Posted on 11/10/2013 11:05:54 AM PST by SeekAndFind
On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States in a bitter contest against the incumbent Vice President, Richard Nixon. It was one of the closest elections in American history, and some people still doubt its outcome.
The New York Times called the election for then-Senator Kennedy just before midnight. NBC News didn’t call the race until 7 a.m. the following morning. All night, the newly empowered national television networks had forecast that Kennedy was leading, but in a race that was too close to call.
In 1990, the late John Chancellor recalled the chaos at times at NBC, when the network was relying on new computer technology to decide the winner.
“I think it was about 2 in the morning Eastern time when we began to think Kennedy might pull it out, and then the computer, which was very cumbersome in those days, began to say ‘Kennedy wins, Kennedy wins,’” Chancellor told the Los Angeles Times.
“I found out later on it was after midnight Eastern time when the Nixon people began saying, ‘It looks pretty bad,’ and then the Kennedy people began to say, ‘Not so bad.’”
Kennedy’s rise in politics began at a young age. In 1946, he ran for the House of Representatives at the age of 29 and won. His older brother had been expected to be the family’s political standard bearer, but he was killed in action during World War II.
Kennedy was elected three times to the House and two times to the U.S. Senate before becoming president in 1961, and he had more national political experience than our two most recent presidents. Health problems did keep Kennedy from attending Congress for some periods.
The race between Kennedy and Nixon had been close all fall. The candidates were tied in a late August Gallup poll, and Kennedy took a three-point lead after his historic TV debate performances. But Nixon gained momentum heading into Election Day, and he cut Kennedy’s lead to one percentage point in a poll taken four days before the election.
Kennedy defeated Nixon when votes were finally counted in the Electoral College, by a margin of 303 to 219. But in the popular vote, Kennedy won by just 112,000 votes out of 68 million cast, or a margin on 0.2 percent.
So arguments persist to this day about vote-counting in two states, specifically Illinois (where Kennedy won by 9,000 votes) and Texas (where Kennedy won by 46,000 votes). If Nixon had won those two states, he would have defeated Kennedy by two votes in the Electoral College.
That fact wasn’t lost on Nixon’s supporters, who urged the candidate to contest the results. At the time, Kennedy was also leading in the critical state of California, which was Nixon’s home state. But a count of absentee ballots gave Nixon the state several weeks later, after he conceded it to Kennedy.
In Illinois, there were rampant rumors that Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley used his political machine to stuff the ballot box in Cook County. Democrats charged the GOP with similar tactics in southern Illinois. Down in Texas, there were similar claims about the influence of Kennedy’s running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, over that state’s election.
On Wednesday afternoon, November 9, 1960, Nixon officially conceded the election to Kennedy. He told his friend, journalist Earl Mazo, that “our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.” (Mazo had written a series of articles about voter fraud after the 1960 election, which he stopped at Nixon’s request.)
In later years, Nixon also claimed in an autobiography that widespread fraud happened in Illinois and Texas during the 1960 election.
However, despite Nixon’s requests and decisions to not ask for a recount, the Republican Party had other ideas. In 2000, historian David Greenberg recounted the GOP’s efforts to contest the election in an article for Slate.
Greenberg said it was Mazo who helped to publicize the idea that voter fraud cost Nixon the election, and that Republican officials pursued recounts and investigations in 11 states. In the end, Nixon wound up losing the state of Hawaii to Kennedy after the recounts.
But that doesn’t mean that Daley didn’t affect the outcome in Illinois.
“The GOP’s failure to prove fraud doesn’t mean, of course, that the election was clean. That question remains unsolved and unsolvable,” Greenberg said.
Another historian, Edmund Kallina, has conducted extensive research into a Chicago vote recount, and he concluded the discrepancies weren’t wide enough to decide the election.
In a 2010 interview, Kallina said in the long run, the close election changed politics by forcing parties to focus on the Electoral College, while fueling partisanship at the same time.
-- Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
RE: nixon personally killed jfk to win in 68 how much more obvious can it be
Why would Nixon bother? JFK would have been term limited in 1968. It would have made more sense to kill KBJ.
