Fifty years ago, Kennedy and Nixon changed our politics forever

Renew America ^ | 9-26-2010 | Michael M. Bates

[x]

Good point, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower “came out” with the real Nixon views in her 2008 endorsement of the Democratic ticket. After all the Republican Party had done for her family for so long

So does Ron Jr. represent the "real Reagan views"?

[x]

And didn’t the Kennedys help usher Obama’s alleged father as an exchange student from Africa?

Obama said so, but his father got the scholarship before the Kennedys were involved.

Some of the contributors to the program were Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson.

That's a more interesting story ... if you're not a politician ...

[SunkenCiv]

Kennedy looked tanned and rested, while Nixon had been ill and appeared fatigued. The Republican turned down an offer of stage makeup. That may have determined the future of the Nation.

It's often been said that those who listened to it on radio thought Nixon won, while those who watched it on TV thought Kennedy won. I've listened to it (not watched it) on an archival recording (went to the university library, got the dreadful headphones, had to change desks because the plug didn't work, can't believe that all came back to me, lucky you getting to read this minutiae) and also thought Kennedy won it.

He was more prepared, more direct, more poised; at one point Kennedy made some claim about something Nixon said or did in the Senate, and Nixon barked, "I never said that! I never said that!" He came off sounding like a buffoon, which would have been remedied had he prepared some retaliatory bon mot against Kennedy, or even just clarified it cooly and calmly. That wasn't his forté.

Kennedy's remarks in the debate included his statement that the country has to move a bit quickly just to stand still (a Zen koan from the sound of it, referring to the economy). At this point I can't recall whether he drummed a major campaign talking point, that of the "window of vulnerability", a hawkish take on the Cold War which surprises some of the kumbaya set. That hawkish stance was actually Nixon's own window of vulnerability, because Eisenhower had the U2 / Gary Powers incident and the handling of that had been a fiasco; also, Castro had taken over Cuba on Eisenhower's watch, and Eisenhower did just that, stood and watched. Nixon was stuck having to either defend that inertia or try to change the subject.

Of course, Kennedy was born rich (some might argue that he wasn't, because the real fortune came as a result of Joe Sr's gig as the ambassador, during which time he secured an exclusive import license for scotch, and brought it in as Prohibition lifted), went to the best schools, had the best of everything, and after his military service (during which he injured his back, giving him an alibi to be out of the Senate during the vote on McCarthy) never held a job. At all. Of any kind.

Nixon by contrast came up the hard way; had parents who were grocers; lost his own and some investors' capital on a refrigerator car orange juice scheme; lost a brother to TB; wound up a VP to Eisenhower, who couldn't stand him, but distinguished himself by facing down angry mobs in South America, the kitchen debates with Khruschev, and carrying out presidential duties when Eisenhower had his heart attack. There has seldom been a better-prepared president than Nixon.

But he lost in 1960 by about one vote per precinct (average) and lost the California governor race in 1962, then unleashed some ill-considered contempt for the press (ink by the barrel, blah blah blah). I once saw a great clip of Nixon at the 1964 convention, beaming smile, laughing, stomping, clapping, probably during Goldwater's speech, happier than we're used to seeing him. In 1968 in the Pubbie primaries he ran against, hmm, I have no idea; he mended some fences. Meanwhile the Demwits nominated Humphrey, and lost the election by a margin similar to JFK's 1960 win. Strange to think how Kennedy barely won, considering how all-important those debates are sometimes portrayed by the self-serving broadcast MSM.

[justiceseeker93]

I saw the video of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on YouTube yesterday. The duration was just under an hour. Please go to YouTube and type in Kennedy-Nixon and review the video. There were several debates, so it would appear that the events you mentioned were in the later ones, because I didn't notice any major gaffes or uncertainty by Nixon. The first debate was on domestic policy, or at least supposed to be, but Kennedy tried to get Cold War themes thrown into the mix.

[PhilDragoo]

I can see Chet Huntley and David Brinkley as the man moved the number placards on the boards. Very close. Close enough for the graveyards of Cook County to make it The Night of the Voting Dead.

Kennedy talked tough on Cuba and Castro. He had been briefed on Nixon's CIA invasion; the new kid on the block could talk the talk.

But Adlai Stevenson fumed that he'd been humiliated at the UN by exposure of U.S. Fingerprints on the “Cuban” B-26's—and the final raid was disallowed.

Nixon would later use Howard Hunt, to his undoing. Give Us This Day (1973) would explain the rage. McClintock would've said, “You made some people angry; might've got some people killed. Somebody ought to blow your head clean off. But I won't.”

Nixon's refusal to pursue election irregularities in 1960 would be repeated in his refusal to pursue Jane Fonda (Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam, Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, 2002).

Kennedy's NSAM 263 ordered U.S. advisors out at 1,000 per month, complete by January, 1965. He would have dropped LBJ, leaving that piece of work to the woodchipper of the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals.

