As the son and grandson of
two prominent historians, I have always been an avid reader of almost every
single historical book and biography of some of the most important figures in
American history. Because of more than a quarter of a century of avid reading
and researching, combined with a love of viewing documentary movies and
television in almost all his forms, I have come to believe a very clear –
perhaps almost too clear – perspective of the American political system since
the founding of the Republic, the men who have served as President and as
elected officials (particularly in the Senate) and the sagas behind almost
every election in the nearly 200 years since the people began official casting
their votes for President.
Because of that, I have also
become aware of the way certain historians and – particularly in the last
quarter of a century – revisionists on both the sides of the political aisle,
have painted a picture of certain political idols and have cast others as
villains as a result to fit their narrative, regardless of the actual evidence
that history has borne out.
Napoleon famously said:
“History is a lie agreed upon.” Few would argue with this statement. I can
argue in favor of the revisionists for this were it not for the fact that these
revisionists far too often are not interested in the truth, but rather the lie
that fits their version of events. Far too often, that version comes down to
what side of the aisle you are on.
I’m not saying that my
version of the facts is any closer to being the truth than anyone else’s, and
indeed all of the articles that will follow will more or less just be my opinion
as much as anything else. All I am saying is that my opinion will be based upon
the better part of twenty years of reading volumes, both contemporary and years
after the fact about the figures involved as well as countless hours spent
looking at films, documentaries and TV trying to get as many angles on the
story as I possibly can. I have no axe to grind; indeed, I intend to spend as
much time tearing down Democrats as I do Republicans, as well as a fair amount
of time building up members of both parties that I think have been overlooked
by history. This series will likely produce something that is going to
fundamentally anger everybody at some point. That’s the mark of a good
historian and writer – something that the media and too many so-called historians
seem to have forgotten.
So I will start this series
with perhaps the biggest and most mythic political family of all: the Kennedys.
That myth began in the 1960 election. And what’s the best way to jump in to the
Kennedy saga? By telling you the story of the losing campaign – because let’s
not kid ourselves, that may be the single most important part of the Kennedy
myth.
Part 1: Sympathy for The
Devil?
Or: What They Don’t Talk
About When They Mention the 1960 Campaign
Don’t worry. I’m not going
to try and redeem Richard Nixon. I think he was a contemptible and horrific
human being whose Presidency is still the biggest stain on our country, not
just because of all the horrible things that Nixon did as President or how some
truly wretched human beings enabled him, but because ever since far too many
future office holders have tried to learn from what he did wrong and find ways
not get caught doing worse things. The idea that even now some on the far-right
will try to excuse Watergate or call it a leftist conspiracy is beyond me at
this point, even as they overlook all the truly horrible things he did every
time another tape is released.
And it was obvious from the
start of his political life, Richard Nixon had the potential for ugliness. From
his first campaign for Congress to his work for HUAC, from his betraying the
California delegation for Eisenhower in 1952 so he could become Vice-President,
to the ugliness of his campaigns as Eisenhower’s attack dog. Is in any wonder
that so many historians remember 1960 campaign with fondness? It’s because in
their minds, good triumphed over evil. (For a while, anyway.)
But there are two small
problems with this narrative. The first in the way the Kennedy machine works:
in the myth of Camelot, the Kennedys are always saints and the people who got
in their way, always devils. This is easier to frame in Nixon’s case than so
many others, but it leaves out the fact that the Kennedys were fundamentally
just as ruthless as their opponents and willing to do anything to win. The
tragedy connected with their legacy causes many to overlook this fact; as we
shall see the Kennedy family may be the only political figures in history who
have a great reputation based more on potential than their achievements.
The second is one of the
dirty secrets of history: the campaign that Richard Nixon waged for President
in 1960 is not only the cleanest one he ever ran, in many ways it was a better
and more effective campaign than the Kennedy clan. It’s not that Nixon did not
make many mistakes that contributed to his defeat; it's that he was making many
of them because he was trying to play, probably for the only time in his entire
political career, as someone determined to offend as few possible as people as
possible and win over as many. There were lessons from his campaign that many
politicians would have done well to take from it had he won. The fact that he
lost (and how he lost) fundamentally meant that Nixon was not the only one who
took the wrong ones from it. In order to understand that we need some
background.
The 1960 Presidential campaign
was significant for many reasons. The most important one, in Nixon’s case, was that
it was the last time that a non-incumbent ever was essentially anointed by his
party with no real competition.
