David C. Hoeh
Dartmouth College Oral History Program
The Dartmouth Vietnam Project
May 7, 2015
Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft
[TIMOTHY C.]
HARRISON: This is Tim Harrison. I’m with David C. Hoeh [pronounced HOE] in Rauner Library in Hanover, New Hampshire. Today is May 7th, 2015.
Thank you very much, Mr. Hoeh, for talking to me. Can you tell me first where were you born and when, and what were your parents’ names?
HOEH: I was born in Boston December 1st, 1937, and my mother’s name was Priscilla Smith Hoeh, her married name, and my dad’s name is Robert Yetter Hoeh, and he was born in Boston, and my mother was born at Andover, Massachusetts.
HARRISON: And what did your parents do?
HOEH: My mother went to Wellesley College and had become an accomplished harpist in her early years and went to Wellesley principally because it was close to Boston and she could maintain her studies with the harp. As you know, the harp is a large instrument, and it’s not easy to move it, and she would travel by train from Wellesley to Boston and studied with a harpist from the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
My dad was first-generation German. Was born in Roxbury, and his father was opposed to [Otto von] Bismarck’s Germany and left when he was 16 and then migrated to Boston, Roxbury, and there he became a barber with a barbershop in the Financial District of downtown Boston.
His commitment—my grandfather’s commitment was that his children become Americanized, and he was proud of speaking English without an accent, and his children—my father was the youngest of four; they all had higher educations. My father went to Roxbury Latin School and then Harvard [University]. And then he didn’t know what to do when he finished his undergraduate, because he didn’t really have a job, so he went to Harvard Business School and graduated in 1929. Not a good year to graduate from college as a—and he and his brother put together a small business in Roxbury, fed his—our family.
My mother’s connections go back to the 1700s in the town I live in in Vermont. On her mother’s side, her ancestors, my ancestors were Quakers and were kicked out of Connecticut and driven up to where Quakers might be more welcome in rural Vermont in 1791 and became settlers there. And on her other side, her dad’s side there’s a relative who was one of the founders of Dartmouth College, by donating I think it was ten acres of land to get the reverend founder of Dartmouth to come plant the stakes and found Dartmouth College. I think his name is Jonathan Smith. And he’s buried up the road a bit.
And then the family ultimately migrated—her parents met in Castleton Normal School, married and then migrated back down to Massachusetts.
HARRISON: Where did you grow up?
HOEH: I was brought up in Newton, Massachusetts, went to Newton public schools, and my undergraduate was at the University of New Hampshire. Graduated in 1960. And then I eventually got a master’s degree at Boston University and a Ph.D. at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
HARRISON: What do you remember about growing up?
HOEH: Just a participatory life. My mother was very active in the League of Women Voters and was concerned about women’s participation in political life, public decision making. She was very active in that sort of effort.
Her profession as a musician, which she pursued basically until I was born, was one which called for her to play a solo role often, so she had the experience of having to interact, negotiate her agreements, contracts and was an excellent manager of her professional life, which carried over into a teacher of music, of harp and to her children.
My dad worked with his brother and put together a small business and were committed to that business, but they were also committed to family life, so when the work day—the work day began at about eight o’clock in Roxbury Crossing. We lived in Newton. And the work day ended at five o’clock, and he would come home and be home at about six. And occasionally there would be enough work, more work and he would work part of a day on Saturday, but he made sure he took his vacations and was not overrun by the business at the expense of the family.
HARRISON: Now, you said you were born in ’37. Is that right?
HOEH: Yes.
HARRISON: So do you have sort of memories from World War II?
HOEH: Yes. Very much so.
HARRISON: Can you tell me about those?
HOEH: I lived on Walnut Street in Newton, and in 1942 this was [Massachusetts] Route 128, and 128 was the ring road that was built after World War II. It was supposed to be constructed before World War II as part of the [Great] Depression, WPA [Works Progress Administration] recovery to provide a ring road and get the truck transportation off these neighborhood streets. And that did not—obviously was not accomplished because the war started. And we had everything that supported the war right by our house, which mean convoys, trucks with tanks, with other kinds of equipment, with soldiers ready to go, and they were being transported from Fort Devens, which is west of Boston. It’s now called Deven [sic; Devens] on the sign, but it used to be Fort Devens, and that was a major training facility in preparation for troops being shipped overseas.
We had watch towers, where people would look to see if there were any planes coming, and there was searchlights that ran often in the evening, at night. There were blackouts, all of those disciplines, because we were close to the shore, and the concerns about battleships, submarines finding their way to our shorelines and being—or even invasions. I mean, they were speculation because of the power of the Germans to overrun Europe and the threat potentially to England, and if they conquered England, what would be next? And there were submarines off shore, U-boats off shore.
And being that I was in the Boston area, we would go in town, where my dad’s business was, and moved around. We were aware of the interaction between the various military services as they were in preparation to be shipped overseas or had come back and were on a leave of some sort, so they would entertain themselves in downtown Boston.
HARRISON: Mm-hm.
HOEH: And then our family were in different locations along the coast, and when it was possible—you didn’t drive a great deal because of the rationing of gasoline, but when we would go to family events, we would go by shipyards and places where boats were being built in preparation for the war.
Also a German submarine was captured off the New England shore, and they tried to sink it, but our sailors got on board and kept it from being sunk, and it was brought to Boston, and it was a fundraiser for the war, and my dad took me there, and I went in that submarine. That submarine is at the [Great Lakes] Naval Museum in Chicago, and I’ve been on it since then. Maybe you’ve been on it.
HARRISON: No, I have not.
HOEH: Okay. It’s unique. And having been on it, you know, almost, like, weeks after the Germans used it was an interesting experience.
HARRISON: But you were very young when this was all going on, when these convoys were passing your house. Were you in complete awe?
HOEH: It was just sort of an amazing experience because we—there’s also another factor, which is an interest of—because this was a major highway, it was constantly patrolled so that nothing could be parked on the road or very close to the road that might be used as an explosive. I mean, there were concerns that some Germans or—Germans particularly, maybe Italians as well because we were fighting both countries—might decide to load up a vehicle with explosives, park it on a hill with an emergency brake, release the emergency brake and have it come down into a convoy and kill hundreds of soldiers. So those side streets were all closed off. Not closed off; you could not park on those streets, and there were some limitations as to how those streets could be used as intersections. And they would be blocked when major convoys were coming through. So there were times when just getting around the neighborhood to do some shopping was a little difficult.
HARRISON: Did people complain about that, or was there an acceptance?
HOEH: It was an acceptance. I mean, there was irritation because it disrupted just the normal things people would need, wanted to do: social events or even, you know, events where you would be thinking about how to get through with menus because [of] rationing, so the women would gather—or will cook or will—they did a lot of canned goods. Lots of preparation of things that could be used from gardens. You had victory gardens. Everyone who had a piece of land was responsible for planting for their own use and to share with neighbors, so this was—
HARRISON: Did your family have one?
HOEH: We didn’t have—we lived—this is another aspect. We lived on an aqueduct, which is a buried pipe where water flows to central Boston, and it was an open walkway. We used to bike, walk—really nice pedestrian path. But it was of concern that that might be damaged, blown up, and then the water supply would be cut off to Boston, so that was all patrolled. And the access and use of that was limited to walking. You almost couldn’t do anything else except you could walk along it.
And then your neighbors were encouraged to observe if anything unusual was happening. And there were two of these quite close to where we lived, so on one side—the front of the house was on Route 128 with the troops, and then behind the house was the aqueduct. We happened to live on a piece that had rocks, so we weren’t too successful with the garden, but our neighbors had gardens, and we would help with that.
HARRISON: Did your neighbors look at you suspiciously, look at your family suspiciously because your father’s father had come from Germany?
HOEH: We did not find that to be a difficulty. We were well known. My parents were well known in the community, and the name is German. It’s H-o-umlaut (the two dots)-h [Höh], and it means “high” or “hill” in Germany. But we did not have any, you know, sort of serious problems with that. There may have been some issues in respect to my dad and his brother running their business, but they were determined to run it in a way that supported the war effort. They manufactured products. Their business was to convert cardboard into various different products, and one of them was to create a winding board for textiles, and the textile industry was enormous in New England and produced the materials for the uniforms, so they were involved in that.
They had made a partition for separating bottles—bottle cases and actually had a patent for a strip. It was called the metal lock. And, of course, during the war you couldn’t get the metal, so they couldn’t make the partition. They made the partitions, but it didn’t have the metal top. And they were used for a whole variety of different purposes, not just for separating bottles.
So there was, you know, a commitment to do what their business could do and produce the products that were needed to support local industry.
HARRISON: Mm-hm. You called them Americanized. You said they were determined to be American.
HOEH: My dad’s parents were committed to raising their children in this country and to shedding their history as part of the German Empire or whatever. They were a member of a German Methodist Church [United Methodist Church] located in Jamaica Plain, and kind of to the irritation of my dad, the services were always in German, and there was not much of a translation into English, so while his parents would speak German to each other when they didn’t want the children to know what was going on, they would speak English to the children. My dad was the youngest, and his exposure to English was, you know, like, 100 percent.
HARRISON: So he did not speak German.
HOEH: No. You know, he had understandings of German. His oldest sister was conversant in German, and the next sister was a little bit more conversant, but as time went on, English became the language, and German receded to the church. There were problems, probably more problems during World War I for the German community in Boston than World War II, because World War II, the separation between American Germans and the culture and, well, the politics of Germany was enormous. And the culture, the German culture, from their point of view, had been violated by [Adolf] Hitler, whereas in World War I, the controversy was much more discordant—discoordinate [sic; discordant]. We could have supported the French in their circumstance or even the Germans in their circumstance against France, as opposed to ultimately the British. It was just—it was the complexity of that era. You may have studied this, but—
HARRISON: Now, can you remember being in kindergarten or early grade school, having to make sacrifices yourself?
HOEH: Oh, yes.
HARRISON: Can you tell me about those?
HOEH: Well, there were—you know, we weren’t going to be driven to school. We walked to school. We were aware of what limitations there were for foods. I never saw a banana until 1946. I mean, foods that were imported were not imported because the ships needed to be used for military purposes, so the bananas used to come from South America and be transported to Boston, and then that was an important, you know, early fruit for year-round use in New England up until the beginning of World War II, and then the shipping had to be—so fruits that were available in the States could be moved, but not necessarily in conflict with having to ship military supplies, so a number of things were rationed, and you were limited to—well, sugars were rationed. Coffee was really difficult to find. Cocoa. Any of the things that we don’t kind of produce in New England and were transported here were limited and rationed or elsewhere in the country, for that matter. Meats were rationed because they needed the meats to support the troops, and we had limitations on what kinds of meats I think wheats and grains were limited as well, because they were absolutely essential to supporting the soldiers and the sailors around the world.
HARRISON: Can you tell me where you went to high school and what that was like?
HOEH: I went to Newton High School and it was down the road from—on Walnut Street—from where I lived. I was Class of 1956. And in those days, I had a three-year junior high school and then a three-year high school, so it was 7th, 8th and 9th in junior high school, and that was a separate location, and then my high school. Newton had a single high school in that era, with about 3,000 students, and it was in three buildings of different ages, with tunnels between them.
