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Richard 37th, Act I: Rise and Crash of the Angeleno, 1913-1962

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“When I get big, I’ll be a lawyer they can’t bribe.”[3]

--Richard M. Nixon, 1924 (age 11)

Richard I “Coeur de Lyon,” who led the Second Crusade and won from Saladin the Great the rights of Christians in Jerusalem, figured prominently in Ivanhoe and The Talisman, novels of Sir Walter Scott much loved by Hannah Nixon, a humble Quaker pacifist.  She named her son after Richard I in 1913, taught him to love history, and he lived to fulfill an uncanny destiny as the political heir, not to Richard I, but to “that valiant Crook-back Prodigie, Dickie,” of Shakespeare’s first great historical drama, Richard III (1591). Richard III was the most popular play in the United States throughout the century before Nixon was born, outranking even Hamlet. The play, about undisguised political evil, the dangers of political ambition and the awesome spectacle of naked power used cynically by a master of deceit with a bitter heart and a huge chip on his shoulder, resonated deeply with the political culture of North America.[2]     

At the corner of Whittier Blvd. and Leffingwell Road in Whittier, Frank and Hannah Nixon re­inserted the capital they had extracted from a failed Yorba Linda lemon orchard into a gasoline station and general store called “The Nixon Market.”  Here young Richard learned the ways of semi-rural  "plain folk" and absorbed the reactionary regional political culture of Southern California. Frank Nixon was a man of strong but erratic political opinions, so deeply dedicated to the work ethic that he refused to use fertilizer on his lemon trees in Yorba Linda, which eventually died as his neighbors predicted. The Nixon household was an intense psychological environment. Hannah’s Quaker faith required the family to live in “dry” cities, like Yorba Linda and Whittier, where no saloons threatened the morals of the community. In Quaker “meetings” young Dick was required to “testify” when the Spirit moved him—and here he must have gained his first thrills as a public speaker. At home, Frank made political debate the subject of most dinner­table discussions, and Dick became fascinated with politics at the earliest possible age. “By age six he was reading the newspapers, the front page, not the comics, and discussing public events with his father.” By age seven he was haranguing his classmates on the “merits of some upcoming candidate and the issues he represented.” 
 
The Teapot Dome scandal of 1924 made a big impression on the eleven-year-old Richard, who swore: “When I get big, I’ll be a lawyer they can’t bribe.”[3]  Already by eleven, sparked by sensational press stories of Edward Doheny's corruption of the Harding Administration, Richard Nixon saw his destiny, and became exactly that: a lawyer, and a politician, that they can't bribe.  Incorruptible by others, Nixon corrupted himself not with money but with power.

Richard Nixon's extreme ambition, ruthless ascent to power, deceitful and criminal character, his bitter resentments, and eventually, his self-consuming secrecy and paranoia, all raise important questions.  How did such a man emerge from the boy who sought to be incorruptible?  The challenge of understanding Nixon is compounded by his towering genius as a politician.  He was an extraordinary public man, truly sui generis in his mix of qualities and flaws.  "He is great," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "who is what he is from Nature, and never reminds of others."   It is sobering to know that scholars shall certainly study him for centuries to come, and that this humble study can only offer a limited contribution beyond many fine studies already published by writers to whom this author is deeply indebted.

How and why Nixon became a tyrant is a most vital question for our or any age.  I have adopted it out of a sense of responsibility to the humane values of the Declaration.  Nixon became the tip of a pyramid, like the Masonic monogram, and that pyramid was made of Americans all the way down.    Not only he but they inflicted the catastrophic damage to its cherished institutions domestically and internationally.  

We need every relevant discipline to study Nixon: psychology, sociology, political science, of course history.  Beyond these social sciences, we need most of all the humanistic tradition of political studies.  Nixon is best understood in terms of Shakespearean drama and political theory, particularly in the Historical tetralogies: The  Henriad, consisting of Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V ; and the "first" tetralogy consisting of Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3,. and Richard III.  It is, of course, from Shakespeare's first important historical melodrama, Richard III, that title of these essays is derived.  But these plays alone cannot encompass the out-sized life of Nixon, so these essays also draw on Shakespeare's magnificent political tragedy, portrait of a soul corrupted by ambition, Macbeth--Abraham Lincoln's favorite.  Richard 37th is also inspired by Herman Melville's portrait, in Moby-Dick (1851)  of Ahab leading an allegorical ship of the United States to its doom for the sake of the twin engines of Slave Power and Yankee Capitalism.
 
