40 years ago, Maine’s Smith ran for president

SKOWHEGAN – Long before her own days in politics, Hillary Rodham Clinton looked to Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith as a role model.

“I remember being fascinated by Margaret Chase Smith because she was in the U.S. Senate,” Clinton, now a U.S. senator from New York, said in 1993. There “weren’t very many good women role models or even good biographies of women in those days.”

Clinton’s quote, from an interview with Parade magazine, is on display in the Smith library in her hometown.

While Smith and Clinton have roots in different political eras, are from different parties and represent different philosophies, they have one thing in common: Both have won serious support for presidential bids.

Forty years ago this summer at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, Smith’s name was placed in nomination for the presidency. It was the first time a woman was so honored by a major political party, but it was only one of a string of firsts for the Mainer, who died in 1995.

As this week’s Democratic National Convention in Boston drew closer this summer, former first lady Clinton drew gestures of support for a 2008 White House run.

In an Associated Press survey, 26 percent of the Democratic delegates identified Clinton as their choice for president in four years should presumptive 2004 nominee John Kerry be defeated in November. John Edwards was favored by 17 percent. About 70 percent of the delegates were surveyed nationally.

Among Maine delegates, Clinton was also the top choice for a 2008 run if Kerry loses in November. Five of the 35 delegates – nearly 15 percent – named Clinton as their top choice, with Dennis Kucinich behind her with four nods of support.

Nationally as well as in Maine, the largest share of delegates demurred when asked about 2008, saying they believed Kerry would win this year.

Former President Clinton’s wife, who was a featured speaker at the convention Monday, has avoided talking about what her role may be in presidential politics.

But Smith, who was in the third of her four Senate terms in 1964, campaigned actively, competing in five state primaries for the Republican presidential nomination that ultimately went to Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater.

Making her announcement at the Women’s National Press Club in Washington, Smith listed all the reasons that she shouldn’t run, including her gender and lack of finances and political organization.

“So because of these very impelling reasons for not running, I have decided that I shall,” she said. The senator ran a low-budget campaign in which William Scranton of Pennsylvania, Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Goldwater were her rivals.

Democratic President Lyndon Johnson won the general election in a landslide, but Smith had staked out new ground for women in politics. Numerous women have taken seats in Congress, and Geraldine Ferraro broke new ground as she accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president in 1984.

Earlier this year, Ferraro expressed disappointment at being the only woman ever on a major party’s presidential ticket, saying women have been too passive about running. She and presidential nominee Walter Mondale lost the 1984 election to Ronald Reagan and his running mate George Bush.

Smith knew what she was in for in her 1964 run.

“She didn’t have any illusions about running,” said Gregory Gallant, executive director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library, which is added to her home. “She tried to show that you didn’t have to be a retired millionaire to wage a credible campaign.”

Throughout her campaign, Smith tried to distance herself from the gender issue. “She told journalists she was a senator, not a woman senator,” said Gallant.

Following the wishes of Maine GOP leaders, Smith held onto her 27 delegates as the national convention got under way. Four speakers stood to nominate Smith, who wore her trademark red rose as she addressed the delegates.

Smith, then 66, was well-established in the Washington political structure. She had become the first woman to be elected in her own right to the Senate, and the first woman to have been elected to both the House and Senate.

In a reflection of the advent of TV in politics, Smith became the first person to chair a televised Senate committee hearing. She was the first woman to hold a ranking position on the Senate Armed Services and Appropriations committees.

She broke into politics after the 1940 death of her husband, Clyde Smith, who had been elected to Congress in 1936. In 1948, she was first elected to the Senate, where Smith amassed a record for consecutive roll-call votes that remained intact until 1981, nearly a decade after she left office.

In her retirement in the home she designed along the Kennebec River, Smith was surrounded by mementos of her years in politics and relished meeting visitors to the library, which was adjoined to her home and dedicated in 1982.

The library has photos of Smith with an array of luminaries from Winston Churchill to Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart. The house is kept exactly as it was when Smith lived there, right down to the sugar and flour canisters in the kitchen and a note she never finished writing on a table next to her living-room chair.

Paintings by Madame Chiang Kai-shek remain on display, and a miniature piano, a gift from America’s first defense secretary, James Forrestal, is still tuned once a year. A clock remains stopped at the time she died, 4:29 p.m. May 29, 1995.