This was not because there
was no opposition to Nixon among the Republicans. Eisenhower himself had been at
best indifferent to his vice president since the slush fund scandal that had
nearly torpedoed Nixon’s career in the 1952 campaign. While as President he
went out of his way to give Nixon more power than any Vice President had ever
had and while Nixon had been forced to have more direct authority due to
several health scares in Eisenhower’s term, this never translated to trust –
famously in 1956, Eisenhower had not-very-subtly tried to get Nixon off the
ticket before the convention. Nixon had done much to improve the image of
himself as a campaigner and a politician throughout Eisenhower’s administration,
but the fact that he was the prohibitive nominee in 1960 was more because of
the rules of the era, and particularly of the GOP ever since World War II –
Nixon was essentially next in line, and that was more or less how the process
went in the GOP until 2016.
It didn’t help matters that
the list of alternatives, which had been relatively deep for the last twenty
years, was practically non-existent. Ever since FDR’s landslide in 1932, the
Republicans had been the minority party in the truest sense of the word. Eisenhower’s
electoral landslides in 1952 and 1956 had been a validation of his immense
popularity rather than that of the GOP; they would only control both houses of
Congress in his first election, and after that Democrat dominance resumed in
huge numbers. The 1958 midterms had been particularly devastating, costing the
GOP thirteen Senate Seats and nearly fifty house seats, giving the Democrats a
margin of almost two to one in both houses of Congress. The Republicans outlook
was grim no matter who they nominated, and they didn’t have many viable
alternatives. The only two real potentials from the 1958 midterms came from
diametrically opposite wings of the party: Nelson Rockefeller, who had become Governor
of New York in a landslide, and Barry Goldwater, who’d managed the biggest
margin of victory in his reelection to the Arizona Senate.
Rockefeller spent much of
1959 seriously considering a run for the Presidential nomination, but when he
tried to find backing for it in the fall, there was no true interest from any
of the major fundraisers or party leaders among Republicans. In November of
1959, he announced he would not even try to run for President, which stunned many
among the press – and which several of Nixon’s campaign team was not happy
about. Part of their strategy was battling with Rockefeller in the primary
season to prove Nixon was electable. Rockefeller’s withdrawal took the wind out
of their sails and meant that all of the news about campaigning for the first
half of 1960 would be dominated by the Democrats, helping whoever the eventual
nominee would be. It certainly helped Kennedy.
At the Republican convention
in 1960, both sides made noises about their ideals. Rockefeller spent much of
the weeks leading up to the convention, threatening to get into the race at the
last minute, and it was only through heated negotiations with the Nixon team about
the platform that he backed off.
The conservative branch of the party – at this
point still just a minority – was not happy with Nixon to begin with and liked
his meetings with Rockefeller even less. Before the convention, they came to
Goldwater, saying that they wanted to nominate him for President and that they
could provide 300 delegates to do so on the first ballot. Barry Goldwater was many
things but he was not idiot; he demanded those same conservatives give him the
names of the delegates. They could only come up with 35, and he told them to
back off. His address to the convention, with the famous words: “Let’s grow up,
conservatives!” was less a declaration of interest for the Presidency and more
of a warning to them about how they should do things going forward. (Much of
the problems with the 1964 campaign was that while conservatives idolized Goldwater,
they did not listen to him.)
Nixon was nominated practically
unanimously by the GOP on July 28th. (10 Louisiana Delegates stubbornly
voted for Goldwater anyway) Knowing how much ground he had lost in the last few
months as well as how bad his reputation was among the electorate in general,
Nixon knew he had to do something to galvanize his campaign. So in his
acceptance speech, he made one of the boldest campaign promises in history:
“What states are you going
to visit? And this is my answer… In this campaign we are going to take no state
for granted, and we aren’t going to concede any states to the opposition.”
It was the first ’50-state
campaign’ (Alaska and Hawaii had just been admitted). And Nixon kept his promise,
engaging in what was probably a far more grueling campaign than even Kennedy did.
Indeed, it was in the midst of this particular grind in September that Nixon
famously injured his knee getting out of a limousine. Rather than halt his
campaign he kept going, despite his appearance and well-being. That was a major
reason that he looked in such poor physical condition prior to the first ever
Presidential debate.
The results of the first
debate has been deconstructed for decades, with most people saying Kennedy won
the debate more because of how he appeared on camera than anything he actually
said during the course of it. Whether or not people who listened on radio actually
thought Nixon may have won is something that has been presumed, though never substantiated.
It is generally more agreed on that Nixon’s performance in the next three
debates was superior to Kennedy’s and that Kennedy performed progressively
worse with each one.
Another contributing factor
is the fact that in October, when Martin Luther King was arrested in Alabama,
Kennedy made some calls to Coretta Scott King and eventually the campaign ended
up contributing to King’s release, leading to a surge in the African-American
vote for Kennedy a month later. It is generally conceded that this decision was
one many in the Kennedy campaign (including Bobby) were opposed to because of
their fear it would cost them the south. It is also conceded that Nixon
considered intervening as well, something that he had more authority to do
being part of the current administration, but in the end decided not to because
he was trying to court the white vote more actively in key states such as South
Carolina and Texas.