Nixon’s early social milieu as that of the marginal petty bourgeoisie: small proprietors who operate on such thin margins that they fear losing everything from the slightest unionization of workers or regulatory interference by the government (local, state or national).  This crucial class also resents the Big Guy who has all the advantages and the "fix" in politics, as well as the highly educated because that elite, who could send their sons and daughters to Ivy League schools, never had to face poverty and do manual work for hire with pride.  The Nixons supported capitalism, as true believers in unregulated enterprise. But they also resented the Capitalists like Edward Doheny, who seemed to corrupt the system through unfair advantage. Such families in other regions were likely to become Populists. In Southern California, the Republican Party as led by the Otis-Chandler Open Shop message of the Los Angeles Times, provided a safe harbor for the Iowans and other midwesterners who made up the bulk of the Southern California white majority in the first half of the 20th century.. 

The Nixon Market was a microcosm of the Los Angeles regional economy. He sold gasoline refined from the region’s oil wells to fill the tanks of automobiles, manufactured at the nearby “branch” auto plants. Rubber parts were produced by workers in the Goodyear and other major rubber factories. Those tires were driven by motorists who were increasingly building homes in the suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. Long before he became the most powerful man in the world, Richard the teenager rose at 4:00 in the morning and drove 15 miles along Whittier Blvd. to downtown Los Angeles. Northwest from his father’s general store at Leffingwell, into Boyle Heights, where the unfinished 6th Street Bridge forced him and others into traffic jams winding through the Mexican, African-American, and Eastern European Jewish neighborhoods, over the river at the 4th Street Bridge, and into the produce quarter along Central.[4] Nixon still had to return along Whittier to wash and display the fruits and vegetables before going to school at 8:00 in the morning. Like millions of other Angelenos, he would have had an integrated sense of the metropolis, knowing without needing to think about it, that there was a powerful functional centrality to it. While it was criss-crossed with boundaries and barriers of all kinds, those of jurisdiction, race, class, function, most people circulated no matter what their social position, as workers and consumers throughout the metropolis.

Also jostling through those streets in those same years was Jose Castillo, a Mexican immigrant who had managed to establish independence renting a farm east of Los Angeles with his son. Castillo was a producer, bringing his alfalafa, lettuce, cabbages, and chicory to sell to the wholesalers in the produce mart. But the market was treacherous. Castillo recounted mostly stories of Anglo injustice, but he also perceived injustice at the hands of the Japanese. “Another time it was a “chapanis” (Japanese) who gave me the other [bad] check. I had confidence in that ‘chapo’ (Jap)” but “when I went to cash it....the ‘chapo’ no longer had any money.”[5] Richard Nixon visited these same Japanese wholesalers, but his task was quite different. He had to haggle over the wholesale price, load Castillo’s vegetables, and make them look attractive to shoppers at the Nixon Market, where the customers paid yet another price. This circulation of petty capital accumulated at the top of the food chain, in the bank accounts of the major investors like Doheny, Huntington, Otis, Chandler, and Burroughs.

What made young Dick’s morning schedule so grueling was his obsessive study habits. One classmate remembered him “poring over the books at one­thirty in the morning.” By many such accounts he slept very little. He enrolled as a ­pre-­law student at Whittier High, telling classmates that he intended a career in politics. His love was oratory. First at Fullerton High School, and then at Whittier Union High School, Dick Nixon became a star of the debating team. “He was so good it kind of disturbed me,” his Whittier High School coach recalled: “He had this ability to kind of slide around an argument instead of meeting it head on, and he could take any side of a debate.”[6] Richard Nixon’s debating skills were so outstanding that his photograph had already appeared in the Los Angeles Times while he was just a Freshman at Fullerton, competing at the County level, noted for confronting “some of the best speakers that had ever taken part” in those contests. (High School oratory was a newsworthy event in the 1920s).[7] But the content of his orations indicate that young Dick Nixon strongly preferred the right-wing side of debates. His first triumph was to best a liberal-minded champion named Merton Wray, who “took the position that the principles of the Constitution should be extended around the world, that there should be a worldwide Bill of Rights and a world government to guarantee it.” Nixon’s response was that the privileges of the Constitution should be restricted to responsible citizens. He spoke for the restriction of religious liberty in order to guard against “religious practices which are debasing to mind and character,’ and, most probably referring to California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act, praised “laws...for punishing those who abuse their Constitutional privileges.”[8] His leadership continued through his graduation in 1930, each triumph earning him personal praise and another photograph in the Los Angeles Times. Nixon founded his own public career—earning actual notoriety at the metropolitan level—during High School, long before he had a shred of material support, long before he had a friend in the business world. He was a ­self-­made politician who had already taught himself to sell ­right-­wing ideology to the Southern California public by the age of 18. [9]
 
