What if Nixon contested the 1960 election?

Nixon contests → Universal madness → Jimmy’s bad day

What?
•Richard M. Nixon, quoted in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

Back in the 1950s Richard Nixon was the wunderkind of American politics. A working-class boy from California, he had won enough money playing poker in the navy during WWII to finance a campaign, running in 1947 as a representative from California—his first foray in to politics, at age thirty-three, which he won. He quickly found himself a national celebrity for his dogged pursuit of preppie spy Alger Hiss. Two elections to the House, one to the Senate, and then Nixon became the second-youngest vice-president in American history, backing Dwight Eisenhower. Under Eisenhower, the US had enjoyed an unprecedented era of prosperity and a relaxation of Cold War tensions; Nixon had traveled far and wide as the international face of the administration, confronting, at the hands of a Venezuelan mob, more mortal peril, perhaps, than any US VP since Aaron Burr when he showed up at a duel to become chapter 18 of IH.

In 1960, when he was Republican candidate for president, he had never lost an election.

But in 1960 he faced another wunderkind. John F. Kennedy had similarly been elected to the House in 1947, and later the Senate—but he was four years younger than Nixon. He had also never lost an election. His wartime career was, if not more honorable than Nixon’s, at least more exciting. He was also much more attractive than Nixon, and filthy stinking rich. 1960 was going to be quite a campaign!

ii. JFK joked with reporters during the campaign that his father had told him, “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary—I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide,” and he was just admitting, in his jocular way, that family money was bankrolling his presidential run. But old Joe Kennedy wasn’t just rich; he was also crooked. When the election results rolled in for what proved to be the closest presidential election ever (by these somewhat complicated rankings), Kennedy’s razor-thin victory came with allegations of massive voter fraud in Illinois (which JFK won by 9k votes) and Texas (46k votes). Those two states would have altered the election.

The old gag runs: When I die I want to be buried in Chicago, so I can remain active in politics. Chicago politics are proverbially dirty, and in 1960 they were under the thumb of Boss Mayor R.J. Daley, famous nowadays for being quoted in Appendix Nun of Illuminatus! as saying “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

Was the 1960 election rigged? I have no idea, and I’m not interested in fighting over it. Probably zero humans alive think Joe Kennedy and Richard Daley would refuse to fix an election if they could, but that doesn’t mean they did it. I don’t even know what was going on in Texas. Certainly in 1960 a lot of people thought the election was rigged, and some of them (including, Nixon claims, Eisenhower) pressured Nixon to contest the results.

Nixon took the high road and refused. He conceded and rode off into the sunset.

iii. You may be thinking, well, the high road doesn’t sound like the Richard Nixon I know. But Nixon could absolutely take a principled and even unpopular stand when he chose to. As a freshman congressman he supported the Marshall Plan when three quarters of his constituency opposed it. In the 1956 election, neither presidential candidate would openly support the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision (not because they actually opposed it, probably, but for political expedience); nor would the Democratic VP candidate (probably because he opposed it); but Nixon was 100% gung-ho for Brown, certainly the most visible American politician to throw his weight behind it.

In his memoirs Nixon gave two reasons for not contesting in 1960. One was that he “could not subject the country” to a situation that gave the appearance of illegitimacy to the American electoral system. The other was that it would make him look like a “sore loser,” rendering him unelectable in the future. You can add a third reason to these two—it probably would have been impossible to do a recount. Texas had no provisions for recounting, and a recount in Chicago would have taken (this is campaign manager Bob Finch’s estimate) a year and half. So for reasons altruistic, self-serving, or merely practical, no challenge to the election took place. Well, there were some challenges here and there, some lawsuits, and Nixon’s two young daughters donated their Christmas money to a Chicago “recount committee”—but nothing carried the imprimatur of the losing party, so nothing came to much. Whatever happened in 1960 stays in 1960.

But Nixon (as later American history shows) hated to lose; what if he’d ignored the three reasons from the previous paragraph and contested the election? Where would America be then?

---

Nixon contests → Universal madness → Jimmy’s bad day

Is everyone but me going mad? Over 40th street, an elephant was drifting.
•Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, Watchmen #5 (1987).

