Pride of the Yankees

Let's start where journalists usually begin. There are no anecdotes about Judd Gregg.

He's bland, colorless, nearly humorless. He looks like Ichabod Crane. He is not given to flights of verbal majesty, or even to normal conversation. He's from the same state as Daniel Webster and Robert Frost but without the rhetorical lift of either Black Dan'l, who sometimes declaimed for hours, or the poet, who wrote 11 volumes of verse. He also is not a swinger of birches. Most definitely not a swinger of birches.

But he is, or soon will be, the secretary of commerce. President Barack Obama selected him last week -- the third Republican in his Cabinet -- and in choosing the senior senator from New Hampshire he inadvertently brought to a close more than a century of an important, though quiet, cultural and electoral phenomenon.

Flinty New England conservative, R.I.P.

When commentators bemoan the eclipse of a potent strain of New England Republicanism, they're usually talking about left-leaning moderates or liberals, men in the mold of Lowell P. Weicker Jr. of Connecticut and Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts (both still alive), women in the mold of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine (both still in office).

They're an endangered species, but Gregg is from a different genus entirely. He's from a line of men with huge Adams' apples and no small talk -- one of them, Rep. Perkins Bass, the son of a governor and father of a House member, was known, approvingly, as "small-mouth Bass" -- who have now faded from public view. Gregg is the last one, the lineal descendant of Charles Tobey, John G. Winant, Styles Bridges, Robert O. Blood, Sherman Adams, Norris Cotton, Lane Dwinell, Walter Peterson and his own father, Hugh Gregg.

They all served a term or two as governor (excepting Cotton, who served only in the House and Senate), never imposing a sales or income tax, never even thinking of it, and some of them went off to Washington, where their deep silences, which matched the mountain fastnesses of their home state, unnerved the panjandrums of the capital and, in some cases, terrified them. These were party men, to be sure, but you never, ever, saw them at a party.

They tended to be lanky and lean. They looked like they wore the same sports jacket (brown tweed, a little worn around the edges) and shopped at the same two stores (McQuaid's on Elm Street in Manchester and Campion's on Main Street in Hanover, both sadly now out of business but whose wares still sit comfortably in the closet of the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). It suited these men even better if these jackets were purchased in college, and in some cases they almost certainly were.

Gregg is a worthy representative of this Yankee tradition, whose members were sometimes ridiculed for their haberdashery and their reticence but were never discounted for their intelligence and character. (Gregg's only two known indulgences were attending Columbia, which is not located in New Hampshire, and being a member of the university's golf team. In some quarters he has been forgiven for one but probably not both.)

These men shared a domestic policy, which was to marry strong, sometimes fierce women. Styles Bridges' second wife, the formidable Doloris, is known even today as "The Widow Bridges"; her effort to succeed her husband, who as chairman of the Appropriations Committee was probably the most powerful New Hampshire senator until Warren B. Rudman, ruptured the Republican Party in New Hampshire in the early 1960s. Gregg's wife, the formidable Kathy Gregg, once had her legs and arms bound by knife-wielding home invaders but persuaded the intruders to drive her to a bank for money -- at which point she escaped. Bill Clinton didn't face down a House invasion nearly as effectively, or stylishly.

Gregg came by his non-style style honestly. It is often said in New Hampshire that no one got more out of two years as governor than did his father.

A half-century ago the job of governor was not exactly a full-time occupation -- Blood, who served from 1941-1945, was a practicing physician in Concord even as he served in the governor's office -- and so Gregg's father ran his furniture and cabinet company and the state at the same time.

Once out of office, he became something of a king-maker, playing prominent roles in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and becoming a driving force behind the creation of the New Hampshire Political Library, which to this day is dedicated to preserving the state's presidential primary as the nation's first. Indeed, for a generation it was impossible for an out-of-town political writer to visit New Hampshire without being accosted by Gregg's father for a homily on the importance of the primary.

"I think there was a law to that effect," says Thomas D. Rath, a former state attorney general.

The younger Gregg is a man of few words but many strong opinions, which Obama is about to discover, maybe not always to his delight.

Calvin Coolidge, who had the misfortune of being from Vermont and Massachusetts rather than New Hampshire but shared much of the ethos of this group, also had a strong-willed commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover.

"That man offered me unsolicited advice for six years," Coolidge once recalled, "all of it bad."

The difference between Hoover and Gregg is that the latter's byword is modesty. That word was not in Hoover's lexicon.

These Republicans shared many convictions. They were "old-fashioned conservatives, not the new conservatives," former Gov. Peterson, now 86, told me in a conversation Thursday.

Besides a rock-hard fiscal conservatism, they generally avoided social issues -- but were hawkish on defense. In his classic 1946 book, "Inside USA," John Gunther described Bridges as an "aggressive reactionary" who was "pertinaciously engaged in a continual running fight with the CIO, the Roosevelt family and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

Gregg is a more modern version of this model, to be sure, but temperamentally in synch with it.

"This is a low-key, all-New Hampshire kind of guy," says former Sen. Rudman. "There haven't been many exceptions to that mold, and now it's gone."

Soon it will be forgotten. But those sports jackets will remain forever, in pictures in the archives if no longer on hangers in the closet, except for mine.