Young Dick Nixon ambitiously aged himself beyond his years, racing toward his political destiny, during a transformative human-institutional migration.  A profoundly transformative migration of "plain folk" from the lower South and especially the western South of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, built on the already-Iowa-Republican colony of Southern California, to found a prosperous socio-political base of self-made, militant, grass-roots, evangelicals for both Capitalism and for Christ. They founded Freedom Forums and convened in mass Revivals under the guidance of the magnetic mass-evangelist Billy Graham.  Thanks to the magisterial study by Darren Dochuk, we now have a detailed portrait of precisely who these pioneers were, and precisely how they inscribed institutions into Southern California.  Home-grown born-again Christian entrepreneurs like George Pepperdine, who prospered from his Western Auto dealership, joined with plain-folk, fundamentalists from the former Confederate States. These newcomers, armed with a Jeffersonian small-town democracy suspicious of cities and federal authority, almost uniformly supporters of racial segregation, were already, by 1940, organizing the Southern Baptist General Convention of Southern California, which a year later won recognition from the Southern Baptist Convention. (Dochuk  2011, pp. 9, 38-39).
 
We have already seen that Christian Fundamentalism itself was literally founded by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA), producing the published the series of 90 essays from which the movement got its name: The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth (1910-1915).  BIOLA remained a potent anchor of evangelical fundamentalism in Southern California, around which later clustered more colleges and churches dedicated to the cause. (See Ghost Metropolis, Manna From Hell; Dochuck 120-210).   As Dochuk shows, the founding of Pepperdine College in 1937 represented a major landmark in the rise of a militant, mobilized, religiously-driven politics, which began as insurgency during the 1930s and 40s, but blossomed as the orchard of the New Right in the 1950s and 1960s.   Pepperdine had toured the South's Church of Christ schools, which he recruited his first President, Batsell Baxter.  Together, they insisted that "all instruction"  follow "conservative, fundamental Christian supervision." (Quoted in Dochuk, 71).   Also arriving in LA in the 1930s was James Fifeld, who built on evangelical principles a five-thousand member First Congregational Church.   With a mission to "check the trends to pagan statism" in America, he enlisted no less than 16,000 ministers in a network called Spiritual Mobilization, (SM), headquartered by 1949 at the Freedom Center Building on Wilshire Boulevard (Dochuk 117).
 
These institution-builders also mobilized, doing so with the greatest resource of all: preaching as mass-performance. Preachers set a new standard beginning with Billy Graham's Christ For Greater Los Angeles Campaign, a revival in tents at Washington and Hill in 1949, promoted over the airwaves by KGER to the 2.5 million radio sets in teh Los Angeles broadcast media market.  These downtown LA roots of Southern California's "Suburban Warriors" of the 1950s-60s are essential to recognize, because they show the direct lineage of the Reagan Revolution to the Otis-Chandler Regime of the 1880s-1940s period.   The geographic center-weight of this movement was  to the south and west, planting ever-proliferating nodes in Orange County, such as Robert H. Schuller's 1955 Drive-In Garden Grove Community Church, literally converting an icon of Souterhn California's new suburban lifestyle into a people's church, and later becoming the nation's leading television-evangelists: "televangelists."

The master of postwar suburban politics was Richard Nixon. His political debut contained elements both of the small town and the Big City. Richard Nixon’s home Congressional District was the 12th, which was mostly comprised of the rural and ­small-­town landscape of eastern Los Angeles County, typified by his own home town of Whittier. But the 12th also stretched as far west as Pasadena, a short commute to Downtown, the refined residence of the most powerful figures in the metropolis. Harry and and Dorothy "Buffy" Chandler, the Los Angeles Times publisher and his socialite/civic leader wife, were among these residents. Five-term Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhies had represented this district since the high tide of the New Deal in 1936. In the 1920s he was a registered member of the Socialist Party and was an unapologetic champion of the progressive wing of the New Deal. His chief support came from the tens of thousands of farm and union workers who had finally begun to enjoy social power in the Southland after decades of repression under the Otis-Chandler open­shop campaign.
 