Lots of big changes and historic events in the 60s. The U.S. has never been the same since. My Dad is on the right looking towards Kennedy and his good partner is looking directly at the camera at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
He was very involved in providing security for national and world dignitaries of all stripes. Not long after this photo was taken, things started getting pretty ugly. Him and his partners seemed to know what was coming.
I wonder if a 1960 Nixon presidency would have been better than a 1968 presidency?
Had Nixon not spent the 8 years before his election knowing that he was cheated, and knowing no one else stood up for him, would he have served without the manifest paranoia he had knowing that he would be attacked at every turn and defended at none?
Yup.
And Illinois came free.
Actually, when I was little, I remember the entire time. Everyone around spoke in VERY hushed tones that Johnson had him killed because Johnson was shortly to be indicted for murder. Kennedy was in Texas to try to heal the party’s divisions.
The changing of the route. The replacement of certain Secret Service. The slowing of the car to 2-3 mph. The perfect triangulation where the shooting took place.
And then, the complete cover up. All the way up the chain. This included Johnson, but anyone in a position of power could have been a part of this, including Earl Warren and his kangaroo commission.
There’s a good piece in the NYPost today about how his assassination led the Dems to start the blame America syndrome and to lionize Kennedy as a paragon of liberal ideals, In actual fact he was more conservative than Nixon. Both men were Cold Warriors but Nixon was a New Dealer, having worked in the federal govt after law school, while Kennedy came from a family that hated FDR. The regulatory state in which we live as serfs was begun in the Nixon Administration. OSHA, the EPA, wage and price controls, all began with Nixon. Nixon to his credit was on board with civil rights before Kennedy who was only pushed into it by events like Meredith and Ole Miss.
you can only say kennedy would be term limited since that is history and anyways a very successful two term kennedy who didnt put us balls to the walls in viet nam could have very well been followed by another two term kennedy and on the other hand i wanted to kill kbj but how far can you get in a radio flyer holding a red ryder when mom dint even pack a lunch
Whatever one thinks of Joe Kennedy and the Kennedy clan, JFK, despite all his faults, was a lot better president than the last four that we’ve had.
Four includes Poppa Bush?
I'd say he was definitely better than Kennedy.
say it all you want people only hear what they want to hear
The proof I got that Nixon should have won came with that poll following the debates; those who watched on TV thought Kennedy won, and those who listened on radio thought Nixon had won.
Once again, substance was trumped by style.
“I was always under the impression that the height of Joe Kennedy’s manipulation was the West Virginia vote.”
That was in the primary.
“Bobby Kennedy would have made a better president than Jack.”
I respectfully disagree. Bobby Kennedy was a punk with a chip on his shoulder. He was widely known as a ruthless SOB.
“Whatever one thinks of Joe Kennedy and the Kennedy clan, JFK, despite all his faults, was a lot better president than the last four that we’ve had.”
I agree with that, and JFK was just a mediocre president.
Except Nixon was actually beaten by vote fraud — algore was unhappy because his own vote fraud was thwarted.
That’s debatable. But, I would have to say that NWO Poppa Bush, at least, was competent. Read my lips and the beginning of the peace dividend reduction of our military brings him down a few pegs below Kennedy as I see it.
Possibly, you are right, but it was Bobby who persuaded Jack to stand up for the civil rights bill. JFK had no real interest in civil rights issues and didn’t even really know any Black outside of the ones who worked on the family estates.
It was also Bobby Kennedy’s idea to go after the syndicate.
It is really difficult to know because everything that we learned was so heavily filtered through the newspapers and tv reporting.
I was watching a speech Kennedy gave while in Dallas just before he was assassinated — he shames most modern politicians with the richness of his vocabulary and the content of his political philosophy. Say what you will, he would be conservative today, probably what we would call a national security conservative.
Does anybody think the courts in Chicago were going to give him an even break if he had?
Richard Nixon walked away from the Presidency twice. Once in 1960 and the other after the set-up of Watergate 1974. In a fascinating book titled ‘Watergate Amendment’ Review:
http://lasvegas.informermg.com/2013/10/29/book-review-the-watergate-amendment-by-john-fitzgerald/
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