There were different curriculums, and I was good in, very good in history and reasonably good in English, and so I took some Curriculum 1 courses. I wasn’t very good in math or science, and so I took some Curriculum 2 courses. I enjoyed it. It was difficult to be involved athletically because it was very competitive athletic environment. The teams were—with that many students, there were kind of limitations on the levels of participation. So I became interested in rifle—shooting a rifle and got involved in marksmanship there, principally because I spent my summers in Vermont, roaming around with a .22 [caliber rifle].
HARRISON: Hmm.
HOEH: So I carried that on into college and was on a varsity rifle team—
HARRISON: In high school.
HOEH: In high school and college.
HARRISON: So you must have been capable at it, right?
HOEH: Yeah. Well, in college there were people who had come back from the Korean War who were pretty good shots. [Chuckles.] So you had some veterans along with us who were—had that experience.
HARRISON: Uh-huh. So the ‘50s. You came of age in the early 1950s. You were in high school?
HOEH: Yes.
HARRISON: A very different time from your early childhood.
HOEH: Things opened up. What’s interesting is when we’re at the anniversary—what was it? No, it’s May—what do we got? Today is the 7th.
HARRISON: The 7th.
HOEH: Tomorrow is the 8th, was Victory of [sic; in] Europe Day, so 70 years ago tomorrow, Germany ended the war, or it’s—it gave up.
HARRISON: Yeah.
HOEH: So that was a really important day because I recall walking—we were let out of school early, and we could go home, and there was just this incredible celebration. And it was, like, the war is over, but—whoop!—wait a minute, it’s not quite over. We’re still fighting Japan.
HARRISON: Mm-hm.
HOEH: But that part, the part that was threatening the East Coast, was done. So we, you know, walked home and were celebrating as we walked home, with my friends, and my parents were very much relieved that all of this intrusiveness of that era was beginning to come to an end, and it was no longer as necessary to have the watch towers and the—well, we had planes that were fl- —there was a lot of aircraft that would fly near us because they were being transported or began to be flown over to Europe or to be transported to Europe, and that began to tone down somewhat.
So it was—you know, the idea that we could get in the car and drive to Vermont more frequently was a great relief, because we had had to be very careful in our ability to drive to our summer cottage, which my dad had built in 1942. We would use the train to get up here to Vermont.
HARRISON: So it was a bit more normal, starting to get more normal.
HOEH: Well, yeah, but I hadn’t really been old enough to recall what normal was before, so my experience was of this intense activity. Now, my parents had gone through World War I, so they knew what the restrictions had been of that era and how they, you know, had a few years between the two wars, and then we got hit by this other experience.
HARRISON: You talk about restrictions in both world wars, but then there were, when you were in high school, restrictions of a different sort, right? The different sorts of fears and anxieties—
HOEH: Well, because then you started to see the Cold War begin to evolve.
HARRISON: Yes.
HOEH: And that offered—and then we had gone through, you know, the Hiroshima, Nagasaki bombings in Japan, the end of the war in Japan. I was in Vermont when the end of the war in Japan occurred that summer. And, you know, the celebration was just incredible. But that was over—because there were people from Vermont, from our town, who were in the service in that part of the world—Australia and New Zealand and then up through the islands and then to Japan, so there was a proximity on that part as well as a tie to the European sector.
But then you began to—and I was, you know, kind of old enough to be aware of what the tensions were beginning to evolve between the Soviet Union and then France, Britain and all of the other countries. But a year ago, right about now—right now, actually—we were in Moscow, and Victory Day is May 9th, and they were preparing for their Victory Day celebrations, which is the biggest holiday in Russia because this was the end of World War II for them. The Japanese part was way the other side of the country. [Chuckles.]
So it was amazing to be there at that point, and their gratefulness to America for entering World War II and doing what they did to help the Russians defeat the Germans is acknowledged—you know, people would come up to us, recognizing we looked a little different. Were we Americans? “Oh, thank you for what you all did.” So this was, you know, kind of a reassurance because there had been—you know, that point from about ’45, ’46, ’47, beginning to figure out what went on with the end of the war and how to prevent a reoccurrence of what happened after World War I and try to establish a unified, peaceful, interactive—culturally interactive, politically interactive, economically interactive networks supporting each other. Just didn’t happen ultimately.
HARRISON: Can you tell me where you went to college?
HOEH: I went to the University of New Hampshire. I kind of liked the idea of being near a municipal area, like a city. I had looked at University of Vermont, I’d looked at [University of] Maine, looked at—well, I had a list. I’m not sure I can recall all the ones I looked at. Had cousins who went to Hiram College in Ohio and found that to be a wonderful experience for them, so I was looking—Oberlin [College]. I might have looked at Dartmouth. I’m not sure how much I—at that point, Dartmouth seemed to me a bit isolated, and how to get from here to Boston and such—it was okay to get to New York, but if you wanted to go to Boston, that was not easy in those days.
HARRISON: So what did you study at UNH?
HOEH: My major was in history and government, and those are areas that I typically had a great deal of interest. I had become—principally because of my mother’s League of Women Voters experience and exposure to politics, and she was a Democrat—my dad was a Republican, sort of, not a participating Republican, but he graduated from Harvard Business School. You were a Republican. It was expected. But my mother’s family were progressives going way back. Her older brother was a conscientious objector in World War I, did alternative service by going across Siberia to Armenia and worked in Armenian relief and then taught at American University in Beirut and then Cairo. Was a Rhodes Scholar. So this is all a hundred years ago now, was what that experience was. So that’s kind of the history. I felt my interest in politics—I really had a strong interest in politics.
HARRISON: And you would have graduated in 1960?
HOEH: I graduated in 1960.
HARRISON: So actually you were studying government and history just from the past, but was there a touch from current events—
HOEH: Oh, absolutely.
HARRISON: —in the late ’50s?
HOEH: Well,—
HARRISON: In the classroom and in your academic interests?
HOEH: We had a very conservative congressional delegation in New Hampshire. [Senator Henry] Styles Bridges—are you familiar with that name?
HARRISON: It does ring a bell.
HOEH: Yeah, well, he was a very strong [Senator Joseph] “Joe” McCarthy supporter, anti-communist, and the Manchester Union Leader—and this is in the days before television and before public radio and before public television, and so you had very limited outlets for the news, and the Manchester Union Leader controlled the pivotal portion, political portion of the state of New Hampshire, so that unless you were a supporter aligning with the editorial ethos of the Manchester Union Leader, you had great difficulty being elected.
Styles Bridges came out of New Hampshire, kind of controversial in the pre-world war period and then moved very far to the right and then aligned with Joe McCarthy. The governor, who was the governor in New Hampshire when I was there, had been a stalwart of Styles Bridges. There was a movement to try and shut down free speech on the campus and public events, political events that were viewed as—
HARRISON: While you were a student?
HOEH: Yes.
HARRISON: Tell me about that.
HOEH: —that were viewed as being progressive. “Communist” would be the phrase that was use. Or “you’re leaning to the left.” And if you’re leaning to the left, then you’ve got to be a communist because if you’re leaning to the right, then you’re opposed to communism.
HARRISON: What sort of organizations were these that were shut down?
HOEH: Well, the newspaper editorials were controversial. If you supported candidates who wanted to open—
HARRISON: On the college campus,
HOEH: —yes, the discussion. The administration on the campus was basically interested in liberalizing, making UNH a progressive, functioning, sort of a mini Ivy League school. If you didn’t get into Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, the Ivy League schools, then the next layer was the land grant schools: University of New Hampshire, University of Vermont, University of Maine, University of Connecticut. I mean, these were all emerging particularly because there were numbers of veterans who had come back from World War II who, with the assistance that they had, they came to those colleges and built, developed the strengths and the diversity, and that justified more public expenditure on public education, opening the doors.
HARRISON: Were people paying tuition at UNH in those days?
HOEH: I think my out-of-state tuition was $600 a semester, and if you were in state, it was $100 or such—I mean, and then you paid room and board in addition.
HARRISON: Right. So you got there freshman year. What sort of things did you start to do?
HOEH: I got involved in—first of all, I wanted to get my feet planted and make sure I was going to be doing okay in my courses, so I was interested in history and government, and then I had required courses. I had to do something of a natural science, a biology—you had these checklists of things. And then you had to do a language like Spanish.
But on campus I was concerned about this pressure from off campus from the United States senators and from the governor to repress what we classified as free speech, intellectual interaction, things of that sort.
HARRISON: Were you involved as a member in any of the organizations that had trouble speaking freely?
HOEH: Not specifically. I would attend meetings. I was more interested in finding ways to increase public participation in the Democratic Party in New Hampshire, and the Democratic Party was basically shut down because of—the dynamics of New Hampshire in those days was that there were certain cities where the industries were located, the textile manufacturing industries, and there was a French-Canadian population who spoke French. The whole French culture was transported from Canada. And those people had achieved a certain level of concern about the workplace, so you unionization had begun to progress, and there had been efforts to create unions.
HARRISON: What year, would you say, this unionization took place?
HOEH: Well, this was in the ’20s and then into the ’30, and then you hit the [Great] Depression, but then with World War II, then these industries just blossomed because of the needs for their products and because of the [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt administration supporting unions and benefits for unionized workers, the effort to unionize began to really increase. So you began to have an awareness of a workforce that translated back to a community that might be stirred to take on the Republicans.
And the tradition, which I comment about in my book—the tradition there was these communities were pretty isolated, and they didn’t interact, and the interacted in a way that would not stir up one or the other. So there was not separate voices; there were just separate cultures, histories, traditions and a separate territory. I mean, there were parts—the west side of Manchester was entirely French in the signage, the language, the culture and its connection—and the children who sought higher education, as few as those were, would tend to go back to Canada, to Ottawa—I mean, not Ottawa, to Montreal, Quebec, to those institutions and then come down back again as teachers, priests, nuns.
HARRISON: Within their own communities.
HOEH: Within their own communities.
HARRISON: I see.
HOEH: It was not a visible fence, but—an invisible fence.
HARRISON: So when you were in college, had you studied the ’20s and the ’30s and the developments that you’re talking about?
HOEH: Yeah, I looked—I was curious about these dynamics. What turned me on to this was what happened—how Boston had evolved. I mean, you know, there was the German neighborhood, there was the Irish neighborhood, there was the Italian neighborhood, there were the eastern European—the Poles and Czechs and things. I mean, there were these sorts of neighborhoods and cultures. And then they began to—you know, know began to diverse and open up and—during my—basically during World War II, is when the barriers began to break down because they would realize we were all dependent on each other nationally and also internationally.
What happened in New Hampshire was this just didn’t cross the border, and the culture—they were doing quite well economically, not real prosperity but basic survival prosperity, and there were opportunities for their children to continue—you know, pursue careers in the mills. Very rarely could they reach beyond that.
What the emphasis was in the post-World War, World War II period was to open higher educational institutions to a more diverse population and to actively reach into these communities and recruit young people to go to the University of New Hampshire, the land grant universities and then the other teachers colleges—they were called teachers colleges in those days.
HARRISON: So would you have interacted with some of the people from this community, this French community at college?
HOEH: Mm-hm.
HARRISON: Can you tell me about that?
