Nixon's Secret (24 page)

“LBJ and Lady Bird could have gone through the lobby and got on that elevator in five minutes,” said D. B. Hardeman, an aide to House Speaker and Texan Sam Rayburn, “But LBJ took thirty minutes to go through that crown, and it was all being recorded and photographed for television and radio and the newspapers, and he knew and played it for all it was worth.”
95

The shift of Illinois and Texas, where victory was indeed stolen from Richard Nixon, would have elected Nixon president. The selection of Lyndon Johnson would both guarantee Kennedy’s election and his murder in Dallas as Johnson, on the verge of federal indictment and prison for corruption engineered the killing of the president in the city where LBJ controlled the investigation. LBJ would helm a plot that yoked a coalition of interests who needed JFK gone including the CIA, the Mob, and big Texas oil. Those interested in this history should read
The Man Who Killed Kennedy—the Case Against LBJ
.

There are those who have argued that, as some measure of fraud has been documented on both sides of the campaign, we must conclude the race as a wash. This is a deliberately misleading reporting of the truth—that the Kennedy-Johnson fraud campaign in 1960, particularly with the aide of organized crime, was of such substantial size as to have stolen the presidency for Kennedy. Theodore White, friend of the Kennedy family and originator of the Camelot mythos through which we have enshrined Kennedy, admitted in his book
Breach of Faith
, regarding the downfall of President Nixon, “Democratic vote-stealing had definitely taken place on a massive scale in Illinois and Texas (where 100,000 big-city votes were simply disqualified); and on a lesser scale elsewhere.”
96

White was not alone in believing the Kennedys stole the election; among those who recognized the truth was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Shortly after sending a brief congratulatory note to President-elect Kennedy, Hoover called Philip Hochstein, editorial director of the Newhouse group of newspapers, and “mounted a tirade accusing the Kennedys of having stolen the election in a number of states [and] would Hochstein join the effort to reverse the election results?”
97
Shortly after President Kennedy took the oath of office, the FBI’s special agent in charge in the Chicago office reported back to the Justice Department that it was his belief that the election had been stolen for Kennedy.
98
Unsurprisingly, no action was taken in response to the report.

JFK may even have lost the popular vote. Five states—Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama—flirted with running unpledged slates of Democratic electors in an effort to throw the election into the House. This was a reaction to the civil rights plank adopted by the Democrats in Los Angeles. Alabama ended up with five electors pledged to Kennedy and six unpledged. Mississippi would run both a Kennedy and an unpledged slate of electors. In those states voters were asked to vote for specific electors rather than casting their votes for Kennedy or Nixon. Political scientists have continued to argue about how votes should be counted and distributed because of the peculiar and arcane nature of the clash in which the diehard segregationists Democrats in the South sought to block JFK from winning the electoral votes in their states by trying to block out the national Democrats and run slates of “unpledged” electors. Fifteen of these renegades would ultimately vote in the Electoral College for Harry F. Byrd Sr. The complexity of this disagreement on how the votes should be cast is addressed in an outstanding monograph by Sean Trende of
Real Clear Politics,
which is reproduced in Appendix 4. At least one reasonable method of counting the vote results in a Nixon victory of approximately sixty thousand votes nationally. This was the methodology initially used by
Congressional Quarterly
in their reporting, only to be amended after Kennedy was declared the popular vote victor by the mass media of the day. The election of 1960 was so close that Nixon
may
have won the popular vote.

In 1960, the records tell us that Sen. John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in an incredibly close popular vote, 34,220,984 to 34,108,157, a difference of only 112,827 votes. Unfortunately, this is wrong. In fact, it would be
Kennedy
who would lose to Nixon in a photo finish.

Party conservatives would feel that Nixon had pulled his punches in the race with Kennedy and had wasted time in urban northeastern states like Pennsylvania and New York, instead of spending more time in the Deep South. “If all Republicans had worked as hard as did those in the South, we would have won the election hands down,” he said. “If we had taken Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, and had done better in the rural areas of Alabama and Georgia, we could have had an almost solid South,” proclaimed Barry Goldwater.
99
The Arizona Senator could not deduce why black Americans leaned Democratic, but to Goldwater, it was a problem that could have been avoided by utilizing resources elsewhere. “If you are going hunting for ducks, you go where the ducks are,” Goldwater said.
100

The negative reaction from the conservative wing of the party was rooted in the “Sellout of Fifth Avenue,” the secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, which Goldwater had alternatively dubbed “the Munich of the Republican Party.” The meeting was perceived by many on the right as a double-cross, an act of treason that would not wash off easily after the narrow loss. Nixon had lost because he had subscribed to “me-too Republicanism” in lieu of a hard-hitting Republican Party platform. The votes were hardly in the ballot box when Goldwater, who had supported Nixon in the days preceding, went on the attack. Nixon had offered conservative voters “an insufficient choice,” in the words of Goldwater. “There wasn’t enough difference between the two candidates’ position,” he said. “Had Nixon started banging away at Kennedy’s domestic proposals he would have won. Every time Kennedy said something about federal aid, Dick said something about federal aid. But the people felt that if we’re going to have a welfare state, let’s have a president whose whole experience is in the welfare state field and whose whole philosophy is welfare state, rather than one whose party had worked against the idea.”
101

Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire echoed the Goldwater assessment that Nixon had mollified liberals and handled Kennedy with kid gloves. In Bridges’s view, Nixon could have won “if he had slugged hard enough against Kennedy in the last three weeks of the campaign.”
102

Though Goldwater was critical of Nixon’s strategy, he too thought the election had been stolen out of Republican hands by the depraved and power-hungry Lyndon Johnson. “You can’t discount Johnson in this thing,” Goldwater said. “With the tactics he used, we don’t know whether we lost Texas or not. I don’t think we did. I think Texas might have been stolen, frankly. I was through that state too much and too often to believe that they could have switched in the last ten days to the extent that the vote count showed they did.”
103

In the end, it would have taken only twenty-eight thousand Texans and four thousand Illinoisans to shift the electoral vote victory to Nixon. Kennedy ended up with 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219. The shift of Illinois and Texas would have made the difference. Nixon had come roaring back, and they robbed him. Victory was stolen from Richard Nixon.