He would have dropped the waiver of Hoover's mandatory retirement. Detente with Khruschev; demarche with Castro. Test bans, and missiles in Cuba, and out of Turkey. Generals enraged.

The day after the riderless horse was displayed on tens of millions of televisions, Johnson signed NSAM 273.

The next year the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

The following year, November, 1965, Johnson cursed and threw out the Joint Chiefs from their fifteen-minute allotted plea for permission to bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong. The Day It Became the Longest War

We got a six-trillion-dollar War on Poverty, Medicare, and a war micromanaged and constrained to the point wherein 58,000 gave their lives, the commander in chief took Walter Cronkite's word for it that Tet was a victory for the Communists.

Johnson in March of 1968 gave the enemy the strength to persist; Kerry and Ted Kennedy would insure they would win.

I was at the Nixon Library in 1998. There was a section of the Berlin Wall there.

It went up in. . . .let's see. . . .it went up in. . . .uh. . . .

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[smoothsailing]

Just past midnight on the night of August 12-13, 1961

[Impy]

That was the last time the Democrat was more conservative than the Republican

No. That's absurd. Almost as absurd as it would be to suggest that Obama is more conservative than McCain or Bush.

The last time you can make the case that the dem was more conservative was in 1904, Teddy R. and Alton Parker (D), It's been said that "the nominations should have been reversed" (paraphrase). I think it probably would have been a push as to which was more conservative.

Now I have absolutely no love for Dick Nixon. Conservative? No. RINO? Yes. Bad President? i say yes. Commie lover? No. Neither was Kennedy but he was the one in the same party as the commie lovers. And he was the one who had mob ties and stole the election. Nixon being lousy does not make Kennedy good.

Nixon was a big government Republican a step above outright liberals like Nelson Rockefeller and several steps below a good conservative. Kennedy was a rank socialist. A socialist that supported a modest tax cut and didn't love commies but still a socialist. He was every bit the conservative and "moderate Republican" (to quote Bucaneer81) that Joe Lieberman is today. That is to say a broken clock socialist. He's still an icon to liberals to this day.

You've heard of the great society Nick? Kennedy would have passed that crap if he hadn't been killed. If were still alive today he'd be shilling for Obama and praising Obamacare as "my brother's legacy".

Kennedy is absurdly popular due to being deified by the media. So it's become quite the prevalent meme that "Kennedy was conservative", "Kennedy would be a Republican now, unlike everybody else in his damn family expect for in-law socialist "Republican" Arnold Swatzencantspellhisnamegger. According to freeper Billyboy's research this meme popped up around the time of the Bush tax cut when everyone was pointing out that the liberal rat Kennedy lowered the income tax. It morphed into the current meme which is treated as gospel by a shocking number of freepers. It's fun to mess with the rats by claiming their icon as one of us but it's just not factually supported.

If FR and the net existed in 1960 any freeper for Kennedy would have been ridiculed and probably banned.

The 60's were a disaster for the country. It could not have been worse if Nixon had won not had the election stolen from him.

[justiceseeker93]

Here's a question about the 1960 election that has always puzzled me:

It's pretty much agreed that Kennedy stole Illinois from Nixon thanks to the Daley machine in Chicago. But Kennedy got a total of 303 electoral votes, whereas only 268 were needed to win an outright majority of them. Illinois had 26(?) electoral votes, so even if Kennedy hadn't cheated there and lost Illinois, he still had enough to win the national election.

That means that in order to argue that the fraud was decisive and the election was stolen, you would have to demonstrate a decisive amount of chicanery in some other state or states outside of Illinois. What do you know about other states?

[Jakarta ex-pat]

And 99% of the world’s population under 21 probably wouldn’t have a clue who either Kennedy or Nixon were.

[smoothsailing]

“There is no certainty that Nixon won both Texas and Illinois [which
he would have had to to do win the Electoral College vote]. What is
certain, however, is that massive voter fraud on Kennedy’s behalf
occurred in both states. In Texas, Kennedy’s margin of victory was
46,000 votes, but Lyndon Johnson’s Lone Star state political machine
could easily have provided that number. In Illinois, Kennedy won by a
bare 9,000 votes, and Mayor Daley, who held back Chicago’s vote until
late in the evening, provided an extraordinary Cook County margin of
victory of 450,000 votes. No thorough investigation of the massive
irregularities was ever conducted, and partisans of Kennedy and Nixon
still debate the bottom line.”

(From “If It’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat,” by Hugh Hewitt, pages 60-61)

[BillyBoy]

>> That means that in order to argue that the fraud was decisive and the election was stolen, you would have to demonstrate a decisive amount of chicanery in some other state or states outside of Illinois. What do you know about other states? <<

The two states where there was significant evidence of voter fraud were Illinois and Texas.

