presidential primaries in 1968, some candidates had well-connected backers, others elaborate TV campaigns.
Eugene McCarthy had Cool Hand Luke.
McCarthy, the Democratic senator from Minnesota running against President Lyndon B. Johnson as an anti-Vietnam War candidate, had a lot riding on Wisconsin.
On March 12, McCarthy had stunned the political establishment by winning 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire Primary to Johnson’s 49%. Four days after New Hampshire, Robert F. Kennedy, another Vietnam War foe who initially had declined to oppose Johnson, announced he was running, too.
Unfortunately for Kennedy, his decision came too late to get his name on the ballot in Wisconsin, giving McCarthy a chance to avoid splitting the antiwar vote and, possibly, win in Dairyland.
McCarthy pulled out all the stops, making dozens of appearances all over the state. And as the April 2 primary approached, his campaign brought out the heavy artillery.
While Johnson’s campaign sent members of his cabinet to Wisconsin, McCarthy brought in Paul Newman.
Newman was probably the highestprofile star among the legion of celebrities lining up behind McCarthy in 1968. But Newman, who had recently received his fourth Oscar nomination for the title role in the 1967 hit “Cool Hand Luke,” was all in, crisscrossing the country for McCarthy.
Those travels brought him to Milwaukee, for a long weekend starting on March 21.
“Actor Paul Newman, with seven pretty college girls skipping along beside him, walked the streets of Milwaukee for seven hours Thursday … ,” the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Marian McBride wrote in a story on the front page of the March 22 edition.
Newman and his companions strolled down Mitchell Street, where he pinned McCarthy pins on two women’s lapels.
“What do you like about McCarthy?” McBride asked one of the women. “Paul Newman,” she answered “as she pretended to sink to her knees.”
Newman made several other stops in town, but made his only speech of the day at Alverno College.
In an auditorium at Alverno, while the 750 or so students focused their attention on Newman, Newman focused his attention on McCarthy.
“Eugene McCarthy doesn’t need me, but the fact of the matter is I need Gene McCarthy,” Newman said. “… McCarthy is not just sitting around like some others waiting to find out if the wind is blowing in the proper direction” — an apparent dig at Kennedy’s late entry into the race.
The Milwaukee Journal reported on March 22 that Newman’s whirlwind Wisconsin tour took him the following day to Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Green Bay, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, West Bend and, on Saturday, stops across Waukesha County before a fundraising dinner at the Pfister Hotel.
At the Pfister, The Journal reported in its March 24 edition, Newman “didn’t get to finish his drink. He was so mobbed by his fans that he had to make a hasty exit to a parking ramp about five minutes after he arrived.”
Newman’s visit, it turned out, was just the first of several by celebrities stumping for McCarthy in Wisconsin in the final days before the vote. Others, according to a report in The Journal on March 26, included singer-actress Phyllis Newman; the musical-writing team Adolph Green and Betty Comden; and “Twilight Zone” writerproducer Rod Serling. (Paul Newman himself made a return trip to the state for nearly a week before the vote.)
On March 28, Serling gave speeches at five Milwaukee-area campuses. In a story in the March 28 Journal, he said he was campaigning for McCarthy because he “got hung up on the Vietnam War. I wanted a choice, an alternative. … McCarthy spoke with restraint, a semblance of wisdom.”
At the same time, Serling acknowledged that he might not be the celebrity messenger people wanted to hear from.
“When personalities like Paul come to town, we wind up with a sort of collective embarrassment,” Serling told the Journal reporter. “The audience wants Paul and, instead, they get me. ‘Who the hell is he? they say. But they listen when you start talking issues.”
As it turned out, McCarthy’s celebrity blitz might have been overkill.
On March 31, two days before the Wisconsin Primary, Johnson announced that he wasn’t running for reelection after all. McCarthy won easily, collecting 56% of the vote to LBJ’s 35%.
On the Republican side, Richard Nixon — the front-runner after Michigan Gov. George Romney dropped out in February — collected more than 79% of the vote, with Ronald Reagan getting more than 10% of the vote in his first electoral test outside California.