HOEH: Yes. Well, principally we’d interact with people who had similar interests to mine. They were interested in the history of these cultures: how they got here, what brought them here and how they’re doing, and then what the next step needed to be as our cultures began to intermingle and be much more dependent on each other, and to appreciate the values of that, because there’s a lot of prejudice around. There was all of the usual names to classify this group or that group, and just, you know, that was not acceptable. That language, in my household, was unacceptable. My mother was very, very strict, and my father, that you didn’t use these racial nicknames or ethnic nicknames for anyone. They were treated equally, professionally. My dad was that way in his business, and he had African-Americans working for him, and he had people from a variety of different cultures worked in his business.
HARRISON: What was the main activity for you when you were on campus, in college? Was there a club or a newspaper or something—
HOEH: Well,—
HARRISON: —that you did outside class?
HOEH: State government—[laughs] I mean, government.
HARRISON: Student government.
HOEH: Student government. I was active in my dorm. I was active politically. You know, this is 1956. That was the presidential election year. My mother was a great fan of Adlai [E.] Stevenson [II]. I was as well. And so we kind of stood with Adlai Stevenson.
HARRISON: Was there a group of college Democrats?
HOEH: Yes. It’s small. You know, New Hampshire was a Republican state, and the elite were the Republicans who went to college.
HARRISON: And were you involved in this college Democratic group?
HOEH: Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah.
HARRISON: Tell me about that.
HOEH: Well, we just were active—what I learned was that there was—early on, there was a family, the Dunfey family, which had been—it’s an Irish family that kind of migrated to Hampton, New Hampshire, and had started several different kinds of businesses: hotel, restaurant, accommodations kinds of things. And they had also a strong tie to the northern Massachusetts communities, where the family would come—large, Irish family. I mean, there were, I don’t know, maybe a dozen in the family. A couple were priests, and men and women. They just were ready to dig in. And they had—it was the same kind of a tradition that the Kennedys evolved: “We’re coming. We’re going to participate. We’re going to be involved politically.” The Irish were involved politically in the Boston area, much to the chagrin [chuckles] of my parents because they weren’t that happy with some of the Irish. You know, [Mayor James] Michael Curley—you’ve heard that name?
HARRISON: No.
HOEH: Well, he was the mayor of Boston,—
HARRISON: Oh, I see.
HOEH: —and he was kind of a tyrant and, you know, not exactly honest, at least in their standards and probably in others. If you were his buddy, you get the contracts; if you weren’t—you know, this sort of thing.
HARRISON: Got it. Yes.
HOEH: So that was the controversy. And the Kennedy family came up the same way, and the Dunfeys and the Kennedys had a relationship through some of the businesses that they were involved with.
I became friends with Bill Kennedy—I mean, [William L.] “Bill” Dunfey, and he was the one who kind of was the activist in the Democratic Party.
HARRISON: At school, yes. At UNH?
HOEH: He had graduated in—I think maybe ’50. I think he graduated ten years before I did, and his family were beginning to dig their roots into the businesses. They ultimately bought a hotel and built a new hotel, in an area in Manchester and were really introducing a new economic environment, culture through their business—their imaginative, effective, hard-working business experience.
But Bill was the one who was going to be the front person politically, and I got to know him, and he somehow realized that I, you know, could help out, principally because they didn’t have to pay me much, and—available.
HARRISON: You were maybe a freshman or sophomore in college?
HOEH: Yeah, and I had various experiences in—this would have been my junior year, when I really spent time—I worked in his resort, and my job was in the—when I wasn’t on the desk at the hotel—I was living in Durham, and I would be at the desk in Hampton at the inn, and then when I had the free time, I was—to help organize Democrats in Rockingham County.
HARRISON: I see.
HOEH: This is a county that’s adjacent to the Massachusetts border and goes up into Portsmouth. It’s quite a large county. And because it was close to Boston, the feeling was that these people had the benefit of something other than the Manchester Union Leader to read. They could read the Boston newspapers. And they did. So they got the facts as opposed to the skews that the Union Leader had. But I did a newsletter and would run these meetings and worked with other students who were kind of in the same situation, and other people who would volunteer. So we had regular meetings, organizational events. We would bring in people prominent in the Democratic Party, speakers. Or, on occasion, we had people who were nationally significant to come in. So we had some significant events that were, you know, kind of ice breaking. And then we kind of spread that to some of the other counties. As we succeeded more in Rockingham County, then we spread it.
HARRISON: So you were simultaneously, as a college student, involved in your dorm and involved in student government, so—
HOEH: Yes. Well, I ultimately became president of the student government.
HARRISON: Okay, so what was that, senior year, junior year?
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: Senior year.
HOEH: It would be—yeah, it was all of my senior year.
HARRISON: So you were no doubt a public face at your school.
HOEH: Well, and I was controversial because I would do things that upset the administration.
HARRISON: Tell me about that.
HOEH: Well, one instance was I complained about—as president of the student government, about—I’m not going to come up with all the details, but an issue that the governor had attempted to restrict an open meeting event on the campus, and he complained that the university should not be allowed to have this person on campus and to speak. He was a controversial political figure. And I wrote this letter, as president of student government, to the governor and copied the administration and the newspaper, the campus newspaper. And I got called in by the president for what I had done without approval and how it was going to cause them problems with the legislature and with funding. Public universities are dependent on state funding, and if they’re controversial, then “the legislature will cut our budget.”
HARRISON: So would people target you specifically?
HOEH: Oh, yeah.
HARRISON: I mean, this is the height of red-baiting.
HOEH: Well, this was—yeah. I mean, I was—it was—I don’t know where—the clippings may be in your files here. But they were—you know, it made a fair amount of noise.
HARRISON: What would they call you, associate you with?
HOEH: Well, the Manchester Union Leader associated me with the left wing and the commies and things like that, and some of the other papers that picked up on it were the other way.
HARRISON: So these were large newspapers that were covering—
HOEH: Well, the Portsmouth newspaper was the one that sort of covered where Durham is, so there were the regional newspapers, and then the state newspaper was the Manchester Union Leader, and it controlled the heartland of New Hampshire: Nashua and Manchester and the surrounding communities. And in Concord, the Concord Monitor was a much stronger independent, liberal paper, but its distribution was less. And then the Valley News, which was not the Valley News, the Claremont paper—something in those days but more progressive. And The Keene Sentinel was a progressive paper, so they would pick up on sort of my side of it, but it was the Manchester Union Leader that dominated the politics of the—
HARRISON: Did you find these accusations ridiculous?
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: In the Manchester Union Leader.
HOEH: Yes. I mean, I had been found—their editorial—it was William Loeb, who was the owner and editor [sic; publisher] of the Manchester Union Leader, who wrote these editorials.
HARRISON: Specifically about you.
HOEH: Well, I’m not sure I reached quite that level at that point, but there were comments about what had gone on—
HARRISON: I see.
HOEH: —with respect to the person who had been invited to speak, and that that was not appropriate to have on a public-funded campus.
HARRISON: And did you think about this at the time?
HOEH: I was—I think it’s fair to say I was offended by the lack of support from the administration for the position I had taken in behalf of an open dialogue on the campus, and they were reluctant to support me because of their concerns about where the money’s coming from, and yet they would say, “Well, we understand”—and there was the American Civil Liberties Union—you know, I got notes that said, “Go for it, David. You’re right on.” And I had, you know, my groups of supporters, but they weren’t the ones that ran the university. And it was—you know, it was kind of a bubble in time, and I just realized that, you know, time would go—it would be one of those things. I had enough political experience [to know] that there’s a lifetime of an event, and it’s how many days, how many weeks.
HARRISON: What did your parents think of this? As speaker.
HOEH: They were supportive. You know, they just were concerned that—you know, they hoped it wouldn’t jeopardize some things that might be of help to me in my future, would have kicked me off of some eligibility of an award or a this or a that.
HARRISON: Did he come, the speaker?
HOEH: Yeah. The event—it occurred.
HARRISON: It did occur.
HOEH: It occurred, and that was the controversy, that it actually happened.
HARRISON: I see, so the controversy erupted after the speaker came to speak.
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: I see.
HOEH: Well, it kind of all happened at the same time. You know, it was one of those events. And I’ve probably got it in here, but I’m not exactly sure who the person was at this point, but it was kind of a left-wing political person who may have been thinking about running for president. You know, people—it’s just like now with all of these presidential candidates coming to New Hampshire to test the waters that happened,—
HARRISON: Mm-hm.
HOEH: —was happening in that era. [John F.] “Jack” Kennedy was testing the waters, and he came to the university in the spring of 1960, before the—well, it was during the campaign for the presidential primary in 1960, and I was president of the student government, and I had lunch with him and stood with him at press conferences, so I have some pictures that I’m quite happy to have.
HARRISON: I’m sure.
HOEH: But I was supporting Adlai Stevenson, so I ultimately, because of Dunfey, did become very close to what he was doing with the Kennedys.
HARRISON: What did the Democratic Party at this time, in the late 1950s, stand for to you?
HOEH: Open, progressive. I was, you know, committed to the idea that if you have the facts straight and you have the arguments correct, you will prevail and that that’s what we as a society had done and needed to do, and that’s how we won our wars and how we had settled our lands and how we had learned our lessons, was to find kind of this progressive, interactive—and not to isolate, segregate people, populations, ideas but to open those doors and there’d be room for all of these functions to occur, but there had to be an appreciation for the validity of the discussion one to the other, and to shut that discussion down because of the Cold War or alleged use of language to supposedly support the Soviet Union during the Cold War was just not appropriate for progressive education.
HARRISON: Did you identify with any of the claims made by McCarthy and people who spoke like him, that the Soviet Union was expansionist or that it was harmful?
HOEH: Joe McCarthy?
HARRISON: Yes. Yes, Joe McCarthy.
HOEH: Well, we didn’t appreciate the language. We were concerned about the military expansion, and we clearly were concerned about what was going on with the Soviet Union and with the taking over these lands, these countries that had been overrun during World War II and then had been liberated and now were behind the Iron Curtain. I mean, this is not—we clearly did not support that. We supported the opening of—the war was over; these countries deserve to restore their independent governments, to find their cultures, their political traditions, their economic place and to collaborate in recovery. And that’s clearly what the allies tried very hard to do, and then the Russians dropped the Iron Curtain. It was a very difficult time. There’s no question about that.
But the idea of restricting our means of discussing our culture, our history, our expectations openly in our own country, because that might be interpreted as being supportive of—that was just not an acceptable approach to many of us. And yet it was one that was picked up by the Joe McCarthys, the Style Bridges, that crowd.
HARRISON: Did that crowd motivate you to become more interested in politics?
HOEH: I think so, and clearly I was motivated by—you know, I wanted to participate, and I wanted the open discussion that I had grown up appreciating in my family, that repressions and isolation and segregation—all of those were just anathemas to our civilization that were not consistent with democracy.
HARRISON: And so they gave you something to respond to.
HOEH: Yes. Yeah. Well, and hopes that if you do your homework and work hard enough and your arguments are effective enough, that you can change people’s minds, and that’s kind of where we start with what was going on in ’68 or, you know, well before that.
HARRISON: Can you tell me briefly the trajectory from when you graduated in 1960 to when you ended up at Dartmouth?
