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Editor’s Note: This essay is customized from Chris Wallace’s e book, “Countdown 1960.”
The 1960 presidential election modified every part. It was the first to characteristic televised debates between the two major-party candidates. It was the first by which each candidates have been born in the twentieth century. And as is true in the present presidential marketing campaign, the 1960 candidates have been each fascinating characters.
John F. Kennedy – the scion of a wealthy, highly effective household – ran the first actually trendy marketing campaign. Traveling the nation in the “Caroline” – the personal aircraft his father purchased him– Kennedy used subtle polling and tv to deal with voters’ considerations. His marketing campaign took full benefit of Kennedy’s beauty and eager mind.
Richard M. Nixon lacked Kennedy’s glamor. But the sitting vp had a giant benefit in real-world expertise – even confronting Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev face-to-face in the well-known Moscow “kitchen debate.” And he had served eight years below the vastly in style President Dwight D. Eisenhower throughout a interval of peace and prosperity.
But whereas the 1960 marketing campaign is a good political story, full of drama and unbelievable plot twists, that was not the driving power that led me to write down my new e book “Countdown 1960: The behind-the-scenes story of the 312 days that changed America’s politics forever.” No, the purpose I wrote “Countdown” is as a result of of its relevance to the 2020 election – and to the persevering with debate proper now about our electoral course of.
To put it merely: There is nice purpose to imagine the presidential election of 1960 was stolen. And but, in 1960, the candidate who “lost” refused to contest the outcomes and intrude with the peaceable switch of energy. What occurred again in 1960 turns present discuss of voter fraud, rigged elections and the refusal to simply accept the remaining outcomes on its head.
To perceive the distinction, check out what occurred on Election Day, November 8, 1960. The polling margins in at the least seven key swing states have been gone. Kennedy appeared to have a slight lead, however the race was breaking late for Nixon. The remaining distinction in the in style vote was 112,827 – a margin of simply 0.17%.
But it’s what occurred in a number of key states that made the distinction. Kennedy received Illinois and its 27 electoral votes by simply 8,858 votes out of greater than 4.7 million forged. But Kennedy had a giant benefit: the help of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Cook County Democratic machine. As the outcomes got here in on election evening, the vote totals from Republican areas in downstate Illinois have been reported first. The rely from Chicago and Cook County was surprisingly sluggish. But when Daley’s precincts reported, Democrats rolled up “fantastic pluralities” for Kennedy, in keeping with The Chicago Tribune from November 1960.
A single neighborhood in Chicago’s Ward 4 reported 25,770 votes for Kennedy, whereas Nixon obtained 7,120. In Ward 24, Kennedy collected some 24,000 votes to Nixon’s simply over 2,130. But these lopsided margins have been the least of it. In Ward 2, Precinct 50, virtually 80 votes have been forged – although the precinct had solely 22 registered voters. And when Republican election officers tried to research suspicious exercise, they found poll bins have been both empty or lacking.
The exercise in Texas was much more egregious. In the house state of Kennedy’s operating mate, Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Democratic ticket received its 24 electoral votes by 46,266 votes out of greater than 2.3 million forged. But simply take into account the multiple million paper ballots. Texas had created an virtually impossibly complicated system. Voters utilizing these ballots not solely needed to mark their alternative for president, but in addition needed to scratch out the names of all the different candidates they weren’t voting for.
Understandably, 1000's of voters did not observe directions. It was then as much as precinct judges to determine whether or not ballots that weren't absolutely marked needs to be counted – or disqualified. Those election judges have been overwhelmingly Democrats. In Republican-leaning precincts, investigators discovered as much as 40% of Nixon votes have been disqualified. But in Democratic-dominated areas reminiscent of Starr County on the Mexican border, virtually none of the ballots have been thrown out.
With all the proof of irregularities, Nixon got here below appreciable strain to contest the election. Kentucky Sen. Thruston Morton, the Republican Party nationwide chairman, refused to concede defeat and was joined by different high GOP officers. Some historians imagine that behind the scenes, Nixon inspired them to problem the leads to Illinois and Texas and different key states.
But publicly, the vp was loser. At 12:45 p.m. on November 9, when it was clear that Kennedy was the winner, Nixon despatched him a telegram, saying, “I know you will have the united support of all Americans.”
On November 14, Nixon was in Key Biscayne, Florida, recovering from an exhausting and unsuccessful marketing campaign. Kennedy advised a gathering in the pursuits of nationwide unity. Nixon agreed, and after spending an hour with the president-elect, informed reporters he considered their getting collectively for instance of how democracy works, including that it was all about the peaceable transition of energy.
For somebody who lived via the occasions of 1960 (I used to be 13), that's the reason what occurred in 2020 was so deeply stunning. I spent my life figuring out the guidelines of democracy in America. Somebody received, someone misplaced, either side acknowledged it, and we moved on. That’s simply the manner it was.
But 2020 shattered that. And I’m unsure we'll ever return to the identical unstated confidence that our political leaders will settle for the guidelines and abide by them.
I'll always remember the second all of it modified. Around 2:30 a.m. on November 4, 2020 – in the center of election evening – with the race nonetheless far too near name and thousands and thousands of votes nonetheless to be counted, then-President Donald Trump appeared earlier than a crowd of supporters in the East Room of the White House. Fox News, the place I then labored, had projected that Joe Biden would carry Arizona, the first state both social gathering had received in 2016 to be put in the different social gathering’s column in 2020.
“This is a fraud on the American people. This is an embarrassment to our country,” Trump declared. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win the election.”
It wasn’t a fraud, however every part to come back all flowed from there. The dozens of lawsuits; the name to Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes; the effort to place collectively slates of false electors in states Trump misplaced.
If there may be one second that crystallizes the variations between the 1960 and 2020 elections, it was on January 6, the day set by the Electoral Count Act of 1887 for Congress to fulfill in a joint session to tally the electoral votes of every state and for the vp to certify the winners of the election.
On January 6, 2021, Trump summoned a crowd of tens of 1000's of offended supporters to a rally at the Ellipse. “We will never give up. We will never concede,” he informed them. And he gave the crowd their marching orders: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump had been pressuring his vp, Mike Pence, for days to reject the electoral votes for Biden and overturn the election. When Pence introduced he was not permitted to try this below the Constitution, the mob stormed the Capitol, and even arrange gallows exterior whereas chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Contrast that to the occasions of one other January 6, in 1961 – a exceptional day that noticed Nixon presiding over the counting of the electoral votes. Standing on the House rostrum after the rely was full, the voices of members of his social gathering pushing him to contest the election certainly ringing in his ears, Nixon nonetheless famous the second’s core reality: This was the “first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the results of an election in which he was defeated, and announced the victory of his opponent.”
Nixon declared that Kennedy, who was in the House chamber, had been elected president. And he added, “I don’t think we can have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing and respecting institutions of self-government.”
That is why I wrote “Countdown 1960,” and why I believe it has such relevance immediately. Sixty-four years in the past, with the strongest place in the world at stake, and with the distinction between victory and defeat on a razor’s edge, Nixon selected to do the proper factor– what was finest not for himself, however for his nation.
As we now have realized so painfully, that alternative is not assured.
