How Can Richard Nixon Win the Presidency in 1960? (And Keep It)

I read a dozen biographies of Nixon by learned men and still feel like I don't have much of a handle on the man. But here are my hot stove takes on him as it relates to 1960 and beyond. I think the 1960 election was not a Kennedy win but a Nixon loss.

Yes, there were some weird things that went on in Texas and Illinois, but, um, it's Texas and Illinois and you got an (R) after your name and running against LBJ and Daley. I mean, honestly. How can any human being as the Vice President of the United States deal with the Senate and not walk away with the feeling that the Majority Leader of it (LBJ) would not kill your grandmother and boil her bones in front of you if it meant winning a race, any race, much less the race for the White House? And Daley is... The guy supported Truman and fought for him back when all thought Truman was a goner (including Daley's then boss), just because he believed in Party loyalty. The dead have always voted in Chicago and they have voted Democrat.

And arrayed against this skulduggery... Nixon goes to Alaska, to keep his silly pledge to visit all states. *Sigh*

Yes, Ike did not help, for a lot of reasons, but in the end Ike did cotton on that if he did not help Nixon it would besmirch his (Ike's) reputation, as a man could not ride his coattails (which were not as wide or long as Ike really thought).

We can talk Kennedy money, machine and dirty tricks (Dick Tuck really deserves his own alcove in the Church of Dirty Campaigning), but Nixon could have run better and did not, and that loss and his inability to deal with it unleashed a lot of "demons."

But Nixon in '60 as President would have been an odd duck. Many have written timelines on that presidency here, and had their takes. I am not sure I can, because it is hard for me to imagine a Nixon who is not haunted by the loss in 1960. It's a bit like picturing Poe without the mustache, even though he did not have it for the majority of his life. It defined the man.

Nixon's take on civil rights was... curious. I do not know what he felt about it. I read the bios, listened to the tapes, read his self serving memoir and the memoirs of his cronies, and watched them talk about it on documentaries and still have no notion of what he really felt. Nixon was a blurter. And he would blurt dumb as dog shit things. And then do the opposite of what he would say. You could not take what he said at face value. But judging him by his actions alone is also hard, because everything has to be weighed in the time and context of it. For instance, EPA. For years, I believed that Nixon really gave a shit about the environment. That even though elected by pro-business interests he decided that they need regulating and as a California man he had that unique touch of being conservative on a lot of things, but liberal on others. That belief and quirk of his personality was enshrined in a lot of books I read as well, until some learned fellows pointed out that Nixon only started giving a shit about EPA once it became clear (to him) that Muskie was using the environment and the support for it to make himself the front runner for the Democratic Party nomination. So, to forestall the Dems from using environment as an issue, Nixon waded into it. So there went that image.

Domestic agenda bored Nixon to tears. It was the petty bullshit of Congress that he had to wade into to promote his Party and ensure his chances, and yet... I think he gave a shit about health care based on his (not entirely accurate) childhood memories of the family dealing with the fear of poverty due to medical bills for his brother's treatment. He also did not reject the Great Society, but merely wanted to limit some of its parts. Then again, how is that argument any different from what the Tories said after Labour started creating the welfare state in the '50s, or how the Repubs ran against FDR in the '30s, when they argued that they will not dismantle what their predecessor created. But would they have created that which they promised not to dismantle?

Vietnam would have been a lodestone. McNamara once postulated that it is a war that the American people could not understand because it had no true beginning. Nixon would have waded into it and there is no telling if he would have made things worse or better and how many (more or less) people would have died.

Cuba was... Nixon said a lot of strange things about Cuba and some poignant things as well, and he was as I said a blurter, capable of saying something really bizarre and then his closest aides would nod sagely and ignore it. How would he have dealt with Castro? Probably as badly as Kennedy. How he would have dealt with Khrushchev? Hard to say. Nixon has always claimed he understood the Commie mind. And on the surface of it, his bromance with Brezhnev shows some of it. As does his going to China at the height of the Sino-Soviet split. But how would he have handled the Crisis? I have no idea.

One really strange thing must be said, I do not see De Gaulle pulling out of NATO with Nixon in the White House. Nixon rated De Gaulle in the holy trinity of politicians, along with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He would have bent over backwards to help out De Gaulle come to an understanding. Meanwhile, for his part, De Gaulle liked Nixon. So take that for what it's worth.

