Is there any evidence that Nixon’s campaign did any sort of underhanded, Watergatesque stuff in the 1968 presidential campaign?
Or the 1960 one?
I don’t think so. You want real election highjinks look at JFK. His daddy bough him de eleckyshun. Not that JFK was neccessarily a bad guy, but I have my doubyts about the veracity of that election.
Nixon in 1968 didn’t really need to do anything underhanded; he was leading in the polls from the Democratic convention on. As a matter of fact, he was nearly defeated by Humphrey; he was losing support and Humphrey was gaining as time went on. One poll even put HHH ahead (though within the margin of error) and it’s generally thought that if the election had been held a week later, Nixon would have blown it.
The Democrats did just about everything they possibly could to lose the 1968 election and they still almost won. If Nixon’s camp had engaged in any dirty tricks, they certainly weren’t effective
If it was that close, then who did George Wallace hurt most? Did he take away the votes of right-wing Democrats who would’ve voted for Nixon if their only alternative had been Humphrey, or did Wallace help Nixon by splitting up a Democratic party whose “yellow dog” loyalty didn’t crumble until the 1972 election?
Republicans engaged in exactly the same kind of hijinks as Democrats did in 1960. You hear a lot about Mayor Daley’s activities in Chicago, but the Republicans knew what was going on and countered with just as much ferocity and corruption in their downstate precincts.
The main feature of Nixon’s '68 campaign (which paid of more in 1972) was his “Southern Strategy”. He brought on board former Southern Democrats like Strom Thurmond to counteract Wallace. It was sucessful in that Wallace didn’t sweep out the South and Nixon squeezed by.
Hardly a ‘dirty trick’ but it did involve many discrete signals that the Civil Rights movement would be greatly slowed in momentum once he became president.
One of Nixon’s ads from the 1968 campaign featured rocks hurled into a storefront window. No people were actually shown, but it was still very obvious to people that year what Nixon was campaigning against.
In a certain sense, yes.
There is good evidence that Nixon sent actual messages thru secondary parties to the S.Vietnamese government to resist compromise in the Peace Talks, more or less stating that if they would just wait on his election, he would be a stronger advocate of their position.
Small hints of this activity were actually reported in some of the U.S. media at the time. The Johnson Administration appearly had significant evidence of this, but for reasons unknown, did not leak it in an attempt to swing the election to Humphrey.
It’s conjecture, but the true reason for the 1972 breakin may have been an attempt to recover or learn of what evidence Demos had of these 1968 Nixon/S. Vietnam contacts. One or more of the officials at the Watergrate in 1972 were officials in the previous Johnson Administation.
Fact is that it was in the 1972 election that Nixon had the least to worry about. McGoven never stood a chance.
However, Nixon was just a tad on the paranoid side. And he wanted a big win to improve his standing in history, something he worried about a lot.