HOEH: I went to law school the fall of 1960. At the end of that fall, I then continued in the graduate school at Boston College [Boston College Graduate School of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences] and appointed to the senior Massachusetts internship program, where I was in state government, and also at Boston University, so that was a two-year window where I had free tuition and a substance [sic; subsidy?? 1:02:49].
HARRISON: And you were—what were you pursuing a master’s degree in?
HOEH: In public administration and history. I mean, I always wanted a little history, so it was basically public administration. I worked in the—I had a couple of internships in state government, and the principal internship was [in] the Department of Administration in state government, so I worked—
HARRISON: In Massachusetts?
HOEH: Yeah. I worked at the State House, in the capital. And then I would kind of migrate out of there and was exposed to a dynamic Boston. Boston was going through the early eras of its change. The influence of the Kennedys and the other progressives were changing the culture of Boston into progressive, effective government, bringing the neighborhoods together, looking at how to revitalize the neighborhoods, the economy. This was a very strong period for community participation, in politics and in government, as well as in the neighborhood revitalization activities. So I got hooked into all of that, and so that was, oh, ’61, ’62. I finished up in that spring of ’62. I started migrating back to New Hampshire and got involved in the gubernatorial campaign for John [W.] King, who was the first Democratic governor.
In that fall, I basically finished up my classwork at BU. I still had to complete the hurdles that would get me the degree, and a master’s thesis. But then I was appointed to the state planning project in New Hampshire in the spring of—let’s see, ’62, I think it was, and worked in state planning in the new administration.
HARRISON: Which was a Democratic administration.
HOEH: Yes, this is the first Democratic administration. And we were doing state planning, state wide. This was a program that was supported with incentives from the federal government, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and it was designed to go out and get communities to focus on their resources, what they wanted to—how they wanted to create their—support their economies, what they wanted to protect in terms of their assets, what concerns they had about liabilities, how they were—it was transportation, housing, community health, interactions with neighboring communities and states.
HARRISON: Were the walls that divided people in New Hampshire and people who had come from Canada, the French-Canadians—were they affected by this work?
HOEH: It was beginning to be—beginning to open up. Part of it was here’s a Democratic administration in office that wants to bring people together, not isolate them but bring them together. John King came out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and he tended to respect the separation between the various communities in Manchester, but the younger populations were beginning to intersect and looking for new careers and new opportunities. So they were looking for new educational opportunities that would allow them to enter the economies on one side of the river, as opposed to the other side of the river. Literally, the Merrimack River divided how—if you were French-Canadian, you worked here; if you of the other side Yankee, other ethic groups, on the other side, you worked there; and the two didn’t match and didn’t intermingle.
But then the next generations just—you know, you’re coming into the late ’50s, ’60s—there’s other things to do. We’re not going to be happy just being locked in. Because media was telling them, “The world is larger, and you have other opportunities.”
HARRISON: Mm-hm. So you were in college, you were in the State House, and then you came to New Hampshire. Through all of this, were you affected, do you think, by fears of the Cold War, or was it a time to be scared?
HOEH: I was—since I grew up on Walnut Street during World War II, the Cold War just seemed sort of a long way away, and to have that be kind of a big damper on our ability to grow, expand, interact and appreciate the fact that we had won World War II and to—you know, okay, there is this Iron Curtain, but we can stop other interventions from the Iron Curtain by strengthening the economies of our former allies. And that was really important. But we are not to limit our ability to grow our own culture and our own appreciation because, you know, we were beginning to have this incredible—the communications revolutions were underway in that time.
I just was checking to make sure I get my dates right. I worked for the State of New Hampshire basically from June of ’63 until March of ’67, and then in March of ’67 I came here to Dartmouth.
HARRISON: Tell me what they brought you here to do.
HOEH: I had a friend who was on the faculty here, and he and I made a connection somehow, and there was a new—called a Public Affairs Center [the Dartmouth College Public Affairs Center]. Had been open to help Dartmouth reach out beyond the confines of the campus, or Hanover.
HARRISON: So this would have been in the [Dartmouth President John S.] Dickey administration, right?
HOEH: Yes.
HARRISON: In 1967.
HOEH: Well, yeah, it was—
HARRISON: End of the Dickey administration.
HOEH: It was ’63 to ’67, so—no, no, I’m sorry, ’67 to ’69. It was the end of the Dickey administration. And who was the next president?
HARRISON: [John G.] Kemeny, I think.
HOEH: Kemeny. That’s right. So this was—Dickey was beginning to think about retiring, and the younger faculty in government—it was the department of government in those days—
HARRISON: Remind me of the title of this group that you joined in ’67?
HOEH: Public Affairs Center.
HARRISON: Okay, and that was—was that part of the government department?
HOEH: Well, it was adjunct. The director was [Franklin] “Frank” Smallwood, who was a professor in the department of government. He was assigned part time to establish this Public Affairs Center, and the goal of this—there was some funding that had been donating to support the activity of the Public Affairs Center, and what he needed was someone with experience, who had connections to reach out. And I was able to convince them that, through my experience working on regional planning in New Hampshire—and I guess, you know, sort of the undercurrent of that was my connection politically with Governor King and [U.S. Senator Thomas J.] McIntyre and some others.
I also—in ’66 I was the campaign manager for Charles [B.] Officer, who came within 425 votes of defeating the incumbent congressman in the 7th Congressional District.
HARRISON: So you might say that—I mean, I’m sure that brought you to Hanover quite a bit.
HOEH: All of those things, plus now Hanover was kind of more accessible to the rest of New Hampshire because [Interstate] 89 was under construction. But before 89 was under construction, to get here from the central part of New Hampshire, from Concord, was a two-lane, squirrely road.
HARRISON: I see.
HOEH: And I drove that, behind buses, semis, things like that that made that trip difficult. But as 89 began to make the connection, Hanover, Dartmouth, this part of the state could become part of the rest of the state instead of being part of the Connecticut River.
HARRISON: So what sort of work did you do with the public affairs group?
HOEH: I was actually associate director of public affairs and a lecturer in social science, and my public affairs aspect was to seek grants from the state—I would write grant proposals—from the state to do these kinds of studies that would—studies or provide technical assistance, accessing faculty members on the campus with the technical experience to be of assistance to local governments.
And that was really important because the younger faculty in those days wanted to participate. They didn’t want to be locked into the ivy [sic; ivory] tower. They wanted to be able to reach out into the community, work with people to help them solve their problems. And the problems were to adapt to a new culture, a new environment, new economy, find education, seek new opportunities.
And these young—Dartmouth was beginning to expand. There was a commitment that it should become—it’s also the time it became a co-ed [sic].
HARRISON: That would have been in 1972, ’73.
HOEH: Well, this was—we had—the first women were on the campus.
HARRISON: Yes, yes, okay. From the Seven Sisters schools, I think.
HOEH: Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, the door opened about the same time I moved here with my wife and my young family. And we also were involved very much in supporting that women on campus effort, reinforcing it and providing opportunities for them to be comfortable in the culture of the guys’ school.
HARRISON: I think the actress, Meryl Streep, is famously one of these—
HOEH: Yes, yeah.
HARRISON: —first women students at Dartmouth.
HOEH: Yeah, yeah. And there were others who have had careers that came in that era.
HARRISON: I’m sure.
HOEH: But it was—you know, that was an important transitional phase, as you were opening the door. What I opened to door to was to faculty who felt isolated and wanted to be involved in—you know, like, in some regional activities in Lebanon or across the river in Vermont or—you know, there was sort of a range of Grafton County, where it was—Dartmouth felt that it had a role to play in supporting these communities, these economies, especially now that they were being connected by the Interstate 91. When I came here, 91 stopped at the bridge at Norwich. You could go south, but you couldn’t go north.
HARRISON: I see.
HOEH: And [Interstate] 89 was not connected all the way to Concord until a bit later, but then they got the one lane and—you know.
HARRISON: So you would find these projects, you would find funding from the government and you would set this up.
HOEH: We would set up a study team, and then we’d have, you know, a work program in a window where we could use students to do this kind of work. My lecture in social science was that I ran—I had a number of students who were doing intern programs, and they would report to me as to the progress that they were making.
HARRISON: These were government students?
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: And they would be working for elected officials?
HOEH: They could be working for elected officials, they could be working for local agencies, they could be working for—basically, they had—they also had to be able to come to their classes, but they could be placed, for a part of a semester, or term, in a location, but then they would have to have someone to report to, and they would have to report to me.
We had a program called the Dartmouth/MIT program, and we placed a number of students in Boston, and they lived in a settlement house in Boston, and there was a seminar held on a weekly basis at MIT, and they would—MIT students and Dartmouth students, who worked together on projects in the Boston metropolitan area.
And because I had been involved in the internship in state government, I had state connections which helped that out, plus I—you know, involvement with Boston University faculty and even continuing connections to Boston College. I was able to—and then Northeastern [University], and—
HARRISON: Did you teach a class in ’67 as a lecturer, or was the work as lecturer coordinating this program?
HOEH: It was really as a coordinator of the project. There were times when we would meet, and there would be a reading—there would be a list of things that they needed to read, and there would be reports back from their experiences in relationship to the reading that they had to complete, and then there were times when I would, based on my experience in Massachusetts or in the Boston area, I would lecture, and then I would also invite other people that I knew, who would come and lecture to this group.
And what happened is you would get people who would come in and talk to this group in a way that they would never talk publicly.
HARRISON: Mm-hm.
HOEH: So, it was—I mean, the doors were closed. No press. And they would—“This is what it’s like.” And so we—you know, those experiences were incredible, and the feedback was excellent.
HARRISON: So this was really a public policy program.
HOEH: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HARRISON: An experiential program in that people would go do internships and a more traditional learning program, where people would come and talk and you would lecture.
HOEH: Right. So we had—you know, Dartmouth—MIT resources and people who connected with the person I worked with there, and he would—you know, picked up part of that responsibility, and then I picked up the other part of it. So I had people that I needed to connect within—that I had some connection within Massachusetts, who I thought would be able to bring things to the table or whatever my network was.
HARRISON: So what the nature of public policy complexity in 1967 when you arrived here, and what were you talking about with these students?
HOEH: Well, the students who were here were curious, I think, and willing to push sort of the limits of their expected social—well, intellectual experience. And what was excellent about that is they came from the Ivy League track. Their parents had been successful enough to get them here, to pay the tuition, all of that, and it was expected that they would pursue a reasonably narrow course and complete their undergraduate degree in X period of time and then move on to the graduate program and to the professional programs that they were expected to pursue.
And I just saw the movie, Dead Poets Society. I don’t know whether you—
HARRISON: I have seen it.
HOEH: Yeah. And here’s the expectation of Dad, about the Robin Williams character, and that’s what a number of these young people at that time were expected to do. Their parents had not been able to reach that level and expected their children, now that the door is open, to do this, do the things that they were not able to do because of whatever. It may have been the war, it may have been the economy, the Depression, but anyway—
So I had, you know, a number of students who were really pushing the env- —they’re pushing the envelope with their families, and, “What? You’re going to Boston? You’re not staying on that wonderful campus? You’re going to Boston for how long? And what are you gonna do in Boston? You’re not going to class.” I mean, there was this—and I had to work with other members of the faculty to communicate that this was education and it was important and valuable for their career development, because as you go into graduate school, graduate schools were looking for diverse experience, not the narrow one that may have been in the minds of their parents or—in fact, until, you know, we got into the ’60s—I think the ’60s opened a lot of doors in the public education environment to real experience and bringing those kinds of different interactions into the academic environment and then looking to what the environment would produce in terms of a benefit.
