The Time Nixon's Cronies Tried to Overturn a Presidential Election

[brooklynite]

Politico

Donald Trump is fanning fears that if he loses the presidential election in November, he’ll try to discredit the vote totals as fraudulent and won’t concede the race. Doing so would amount to a dramatic break from historical precedent, as commentators are noting. But not all of them are getting their history right. Al Gore, we’re reminded, accepted defeat in 2000, despite reason to believe he should have won Florida, and Richard Nixon, we’re told, declined to challenge John F. Kennedy’s razor-thin victory in 1960.

The part about Gore is true. But Nixon did no such thing. In fact, his top aides and the Republican Party, almost certainly with Nixon’s backing, waged a campaign to cast doubt on the outcome of the election, launching challenges to Kennedy’s victories in 11 states. Far from providing a counterexample to Trump, the 1960 election aftermath amounts to one more way in which Nixon, known for his contempt for the Constitution, furnished Trump with a playbook for thinking about political power. And let’s remember that in the end, it didn’t work: While Nixon’s gambit was cynical and disruptive, it went nowhere, suggesting it’s harder to overturn a presidential election result than doomsayers suppose.

The 1960 election was extraordinarily close. Nixon, the sitting vice president, lost the popular vote to Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts senator, by 113,000 votes of 68 million cast—a hair’s-breadth 0.2 percent margin. In the Electoral College, Kennedy’s margin was a healthier 303-219 (Dixiecrat Harry F. Byrd got 15), but in many individual states the margins were slender as well.

Everyone knew that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, a key JFK ally, ran a powerful Democratic machine. It was perennially suspected of meddling in important races around Cook County. As numbers came in on election night, rumors circulated that Daley had put his thumb on the scales for Kennedy, who took Illinois by a mere 9,000 votes. There were questions about the vote count in Texas, too, where Kennedy eked out victory by 46,000 votes out of 2.3 million cast—and where associates of Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s running mate, were also reputed to interfere with the count. (Rumors of having cheated in a tight Senate election in 1948 had given LBJ the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”) Together, Illinois and Texas had 51 electoral votes. Moving them from Kennedy’s column to Nixon’s would flip the election.

Republicans saw an opportunity. Some urged Nixon to contest the results. In his first memoir, Six Crises, written shortly after the election, Nixon claimed to reject their advice, and a surprising number of biographers have credulously accepted and repeated his claim. But Six Crises is a notoriously unreliable account from a notoriously unreliable narrator. As Nixon speechwriter William Safire noted in his own memoir, Nixon loved nothing more than to have aides tell him to “take the easy path,” so he could look admirable by defying them. He loved giving the impression of forswearing political calculations and following his own lights, even when it wasn’t the case.

[SharonClark]

1. Appreciate these history lessons.

Thanks for posting.

[The Magistrate]

2. In Those Days, Sir

Republican cheating downstate and in collar counties matched or exceeded anything the Daley machine ever managed in the city.

[H2O Man]

3. It wouldn't have

changed the outcome even if Nixon won the state. That is one of the political myths from that era. Kennedy would have still taken the electoral college.