One butterfly the size of Mothra here, if Nixon wins in 1960, it derails Goldwater. Goldwater's faction was being propelled by the notion that a middle of the road Nixon lost in 1960 because he wasn't hardline enough. And thus the '64 beer hall putsch of the Repub Party nomination. Oh sure there would be right-of-Nixon candidates, but with Nixon sitting on the throne, he would have squashed these rebellions and consigned opposition within the Party to the fringe.

Race relations... this is a separate subsection of civil rights... Nixon's views and actions were contradictory. And I am not sure how long he could have sat on the fence or said one thing and done another with what was going on in the '60s. In '67, I believe he read the tea-leaves and made a conscious effort to withdraw from public life and hid out in his NYC firm because he saw the lit fuse to the powder keg in Detroit and other places. I don't think he would have been able to hide in the White House as effectively as he did in his private life. He would have had to have taken stances and here he would have waffled until the last second and then committed himself to it at the eleventh hour and blundered and then gotten it right and then agonized over it. I have no idea how it would have ended up.

Drinking and pills. Nixon's view on booze was as contradictory as anything, but it did not take him much to get plastered. The pills were another thing. He suffered from insomnia and experimented with whatever bullshit his rich pals suggested. Nixon went weak at the knees around successful self-made men who professed to him how they overcame their weaknesses. I think everything from meth to anti-epileptic seizure medication would have been on the table. He had around him quacks and marks that would make Hulk Hogan blush and go, "You need to see real doctors, brother." Reverend Billy Graham once opined that the downfall of Nixon were sleeping pills and demons. Would have the '60 election win reduce some of those demons, or at least not make them shout as loud? And would have the win helped him sleep at night? It's tough to say. Once again, I have such a vivid image of Nixon haunting the White House, railing against JFK portrait, with a highball in hand that I can't picture a smiling Nixon strolling by, whistling and saying goodnight at eleven o'clock. And yet... he did try to be happy. He had a habit of turning on all the lights when he would come home to cheer up his young daughters and putting on a record and singing along with tunes, because he wanted to not be miserable. So...

With Kennedy defeated, the Democratic party would have had its own moment of reflection. I think LBJ would have gone for it and he would have broken enough bones and boiled enough grandma bones to get it. The '64 Nixon-LBJ showdown would have been something, unless LBJ suffers a panic and decides to hold off until '68. The idea of Nixon-LBJ in '64 would probably make more than a few people disgusted enough with politics to stay away and maybe, just maybe, some kind of third party would develop, with Wallace also lurking in the shadows.

Triple H from Minnesota would have been in a quandary. He was the guy tagged with "too liberal" tag in 1960, but if LBJ takes the nom in '64, he might have tried to coopt Humphrey, or Humphrey might have stayed away and been the reconciliation candidate in '68.

One thing we cannot safeguard against is Agnew or some other horrid mediocrity crawling onto Nixon's ticket. One of the goofier aspects of Nixon's '68 win is the transition process. It was a cluster. At one point, Nixon's campaign lit upon the idea of sending out a questionnaire to Who's Who and literally asking them to name suggestions for who they would like to see in the Cabinet. Now, granted, in 1960, he would have had Ike's team to pick from, so it would have gone smoother, but Nixon's organizational skills were not high and the prospect of Agnew or some other sop to the ignorant, insane or incompetent could well have happened.

In conclusion, I'd love for someone to write this up and address what I said above, because while I have toyed with a Nixon '68 timeline that addresses some of this... I did not toy with Nixon in '60, because I have a hard time picturing that, because of the books I read about the Nixon brooding over '60.

Greg Grant, here, does what we think most historians would do: set us, as ourselves, as we are Now, in the past.

What I get out of this AWESOME diatribe is this: a Nixon who wins in 1960 would have been far more driven to the center of American political opinion, far less angry about American institutions like the Free press, and far more willing to address the need for social policies that reflected the needs of ordinary people more clearly, overall, irrespective of race or natural origin. R.M. Nixon, as a winner in 1960, would have had no reason but to promote Civil Rights as a necessary gesture of the General Welfare clause of the constitution, and nobody can argue that Kruschev would NOT have dealt with Nixon differently than he did with Kennedy, in the matters of Cuba, Berlin, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Palestinian nationalism, the Turkish role in NATO, and the political dynamics of the ruling class in South Vietnam, IN SHORT, a less traumatic 1960's.