HARRISON: So what would you teach in these classes in terms of the current events going on in 1967 and the early and middle 1960s?
HOEH: Well, most of what I was involved with was with community development. There had been this movement to—right after the war, to come in and revitalize our old neighborhoods, and historic, traditional historic areas were viewed as being slums, and there was significant “urban renewal,” which was to demolish these structures and then replace them with new buildings. So you can go to places in Boston where there were just beautiful, classic, three-story kind of triple-decker—different types of housing styles that had been cleared, and then they built these really ugly [chuckles]—not pyramids but high-rise structures.
We—a number of us just said, “This cannot happen anymore,” and we began to battle against urban renewal. And that’s a big piece of what took us to Boston, was—the Dartmouth/MIT program—was to go in, put the students into these traditional neighborhoods, get them to understand what the neighborhoods were like, what the culture and the history was and what incredible structures they were. All they needed to be is renovated, to be updated, you know, with the plumbing and the bathrooms—I mean the kitchens and things like this, to make them homes that have survived, you know, from the 1800s and are the high-end neighborhoods today because they’re there.
So we were also opposed to building our interstate highways and coming, blasting through the cities in a way that would destroy these neighborhoods and separate them and make it impossible for the communities to interact. What was happening in the immediate period after World War II is suburbanization, so people were spreading out from these neighborhoods, from the traditional neighborhoods and—as middle-class, now educated, more educated people and going into the suburbs, and not appreciating what they had left.
And they took a generation to look back and say, “Whoa! What did we leave? Let’s go back there.” And that’s principally—that was a movement that I felt—I’m not saying I was—I think I was on the cutting edge with a number of others, particularly in planning. The more innovative portion of the planning community was really concerned about protecting these neighborhoods, as opposed to the highway builders, who were determined to drive these expressways right through the historic neighborhoods.
HARRISON: Were there elements of foreign policy in this public policy group [cross-talk] for the students?
HOEH: That’s—much less so. I mean, foreign policy was peripheral to what was going on. The concern was that in certain situations, if you were involved with planning, where was planning seemed to be political? And that was in Russia, where the Soviet Union had planned this and done this, and you didn’t have a choice; you were told you had to—because of the plan. Well, that was a misuse of the word. We were talking about participatory planning, where you get together and you look at what you appreciate in your community and discover that, Oh, that person over there has the same ideas I do about this. And that began to build these coalitions that then made it possible to influence local governments to become what could be called more progressive in the way they opened the doors to participation and then looked at ways to revitalize, strengthen, reinsure the character of the community or what their particular area was of interest.
HARRISON: Now, you would not have been at Dartmouth yet when President Kennedy was assassinated, right?
HOEH: No, that was ’63.
HARRISON: Do you remember where you were when that happened? Was that an important event for you?
HOEH: It was, because I had—I had actually been to the White House. I’d been to—you know, and he was involved with—we, actually—in 1962, in order to convince Tom McIntyre, who was a potentially excellent candidate to replace Styles Bridges as the United States senator—to convince him to run, we took him to Washington, and we took him to the White House, and he was welcomed and taken on the lawn with Jack Kennedy. I went in to—met with several of his top aides in the White House and talked to them about what we were going to try to do in New Hampshire to get him elected. We needed his support. We needed McIntyre’s arm twisted to get him to say yes. And all of that happened, and he did agree to run, and he was elected. So, you know, it was just—and this is the way I thought politics would be in my life—you know, that if I needed to get to the White House, I’d just, you know, call somebody and go.
HARRISON: Where were you when he was assassinated? Do you remember?
HOEH: I was in Concord, working in state government and got the message, and it was just like—I was sitting at my desk, and I—there was nothing I could do. I just got up and walked out. And we shut down for, I don’t know, 48 hours, something like that. It was just—boom! And then gradually kind of found our way back. But, you know, you’d go home and then all of the details of what had happened and the reactions and the replays and all of that just was incredibly devastating, horrible.
HARRISON: So you saw it. You would have seen a video of the—
HOEH: Right away.
HARRISON: —of the assassination.
HARRISON: Yeah.
HOEH: And what did you feel?
HARRISON: Just totally horrified. I mean, how could that have happened? How could he—I’ve been to the sites. You know, I’ve been where the bullets were fired and all of that. So I just, you know, couldn’t imagine that that could happen in our society and that the shooter was able to access the location and move with a firearm under those circumstances. I mean, it was just all of those details were—how did that—
And also here’s Kennedy, who really insisted on being in an open vehicle, even when traveling in these streets, where it would be difficult to make sure all aspects of his visibility were protected. So it was—and that’s just, you know, sort of the way things operated in those—with those days, and he was very proud to be out in the open. I mean, he was out in the open when he campaigned and wouldn't even wear a hat.
HARRISON: By the time you came to Dartmouth, the White House was rather a different place.
HOEH: Well, part of what brought me here was I wanted to get out of—when I worked in state government, I couldn't be active in politics. My wife was active in Democratic politics in Concord, New Hampshire. She—I mean, I did all sorts of behind-the-scenes things, but I couldn’t be visible. And I was, you know, interested enough where I wanted to be visible as I had been earlier.
So I—you know, this opening would put me in touch with what was going on in a political way. I mean, I could open the door to—and I thought because Dartmouth—you know, because I had been involved with the opening of the doors to the Democratic Party, and opening the doors to this part of the state to other parts, and opening the doors to this participatory type of local government, using planning, that this would be a very good place for me to be.
And then the people who I interacted with—Frank Smallwood, who lived in Norwich and was active politically in Vermont in those days. There were people in Vermont that were, you know, kind of radicalized and interesting. And then Roger [H.] Davidson—do you know that name?
HARRISON: No.
HOEH: Well, he was on the faculty, the government department faculty. There were several people who were—they’re in my book, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come up with their names at the moment—who were influential in telling me that I would enjoy being here and that I could pursue my partisan interests as well as—
HARRISON: Were those interests similarly, as they were in college, responding to something going on in the Johnson administration, be it broad covert foreign policy or Southeast Asian policy, domestic policy? What was it that perpetuated this interest in politics as the 1960s went on?
HOEH: I came up here hoping to be able—after the ’66 congressional election, where my candidate lost by this narrow margin, and if he’d won, I would have gone to Washington and been his staff and such, and that would have been an interesting new door. When that didn’t happen, I kind of said, “Oh, please let me back in state government.” And I was sort of welcomed back but not really welcomed back, because I had left. The person I worked for was very happy to have me come back, but I was controversial at the state level. The governor was not that wild about having me bail out and then come back. That’s just his personality.
So I just—it was time to take another step, and I was of the feeling that I’d like to be in the active interactive side of academia and that the Public Affairs Center was an excellent opportunity for that and that I might be able to pursue a teaching/research career and also be involved casually or whatever in political activity.
HARRISON: When did you start to hear about American involvement in Southeast Asia and American involvement in Vietnam?
HOEH: That came up in the—well, it was late, well, ’62, ’63. We were beginning—and also there were some aspects of the Kennedy administration where there were some troops being sent to Southeast Asia, to Vietnam as training staff for the Vietnamese, and equipment was being sent. This was viewed as the expansion of the Iron Curtain from China, and it was viewed as “we’re going to be losing more ground.” There were the consequences of the Korean War, where they had stopped with the parallel [the 38th parallel], the border between North-South, and the hostility of the North and the South. China was really a closed society and had been an open society for Americans for a long time, and then they just—boom!—closed that.
HARRISON: What did you make of this foreign policy in Southeast Asia, as you started to know about it in the early ‘60s?
HOEH: I was really concerned about the colonial circumstance that Vietnam had gone through or was going—not—you know, the French had dominated that area. The French were much less sympathetic to a diverse ethnicity, I guess, culture and ethnicity than the British, although the British weren’t all that great either, given some of the interactions—I mean, those countries had their little—they had their reasons to be in these places, and it was basically for the cash and to dominate the societies and to brag about “we’re here. Our flag is flying.”
So I was very conscious of the issues of social, ethnic interaction and the need for—you know, again we’re looking at participatory democracy. That’s our message, and we were not supporting a participatory democracy. So that was my early take.
I was opposed to Kennedy sending troops to Cuba. I mean, that was a very dark moment in my experience with Kennedy, to have that happen. And I just didn’t want the Cold War to escalate to troops on the ground and that if you could do other kinds of arguments or ways to interact, fine, but—especially here are the French. They pulled out, and it was not the Chinese that were taking over, it was alternative groups in the Vietnam cultures, society, that were expressing their concerns, which had links to the Soviet—not Soviet but the socialist ethnicity, if that’s the proper word.
HARRISON: In China, you mean. In that order?
HOEH: Well, it was—well, China—the Vietnam were not happy with China because they were afraid China was going to take over them, and the Russians were unhappy if China had taken over Vietnam, so here was the Russians kind of getting things to the Vietnamese to support them in their battles with the French and their desire to establish a independent government, but our concern was that then the Soviets—and we just mixed that all up and said, “Oh, it’s those Iron Curtain people are going to just take over that part of the world.”
But, I mean, the dynamics were really quite complicated. And I studied them. I mean, I went to some workshops and went to some events where the culture of Vietnam was explained.
HARRISON: So with the middle of the decade, the Americanization of the war under the Johnson administration, with air and ground troops—
HOEH: We were not happy about that, but we were pleased that we had elected our first Democrats in ’62, and here’s Johnson running against [U.S. Senator Barry M.] Goldwater in ’64. We weren’t happy about Goldwater, and his position on Vietnam was represented to be, or he represented it to be much more militaristic, Cold War style than Johnson did. And then—so we stuck with—you know, obviously with Johnson, Goldwater [sic].
And then in ’66, some doors—you know, the circumstances began to get more difficult, but we had a reelection of a governor and a reelection of our United States senator and a congressional election, two congressional elections, and we just kind of, you know, stood back on Vietnam and said, “We’ll talk about that after the election” and went ahead with it, basically supporting Johnson’s domestic policies: the War on Poverty, all of the things that—education. I mean, he had an incredible, productive legislative accomplishment, and then—and the footnote of this was what was going on in Vietnam.
HARRISON: So really the electoral focus in ’66 was the Great Society program.
HOEH: Right, absolutely.
HARRISON: And you, I imagine, supported that program.
HOEH: We did.
HARRISON: Yeah.
HOEH: And Johnson came to New Hampshire, and we were in events where he, you know, was speaking, and we would sit on our hands if anything came up on Vietnam, but that was—and actually [Robert F.] “Bobby” Kennedy came up and spoke. And, you know, we had to sit on our hands when he was supporting Johnson on that type of foreign policy. I mean, there were a number of us who were clearly not happy with the way that track was going.
HARRISON: Would you call yourself one of those people?
HOEH: Yes.
HARRISON: Tell me about that, in ’66, I mean, when you were sort of keeping this restrained.
