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Hillary Clinton became the subject of debate this week when she appeared to choke up at a town meeting in New Hampshire. Many observers compared her to Edmund Muskie, whose 1972 presidential campaign was reputedly undone by a display of tears on the campaign trail. Are tears really that fatal to a candidate's chances?

David Broder of the Washington Post wrote the initial story to depict a weeping Muskie.

With tears streaming down his face andhis voice choked with emotion, Senator Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) stood in the snow outside the Manchester Union Leader this morning and accused its publisher of making vicious attacks on him and his wife, Jane.

The Democratic presidential candidatecalled publisher William Loeb "a gutless coward' for involving Mrs. Muskie in the campaign and said four times that Loeb had lied in charging that Muskie had condoned a slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent.

In defending his wife, Muskie brokedown three times in as many minutes-- uttering a few words and then standing silent in the near blizzard, rubbing at his face, his shoulders heaving, while he attempted to regaim his composure sufficiently to speak.

But Muskie later told Broder he hadn't been crying. Broder recounted the conversation in a 1987 article for Washington Monthly:

(Muskie said) I did not cry. I know it is not easy todistinguish between anger on the verge of tears and crying, but there was no flow of tears . . .. There was melting snow. But I choked up in my anger, and it was a bad scene, whatever it was. Interestingly, the first reaction I heard that day was positive, that I had confronted Loeb and told him what I thought. Only later did I hear the reaction that it was a sign of weakness.

That left Broder uncomfortable. He wrote that he had written the story differently.

It is unclear whether Muskie did cry. He insists he never shed the tears we thought we saw. Melting snow from his hatless head filled his eyes, he said, and made him wipe his face. While admitting that exhaustion and emotion got the better of him that morning, the senator believes that he was damaged more by the press and television coverage of the event than by his own actions.

Did a misperception kill Ed Muskie's presidential bid? True or not?