Nixon wins 1960

jeffking

Banned
Let's assume that the Presidential Debates weren;t broadcast on tv thereby changing public opinion of Nixon. Anyone listening by radio and all pundits said Nixon won the debate easily, so just as Gore's sighs likely cost him the election after he so clearly won the debate. There was also the relationship between the Kennedys and the Giancamo Mafia in Chicago that "won" him Illinois. So how would a Nixon Administration dealt the the Cuban Missile Crisis, VIetnam, Civil Rights, Berlin Wall, ect?
 
I think there wouldn´t be a Cuban Missle Crisis. The Soviets wouldn´t dare to play such games with Nixon. It would still be a Berlin Wall. The Soviets couldn´t give up East Germany and the Wall allowed both Sides to safe face.´Unlike Kennedy, Nixon wouldn´t kill Diem, and South-Vietnam would stay more stable.
 
I think there wouldn´t be a Cuban Missle Crisis. The Soviets wouldn´t dare to play such games with Nixon. It would still be a Berlin Wall. The Soviets couldn´t give up East Germany and the Wall allowed both Sides to safe face.´Unlike Kennedy, Nixon wouldn´t kill Diem, and South-Vietnam would stay more stable.


Nixon harkens back to when the Republcans were the party of blacks. If he was in charge during the early 60s, there could be some very different responses.


Indeed without the various international problems, he would have had more time and poltical capital to focus on the issue.
 
There was also the relationship between the Kennedys and the Giancamo Mafia in Chicago that "won" him Illinois.
No, there was not. That's Seymour Hersh BS. The Kennedy family was not now, nor ever, involved with the Mafia, outside of cracking down on them with Bobby. Papa Joe got his fortune as a Stock Broker and with Film and Investing. He was a liquor importer but only after prohibition was ended.

Likewise it was Daley and the Democratic machine, not the Mafia, that won Kennedy Illinois, either through campaign support or election fraud. However, the Republicans did the exact same thing in Illinois, or were at least as fishy as the Democrats as to whether or not they were doing it. Likewise, a national recount did not change the election. It only lead to Kennedy winning Hawaii when it was shown that he had received more votes than Nixon.

Any election fraud there was, which there potentially was, was not enough to change the election, nor significantly effect it. It all really lies with the voters. Which, for a stroke of luck, very well could have turned out slightly more for Nixon than Kennedy where needed to give Nixon the election.

So how would a Nixon Administration dealt the the Cuban Missile Crisis, VIetnam, Civil Rights, Berlin Wall, ect?
I'll probably say things that will get people to say I'm being an apologist or anti-Nixon. And I apologize.

  • Bay of Pig goes ahead. It was an Eisenhower era plan and, if I recall, one Nixon was involved in. It will also fail, Air support or not (and there were air strikes beforehand, among other things). Castro was already worried about a US invasion. Not only that, it had already been leaked that the CIA was training Cuban exiles in Guatemala, so Castro already knew what was going down. That lead him to round up and arrest any dissidents (the dissidents the exiles were supposed to meet up with, mind you), and prepare for the invasion. The Cubans also hid away their planes, leaving out ones they could afford to lose (broken, outdated) for the B-52s to bomb. The fact is, it was always on the backs of the exiles to win or lose that. The US wasn't offering support which could be traced back to them and could not, in order to have plausible deniability. Which would have hamstrung Nixon as much as it did Kennedy. Any operations that the US did undertake were made to look like they were the Cubans. So I think it still fails. Even if the exiles do well initially, and they get air cover when things get hairy and flee into the mountains or something, the dissidents they were to meet with and ferment a mass rebellion (or illusion of one) have been rounded up, and Castro has the island under a tight grip.
  • If Bay of Pigs fails, I think you still see Castro befriend the Soviets, and those Missiles still put in place, and if discovered, you still unleash a Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps Nixon would be in a better position since he "knew Mr Khrushchev" and it took someone in the Kennedy administration who also knew Khrushchev and how his brain worked to make Kennedy aware that if the US promised not to invade Cuba in the future, Khrushchev could remove the missiles and sell it to the Russian people that he saved Cuba from imminent destruction, which is how it happened. EDIT: I forgot about the missiles in Turkey. If those aren't put into place, you could avoid the Soviets doing likewise in Cuba. Though I think there's still a good chance of them extending their influence to the island all the same.
  • Vietnam is dependent on the wind really. If the US gets involved, it will lose, but all the details of the existence of South Vietnam and US involvement can vary. Vietnam is an area where you will get a lot of PODs and Butterflies. The thing of the Diem coup is that the US/CIA did not order it, but rather it was a Vietnamese operation which the US gave the ok to, or at least said it wouldnt interfere in. I think the request was something along the lines of them asking if the US would still provide support to Vietnam after a coup, and the US saying yes, and then the coup going ahead. If Nixon is presented with that same scenario, he has the same choices; either saying the US would still support Vietnam after a coup against Diem, or saying no and forcing the coup to be called off or at least trying to. In which case it may boil down to calling each other's bluff since there's no way Nixon is going to leave Vietnam to twist in the wind in a huff coup or not, the those in the coup have to deal with the possibility that maybe he would. There was also other coups which were possible. Diem wasn't a popular leader. He promoted men not on merit, but for patronage or because they were family or he liked them. He abused the Buddhists in a Buddhist nation. He said stupid things like "Vietnam needs Six Hitler's". He was just not popular with his people, and increasingly unpopular with the US (not least of which for the reason he was proving incompetent in winning his nation's anti-Communist struggle). His strength was that he was good at playing factions against each other. There was a coup planned in 1960 for example. And likewise, a coup that could occur will not necessarily consult the United States before it goes ahead, leaving the US to deal with a new leader and governmental situation. Nixon certainly said publicly that removing Diem was wrong (to make myself sound like a hopeless Anti-Nixon, maybe he only said so when the situation proved to look worse in a post-Diem Vietnam; I don't know the date when he said that). But how different Diem's longevity would have been under Nixon, I'm not sure of. Diem was, for lack of a better word, a jackass.
  • I could see Civil Rights progressing in a similar fashion. The movement is in full swing, and the dam of racial injustice is cracking and must give way sooner or later. And Nixon seemed to support it, and said it was anti-Communist. It depends on how much Nixon cares to alienate the South, though. He's a Republican, so there's no Solid South worries for his party. Then again, the South is becoming increasingly Republican as it becomes increasingly White Collar, and Civil Rights would alienate that future voter base.
 