HOEH: We would discuss it amongst ourselves—you know, in campaign meetings, organizational meetings. There was, you know, kind of a group of us who would meet periodically in different parts of the state to manage campaigns, local campaigns, local campaign efforts. And the agendas of those meetings were open. And then we would decide what we were going to focus on and what we could make a difference, and we just decided we couldn’t deal with that aspect of the foreign policy. Was not going to make a difference to what we were trying to achieve for the Democratic Party in New Hampshire. So we—
HARRISON: What sort of results did you see in that ’66 election?
HOEH: We elected—reelected our governor, reelected our United States senator, reelected—I think we reelected the congressman from the 1st Congressional District and did not elect the replacement in the 2nd Congressional District. It came close. That’s the one we came within—
HARRISON: Four hundred votes, you told me.
HOEH: Yeah, 425.
HARRISON: Four twenty-five.
HOEH: On election night. There would be a little bit more later, but—
HARRISON: So then you got to Dartmouth, and then these elections were over, the ’66 elections.
HOEH: Oh, yeah. I came to Dartmouth in March ’67.
HARRISON: By that time, you didn’t have to show that level of restraint about this element of foreign policy.
HOEH: No. Well, what was happening here was—there’s things in my book about—there was a clear movement in opposition to the war in Vietnam that evolved in probably ’65; ’66, it was a factor in a number of states; ’67, there had been the vigils, the events on the [Dartmouth] Green, of students, faculty who were opposed to the war in Vietnam, where they would stand by the flagpole. And then there was a big event, and then there were events in this building, where protests were expressed, concerns about Vietnam.
I was not a participant; I was an observer. My office was at the top of Webster Hall, so I looked out on—
HARRISON: Of this building.
HOEH: Not Webster, the library.
HARRISON: Oh, Baker Library [now Baker-Berry Library].
HOEH: Baker Library. I’m sorry. Baker. It’s up on the wing, and that’s where the Public Affairs Center was. So I could see what was going on on the Green.
HARRISON: The Green.
HOEH: At that point, I was new. I didn’t want that to be my focus, because it was not what I was hired to do. I was hired to reach out to the Dartmouth/MIT—
HARRISON: What did you observe with these students, the students and faculty who opposed the war? What sort of ways did they show this opposition?
HOEH: Well, I thought they were—you know, there was not the kind of violence that there had been on other campuses. There were some incidents along the way, but basically the confrontations were respectful of each viewpoint. I mean, there was a line. I don’t know whether you know about the line?
HARRISON: No.
HOEH: Well, apparently the proponents of supporting our involvement in Vietnam were going to line up across the Green, and the opponents decided, “Okay, we’re gonna match ’em” Or “We’re gonna be there, too.” And the lines were almost identical, much to the surprise of the proponents. They didn’t think the opponents had that kind of—
HARRISON: And you were watching this from your office.
HOEH: Yeah. I mean, it was—I don’t know whether it was there or—I may have been at the—
HARRISON: Dartmouth Hall?
HOEH: Well, Dartmouth Hall or somewhere. I mean, I was aware of this. I was not—because of the controversies, allegedly, that I had been involved with being politically active and such, and I was going to pursue my academic career, I didn’t want to become a instigator. Dartmouth at that era was in the midst of a significant capital fundraising campaign. The culture of the ones who were being looked at as significant donors had come out of the post-World War II history, so there was this concern about what we’re doing to defend our country. It was a fairly conservative history of World War II people who had achieved success and now were being asked to pick their pockets to support Dartmouth. And so the idea that there would be controversy on this campus could have been disruptive to the goal of building a broader, open campus. The whole idea of having women on this campus was upsetting to a number of traditional alums.
HARRISON: So you didn’t instigate this—
HOEH: No.
HARRISON: —in ’67. But what were you thinking, you know, inside your home?
HOEH: I was actually—I mean, I would go to meetings, and I would kind of curl up on the edge of the meetings, because I was visible.
HARRISON: What kind of meeting do you mean?
HOEH: Well,—
HARRISON: College Democrats or SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] or—
HOEH: Yeah. I mean, it was different groups. You know, I would go, and sometimes you’d be asked some questions. I was not—I was determined not to play a leadership role in any of that. My job was to work for Dartmouth in order to strengthen my possibility of working longer for Dartmouth. And so I just was pretty careful of what my role was, because I was recognized as having had a role in state government because of my involvement with the political campaigns and my involvement with campus—University of New Hampshire campus activities. So, you know, small state. News gets around.
HARRISON: What internally and privately was your take on the escalated Vietnam War by 1967?
HOEH: I was really concerned, very concerned, concerned for our government, for our culture, for the message we were sending out to the world. We were supporting a regime that was not a democracy. We were not involved in socioeconomic, cultural aspects of liberating and establishing a functioning democracy and economy in that country. We were basically on the tails of the imperialists and the government that the imperialists had put in place in Hanoi and in—yeah, the various cities that—
HARRISON: In South Vietnam.
HOEH: Yeah, yeah. So that was—that’s what bothered me about it, was that it was—and then it was being interpreted as just another phase of the continuing war, that we had not quite won World War II and that we should have invaded Russia to push the Russians back. Instead—you know, it was a complicated thing, but the solution was to be a military solution rather than to be something that would reinforce and revive or create a democracy.
HARRISON: But there was still, despite this opposition, this private opposition, there was still this Great Society program.
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: And a growing civil rights movement.
HOEH: Right, and that was all on campus and important, and part of the problem I felt with that, with Vietnam was that it was beginning to override the civil rights and that these confrontations that [the Rev.] Martin Luther King [Jr.] was engaged with in Washington and such were starting to get blurred with Vietnam and that it was really difficult—the press was not being very good at separating—this is a civil rights, domestic concern; this is Vietnam; this is international relations concern. They were blurring the two. And then it was being shoved over into the hippie, commune—all of that, you know, vocabulary that was evolving at that time, where—we’re getting these challenges to really the whole culture that we had been so proud of in the post-World War II period.
HARRISON: Mr. Hoeh, we’re getting to sort of a turning point in our conversation, where we’re talking about 1968.
HOEH: Yes.
HARRISON: What do you say we take a couple of minute break—
HOEH: Okay.
HARRISON: —before we get to that?
HOEH: Sure.
HARRISON: Just to relax, use the bathroom, whatever we need, and then we’ll come back.
HOEH: I haven’t been drinking too much, so—
HARRISON: All right. Well, let me pause these recorders.
[Recording interruption.]
HARRISON: Okay, I am back with David Hoeh. This is Tim Harrison, and we’re going to continue in 1967 and ’68, when Mr. Hoeh was at Dartmouth.
So when we left off, we were just getting into the Vietnam War and its relation to the civil rights movement at home. You had started to mention elements of a counterculture, and I hope we can explore all of that now.
HOEH: This is—my concern was that there was this, you know, counterculture movement that was evident in the ‘60s, and it began to really—it was cultural diversity. There were important elements of that in terms of opening doors to different races and to different parts of our culture and economy and equality for women, equality for different races, equality for—all of that was going on.
At the same time, there was this kind of explosion of interest in leading different lives, and Vermont was—New Hampshire, parts of New Hampshire were locations of communes and counterculture activities, events. Vermont particularly changed its conservative Republican heritage to become a pretty sound Democratic, liberal, progressive state, as we all know it know. Parts of New Hampshire actually had some of that experience, and it began to take root.
But there were serious reactions to aspects of that, and it appeared that reaction to it was also taking over as blurring the circumstances of our involvement in Vietnam, and that was of great concern to me because of my experience working in New Hampshire politics and also understanding the dynamics of the presidential primary season.
So at this point, when I left Concord, I had made a connection with people in the Concord area and sort of the progressive, activist aspect of the Democratic Party, who were concerned about making sure our Democratic Party roots were observed and maintained and that we didn’t get overrun or pushed to the right, either within the Democratic Party or by the Republican right wing that might be reviving to resurrect the Joe McCarthy, Styles Bridges New Hampshire activities.
And that meant that in order to address something like what was going on in Vietnam, we needed to figure out ways that we might express our concern in a way that would be respected nationally by the national media, by the institutions in the country and hopefully by our presidential prospects and even maybe influence the president, Johnson, himself.
HARRISON: In 1966, in that election, you were able to keep Vietnam out of the conversation with success.
HOEH: We were able to do that. There were places—there were incidents along the way where there were protests, and we were able to kind of distance ourselves from that. The strongest protests were—well, there was—you know, circumstances that happened on college campuses but not necessarily on the campuses in New Hampshire. Other campuses in other parts of our region had concerns and faculty concerns, and collaborations were beginning to evolve that were expressing that concern.
HARRISON: By 1967, did you think that a repeat of that kind of electoral success of the domestic focus and without a Vietnam focus—by 1967, as you looked at the election of 1968, did you project that that would be impossible?
HOEH: Well, yes. I think we thought that, you know, if we didn’t raise this by 1968—well, you know, Johnson potentially could run for reelection in ’68, and he was the incumbent president and would be very, very difficult to unseat, certainly for the nomination, and then ,because of the Great Society legislation, we had—you know, the Goldwater—the right-wing Republicans would have been perfectly happy to upset everything that we felt was really important to the foundation of our society that Johnson had accomplished.
But here, we were being—you know, budgets were being cut to support Vietnam. The programs that he had endorsed and produced and made sure got legislated and signed into law were now being cut back because of Vietnam. So this was just not consistent with what our commitment to Johnson had been.
So how do we express our concerns, and how do you do that in the New Hampshire presidential primary? There’s a young man who was on the faculty of the—[makes swooshing sound] just lost is in my head, but in Concord. It’s the private school. I can’t think of it.
HARRISON: A high school?
HOEH: Yeah, it’s a preparatory school.
HARRISON: Um,—
HOEH: Anyway—
HARRISON: Not—well, I guess [Phillips] Exeter [Academy] is not in Concord.
HOEH: No, Exeter is in Exeter.
HARRISON: Exeter, yeah.
HOEH: It’s the other one.
HARRISON: Okay.
HOEH: It just brain-faded, but I can find him. Anyway, he and I began—and there was a group of us in the Democratic Party who were thinking ahead to how do we express our concerns? We succeeded with the ’66 election, got our candidates reelected. Now we need to move on. And we would meet . We would meet in people’s homes and talk about what can we do, and can we use the presidential primary in some way to express our concerns?
There’s a fellow named Eugene [S.] Daniell [Jr.], who lived in Henniker, and he—no, that’s not quite right. Anyway, he lived—and he had been a candidate for Congress at one point and was talking about organizing a candidacy for Robert Kennedy and draft—Kennedy had no communication with him, and he was just going to draft Robert Kennedy because Kennedy’s name is a powerful name. And he was pretty sure that Kennedy really didn’t support the war, contrary to what Kennedy was saying in public.
So we just said, “Nyeh, Daniell can’t organize a campaign. When he ran for Congress, he couldn’t put his act together, and he just is a voice in”—so that was not going to work, and how do we organize something in the presidential primary without having a candidate? We have to figure out some way to express our concern about Vietnam. Is it a referendum or is there some candidate that we might be able to bring in?
It was pretty clear that Bobby Kennedy would not do it because of his proximity to the Johnson administration and his brother being—picking Lyndon as his vice president, so it was complicated.
And then who were the other possibilities? And we, you know, talked—I think [George S.] McGovern’s name came up, and he was really not very well known. And there were a few other names out there—probably in my book.