Vice President Nixon repeatedly declared himself “convinced that wiretapping had been a key weapon in the Kennedy arsenal during the campaign of 1960.” In old age he still talked of how he had been “victimized by all kinds of dirty tricks.” Nixon said Robert Kennedy “was the worst. He illegally bugged more people than anyone. He was a bastard.”
104

NOTES

1
.     Leonard Garment,
Crazy Rhythm
, p. 77.

2
.     Richard Whalen,
Catch the Falling Flag
, p. 14.

3
.     “The First Kennedy-Nixon Debate—1947,”
http://coloradopols.com/diary/14886/the-first-kennedy-nixon-debates-1947
.

4
.     Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 202.

5
.     David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, p. 49.

6
.     Kate Milner, “Flashback: 1960 Kennedy Beats Nixon,”
BBC News
, Nov. 9, 2000.

7
.     John Davis,
The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster
, p. 151.

8
.     Richard Whalen,
Catch the Falling Flag
, p. 108.

9
.     Stone, Roger Stone, “Did JFK Steal the 1960 Election?”
The Stone Zone
, Dec. 7, 2010.

10
.   Victor Lasky,
It Didn’t Start With Watergate
, p. 42.

11
.   White House Recording, Friday, Sept. 15, 1972.

12
.   Jeff Shesol,
Mutual Contempt
, p. 34.

13
.   Jeff Shesol,
Mutual Contempt
, p. 35.

14
.   Ralph Martin,
Seeds of Destruction
, pp. 196–197.

15
.   Jeff Shesol,
Mutual Contempt
, p. 40.

16
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
(Kindle Locations 13336-13339).

17
.   Charles Higham,
Howard Hughes: The Secret Life.

18
.   Letter from Richard Nixon to Roger Stone.

19
.   
http://millercenter.org/president/nixon/essays/biography/2
.

20
.   Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power, p. 212.

21
.   Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin,
George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
, p. 256.

22
.   Victor Lasky,
It Didn’t Start With Watergate
, p. 44.

23
.   Carl Solberg,
Hubert Humphrey: A Biography
, p. 209.

24
.   Elizabeth Shermer and Tandy Barry,
Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape
, p. 150.

25
.   Christopher A. Preble, “Who ever believed in the ‘missile gap?’ John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
, Dec. 1, 2003.

26
.   Edmund Kallina,
Kennedy v. Nixon
, p. 108.

27
.   Edmund Kallina,
Kennedy v. Nixon
, p. 109.

28
.   Edmund Kallina,
Kennedy v. Nixon
, p. 155.

29
.   Jeffrey Frank, “When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon were Friends.”
The Daily Beast
, Jan. 21, 2013.

30
.   Herb Klein,
Making It Perfectly Clear
, p. 308.

31
.   Tom Wicker,
One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream
, p. 242.

32
.   Ibid. p. 108.

33
.   Ibid. p. 236.

34
.   Richard Nixon,
Six Crises
, p. 307.

35
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, pp. 205–206.

36
.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, p. 386.

37
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 205.

38
.   Tom Wicker,
One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream
, p. 244.

39
.   Ibid.

40
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, pp. 204–205.

41
.   Tom Wicker,
One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream
, p. 245.

42
.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, p. 226.

43
.   Marvin Liebman,
Coming Out Conservative
, p. 148.

44.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, p. 227.

45.   Richard Kleindienst,
Justice
, p. 37.

46.   Richard Kleindienst,
Justice
, p. 28.

47
.   Richard Kleindienst,
Justice
, p. 29.

48
.   Ibid. p. 27.

49
.   Ibid. p. 27.

50
.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, pp. 228–229.

51
.   David Pietrusza,
1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon
, pp. 228–229.

52
.   “Walter H. Judd, 95, Missionary to China and U.S. Representative,”
New York Times
, Feb. 15, 1994.

53
.   Letter from Richard Nixon to Walter Judd, Aug. 16, 1988.

54
.   
Time
, March 20, 1964.

55
.   Christopher Matthews,
Kennedy & Nixon
, p. 144.

56
.   David Folkenflik, “When Kennedy Overran Nixon,”
The Baltimore Sun,
Oct. 1, 2000.

57
.   Theodore White,
The Making of the President
, 1960, p. 258.

58
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, pp. 204–205.

59
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
(Kindle Locations 4944-4954).

60
.   Ibid. p. 207.

61
.   Richard Whalen,
Catch the Falling Flag
, p. 14.

62
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 206.

63
.   Christopher Matthews,
Kennedy & Nixon
, p. 148.

64
.   David Greenberg, “Rewinding the Kennedy-Nixon Debates,” Slate, Sept. 24, 2010.

65
.   Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power
, p. 208.

66
.   Ibid.