Do you remember your first vote?

The first person I ever voted for, former Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, died May 23 at the age of 95. I don’t remember why I voted for him or who ran against him, but by all accounts, Frelinghuysen was a good choice. He was running for his first term then and he’d be re-elected for the next 20 years. His son occupies the seat now. But then as now, being a Frelinghuysen in New Jersey was quite an advantage. He was a member of a political dynasty that produced, since the 1790s, four United States senators as well as the two House members. One of the senators, Theodore Frelinghuysen, was Henry Clay’s running mate in 1844. They lost, despite their catchy campaign ditty, “Hurrah, Hurrah! The country’s risin’ for Henry Clay and Frelinghuysen.” Theodore was a Whig but my Frelinghuysen was a Republican in a very Republican district. He turned out to be a liberal Republican, a rare species then and practically extinct today. Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican presidential candidate, described them best when he said, “I believe a man can be a liberal without being a spendthrift.”Frelinghuysen was not only my first Republican vote, he was also my last, except for Lowell Weicker, who may have been a Republican one of the times I voted for him. Had 19-year-olds been allowed to vote in 1952, as they can now, Dwight Eisenhower would have been my first vote and first Republican because, having lived under only Democratic presidents in my lifetime, I figured it was time for a change. Besides, being for Eisenhower in Madison, N.J., was a liberal position. My parents and the neighbors supported Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican.”But I didn’t vote for Eisenhower or Democrat Adlai Stevenson four years later. I had just completed basic training at the time and had become disillusioned with both candidates because of the Hungarian Revolution, which broke out just weeks before the 1956 rerun between Eisenhower and Stevenson. When John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, urged the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe to revolt, I naively believed he was telling them the United States would help. And when both Ike and Adlai were silent on helping the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, I rejected both of them. My political thinking hadn’t extended to considering the advisability of getting into a world war at that point.I did support Frelinghuysen’s bid for a second term on my absentee ballot because shortly after his election in 1954, he became one of the first Republicans to speak out against the reprehensible Republican senator, Joe McCarthy.“By remaining silent we permit the public to believe that most Republicans condone the senator’s tactics,” he wrote. “By remaining silent we lend credence to the view that we prefer to risk losing our freedom than to offend a questionable ‘asset’ to our party.” That was heroic talk for a Republican then.Felinghuysen would also be among the Republicans supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He did oppose President Lyndon Johnson’s antipoverty programs, rightly fearing the Great Society would “spawn its own bureaucracy” and “duplicate existing federal programs,” according to his obituary in The New York Times. But unlike today’s Republicans, he offered an alternative, administering some of the same programs through existing agencies.Frelinghuysen’s monument is New Jersey’s Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Had it not been for the congressman, the 10,000-acre refuge would today be the Great Swamp International Airport. The Port of New York Authority insisted no other site would do for a badly needed fourth Greater New York Airport in 1959, and that may have been true, as no fourth airport has been built in the ensuing 52 years.Had I remained in New Jersey, my voting record, at least for Congress, would have been more bipartisan, but I never found Republican House candidates like Frelinghuysen in the Connecticut districts where I lived and voted beginning in 1958. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the Republican Party, I left New Jersey. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.