Okay, haters....prove me wrong.
 
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I believe that you are mistaken with how National vote totals translate to state results. Nixon doing half a point better nationally doesn't mean he does half a point better in each state. Half a point nationally means 2 points in this state, three in that state, 1 in these others, no change in those. In today's electoral map, if the candidates are at about 50% each, the contested states are OH, FL, and PA. If the Democrat is at 53%, he is contesting KY, VA, and AZ. At 55%, more states are in play. If Nixon increases his percentage by 0.5%, he gets over 50% of the vote and probably carries all 5 of the states you mentioned. Maybe not IL but that's a special case.

But there's another side to it: he could do half a point better nationally and actually lose some electoral votes he got in OTL. (If doing half a point better means he gains by 2 or even 3% in some states, it could also mean he loses 1.5 or even 2.5% in others.)
So for example a running mate designed specifically to appeal to the South might considerably strengthen Nixon in the South and might thereby help him by 0.5% nationally (though I doubt very much he would do either.) But he might also cost Nixon California (which indeed he at first seemed to have lost in OTL; only absentee ballots showed that he had carried the state by 0.5%).

In any event, I cannot think of any vice-presidential candidate who would improve Nixon's showing by 2 or 3% (or indeed I would say 1%) in any state other than maybe the running mate's own state.
 
Dave,

I thought in '56 Ike offered him anything but State or Defense (what else was there?) In Stephen Ambrose's biography (vol 1) and in "Nixonland" it's been a while since I read both, am I not remembering correctly?

Nixon being Nixon, would never take a demotion (wisely in this case.)
You could be right.
 
And arrayed against this skulduggery... Nixon goes to Alaska, to keep his silly pledge to visit all states. *Sigh*

Alaska was a closely contested state, Nixon's trip there may have made the difference in his narrowly carrying it (a campaigning appearance probably has more effect in a small than in a large state), and there are perfectly plausible scenarios where its three electoral votes would be decisive.

For example, Nixon does a bit better in the Midwest than in OTL and carries (besides the states he carried in OTL) IL (27 electoral votes), MO (13) and MN (11). That would leave him with 270 electoral votes--more than is necessary to win. BUT if he lost Alaska, that would reduce it to 267 electoral votes--and the race most likely goes into the House...

And if we're talking about candidates wasting time campaigning in the "wrong" state: If JFK had lost in 1960, we would be asking: What the heck was he doing campaigning in Oklahoma on November 3? http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=60384 (Yes, I know Oklahoma was Democratic in most state and local elections in those days. But it had easily gone for Ike in both 1952 and 1956--despite farmers' grumbles about Ezra Taft Benson in the latter year--and was one of the more anti-Catholic states in the Union. It wasn't expected to be close, and it didn't turn out to be close. https://en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_presidential_elect… )
 

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
My POD of choice for 1960 would be for JFK to not react to Martin Luther Kings arrest, something that gave him a civil rights credibility out of the blue.

I can't do the math on tge electoral college to see if Nixon by keeping the Afro-American vote that he lost days before the election can win.

But maybe that is enough.
 
It is undoubtedly true that if Nixon had done as well with African Americans in 1960 as Ike had in 1956--and nothing else changed from OTL--he would have won. At the very least, he would have won IL, MO, and NJ--and those three states by themselves would be enough for an Electoral College majority.

OTOH, I question whether it was the phone call to Mrs. King by itself that caused the increase in the African American vote for JFK vis-à-vis Stevenson's 1956 showing. Two things to remember: (1) In 1956, Stevenson was going out of his way to appease the South with "moderation" in civil rights. This was resented by many African American leaders, and was used by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. of Harlem as a reason to endorse Eisenhower (though some said Powell's real motive was to get Ike to drop a tax case against Powell...) (2) Most important, 1956 was a year of relatively low unemployment for African Americans (though still higher than for whites):

FT_13.08.202_BlackWhiteUnemployment.png


By contrast, 1960 was a recession year--a mild recession, to be sure, compared with 1957-8, yet enough to have overall unemployment at more than 6 percent by the end of the year https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/UNRATE.txt with black unemployment in the double digits. When one recalls that it was economic reasons, rather than civil rights, which got African Americans to switch from the GOP to the Democrats in the first place (in the 1930's) one can see why the recession almost certainly hurt Nixon among black as well as white voters. So again I go back to my belief that William McChesney Martin was the key to the 1960 election...
 
