Having just read the * Atlantic Monthly * cover story this month about how much more horribly ill and physically incapacitated JFK really was, I got to thinking… with what we now know about both men, but with the general innocence and value system of 1960, who do you think would have won? (Assuming either of them would get the nomination of course). Between JFK’s infidelities and physical problems, and Nixon’s, well, Nixon-ness, which one do you think we would have picked?
Nixon would have won, IMHO. People already knew about his Nixon-ness. That’s why they called him tricky Dick. JFK’s running mate Lyndon Johnson was not popular, except in the South. Knowledge of JFK’s health problems would have put more focus on LBJ, which would have hurt the ticket. Also, some of those medicines were narcotics. The Pubbies could have run ads about a drugged President with his finger on the nuclear button.
I always admired JFK, but this health story increased my admiration. His ability to hide his pain and function as President (not to mention boffing Marilyn Monroe and all those other babes!) moves him up even higher in my esteem. He really had a lot of courage.
Kennedy, hands-down. I never was a Johnson fan, (in fact, I still find him pretty unsavory,) but I’d take Johnson over Nixon or anyone’s Nixon-ness. Nixon was an oily slimeball back in the 1950s. His “Checkers” speech was one of the worst examples of using treacly fluff to get what you want. The country would have been better off without Nixon. And his little dog, too.
If the question is who would have won, clearly Nixon. The margin of that election was razor thin, a closeness unmatched until the Recent Unpleasantness. The truth about Kennedys health may not have been much, but it would have been enough.
As to whom I would vote for, rather than vote for Nixon I’d rather nail my pecker to a tree and set the tree on fire!
Nixon did win. And he would have won again. Kennedy stole the election.
Sorry Rhum:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/11/09/politics/main248266.shtml
The biggest doubts always come from the Chicago situation, but even Nixon carrying Illinois was not enough to win the electoral college.
At least Nixon decided to follow the will of the majority, regarding a contested election, unlike . . . .
Well, that is another thread 
It’s worth mentioning that Gerald Ford would have had an electoral victory if only a few thousand votes in Ohio and Mississippi had gone the other way. (I think those are the states. There were two states, specifically, at any rate.) Had Ford successfully challenged these two states’ outcomes, he would have successfully beaten Carter. Some urged Ford to do this, but Ford declined, since he still would have lost the popular vote by close to 2,000,000, and he felt that such a challenge wouldn’t be fair to the voters.
Well, Ford certainly didn’t stumble there.
True. But “will of the majority” is misleading. In any national election, when no more than 50% of the American people eligible to vote actually do so, how does anyone know the will of the American people? If everyone in the nation had voted, Nixon might have won by a couple million, or lost by a couple million. We don’t really know, so we can’t really say what the “will of the majority” truly is. We can only say that, of the half of Americans who bothered to vote, a slight majority of that group favored one candidate over the other, making that decision for reasons ranging from thoughtful and serious to fickle and mindless. No election with such a small margin of victory in the popular vote (whether 1960 or 2000) can be said to establish in any way the will of the American people. The only thing established in those elections is who “wins” under the system we have in place.
Now that is definitely analogous to the recent situation you’re hinting at.
One flaw in your hinted analogy…by challenging the vote counts in those states, Nixon would have been taking the Al Gore role from 2000, yes? Sounds like Nixon’s attitude is closer to that expressed by the Kindergarten class-president candidate in the South Park parody of the 2000 fiasco: “This is boring, let’s fingerpaint!”
No. Gore was the popular vote winner, Nixon was the popular vote loser. The flaw in your analogy is the presumption that Bush was the certified winner on the night of the election, 2000. Not so. Gore was rather in the Kennedy role, while Nixon was in the Bush role.
Election night 1960 was a long one, with Brinkley and Huntley staying up all night and still at their desks when the Today Show began. The news desks didn’t always call them right back then, either. David Brinkley faced the camera and told the nation that California went to Kennedy—when in fact they found it went to Nixon, after they’d actually finished counting the votes. Ah, counting all the votes! Why don’t they do that anymore? Those were the days!
your quote “The margin of that election was razor thin, a closeness …” is hilarious. Clive James in “Fame in the 20th Century” said that Nixon “lost by the shadow on his jaw”, because Kennedy looked so clean-cut, even though Nixon easily beat him in terms of the content of the discussion.
By their inaction. The will of the people was obviously to let the voting people make the decision.
Yes, indeed. 50% of the people indicated a will to let someone else choose.
If you mean, with full knowledge of what both their presidencies were like, I can’t see Nixon winning.
Oh, I think Kennedy still would have won by a small margin, for no other reason than that people were ready for a change. SOME kind of change. They might have been a bit disturbed if they’d known that Jack Kennedy was far sicker and frailer than he let on, but I think most people were still inclined to say
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“Well, I like Ike… and Nixon seems like an okay guy, but stilll… we’ve had 8 years of the Republicans. It’s about time to try somebody new.”
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“Well, okay, so his body’s in bad shape. He got a lot of those injuries in the Navy in the Pacific, where he was fighting for his country. What kind of unpatriotic louse would hold THAT against him!”
Right, which is a choice for neither candidate. It’s merely apathy. Still no candidate has the will of the people behind him. The illusion of democracy.
If no candidate has a mandate from the people, I wonder how any politicians ever claim that an issue is the will of the American people. Politicians are sketchy and evasive about what they actually want to do, so that’s even further removed from any naive sense of the public’s will.