So when I moved up here in March, I was still living in—basically commuting from here to Concord. Then we bought a house and moved up here. But there was a period of time when—and then my friend Gerry [U.S. Representative Gerry E. Studds] was—we would communicate rather frequently, just about what was going on. Gerry had had a significant career in the State Department and in Washington during the Kennedy administration. Then when Johnson came, it wasn’t going to be happy for him, so he moved back up—he came up to New Hampshire. He’s originally from Cape Cod—not Cape Cod but in that area of Boston.
Just as an aside, at one point in the future, Gerry was elected congressman from that district, and Father Robert [F.] Drinan, who was the dean of the law school at Boston College, was elected to Congress from the district where I used to live, Newton, and then a very good friend of mine, who was in the senior Massachusetts internship program, [Michael J.] Harrington, was elected to Congress from the north of Boston district, so there were three congressmen for a number of years who were very close friends of mine from that part—and all had been participants in the [Eugene] McCarthy campaign. So that’s a footnote.
HARRISON: Mmm.
So you were telling me about what changed about the Vietnam War, that it became a distraction from the Great Society to a point where you knew you needed to intervene, “you” being—
HOEH: Well, they were cutting back the funding that was just beginning to have a footprint, and in a state like New Hampshire, our economy was changing, and we needed those kinds of resources to change, to adapt our economy. We were beginning to experience the growth of the start-up industries out of Massachusetts into southern New Hampshire. Nashua, Rockingham County, that area were now commuter destinations out of Massachusetts. And also people would live in New Hampshire for the tax benefits and commute into those suburban Massachusetts communities for their employment.
Then there were new industries evolving in the Manchester and up the Connecticut River—well, up the Merrimack River that were important to diversifying what had been the traditional textile—and shoes. Those were the clothing textiles, were the industries that went back to the 1800s, and those were beginning to move south, because that’s where the labor was easy to get or costs were less or whatever. But it was—those industries were closing. There were these empty factories, and there was a concern about how do you generate new start-ups, use these abandoned factory spaces for affordable housing, for new start-up businesses and for potential, you know, environments where there would be walkable neighborhoods and such. All of that was part of our strategy.
HARRISON: And so you needed the Great Society.
HOEH: Yes, to provide the underpinnings, and the cutbacks were beginning to be really difficult.
HARRISON: And you saw these.
HOEH: Oh, yes. Yeah, we saw programs that had been supported by Johnson and by our legislative delegation or our Democratic Senator McIntyre, but the other Republican senator was a progressive. He was not in the Styles Bridges type, so there was this collaboration between the parties to make sure New Hampshire benefited during that era from the Great Society. And when those cutbacks began to occur, that was an immediate—we were right on the cutting edge of making—really beginning to get the feet on the ground, and that was happening.
So, you know, there were pocketbook consequences to, you know, working people, to our political structure in the state, and there was—you know, here’s a state with a tradition of supporting our military efforts around the world, traditionally. I mean, New Hampshire is—had its feet on the ground, because those were opportunities for people who otherwise had no way to get out of town [chuckles], so they joined the military and get out of town for a while. I mean, those were the sorts of factors that were ones that we had to work with in the culture of New Hampshire.
HARRISON: Tell me about those early conversations with the Democratic Party operatives in Concord and elsewhere, where you got serious about bringing McCarthy to New Hampshire.
HOEH: We—the Democratic Party was dominated by the Support Lyndon Johnson wing. There were very few in the leadership who would kind of break the bonds of that discussion. There were members of county committees, Democratic committees that we were able to reach to and elect. We encouraged our—you know, people who had these concerns to get involved locally. And that meant attend town committee meetings, pick up the jobs of the committees, because people weren’t necessarily interested in stepping up to those kinds of positions, especially in a lot of these towns that had a history of electing Republican state legislators and such.
But if you had a Democratic committee, the Democratic committee would have a representative to the county committee, and pretty soon, if you had enough of those, you could dominate the county committee. And then if you could dominate the county committee, then you sent your representatives to the state committee, and you started to build the pyramid. And we were committed to doing that.
So it was participation—and we had learned that it was important for that participation early on—I mean, from the Kennedy period through ’62, ’64, ’66 we had built an activist political framework, even though many of these small communities were Republican. They had strong Democratic committees. They were vocal. They would write letters; they would organize; they would participate in the county and state level.
So we started to have a serious voice within the Democratic Party, although the leadership was dominated by the people that the governor had appointed or had approved as being the leaders, from his—
Then, of course, as the campaign evolved, it was assumed that Lyndon Johnson would carry the state of New Hampshire, and the first state primary would be the one that said, “Go, Lyndon,” basically because of the Great Society. It was—they kind of, like, cringed at what was going on in Vietnam as well, but there was still this need to support the president in international policy.
HARRISON: Mmm.
HOEH: So there were resolutions and statements moved up through the process that seemed to raise the discussion, and we were able to raise the discussion at state committee meetings and called for votes, and we were making a point.
HARRISON: When did you start to hear the name Eugene McCarthy?
HOEH: I have it in my book. It was 1958—where did I see it? Oh, he came to the University of New Hampshire in 1960 and spoke in behalf of [Estes] Kefauver, I think. Let’s see, I just have my whole political experience flash through my head like a reel of microfilm. I remember that in the spring of 1960, little-known U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy was introduced to a student audience at the University of New Hampshire by the Catholic student chaplain. He was speaking on behalf of Hubert [H.] Humphrey, who was the running for the presidency against John F. Kennedy. My impression on that brief exposure was indelible.
He had—he came and he spoke, and he was just this unknown person, and he interacted with the audience. He took questions from the student audience in the auditorium where he spoke. He responded with great respect and completely to the questions. And I just—for some reason, I just was incredibly impressed by that. And from then on, I just, you know, kind of had that little light in the back of my head.
HARRISON: Mm-hm.
HOEH: He just seemed to be someone who could interact well with the constituency we had in New Hampshire, in that kind of a presidential primary.
HARRISON: Now, this element, I’m sure—I think it’s in your book,—
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: —what I’m about to ask about, which is that my understanding is that McCarthy said he would challenge Johnson in four primaries before he agreed to come to New Hampshire and challenge Johnson here.
HOEH: Right, right, yeah.
HARRISON: Now, you played a role in changing his mind and bringing him here, right?
HOEH: We worked very hard to connect with—Gerry Studds and I, particularly, with Eugene McCarthy because we just thought this would be a very nice way to go. We had wrestled, you know, through ’67 into the early fall with our group: “How are we going to use the primary? Can we use a referendum? Can we, you know, do a write-in for Bobby Kennedy? Write-ins are going to be complicated.” You know, just all of the various avenues we could go. And then McCarthy says he will be a candidate and identifies primaries, not New Hampshire.
HARRISON: Right.
HOEH: And then we say, “Well, how do we convince him to come in?” And so we collaborated on a memorandum which we sent to him, which indicated that he—the primary began when he wanted to run, but it was March 12th, and it basically was this ten-week period or, you know, it would be important for him to come to the state before that as much as he possibly could to meet and greet, and that we had an organization (quote!) [chuckles] that would be here to help him. Didn’t have any money. We didn’t—you know, anything of that sort. But there was an organization.
HARRISON: There was your group.
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: And then you made an announcement, right, in early January?
HOEH: Well, he came and spoke in Manchester, and it was just a—we were really put out by—he—we picked him up at the airport in Boston, Gerry Studds and I, and we drove him up, and we talked to him about all that was going on. He is in this auditorium. It was to be a lecture. He gave a lecture, not campaign speech, and he had been introduced, you know, and we kind of, like, looked at each other and said, “Well, okay.” And there was no hint that he would be running, and yet we then talked to him all the way back.
We had to meet—he met our group and was—but he didn’t give us a clue as to what his immediate response was. He said, “Well, I have a decision to make, and I will let you know eventually.” And we communicated with a schedule of what we thought would be necessary for him to do over twelve visits to New Hampshire and where he would go. And then that was it.
HARRISON: So we know what he decided, of course.
HOEH: Well, I’m meeting with his campaign manager in Manchester. His campaign manager, [L.] Blair Clark, was not—he was familiar with New Hampshire, and he was not at all interested in having McCarthy come to New Hampshire because he thought it would be very, very difficult, given the ethos of New Hampshire and the politics and how much time there might be available.
And I’m having an evening conversation with him. I called to the hotel phone. And it’s Eugene McCarthy. And he says, “Dave, I’ve decided to run in New Hampshire.” And I just like—you know, as I say in my book. Well, I think Blair Clark was right there when he saw my face just—well, actually, I came back to the table and told him that it was his boss and his boss is going to run in New Hampshire. And Clark just like—“Uhh! What?” Because I—“All right, what are we gonna do?” And so we then—Gerry Studds and I worked with Blair on how we would try to—and then what kind of an announcement we would make.
HARRISON: Yeah.
HOEH: But this was—you know, it was ten weeks from then till March 12th to put all of it together.
HARRISON: Yes. In the months between when McCarthy announced that he would challenge Johnson and then—so when you and your group were courting him to come to New Hampshire—and then in those ten weeks when he was here in New Hampshire, what did McCarthy stand for, in your mind?
HOEH: What was really excellent—I think this is what my impression of his speech in 1960 at the University of New Hampshire—was his willingness to listen and his willingness to react to people who were speaking to him. He was willing—he wanted to shake hands, wanted to say hello, but he was there to listen, whereas most other candidates at that level have a message, and they are—the message is what they’re giving, and they have—you know, Bobby Kennedy, Jack Kennedy—they each had—they’d shake a hand, and then there was something—or Johnson, whatever. It was the style to say something that would spark a connection.
What McCarthy would do—would listen and then respond in a way that the people would understand that he had heard what they said and that he had included that in his own thoughts. And quite often what would happen is that when he gave his speeches, which were not prepared ahead—we didn’t have advance texts. This was a very difficult part of the campaign. How do you get press when you don’t have the speech to give to the reporters? Because the reporters then have to take notes and write it, and that’s work.
So we would, you know, try to get an idea of what would be the outline of what he would be saying, but what McCarthy said that was so good for the audiences who came to hear was that he had listened to them and spoke to them about what was on their mind, not his preconceived message of what he wanted them to respond to.
HARRISON: But he did have a strong antiwar message.
HOEH: Oh, well, yes. And he would incorporate people’s concerns, bring their concerns, their antipathy, in fact, into his discussion and then show how that related to his position. So it was incredibly creative. And his style of speaking was such that he rarely raised his voice, whereas other candidates raised their voices and you wished you had ear muffs in some situations. His was you had to listen, and you had eye engagement and his physical presence. Part of it is that he’s a tall man. You know, he was tall and had an engaging look, and you felt comfortable around him. You appreciated his presence, and he appreciated your presence.
HARRISON: The antiwar movement was under a wide tent,—
HOEH: Mm-hm.
HARRISON: —you know? What was right about McCarthy’s strand of antiwar thinking that made you want to bring him to New Hampshire?
