The Styles Bridges Highway flows through some of the most beautiful country in New England, along peaceful river beds, verdant notches, and dazzling mountain vistas. Tourists probably don’t realize that the road is named for a legendary New Hampshire politician, Senator Styles Bridges, who served from 1937 until his death in 1961. A major power broker in his day, Bridges helped to define the state’s rock-ribbed conservatism. At one time, his sleek profile was as familiar to Granite State voters as the Old Man of the Mountain, past which runs the Styles Bridges Highway.
But the Nov. 12 issue of The New Yorker contained an uncomfortable wake-up call: Alex Ross, the magazine’s classical-music critic, wrote an essay on changing attitudes toward homosexuality that included this passage: “In an episode loosely dramatized in the novel and movie ‘Advise and Consent,’ Senator Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, killed himself after Styles Bridges, a senator from New Hampshire, threatened to expose Hunt’s son as a homosexual. Bridges still has a highway named after him.”
Comments
This is interesting. In the interest of balanced commentary, may we now have an editorial on the heterosexual escapades of John and Robert Kennedy?
This editorial is not about the "sexual escapades" of Senator Bridges. It's about blackmail and intimidation. You know that, but you made your point, such as it is.
You're right, Mean Willie. I should have asked the Globe for an editorial on how Ted Kennedy savaged Judge Bork when he was nominated for the US Supreme Court. Bork, an eminent jurist, was falsely accused by Kennedy of wanting women to die from back alley abortions. Members of the Senate were "intimidated" by Kennedy's vicious attack on Bork.
Wasn't easy to find this editorial. Was the person who decides what print items get featured as embarrassed for the Globe as I am, for trying to make a comparison between a mid-20th century scandal involving a Republican senator's personal pressure on a Democrat and the attempts by today's Republican senators to deal with the national debt? Story was interesting, but I'll bet it wouldn't have run today if the bad guy were a Democrat and his victim a Republican.
And it probably wouldn't run in the Reporter.
Read Robert Caro on LBJ for more of a picture of this bum. He never met a plain envelope stuffed with cash that he didn't like.
Better yet, make the road a toll road. It would be appropriate - if you want to use Styles you've gotta pay. Now THAT would be a fitting memorial!
Speaking of LBJ. No roads or buildings named after him I hope!
The villains in this affair were McCarthyites. It was cynical of Alan Drury (of right-wing sympathies), in his novel Advise and Consent, to put the villains on the Left.