www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36425-2000Nov16?language=printer
I thought that the fact that I had lost my state, Illinois, would mean that Kennedy would lose the presidency. Suddenly, somebody was rapping on his door, saying Sarge, the votes in Illinois have changed completely. It was true: A late surge of votes from Chicago had put Kennedy back in the lead in Illinois. A Roller-Coaster Finish Across the country, Nixon and his aides were watching the same returns. We were getting good reports out of Illinois but we noticed that a lot of precincts in Chicago werent reporting, says Herb Klein, who was Nixons press secretary. Hall grumbled that the Chicago Democrats were up to their usual tricks. By midnight-3 oclock back East-Kennedy had 265 electoral votes, just four short of victory. Nixon wasnt ready to concede, but he thought he should make some kind of statement to his supporters in the ballroom downstairs. If the present trend continues, he told them, Senator Kennedy will be the next president of the United States. Watching on TV in Hyannis Port, Kennedys aides groaned and grumbled. Kennedys lead in the popular vote was melting away, from 800,000 votes to 600,000 to fewer than half a million. When he fell asleep, shortly after 4, Nixon still didnt know if hed won or lost. When his daughter Julie woke him two hours later, he learned hed been defeated. Out of 68 million votes, the difference between the parties was only 113,000. Kennedy ended up taking 303 electoral votes to Nixons 219 and 15 for segregationist Sen. But Nixon would have won if hed taken Texas, where he lost by only 46,000 votes, and Illinois, where he lost by fewer than 9,000. Ike told him hed heard rumors of voting fraud in Texas and Illinois and urged him to check it out. By now it was mid-morning and Nixon had no desire to make another concession speech. Instead, he sent Kennedy a congratulatory telegram and dispatched Klein to read it to the press. Kennedy was disgusted, his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, recalled in his memoirs. Showing Grace in Defeat On the plane back to Washington that night, campaign manager Hall buttonholed Nixon to say he thought the Democrats had stolen votes in Illinois, Texas, Missouri and New Mexico. Hed been campaigning nonstop for weeks and hed barely slept in the last three days. He failed to fall asleep on the plane, and when he got home he found he couldnt sleep there, either. He built a fire and sat in front of it, pondering what he ought to do about rumors of election fraud. He decided, he later wrote, that it was important that he appear to be a man who could lose gracefully.
Back in Washington, Republicans were hollering about voting fraud. Everett Dirksen, Illinois frog-voiced Republican patriarch, claimed that the Daley machine had stolen the election in his state. Barry Goldwater echoed Dirksen, declaring that Chicago had the rottenest election machinery in the United States. Thruston Morton, head of the Republican National Committee, flew to Key Biscayne to urge Nixon to demand a recount. They told him they thought the election had been stolen and he ought to fight it, Klein recalls. Exhausted and depressed, Nixon had no stomach for a fight he figured he had little chance to win. On Friday, three days after the election, he sent Klein out to read a statement. The vice president ran the race and he accepts the decision of the voters, Klein announced. Klein recalls Nixon explaining his reason for the decision: He thought contesting it would do a great harm to the country. In his memoir, Six Crises, written in 1962, when he was planning a political comeback, Nixon said he made the decision because he feared American prestige would be damaged by suggestions that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box. In a later memoir, RN, written after hed resigned the presidency in disgrace, Nixon added another reason: Charges of sore loser would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career. Riled Up but No Recount Nixon may have quit, but his campaign manager and the Republican National Committee fought on. Hall and Morton dispatched teams of GOP operatives to ferret out evidence of election fraud in eight states-Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Morton himself traveled to Chicago, where he announced the creation of what he called the National Recount and Fair Elections Committee. Mortons minions failed to uncover much fraud in most states, but they hit pay dirt in Texas and Illinois. In Texas, Kennedys 46,000-vote margin was the closest statewide race there since 1948, when Kennedys running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, won a Senate seat by 87 votes the origin of the nickname Landslide Lyndon. Mortons operatives, aided by local Republicans, uncovered plenty of political chicanery. For instance: In Fannin County, which had 4,895 registered voters, 6,138 votes were cast, three-quarters of them for Kennedy. In one precinct of Angelia County, 86 people voted and the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon. The Republicans demanded a recount, claiming that it would give them 100,000 votes and victory. John Connally, the state Democratic chairman, said the Republicans were just haggling for headlines and predicted that a recount would give Kennedy another 50,000 votes. The Texas Election Board, composed entirely of Democrats, had already certified Kennedy as the winner. A new biography, American Pharaoh, quotes Mayor Daley defending his city by claiming that Democratic fraud in Chicago was no worse than Republican fraud in downstate Illinois: You look at some of those downstate counties, he said, and its just as fantastic as some of those precincts theyre pointing at in Chicago. Robert Kennedy, his brothers campaign manager, shrugged off the whole controversy: A tempest in a teapot. A Republican National Committee member filed suit to challenge the Chicago results. The case was assigned to Circuit Court Judge Thomas Kluczynski, a Daley machine loyalist.
Less than a year later, on Mayor Daleys recommendation, Kennedy appointed Kluczynski to the federal bench. Ultimately, a special prosecutor, Morris Wexler, was appointed to investigate the Chicago fraud allegations. Wexler brought charges against 650 election officials but a Democratic judges pro-defense rulings crippled Wexlers case and the charges were dropped. Finally, in 1962, after an election judge confessed to witnessing vote tampering in Chicagos 28th ward, three precinct workers pled guilty and served short jail terms. Calling Off the Dogs Americans will probably never know for certain if the Democrats stole the election of 1960. Back in 1960, Mazo, now 81, was the Washington-based national political correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. After the election, he kept getting calls from reporter friends in Chicago who told him wild stories of election fraud there. They were in effect chastising me, he recalls, saying, You national reporters, youre missing the story, why dont you come out and look? He went to Chicago, obtained lists of voters in precincts that seemed suspicious and started checking their addresses. There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted, he recalls. At the urging of Chicago Democrats, Mazo went to Republican areas downstate and looked for fraud there. There was no purity on either side, except that the Republicans didnt have Daley in their corner-or Lyndon Johnson. After investigating Illinois, Mazo headed for Texas, where he documented similar electoral shenanigans. With visions of a Pulitzer Prize dancing in his head, Mazo began writing what he and his editors envisioned as a 12-part series on election fraud. By mid-December, he had published four parts and theyd been reprinted in papers across the country, including The Washington Post. Hed interviewed Nixon extensively for a biography hed published in 1959. When Mazo arrived, the two men chatted for a while and then Nixon asked Mazo to stop writing his series. He told Mazo the country couldnt afford a constitutional crisis at the height of the Cold War. Failing to convince Mazo, Nixon called the reporte...
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