The institutional support and mentorship that the Chandlers gave to Nixon is indispensable for understanding his extraordinary career. They were the gatekeepers in 1946 when Nixon brashly sought Congressional office in the 12th Congressional District, which included Pasadena, the Otis-Chandler seat of power.  Shortly thereafter, a mere phone call from Kyle Palmer, the Times’ political editor, made him the 1950 Senatorial candidate. “Few other major politicians came out of a metropolitan context so pampered,” writes David Halberstam: “It all created in Nixon a sense that he could get away with things, that the press was crooked and could be bought off.”[5] But just as important was their ideological mentorship, through their political culture that had crushed its Left rivals in 1911, and then had matured in Nixon’s crucial coming-of-age years as a teenager studying the paths to power in the 1920s. 

Chandler and the industrial elite of Los Angeles hated the representation Voorhis the Socialist-Democrat gave them in Washington, but the animosity of the small-town businessmen throughout the district was even greater. Living in Baltimore in 1945 during his last assignment as a Navy officer, Lt. Commander Richard Nixon received a letter in September from Herman Perry, Whittier’s leading banker and the community’s undisputed big man. Perry knew the Nixons well, and knew as well of Richard’s political ambitions. Perry and his fellow Republicans were having a difficult time identifying a candidate who could challenge the popular incumbent Jerry Voorheis in the 1946 elections. He wanted to know if Nixon was interested. By April, Dick and Pat were flying across the country to Los Angeles City Airport to meet with the Republican Party’s Committee of 100. By the end of the dinner, it was clear to everyone that the knowledgeable and pugnacious Nixon had the potential to overthrow the hated Voorheis.

"Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous": Counter-Espionage, Dictatorships, and Assassinations
 
Nixon's very first political campaign bears all the marks of Nixon's entire career: secrets and dirty tricks.  Above all, cynicism.  Nixon pandered effortlessly to the already-existing Christian Right, and beyond them to the racist right whenever he felt it would pay him at the ballot box. .  A flier was circulated that warned against "subversive Jews and Communists planning to "destroy Christian America and our form of government." (Summers 444).  This leaflet has not been definitely traced to Nixon's campaign.  However, the Anti-semitic sentiments are indistinguishable from Nixon's nearly-constant tirades against Jews while in the White House almost thirty years later: "Jews are all over the government," he recorded himself saying to Haldeman in the Oval Office: "Most Jews are disloyal...generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards."  He said that the IRS was "full of Jews," and demanded that Haldeman get him the "names of the Jews, you know the big Jewish contributors [to the Democratic Party]...could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"  (Summers, pp. 353-54).
 
Richard M. Nixon, the triumphant candidate in the 1946 Congressional elections, had successfully knocked an experienced and respected liberal Democrat incumbent.  And Nixon rode a wave of electoral shift to the Republicans that year, putting the Republicans back in control of both the House and the Senate.  Nixon used his noisy anti-communist record, his tenacity, and all the connections he could pull to win a coveted seat on the House Un-American Activities Committee.  So, we need to picture him now, on the right wing of the Republican Party triumphant, seating in 1947, making HUAC a "permanent" committee for the first time.  That Republican Congress enacted the sweeping National Security Act, which created the National Security Council, the office of the National Security Adviser, along with the Central Intelligence Agency and the information-gathering behemoth, the National Secuirty Agency.  Within just a few years, Nixon would himself, as Vice President, join the National Security Council, the supreme, inner-circle of U.S. military geopolitics.