Despite putting a popular Texan on the ticket (LBJ), Kennedy was still very unpopular with rank and file WASP voters in Texas, and lost the non-hispanic white vote in Texas by a slight margin. In order to put him over the top in Texas, the local Democrats reported large numbers of JFK votes in Hispanic regions of the state, and many of these "JFK voters" were likely illegally cast votes -- either they weren't registered, ineligible vote because they were non-citizens, too young to vote, etc. Kennedy winning the Hispanic regions by decisive margins and having big turnout there put him over the top. There was no question many of those RAT voters were illegal aliens. Had those votes been investigated and illegally cast ballots been discarded, there's little question Nixon would have carried Texas.

In Illinois, the vote fraud in Chicago with the Daley machine reporting in the Crook County totals after the state's other 101 counties had reported their numbers has already been discussed.

A third factor that may have resulted in Kennedy losing the popular vote and electoral vote is that a number of deep southern states in the southeast didn't actually vote "for" Kennedy. A lot of the southern RATs couldn't stomach a Massachusetts elite as their nominee, so they voted for "unpledged Democrat electors" to carry their state, not JFK himself. Therefore, although JFK lead by a slight margin in the "popular vote" nationwide and a decent margin in electoral totals nationwide, it was only because the "unpledged Democrat electors" had their arms twisted and were turned into JFK votes when the electoral college met. If they had been following the wishes of "the people" who voted in that state, they would have awarded the state's votes to an alternate RAT, probably a Dixiecrat, so you'd see numbers like 1948 with another RAT gets a couple dozen electoral votes. Without that chunk of the RAT vote, you could make a good case Nixon would have lead Kennedy in the popular vote.

[Republic of Texas]

This is close to the mark, but it wasn’t an election or a candidate that ruined America, it was, and is, the Media. When the revolution comes, they will have to be the first to go.

[BillyBoy]

http://www.adversity.net/florida/Frame_Fla_Stories/Kennedy_Daley_1960.htm

There were 68 million votes cast in the 1960 election. The margin between the Republicans and the Democrats (Nixon and Kennedy) was a trifling 113,000 (less than 2/10 of one percent!) in favor of Kennedy.

A subsequent investigation of vote fraud in Illinois and Texas revealed the following:

Fannin County, Texas had only 4,895 registered voters. BUT 6,138 votes were cast, 75% of which went to Kennedy.

Angelina County, Texas: In one precinct, only 86 people voted yet the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon.

But Texas refused to conduct a recount. The Texas Election Board consisted entirely of Democrats, and the Board certified John Kennedy the winner in Texas.

[PhilDragoo]

My point being, after Khruschev had taken Kennedy's measure.

Its removal coincided with two different calculations.

Russia rebranded, using Yeltsin.

China struck hard, its 3,000 victims in Tiananmen laid out like a delicatessen.

The missile gap existed--it's just that we had a hundred to their six, six hundred bombers to their one hundred.

Clinton remains close to the levers of power, having given the Chinese our missile secrets via Hughes/Loral in 1995.

A Red October surprise any time between now and January 20, 2013 is the dark matter of the political universe.

[smoothsailing]

My point being, after Khruschev had taken Kennedy's measure

Yep, and found him sorely lacking.

[SunkenCiv]

The liberal liars (sorry for the redundancy) deny that there was any significant amount of vote fraud; furthermore, the anecdote (found in Fawn Brodie’s bio of Nixon) that when Nixon had the party flatfoots look into it, they discovered that a recount would turn up irregularities downstate, which might or might not make the whole thing look worse for the Pubbies. So he just said forget it.

The reason Nixon looked so terrible on TV wasn’t the makeup, it was his having been in an accident during the campaign; when he accepted the nomination, he vowed to campaign in person in all 50 states (as opposed to Obama’s 57 states), and his time off to recover his health screwed up that vow (although he did manage to do it, it was a distraction, and another negative to the partisan hacks who already had begun to dominate the press). That accident was probably the single most important reason for his loss in the election.

[justiceseeker93]

Yes, according to Tom Wicker's bio of Nixon, One of Us, Nixon banged his knee against a car door several weeks before that debate and was hospitalized at Walter Reed for two weeks with a staph infection in the knee. When released from the hospital, he tried to make up for his time lost the with a more intensive travel schedule. So he entered the debate exhausted, appearing pale and gaunt, and supposedly sweated noticeably (although the sweating wasn't all that obvious on the YouTube video I saw; he did not pause to wipe perspiration from his face at all).

[Impy]

(Whoops forgot to reply this thread)

I was gonna say most of the close Kennedy states besides IL (open secret it was stolen at the time, nowadays they don’t bother to deny it they just say “Republicans stole votes downstate”) and TX (40K+ margin but teeming with irregularities and rats had total control of the counting) were suspect. Particularly Missouri, (still home to frequent paper thin rat wins) New Jersey and New Mexico.

Not to mention they needlessless stole Hawaii via recount after Nixon conceded.

And the Dixiecrat situation you mentioned, that was in Alabama. So even in the official count Nixon may have been the legitimate popular vote winner.