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Wallet

Banned
The 1960 election was incredible close. It was a .2% difference and only 100,000 votes separated Kennedy from Nixon, out of 68 million votes.

Any POD can swing it to Nixon.

1. Wearing makeup to the debate. Radio listeners thought Nixon won the debate, but TV views were too distracted by him being sick.

2. Not campaigning in all 50 states. Alaska? Nixon spent precious time in the final month traveling to far flung areas with little electoral value while Kennedy was campaigning in swing states rich with electorate vote.

3. Pick Nelson Rockefeller as VP. This swings New York.

4. He calls and gets MLK out of jail. He seriously considered it, but Kennedy beat him to it. Nixon won 34% of the black vote, which no Republican has ever come close to doing since then. A 1% swings Illinois and maybe Missouri.


Nixon winning in 1960 would be far less paranoid man then he was in 1968. He would also be more moderate. He probably passes a weaker civil rights act in 1961 or 1962 similar to the one Eisenhower passed in 1957. Nixon would fund NASA but not focus on a moon landing. Bay of Pigs isn't a failure. I do think he will go into Vietnam a lot earlier.
 
Does any one know what Nixon position was on The Bay of Pig?
Did he think that we should have sent in Troops?
Or did he think that Kennedy was correct in not supporting the rebels?
 
Does any one know what Nixon position was on The Bay of Pig?
Did he think that we should have sent in Troops?
Or did he think that Kennedy was correct in not supporting the rebels?

(1) On air support: IMO rather too much attention has been given to the air support question--at least in terms of its military effects. (That it had important political effects, especially in engendering a feeling of betrayal in the Cuban exile community in the United States against JFK--and against his party for decades after his death--is undoubtedly true.) I agree with Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1998), p. 171:

"It was clear at the time that the invasion could not possibly have succeeded without American air support. But it was no less clear to many at the time, as has been the judgment of almost every retrospective analysis, that the invasion would have failed even with that support. The argument over Kennedy's decision is irrelevant because the premises and planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion were so faulty that no amount of air support would have made a decisive difference. Aside from the invasion's fatal lack of secrecy and violation of every principle of amphibious assault, it was ludicrous to expect a force of fourteen hundred to hold its own against the twenty thousand Cuban army regulars and local militia that Castro could--and did--assemble to lock the invaders down on their beachhead. But an invasion of ten times as many exiles would also have been doomed from the start because of the CIA's disastrous assumption that Operation Zapata would spark a mass popular uprising against the Castro government; the CIA apparently assumed that Castro was as unpopular at home as he was in the Cuban exile community in the United States. In fact, in 1961 the Cuban Revolution and Castro were still immensely popular on the island. Cuban communism's appeal...rested first and foremost on its nationalist credentials, and Castro was swift to exploit the Bay of Pigs as yet another Yankee bid to reenslave Cuba to American capitalism. In the final analysis, it made no difference in April 1961 what the USS Essex did not do off Cuba's shores."

(Even if one thinks that Record is exaggerating Castro's support in Cuba in 1961 and instead attributes the lack of a popular rebellion to the efficiency of Castro's security police, the result is the same.)

(2) Since air support would not be enough, the only way for Nixon to salvage the invasion--and Nixon would be far more likely than JFK to do so--would be to use US troops. This would no doubt "work" in the sense of overthrowing Castro, but could have severe costs, which I discuss at https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/--wjfk-never-becomes-president.401939/#post-13454386

(Of course, if you're going to use US troops, there doesn't seem to be much point to starting with an exile invasion to begin with.)
 
First of all, he could wear a dark suit for the TV debate. Most who saw it on television felt Kennedy won. Most who heard it via radio felt Nixon won. That's a start.

This notion will never die, but there is remarkably little evidence to support it:

***


"The central myth we should expose is that the majority of the audience who heard the first debate on radio thought Nixon won; those who watched on television were so seduced by the visual that they gave the nod to Kennedy. This claim, repeated in every media book, is based on a poll conducted by Sindlinger and Company, which has now been questioned on many fronts. Most of their small sample that listened on the radio were from Republican areas and probably predisposed to think favorably of Nixon. It wasn't that the radio listeners were less biased in evaluating the debate." https://www.paleycenter.org/p-the-nixon-kennedy-debates-a-look-at-the-myth/

***

"What’s remarkable about this hoary media myth is that it persists despite its thorough dismantling 30 years ago by David Vancil and Sue D. Pendell.