Fortunately, American history has A/B tested this proposition, so we know exactly what would happen. We know because in 2000 there was a similarly close and controversial election, and this time the apparently losing candidate did not concede. There was a recount and he still lost and did not concede. The hand recount he requested would not be completed in time. Possibility for an extension went to the Supreme Court, where in a partisan vote the Court decided not to extend the deadline, de facto ending the challenge to the election. Al Gore got the sunset and George W. Bush became the 43rd US president.

You probably have very strong emotions about all of this, whoever you are. People in 1950 had strong emotions about the Alger Hiss case—when Hiss’s accuser came to Random House to see about publishing a memoir, Bennett Cerf yelled, “Get that son of a bitch out of my office!” (he later relented, and published)—and presumably people in 1960 had strong emotions about the Nixon–Kennedy campaign, and certainly everyone in 2000 had strong emotions. I’m trying to be neutral here. I don’t know if another recount would have changed anything; whether it would have been more fair or less; whether conservative Justices were being unfairly partisan for siding with Bush or the liberal Justices were being unfairly partisan for siding with Gore. All that matters is that Gore, right or wrong, did not concede. That’s our A/B test.

What happened next? Everyone went insane.

ii. Please don’t get mad at me. Maybe there was good reason to go insane! Maybe an election was stolen! I don’t know, and I’m not, please, I’m not trying to relitigate this brouhaha. I’m just here to talk about craziness.

I don’t mean the craziness in foreign policy. What do I know about foreign policy? I’m talking about you and me. We went crazy, remember?

In case you don’t remember this yourself—perhaps you live in another country, or are twenty-five years old—the best way I can describe the domestic madness of the Bush years is this: 2006 saw the publication of a collected edition of the light verse of E.Y. Harburg (most famous for penning Oz’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow”), who had put out some clever little poems in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly attacking religion and the establishment. The 2006 reissue altered, in the topical poems, references to Nixon and Johnson, so they referred not to those presidents but to a man known as “Dubya.”

Harburg, now the author of poems about George W. Bush, had died in 1981.

That captures the spirit of the times; but also people were talking about that election. For the eight years after it, The Comics Journal—not ostensibly a political magazine, just a magazine about comic books—consistently referred to Bush as “the usurper.” Michael Moore won a Palme d’Or at Cannes for a film that suggested Bush’s media connections actually decided the election. Incensed that people might think parts of his film might be open to interpretation, Moore in interviews explained that anyone who did not support him 100% was simply lying.

The obsession never went away. When the 2004 election came around, Harpers, hardly a fringe publication, printed an article by Mark Crispin Miller claiming that this one, too, had been stolen. Robert Kennedy Jr. made the same claim in Rolling Stone. If Miller and Kennedy weren’t crazy yet, they soon would be. Soon everyone would be, including you and me, but these two would be even crazier than we are.

As the Bush years wound down, perhaps you figured things would get saner. But Obama was around the corner, and surely you didn’t think that Republicans were going to let themselves get outcrazied by a bunch of coastal elites?

tip of the hat, o.c., to AstralCodexTen

Presumably you already know that a lot of people, including a future president, became entranced by the possibility that Obama did not legally win the 2008 election because somehow the Democrats had failed to find a viable candidate among native-born Americans and so just picked out a random guy from Kenya. This marked a real upping the ante in the kitty of crazy, but election fraud by now was on everybody’s mind. In 2008 I went to a party; the only person I knew there was my date; some of the attendees tried to get everyone at the party to swear a solemn oath that, should Obama lose the election, we would all “dedicate our lives” to proving the loss had been fraudulent. Such was just the kind of thing you could say to a group of strangers in New York City in 2008.

And after Obama came Trump, who rose to power by making a secret deal with the Russians right? For two years the left assumed that any day now collusion with the Russians would be proved—and presumably the right assumed something similar, considering how much effort they spent establishing that “collusion is not a crime.” Conspiracy is not a crime, either, if what you conspire to do is throw a surprise party for your roommate, but conspiracy can also be a crime, and collusion probably follows similar vectors—but crime or no crime, collusion would prove the election illegitimate.

And here’s where I feel bad. The birther controversy is clearly bughouse wish fulfillment. “Russiagate” is clearly partially true, and even the Mueller Report’s failure to make anything stick only made me revise my estimate that Trump had offered a quid pro quo to Russia in return for election help slightly downward. I feel a little bad that I’m comparing these two situations, but I feel really bad that the election shenanigans I find persuasive are the ones that my demographic wants to be persuasive. It seems…convenient. The common thread from 2000 to 2016 is the fantasy the an election need not be the final word, that some last-minute cavalry action could still save the day. Remember in 2016 how many people were calling for faithless electors to unilaterally make Hillary Clinton president, regardless of traditional election rules? As H.G. Wells once wrote, “Has the world gone mad—or have I?” Should I really be indulging in this fantasy?