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So Nixon wins in 60. He supports civil rights, how does that square with Barry Golwalter and the super right wing of the GO by 64? Plus Nixon had his own health care bill in OTL. Not a bad bill compared to what we got in 2010. Also does Nixon come up with the EPA in the 60's? Those above items won't go over big with the right wingers. Will they rebel? Foreign policy won't be that much different. Nixon will fail in the Bay of Pigs. It was a bad plan air support or no air support. Because of that incident comes the Cuban missile crisis, the fate of the world is in Tricky Dicks hands. The man always had to prove how tough he was. The end of the world may happen. America made the right choice in OTL >
 
Nixon

I think major civil rights legislation will be passed. He did run with a strong civil rights platform and his running mate was had a very good record on this. In 1964 you would'nt have a major split in the Republican party. The rightward drift would take some time.
 
T

Nixon Now?
far fetched I know..

Richard Nixon/Lodge 1961-1969 (R)

Henry Cabot Lodge 1969-1977 (R)
George Romney 1977-1981 (R)
Lester Maddox 1981-1989 (D)
William Bush 1989-1997 (D)
Tom Harkin 1997-2005 (Republican Progressive Green Coalition)
Hubert Humphrey III 2005-2009
(Republican Progressive Green Coalition)
John F Kennedy Jr. 2009- (Alliance of Moderate Conservative Democrats)

The bay of pigs invasion after long deliberation is cancelled leading to an earlier dente with the Soviet Union. Nixon maintains a relation with Dineim he will remain President of South Vietnam through 1970. There is also no presidential assassination attempt by Oswald who as (a side note returns to the Soviet Union in 1967 and lives there for the rest of his life as a simple citizen).

The course of continued New Deal Programs and Civil Rights (passed about the same time as OTL) splits the Democratic Party, there is no transfer by southern conservatives which leaves the deep progressive faction in the United States as a small influence for many years.

The Soviet Union is most effected by the prolonged rule of Nitka Krustev which makes de stalinazation permanent within the USSR.

In 1970 Dineim is finally assassinated by a viet kong member which leads to collapse of South Vietnam, Lodge decides sends 50,000 American soldiers through 1971-1972 but in the eve of the 72 election begins withdraw from Vietnam. Vietnam is unified by 1974. The 70's in the United States are marked by stable economic times until the 1979 energy crisis which occurs as OTL. The Iranian hostage crisis also occurs>

ON a powerful wave of social conservatism and anti communism segregationist governor of Georgia becomes the first southern president since Harry Truman. By the end of the 80's the western world is traveling into instability and troubled economic times. The Republicans through the 80's and 90's fail to win back the Presidency and the congress because of an emergent party formed out of dissatisfied Democrats- The Progressive Greens.

After making a break with an uneasy alliance the greens and the republicans work together win back the government and restore Dentente and to an extent the New Deal that was almost completely removed by the Democrats.

In the 2008 Election after roughly 11 years of Republican Green Control the two parties have a falling out which leads to the election of moderate conservative JFK Jr the son of the 1960 presidential candidate

 
One does not automatically lead to the other. There are numerous other points of contention between the USA and USSR during this period; Berlin and Laos are the biggest, Congo to a lesser extent. Moreover, this isn't the Nixon of 1968; he'd have been elected in 1960 partly on the back of his anti-Communist record. If say a Test Ban agreement is reached between Washington and Moscow, it'd likely be a long, arduous process of negotiations.



The Oswald factor almost goes without saying, but Diem's time was running out arguably by 1960, and certainly by the time of his OTL assassination. He was simply pissing too many people off throughout South Vietnam (there's an illuminating interview in Christian G. Appy's oral history of the Vietnam War as to Diem's unintentional alienation of even the lowliest bureaucrats.) We must also remember that it is harder than it looks for the US to actually topple a foreign leader; most of the time coups of that nature are never organised by the CIA, but by army colonels or local government personnel who just happen to tell the CIA what's going on in the hope of getting a little extra support. Such as it was with Diem in 1963, and such it was with Mobutu in 1961.



Partly agree with this; the Democratic Party is going to face a serious crisis in the dealings between its conservative southern wing (who conveniently monopolised many of the Senate committees) and its more liberally-inclined northern half. A complete split however underestimates the capacity of the party to adapt, especially given by 1964, the GOP will have been in power twelve years. A one term Nixon is a very real possibility indeed, if he's elected President in 1960.



Maybe; Khrushchev may still shoot himself in the foot with all his agricultural jiggery-pokery and is vulnerable to the fact that many of the top members of the CPSU - men like Suslov and Brezhnev - are unscrupulous neo-Stalinists.



Not sure why that'd occur at roughly the same time as OTL, given the sheer amount of butterflies unleashed by a '60 Nixon victory...


Ive looked at both of your timelines you seem to be quite a 60's expert,
your right on your points I was just trying to throw a political situation together
 
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