"They noted in a journal article that evidence for viewer-listener disagreement is thin, flawed, and anecdotal. Moreover, no public opinion surveys conducted in the immediate aftermath of the debate were aimed specifically at gauging reactions radio audiences.

"Often cited in support of the claim that radio listeners felt Nixon won the encounter is a post-debate survey by Sindlinger & Company, which reported that radio listeners, by a margin of 2-to-1, thought Nixon had prevailed.

"Vancil and Pendell pointed out that Sindlinger’s survey included more than 2,100 respondents — of whom only 282 said they had listened on radio. Of that number, 178 (or fewer than four people per state) “expressed an opinion on the debate winner,” they wrote. The sub-sample was too small and unstable to support sweeping judgments about reactions of television and radio audiences nationwide, Vancil and Pendell noted.

"Not only that, but the sub-sample failed to identify from where the radio listeners were drawn. “A location bias in the radio sample,” Vancil and Pendell wrote, “could have caused dramatic effects on the selection of a debate winner. A rural bias, quite possible because of the relatively limited access of rural areas to television in 1960, would have favored Nixon.”

"The Sindlinger data were flawed, and essentially useless in assessing how radio listeners reacted to the debate."

https://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/tag/1960-debate/

***
"But Vancil and Pendell found several reasons for being skeptical of Sindlinger's findings. First, only 282 radio listeners were surveyed—fewer than is usually considered sound for a national random sample. Second, there was no effort to poll a representative group, so we have no idea whether the survey included, for example, a disproportionate number of Republicans. Third, there was no effort to explore whether radio listeners as a group might have been more likely from the start to prefer Nixon—perhaps, say, because they lived in more rural areas that television had not yet penetrated. (Relatively few Catholics—a key Kennedy constituency—lived in the countryside.)

"Vancil and Pendell even present some statistical evidence to suggest that the Sindlinger sample probably included a disproportionate number of Nixon supporters. In any event, this single, flawed survey hardly constitutes strong enough grounds for the idea that Nixon won on radio to have gained the currency that it has." http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...10/09/rewinding_the_kennedynixon_debates.html
 
(1) On air support: IMO rather too much attention has been given to the air support question--at least in terms of its military effects. (That it had important political effects, especially in engendering a feeling of betrayal in the Cuban exile community in the United States against JFK--and against his party for decades after his death--is undoubtedly true.) I agree with Jeffrey Record, The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1998), p. 171:

"It was clear at the time that the invasion could not possibly have succeeded without American air support. But it was no less clear to many at the time, as has been the judgment of almost every retrospective analysis, that the invasion would have failed even with that support. The argument over Kennedy's decision is irrelevant because the premises and planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion were so faulty that no amount of air support would have made a decisive difference. Aside from the invasion's fatal lack of secrecy and violation of every principle of amphibious assault, it was ludicrous to expect a force of fourteen hundred to hold its own against the twenty thousand Cuban army regulars and local militia that Castro could--and did--assemble to lock the invaders down on their beachhead. But an invasion of ten times as many exiles would also have been doomed from the start because of the CIA's disastrous assumption that Operation Zapata would spark a mass popular uprising against the Castro government; the CIA apparently assumed that Castro was as unpopular at home as he was in the Cuban exile community in the United States. In fact, in 1961 the Cuban Revolution and Castro were still immensely popular on the island. Cuban communism's appeal...rested first and foremost on its nationalist credentials, and Castro was swift to exploit the Bay of Pigs as yet another Yankee bid to reenslave Cuba to American capitalism. In the final analysis, it made no difference in April 1961 what the USS Essex did not do off Cuba's shores."

(Even if one thinks that Record is exaggerating Castro's support in Cuba in 1961 and instead attributes the lack of a popular rebellion to the efficiency of Castro's security police, the result is the same.)

(2) Since air support would not be enough, the only way for Nixon to salvage the invasion--and Nixon would be far more likely than JFK to do so--would be to use US troops. This would no doubt "work" in the sense of overthrowing Castro, but could have severe costs, which I discuss at https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/--wjfk-never-becomes-president.401939/#post-13454386

(Of course, if you're going to use US troops, there doesn't seem to be much point to starting with an exile invasion to begin with.)
Thank you for your answer.
 
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