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Editor’s Be aware: This essay is customized from Chris Wallace’s e book, “Countdown 1960.”
The 1960 presidential election modified the whole lot. It was the primary to characteristic televised debates between the 2 major-party candidates. It was the primary by which each candidates have been born within the twentieth century. And as is true within 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 primary actually fashionable marketing campaign. Touring the nation within the “Caroline” – the non-public airplane his father purchased him– Kennedy used refined polling and tv to deal with voters’ issues. His marketing campaign took full benefit of Kennedy’s attractiveness and eager mind.
Richard M. Nixon lacked Kennedy’s glamor. However the sitting vp had a giant benefit in real-world expertise – even confronting Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev face-to-face within the well-known Moscow “kitchen debate.” And he had served eight years beneath the massively in style President Dwight D. Eisenhower throughout a interval of peace and prosperity.
However whereas the 1960 marketing campaign is a superb political story, filled with drama and inconceivable plot twists, that was not the driving power that led me to put in writing my new e book “Countdown 1960: The behind-the-scenes story of the 312 days that modified America’s politics ceaselessly.” No, the explanation I wrote “Countdown” is due to its relevance to the 2020 election – and to the persevering with debate proper now about our electoral course of.
To place it merely: There may be good motive to consider the presidential election of 1960 was stolen. And but, in 1960, the candidate who “misplaced” refused to contest the outcomes and intrude with the peaceable switch of energy. What occurred again in 1960 turns present speak of voter fraud, rigged elections and the refusal to simply accept the ultimate outcomes on its head.
To know the distinction, check out what occurred on Election Day, November 8, 1960. The polling margins in no less than seven key swing states have been gone. Kennedy appeared to have a slight lead, however the race was breaking late for Nixon. The ultimate distinction within the in style vote was 112,827 – a margin of simply 0.17%.
But it surely’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. However Kennedy had a giant benefit: the assist of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Prepare dinner County Democratic machine. Because the outcomes got here in on election night time, the vote totals from Republican areas in downstate Illinois have been reported first. The depend from Chicago and Prepare dinner County was surprisingly sluggish. However when Daley’s precincts reported, Democrats rolled up “unbelievable 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. However these lopsided margins have been the least of it. In Ward 2, Precinct 50, nearly 80 votes have been forged – though 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. Within the dwelling state of Kennedy’s working 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. However simply contemplate the multiple million paper ballots. Texas had created an nearly 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 opposite candidates they weren’t voting for.
Understandably, 1000’s of voters didn’t observe directions. It was then as much as precinct judges to resolve whether or not ballots that weren’t totally marked must be counted – or disqualified. These election judges have been overwhelmingly Democrats. In Republican-leaning precincts, investigators discovered as much as 40% of Nixon votes have been disqualified. However in Democratic-dominated areas equivalent to Starr County on the Mexican border, nearly not one of the ballots have been thrown out.
With all of the proof of irregularities, Nixon got here beneath appreciable stress to contest the election. Kentucky Sen. Thruston Morton, the Republican Occasion nationwide chairman, refused to concede defeat and was joined by different prime GOP officers. Some historians consider that behind the scenes, Nixon inspired them to problem the leads to Illinois and Texas and different key states.
However publicly, the vp was a very good 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 do know you’ll have the united assist of all People.”
On November 14, Nixon was in Key Biscayne, Florida, recovering from an exhausting and unsuccessful marketing campaign. Kennedy steered a gathering within the pursuits of nationwide unity. Nixon agreed, and after spending an hour with the president-elect, informed reporters he considered their getting collectively for example of how democracy works, including that it was all concerning the peaceable transition of energy.
For somebody who lived by means of 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 foundations of democracy in America. Any person received, any individual misplaced, each side acknowledged it, and we moved on. That’s simply the way in which it was.
However 2020 shattered that. And I’m unsure we are going to ever return to the identical unstated confidence that our political leaders will settle for the foundations and abide by them.
I’ll always remember the second all of it modified. Round 2:30 a.m. on November 4, 2020 – in the midst of election night time – 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 within the East Room of the White Home. Fox Information, the place I then labored, had projected that Joe Biden would carry Arizona, the primary state both celebration had received in 2016 to be put within the different celebration’s column in 2020.
“This can be a fraud on the American individuals. This is a humiliation to our nation,” Trump declared. “We have been on the point of win this election. Frankly, we did win the election.”
It wasn’t a fraud, however the whole lot to come back all flowed from there. The handfuls of lawsuits; the decision to Georgia’s secretary of state to “discover” votes; the hassle to place collectively slates of false electors in states Trump misplaced.
If there’s one second that crystallizes the variations between the 1960 and 2020 elections, it was on January 6, the day set by the Electoral Rely 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 on the Ellipse. “We’ll by no means quit. We’ll by no means concede,” he informed them. And he gave the group their marching orders: “And we struggle. We struggle like hell. And if you happen to don’t struggle like hell, you’re not going to have a rustic 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 do this beneath the Structure, the mob stormed the Capitol, and even arrange gallows outdoors whereas chanting, “Dangle Mike Pence.”
Distinction 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 Home rostrum after the depend was full, the voices of members of his celebration pushing him to contest the election certainly ringing in his ears, Nixon nonetheless famous the second’s core fact: This was the “first time in 100 years {that a} candidate for the presidency introduced the outcomes of an election by which he was defeated, and introduced the victory of his opponent.”
Nixon declared that Kennedy, who was within the Home chamber, had been elected president. And he added, “I don’t suppose we will have a extra hanging and eloquent instance of the soundness of our constitutional system and of the proud custom of the American individuals of growing and respecting establishments of self-government.”
That’s the reason I wrote “Countdown 1960,” and why I believe it has such relevance at the moment. Sixty-four years in the past, with essentially the most highly effective place on the earth 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’ve got discovered so painfully, that alternative is now not assured.