Thursday, January 19, 2023

The Myths And Truths About Our Historical Figures, The Kennedys, Part 1: What We Don't Talk About When We Remember the 1960 Election

 

 

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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