First, however, he exposed Alger Hiss, the highest-ranking U.S. Official seemingly "caught" by the vast anti-communist network (see Schrecker).  Sources did later confirm that he was a former member of the Communist Party, but he was actually convicted only of perjury for lying about knowing Whittaker Chambers at the time that both of them belonged to the Party.  In his cross-examination, Nixon had scored the crucial admission, and mailed that moment for many years.  His publicity campaign included the release of photos of Nixon inspecting microfilm allegedly  recovered from a pumpkin in Whittaker Chambers's garden.   Nixon's biggest political success in the first phase of his career, in Congress, involved the breaking of a secret ring, with secret methods, which he later adopted as his own style of governing: secretly.  Nixon had a favored relationship with FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover already in the late 1940s.  The nation's leading internal political security chief was the most formidable ally for Nixon as he built his career on exposing National Security threats.
 
Nixon never left the space he occupied from the beginning, on the Far Right of the Republican Party, joining his intransigent anti-communism with and approach to the electoral process as a game that required cheating and public deceit. “Nice guys and sissies don’t win elections” he famously remarked after defeating Jerry Voorhis on a red-smear campaign. He had already earned the sobriquet “Tricky Dick” during his 1950 Senate campaign against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, and the “Secret Fund” crisis that led to the Checkers Speech in 1952 is full of portents. He had knowingly stabbed Earl Warren in the back to gain the Vice Presidential nomination, agreeing to a Liberal - Anticommunist marriage with Ike, as arranged by Thomas Dewey in 1952. That treachery is what inspired a liberal-­wing California Republican to blow the whistle on Nixon’s “secret fund.”

In a bold determination to make use of Nixon and educate him internationally as insurance policy in case of his own demise, President Eisenhower sent Nixon and Pat on a 70-day tour of Asian allies, departing 5 October.  He was the voice of no-compromise with Communist aggressors, cheering-on and pledging support to the anti-communist efforts under French tutelage in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Los, the "Associated States of French Indochina."  He also met with key allies to bear Eisenhower's clear message not to go on the offensive here Ike wanted to avoid a potential third world war.  In Taipei, Nixon told Chang Kai-shek that the US would not support an assault on the mainland, and in Seoul he told Singman Rhee not to re-invade North Korea following the July 1953 armistice.  Nixon's stop in Japan excited world attention when he called for Japan's re-armament, calling the Constitutional provision of 1946 a "mistake."   By the time this grand tour concluded, Richard Nixon had an enviable lead over nearly all other Republicans in first-hand knowledge of world leaders and a cutting-edge role in U.S. strategy in the Far East. (Ambrose: 319-329)

From 1953 onward, Nixon as Vice President and member of the National Security Council (which directs the CIA), Nixon had himself had installed dictators and dictatorships, from Iran in the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the restoration of Pro-Western absolute monarchy under King Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi; the CIA-planned and executed overthrow of elected President Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala, and the installation of Ft. Leavenworth-trained General Castillo Armas in 1954 (planned by future Watergate Richard Bissel and E. Howard Hunt).  

By 1956, Nixon representing a helpless United States, visited the border of Hungary, at a refugee camp, to symbolically confront the U.S.S.R's suppression of the Hungarian Uprising.  The moment was immortalized in an oddly Stalinist painting by Ferenc Daday (1971) that now hangs on permanent loan in the Nixon Library in Loma Linda, Orange County, California.

The climax of Nixon's education as  foreign statesman came in the pivotal year of 1959, during which, in July, he debated Premier Khrushchev in the U.S. Pavilion in Sokolniki Park, in Moscow, seemingly flustering him with claims of superiority for the American way of life. 

The foreign relations irruption  that would possibly be most fateful for Nixon for the rest of his career, was the 1959 Cuban Revolution.  He played a major role in destroying democracy in Cuba in the NSC's choice to back Fulgencio Bautista's 1952 military coup and subsequent repression and alliance with the Lansky-Traficante casino mobsters.  After Fidel Castro's successful Revolution in January 1959, hat same NSA planned an invasion of Cuba modeled on the Guatemalan seizure of power in 1954.  What became known as he Bay of Pigs Invasion,a nd for which President Kennedy ultimately had to take responsibility, was in fact the handiwork of the CIA with deep involvement by Richard Nixon.  Indeed, he was hamstrung during the 1960 presidential campaign in stating his own very strong support for invasion, because Eisenhower had spiked the Bay of Pigs plan and Nixon could not contradict him. 