HOEH: Well, we were looking for a way to express our concerns, and we needed a candidate, a Democratic candidate. We needed a name on the ballot. And to get a name on the ballot that would also be willing to work in the New Hampshire and respond to our—was, you know, helpful. We had done enough research on McCarthy to know that the Minnesota tradition of interactive public participation is very strong, and he was a product of that culture. He didn’t come out of a Chicago machine or a Boston machine or, you know, a family dominant—he came out of a activist tradition. Minnesota is known for its activist tradition tied to the ethnicity and culture and the diversity of the state, where opinions, varieties of opinions were respected and then the policy evolved out of that. It wasn’t a push-me-down and push-you-up—it was interactive. So his—the way we were organizing our campaign as a grassroots campaign worked for his style.
HARRISON: What did you hear from people in this grassroots—what would McCarthy have heard when he was listening in New Hampshire generally and from students and faculty at Dartmouth?
HOEH: There would be a variety of questions. People—we had many household—what did we call them? Coffee—basically coffee klatsch kinds of things, where people would invite their friends, neighbors to their home, and then McCarthy would come and spend—you know, he would have stayed all day. We had to drag him out. I mean, that was out job. There had to be people there who would physically remove him so he would be on schedule.
HARRISON: And what were they saying about the Vietnam War?
HOEH: There were all kinds of questions, really all kinds of concerns about our—are we diminishing our role in the world if we reduce our military role or our effectiveness in Vietnam? If we leave Vietnam, do we become a small power and the Soviet Union takes over? Are we in Vietnam in a way that is of assistance to their efforts to liberalize and to diversify their society, their economy? I mean, just incredible numbers of—
And then questions about the impact of Vietnam on our domestic conversations. People were really concerned about the divisions that were occurring in their families, in the communities between the proponents and the opponents, and then, you know, kind of the cultural change that the liberalization of our culture that was occurring during that period of time was impacting their communities. “How do I talk to my children? I can’t talk to them about this. They won’t talk to me. They won’t come home. They won’t call. They won’t”—I mean, these sorts of issues that were domestic, personal would be put on the table, before him, and he wouldn’t necessarily solve that except that it would open the door to a discussion in the room, and he would be there.
[Two loud noises.]
HARRISON: Okay, what I’m going to do—I think—okay. Sorry.
So where were we?
HOEH: Well, it’s just what happened in these rooms.
HARRISON: You got to discuss the—
HOEH: People would just interact with what was going on in their communities, in their families, how it was affecting the—you know, you’ve gone through—here’s the baby boomer generation, and now they were having their children, and their children were not really respecting or appreciating where they had been brought, from where—you know, this kind of controversy.
So that was a dynamic that was there in the room and also translated into the way people reached out because we had a very effective—we had targeted our population, and we had people who went door to door, volunteers.
HARRISON: Tell me about [Get] Clean for Gene.
HOEH: Well, we began to—the leadership were connected back to, you know, the Ivy League schools and to places that wanted to participate. What I and other people in the group, the leadership group—Gerry and I particularly were concerned about being able to open conversations and not have people blank by the appearance of people who were engaged in the active part of the campaign.
And there was this cultural separation between the hardworking baby boomer generation and then the new—the hippie convert/protester generation.
HARRISON: What were they doing, the hippie generation?
HOEH: Well, the dress, the hair—I mean, World War II, everybody looked like they could have been drafted, and facial hair was gone, and long hair was not there. And so then the breakout from that was long hair, you know, no neckties,—
HARRISON: What did you think of that group?
HOEH: I just—you know, people want to express themselves in different ways. I was brought up in kind of a liberal tradition. I mean, it wasn’t anything that—I was a little too old. You know, I was not in my 20s at that point, I was 30, and I had a family, so this was not a style of particular interest to me. I think I played with the idea of growing some sideburns at one point, and, I don’t know, my hair never was very long, and I didn’t have a lot of it.
HARRISON: The campaign demanded—
HOEH: Yes. One of our rules was we want people—we understood that there was a serious reaction in New Hampshire to the hippie culture. It was more accepted in Vermont, but New Hampshire was much more conservative. The hippie culture was confined to some limited campuses that were the “radical” campuses.
HARRISON: Was this at Dartmouth?
HOEH: There was a real conflict here. And there were sort of communes in this area, and they would use Lebanon, Hanover as places where they could meet and shop. You know, it was—the Co-op [Co-op Food Stores] was a very nice phenomenon because it was a co-op; it wasn’t a grocery chain. It was back-to-the-earth culture. And going back to the earth meant you changed the kinds of things that you wore, and instead of the dress clothes, you wore casual clothes. I mean, faculty and students on campus were in ties and jackets, and didn’t wear jeans.
HARRISON: So where did “[Get] Clean for Gene” come from?
HOEH: It came out of our group of younger people, who—I was a little bit older, but what I was concerned about what making sure—and this is a Gerry Studds thing as well—making sure that when you interact with people, you make them comfortable and that you don’t present yourselves in a way that they would feel some hostility or insecurity or concern. And this had been built up by the Manchester Union Leader, which had been portraying the hippies as these fly-by-night, irresponsible—who had given up on marriage, given up on this, given up on that, or druggies and, you know, weren’t responsible and couldn’t hold jobs. I mean, this was all of that.
So we just—and it wasn't Gerry and I as much as it was the leaders who came out of the, you know, Ivy League schools that came up here and were in the headquarters, and when people arrived, they had to go through an indoctrination. And part of that was, “You gotta clean up, and if you’re not willing to do something with that hair or with that beard or with the way you’re dressed, then you can work in the basement. We have things for you to do.” And we had a basement space in the headquarters, where they could work on the list. You know, they didn’t want to be knocking on the doors. Then there were other things that they could do.
But when they walked out, they just—“Don’t put on the McCarthy button and don’t look like—you know, maybe go out the back door.” [Chuckles.] So it was just—you know, it wasn’t that we were saying, “You have to”; we’re saying, “When you’re facing the public, representing these issues and Eugene McCarthy, this is the way you need to meet the public.” And the fact that they were young people knocking on the doors, who were kind of looking responsible and clean was very helpful.
You know, the message then got spread all the way across the country that this would be helpful, especially in the more conservative states. I mean, if you go to parts of California, where it was okay, but you wanted to go to Oregon or Wisconsin or Minnesota or Michigan or—“Let’s be clean for Gene.”
HARRISON: And you would count New Hampshire as one of these conservative places, right?
HOEH: Very much so, yeah, yeah, in that era.
HARRISON: So it was a political necessity if people were going to listen to you.
HOEH: Yes, yeah. You know, if you—people would slam their doors against people who they didn’t trust, you know, so this was—if someone showed up, even in working-class neighborhoods and such, if someone, a young person arrived who looked presentable, they were invited or engaged with.
HARRISON: Why did the young people go along with this?
HOEH: They were really concerned about the message. Very, very concerned about the message. And they were the ones who translated this message. If you want to work to help change the Vietnam policy, to get us back to the Great Society, to move in a responsible way with our traditions, this is what you have to do. So when students went to campuses to recruit students, it was students speaking to students. It wasn’t old folks like me doing that; it was students. And it wasn’t faculty saying it; it was other students, as recruiters. And that was what was so incredible, that they—I mean, this network—and then what we got as the campaign began to visibly dig in, we started to have to turn people away because we had nowhere to put them.
HARRISON: Before March 12th.
HOEH: Yeah, this was—well, we started, and we had a few volunteers in—you know, basically the campaign didn’t fire up much until the end of January, but then it got into February, and February break was a big—that was the big flow, the first big flow of students, and so that’s when they started to go out. And there was a lot of homework that had to be done in order to get the contact lists and addresses and all of the information and material so that they knocked on doors of people who were registered to vote and were either Independents or Democrats. We weren’t bothering Republicans.
HARRISON: Were the students who came to you from Dartmouth and elsewhere—were they typically clean when they arrived, or did they really have to change?
HOEH: Typically, the message got back early on that if you want to knock on doors, this is what has to be—and it was winter, and it was cold, so you had a jacket. It was really what was going on with your face and your hair. And for women, it was, you know, being—a skirt or something like that. And then everyone was expected, was presumed to wear shoes that functioned well in the winter. So footwear was not that bit a deal.
HARRISON: You said that you didn’t target Republicans, but were there people on the left, on the far left—what would you call those people? How do you characterize those people who were—
HOEH: There could be people on the left who weren’t registered. I mean, there was a window, but the window closed fairly early on the campaign, for registering.
HARRISON: But I mean activists who would have been registered and who may have begun to withdraw themselves?
HOEH: Well,—
HARRISON: Were they in a commune or part of the hippie culture? Did they need to be excluded from the campaign?
HOEH: We did not exclude participation really of anyone unless there was some demonstration that they wanted to engage in that we would have no part of, and that would be, you know, signs or something that would be distracting from the message which we were trying to convey. So there was a process. We basically said, “We’ll have signs, and we want signs that welcome Eugene McCarthy, that express concerns about this or that. We don’t want agitation; we want things to be welcoming and to introduce him as a candidate and his availability,” rather than to be profane in their expression of their antiwar—
HARRISON: You needed to remain within the political system
HOEH: Yeah.
HARRISON: And there were plenty of people who did not want to remain.
HOEH: Well, there were incidents where that happened, but basically, under those circumstances, they were shut down by their friends who understood that this was not in the interests of the larger message; this was them expressing their own little shtick rather than joining in a united campaign. And that’s kind of what happened with the McCarthy campaign nationally, is that it evolved out of New Hampshire, and the ethos that we had created here became the way that that campaign proceeded across the country. And people who were activists here went with the campaign and became proponents for McCarthy in the next states, even though Robert Kennedy was a candidate, and—you know, Kennedy ran into, you know, serious competition when he thought, I’ll just wipe McCarthy from the face of the earth by announcing, and immediately there was this very strong reaction to—“McCarthy was there when we needed him, and we’re going to pursue his candidacy.”
HARRISON: And what was the nature of the support you received from Dartmouth students? Were they there before March 12th, or were they there primarily after March 12th and over the summer?
HOEH: It’s kind of interesting. There were the protests on the campus. The campus was kind of preoccupied with the concerns of the protests that were on campus. My view was we want to involve people throughout our state, but we did not want the origin of the McCarthy campaign to be Hanover or—you know, there were, like, three progressive areas in the state of New Hampshire in that era, and it was Hanover, maybe a little bit of Lebanon and Concord, and the Durham-Portsmouth area. University of New Hampshire, Concord, the capital, sort of progressive center of the state, and then Dartmouth.
And so this was—in order to spread this message, we needed to kind of bring down the visibility of Dartmouth because the protests had been here, and there had not been really much in other parts. There had been some activity in the southern part of the state, but not a great deal, some in Durham.
HARRISON: What were the protests like? Like that line that you told me about?
HOEH: Yeah, yeah, that, and there’s the vigil and things that had happened a bit before I arrived here and then were happening, but it was just being concerned about trying to spread our message about what the Democratic Party could do for the state of New Hampshire and not get caught up in this national, international crisis which was beginning to evolve. But its characteristics had not been clarified, and it would have been very easy to isolate us by saying, “Oh, that’s the elitists, Hanover, Dartmouth crowd that are trying to impose their will on us poor people in the other part of the state.” I mean, that’s kind of the way Hanover—Dartmouth was viewed in that era. Just this is this golden temple up here, where the people who have desires to succeed or make an expression were going to try to dominate our state.
HARRISON: Mr. Hoeh, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you very much for talking to me, and I think we’ll leave it there.
[End of interview.]