Well, things were not about to get better, because in 2020 the exiting president declared himself a secret winner, campaigned more or less openly in a series of perfect phone calls for various election officials to fudge election results, and halfheartedly tried to piggyback himself onto an armed insurrection. Stop the steal, a hashtag. I’m trying to be objective here, but jumping Jehoshaphat on a pogo stick, what can I say? In 2016 I watched as Trump on live TV said that he would only accept election results if he won, and four years later he delivered on his promise.

Mark Crispin Miller, by the way, now maintains that the 2020 loss was also fraudulent, It’s fraud all the way down. RFK Jr. started peddling vaccine conspiracies to third-world nations until his big opportunity arrived to peddle them domestically. Was anyone still sane?

iii. 1960 isn’t exactly like 2000, of course, because the music was better. But the times are remarkably well set up for comparison. Madness in the US after 2000 was stoked by 9/11. Madness in the US after 1960 was stoked by the Cuban Missile Crisis (and later Dealey Plaza). 2000 saw a new medium, the internet, reaching mainstream acceptance (42% of American households used the web at home), trailing behind the new medium of television nearing ubiquity in 1960 (87% of households). A decade of civil unrest just starting in the wake of years of economic security. A hostile Russia looking to flex. Whoever set this experiment up didn’t do it perfectly, but it works pretty well.

So if Nixon refuses to accept the 1960 election? Well, the first thing is (just as in 2000) the challenge will come to nothing. There just wasn’t the infrastructure in 1960 to count things twice. No matter who was “really” got the vote, JFK would still be president.

More importantly, that challenge, once Nixon issued it, would never go away. Once hearts are broken, everyone’s looking to shoot the moon.

(Only one person, I guess, can try to shoot the moon once hearts are broken, but work with me here.)

I suppose the transfer of power to LBJ will go smoothly, if you can call what happened smoothly. But Nixon’s second shot at the presidency will be mired in accusation. Nixon had already earned the nickname “Tricky Dick” and a reputation for low campaigning. He had called foul once before…would he not play foul now? The death of RFK while campaigning (in the primaries) could even be seen as suspicious. Did not Nixon want revenge on the Kennedys for his previous humiliation? Is not Sirhan Sirhan an anagram for Irish Ann Rash (Nixon’s grandmother, of Scotch-Irish descent, had the middle name Ann and perhaps a rash)? How about Raisin Shah, R.N.? Do I have to spell it our for you people?

Perhaps people fret about the fact that Nixon chose his own successor. Gerald Ford was literally not even elected? Is his presidency legit? And look! Jimmy Carter was born in Georgia, which is not even a part of the US but rather a Soviet Socialist Republic! This is a half-truth, but sixteen years into election denialism, half truths are gospel. Twenty years in, we know, the lame-duck one-term president will resort to violence to keep his seat. In IH I made Jimmy Carter nuke the world (in chapter 20), and I chose Carter just because he seemed the least likely candidate to do it, while still being someone who had the power to. If you want to give him a motive for the nukes, though, here it is. Let Reagan (who clearly stole the election; no one really gets landslides like that) be president of a pile of cinders!

I guess Trump could have nuked the world on his way out, but he was president in a post-Cold War world, while Carter had the button always on his mind.

The Cold War, that’s the big difference between 1960 and 2000, and therefor between 1980 and 2020. Whatever benighted hellscape you’re suffering through now, if Nixon had called for a recount you’d instead be in IH chapter 20 (q.v., o.c.)

.

References: JFK joked; Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus! (Dell, 1988) p. 802; in his memoirs: Nixon, RN p. 224; Bob Finch’s estimate: Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (Regency, 1993) p. 290; “recount committee”: Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster, 1987) p. 644; Bennett Cerf; Harburg, Rhymes for the Irreverent (FFRF, 2006) pp. 42 & 138; Harper’s; Rolling Stone; Wells, The Invisible Man (Harper & Bros., n.d.) p. 153; Miller (I didn’t link directly to Miller’s blog because I didn’t want some pingback to lure his followers to me, but I’m sure you can find it). Picture by Herblock.