The Time Nixon’s Cronies Tried to Overturn a Presidential Election

The gambit was cynical and disruptive, but in the end it didn’t work.

by David Greenberg
Politico, October 10, 2020

Donald Trump is fanning fears that if he loses the presidential election in November, he’ll try to discredit the vote totals as fraudulent and won’t concede the race. Doing so would amount to a dramatic break from historical precedent, as commentators are noting. But not all of them are getting their history right. Al Gore, we’re reminded, accepted defeat in 2000, despite reason to believe he should have won Florida, and Richard Nixon, we’re told, declined to challenge John F. Kennedy’s razor-thin victory in 1960.

The part about Gore is true. But Nixon did no such thing. In fact, his top aides and the Republican Party, almost certainly with Nixon’s backing, waged a campaign to cast doubt on the outcome of the election, launching challenges to Kennedy’s victories in 11 states. Far from providing a counterexample to Trump, the 1960 election aftermath amounts to one more way in which Nixon, known for his contempt for the Constitution, furnished Trump with a playbook for thinking about political power. And let’s remember that in the end, it didn’t work: While Nixon’s gambit was cynical and disruptive, it went nowhere, suggesting it’s harder to overturn a presidential election result than doomsayers suppose.

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In fact, from election night onward, Nixon hedged his bets. As the vote totals came in favoring Kennedy, the vice president pulled back from a full-throated concession. He cagily couched his formal remarks in tricky caveats. “I want Senator Kennedy to know,” he said on television at 4 a.m., “and I want all of you to know, that if this trend does continue, and he does become our next president, then he will have my wholehearted support.” The wording was pure Nixon, leaving himself abundant wiggle room with that little if.

Nixon’s crew recognized that overturning an election result would be an extreme long shot. They often admitted as much to the press. But that didn’t stop them from trying. They calculated that even if they failed, it would still be possible to cast doubt over Kennedy’s victory, imbuing his presidency with a whiff of illegitimacy. This in turn would rally their base voters for future elections.

Throwing their weight behind the effort were three Republican pols who had run his 1960 campaign: Kentucky Senator Thruston B. Morton, chair of the Republican National Committee; Leonard W. Hall, a former congressman and former RNC chair, who had served as the campaign’s “general manager”; and Robert H. Finch, a veteran of California politics who became “campaign director.” Immersed in the plotting, too, was Peter Flanigan, who would serve in 1968 as Nixon’s deputy campaign manager and whom Ralph Nader later called the “most evil” man in Washington.

Morton led the charge. On November 11, just three days after the election, he announced proceedings to question the electoral results in Illinois, Texas and nine other states (Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina). At one point, Morton claimed the RNC had received 35,000 letters and telegrams with anecdotal accounts of fraud. Days later, Hall and Finch deputized staffers to carry out what the Associated Press dubbed “field checks” in eight contested states—essentially, poking around, seeing whether they could find suspiciously pro-Kennedy totals in any precincts. Democrats saw the project as troublemaking. Democratic National Committee Chair Henry L. Jackson called it “a fishing expedition on a grand scale.” Former President Harry Truman called the whispering campaign about rampant fraud “a lot of hooey” and said the Republicans were “just a bunch of poor losers.”

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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/10/the-time-nixons-cronies-tried-to-overturn-a-presidential-election-428318