Mar. 11, 1964 - Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge won a smashing victory last night in the nation’s first Presidential primary of the 1964 campaign. In cities and hamlets alike throughout New Hampshire, voters slogged through sleet and snow yesterday to write in the name of the Ambassador to South Vietnam as their preference for the Republican nomination for President.
Lodge, an undeclared candidate in the primary who is in Saigon, led almost from the start as the returns were counted. He slowly pulled away from the two principal declared candidates in the contest, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, also an undeclared candidate and the beneficiary of a write-in campaign, was running fourth.
At 1 a.m., NBC gave these vote totals on the basis of 85% of the vote: Lodge, 28,526; Goldwater, 18,989; Rockefeller, 17,192; Nixon, 14,226.
The Lodge totals were especially impressive because they required voters to write in his name, while supporters of Governor Rockefeller and Senator Goldwater had merely to mark crosses beside their names. Returns indicated that Mr. Lodge was winning all 14 of the delegates who will cast votes at the Republican National Convention July 13 in San Francisco.
In the Democratic primary, President Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy were having their names bracketed together by the voters as write-in choices for the Presidential and Vice-Presidential nominations. There were no names printed on the Democratic ballots.
At 11:37 p.m., ABC gave these vote totals: Johnson, 27,492; Kennedy, 15,167.
Shortly after 11 p.m., George Cabot Lodge, the elder son of the Ambassador, read a prepared statement from his father in Saigon, asserting that “the voters of New Hampshire have paid me the highest of compliments.” He said he would “consider their action and all its meanings.”
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