This perplexed many at the
time but in hindsight there was a certain logic to it. In Eisenhower’s
landslide elections in 1952 and 1956, he had become the first Republican since Reconstruction
to do well in the South (six states in 1952, eight in 1956)while continuing to
do well in the African-American vote (he averaged nearly 40% in both elections).
Nixon, hard as they may be for those who remember him for the Southern Strategy,
was hoping to build on these gains and absence the immense popularity of his
predecessor, had a far thinner line to walk. As it is, Richard Nixon bares the
very dubious distinction of being the last Republican Presidential candidate to
win more than 30 percent of the African American vote.
Perhaps the biggest distinction
of Nixon’s 1960 campaign compared to every campaign he ever ran previously or afterwards
was how clean it was. In part, this was because Nixon knew how the average voter
and the press considered him, and he was determined to erase this public image
of him. This was not something the Kennedys showed any hesitation of doing –
their campaign was the first campaign for television and in was built less on substance,
all among their man, and how unqualified everybody thought Nixon was (including
Eisenhower’s famous comment about needing a week to come up with a major decision
Nixon had contributed too in his administration.)
Many in his campaign wanted Nixon
to punch back, and it’s not like the Kennedy family didn’t have lots of obvious
material. Leaving aside his womanizing and his health (we’ll get to both of
those deceptions in a future article) there was the fact that the Kennedy
family was everything the average voter railed against. JFK had basically
gotten his Congressional seat because of his father, who had been a bootlegger
with ties to organized crime and was famous for being an isolationist, right up
until Pearl Harbor. Kennedy had no legislation, minor or major to his credit in
either house. He had not voted to censure Joe McCarthy (which many Democrats
had not liked about him) he had limited views on any major issue, including
civil rights and communism. And let’s not forget he was forty-three and a
Catholic, something that almost everyone else in the media was willing to
highlight whenever they got the chance. Most of the Democrats had their own
issues with Kennedy right up until he had snatched the nomination away at the
convention. Nixon could have raised any one of these points, and few could have
argued that it was dirty campaigning any more than it was simply the truth.
Richard Nixon, for the only time in his political career, more or less took the
high ground. The fact that not only lost but no one was willing to give him
credit for it has to have been one of the lessons he took away from the campaign.
Which brings us to one more
point. Despite the fact that Kennedy made all of the right decisions in this
campaign and Nixon essentially made all the wrong ones, it was still the
closest election of the 20th century. Richard Nixon could have made
the argument his strategy had worked: he carried 26 states to Kennedy’s 22
(Alabama and Mississippi had committed to giving their electoral votes to Harry
Byrd regardless of the winner). And in The Making of the Presidency: 1960 Ted
White acknowledges Nixon’s campaign was more successful as part of a general
map: he divided the country into eight regions, and said Nixon carried five.
The three Kennedy carried were New England, the Northeast, and the South. It
was only because many of the states that Kennedy carried were bigger electoral
prizes that Nixon lost. As we shall see in later entries, people only starting
loving JFK after he died. The voters in 1960 only marginally liked him more
than Nixon.
And of course, let’s not
forget one of the biggest things that so many Kennedy fans don’t want us to remember:
Illinois and Texas were basically stolen; the former by the machinations of
Richard Daley; the latter by those of Lyndon Johnson. The most those historians
will argue is that there were ‘some irregularities’ while many contemporary
writers and politicians on both sides knew there was fraud. That actually brings
us to one more point that shows us fundamentally how everybody views Nixon.
At the time, columnists such
as Earl Mazo and Republican legislators like Everett Dirksen urged Nixon to
engage in legal action to contest the vote – something given everything that
happened, he would have been completely justified in doing. Nixon, however,
took the high road again, more or less saying that it was the best thing for
the country. Given all of the election chaos that has unfolded in close
elections in this century, this may have been the noblest thing he ever did. So
naturally, ever since he did it,
historians and pundits have been basically saying that he did so for the wrong
reasons, some just saying he was planning to run again in 1964; the more aggressive
arguing that the Republicans were guilty of fraud on a level as bad as the
Democrats did and Nixon didn’t want it discovered or maybe he didn’t want to be
known as a bad loser. Whatever the reason, the fact that Richard Nixon did not
cause the country to go into chaos and destruction when he did every other time
– always with no justification – is basically treated by historians the same
way God reacts to the idea of a miser who once gave a dollar to a beggar. “Give
him his money back and tell him to go to hell.”
In future articles, I’m
going to deal with what journalists and historians have constructed the myth of
Camelot and what its legacy was. The thing is there’s an ugly side to every
myth. And there’s a very good argument to make that how Richard Nixon
campaigned for elected office in the aftermath of the 1960 election – as well
as so much of the ugliness in the politics that would follow as a result of
Nixon’s strategies and the planning among the GOP faithful as a result of it –
has to be considered a result of this legacy.
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