During the second week of July, 1960, Norman Mailer witnessed the scene from a second-story balcony of the Biltmore Hotel as an electrified crowd waited for the arrival of their hero. “The television cameras were out, and a Kennedy band was playing some circus music” outside of the Biltmore Hotel. Bobby had set up the Biltmore headquarters months earlier, in April.[10] Suddenly, Kennedy arrived in an open car “with the deep ­orange-­brown tan of a ski instructor,” his teeth “amazingly white and visible at a distance of fifty yards.” Mailer grasped in an instant the meaning of a scene that would otherwise have blurred into the mythic story of Camelot: “For one moment he saluted Pershing Square and Pershing Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street, one of those very special moments in the underground history of the world...”[11] In Mailer’s brilliant analysis, Los Angeles represented the mass consumer market of the postwar era, which had reached its spiritual nadir in the last years of the Eisenhower-­Nixon administration: “Not all the roots of American life are uprooted, but almost all, and the spirit of the supermarket, that homogeneous extension of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable, that essence of the new postwar SuperAmerica is found nowhere so perfectly as in Los Angeles’s ubiquitous acres.”[12]

Kennedy, Mailer argued, was the ideal candidate and antidote to the massification of American culture. “No matter how serious his political dedication might be,” Mailer wrote, Kennedy “was going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not easy to calculate.”[13] Indeed, Kennedy brought Hollywood glamour together with the institutional roots of the East Coast establishment, the machinery of the New Deal Coalition that his father Joseph had helped to assemble in the 1930s. Indeed, Joseph P. Kennedy had also been an architect of Hollywood glamour back in the 1920s, and his son was always a hybrid of these two institutional bases of public power: the door­to-door party organizations and the mass-mediated advertising campaigns. The transition from bottom-­up, precinct-­talking, face-to-face organizational party politics to top-down mass advertising politics was underway in this very election. White it is tempting to say that the glamorous Kennedy represented the new era of telegenic actor-politicians and the homely, hard­scrabble Quaker shopkeeper’s son Nixon represents the old order, but it is not at all that simple. Both men were transitional. Nixon, after all, was the true pioneer of televisual politics in his brilliant, 1952 Checkers Speech. Both men tested the new medium for presidential contests in their famous televised debates. And both men were among the last American politicians who were deeply knowledgeable about the local party leadership throughout the nation (although Nixon was most impressive on this score).

Despite its brilliance concerning the symbolic cultural meaning of Kennedy as a charismatic hero in a crass consumer culture, Mailer’s piece is misleading regarding the specifics he offers about Los Angeles. Mailer saw Los Angeles with the contemptuous eyes of a leading member of New York’s literati. Mailer at that moment was, by his own admission “in a Napoleonic mood,” having decided to run for Mayor of New York City.[14] Mailer’s article is also frankly partisan, so he failed completely to assess Nixon’s deep compatibility with the Los Angeles milieu. Kennedy had entered not just any supermarket, but Nixon’s electoral market, the Nixon Market of Whittier, and the Democratic National Convention had come to Nixon’s home political base at a very special moment in the development of the metropolis.

The year 1960 proved to be the peak year for the white Anglo population of Los Angeles County. Every year thereafter, the number and proportions of whites in the county decreased. It was the apogee of the white majority metropolis that had mushroomed with the rapid expansion of military production during the previous twenty years. As such, that population was feeling its oats, fed from the Cold-War censored mass media of the previous decade, that portrayed America as white and middle class. And yet, African American and Latino populations had also mushroomed, blacks increasing from 70,000 in 1950 to almost a half million in 1960.

While Kennedy’s campaign had begun at the Biltmore Hotel on Fifth and Olive, Nixon’s ended at the Ambassador on Wilshire and Alexandria. The 1960 election was the closest finish to date in the 20th century, to be surpassed only by the election of 2000. Of 68 million popular votes cast, Kennedy’s final tally was only 113,000 greater than Nixon’s. But of course the American people do not directly elect their president. What mattered were the electoral votes. When the Electoral College finally met in December, the electors cast 303 for Kennedy and 219 for Nixon. This apparently wide margin masks a razor­thin balance that could have gone either way if just a few states flipped majorities. California’s 31 electoral votes were actually Kennedy’s until absentee ballots were finally counted by 17 November, when those votes went Nixon.

Most notorious were the results in Texas, where Kennedy’s 24 electoral votes rested on a majority of only 46,000 votes, and Illinois, where 27 electoral votes hung by the thread of a tiny 8,000-vote majority. That statewide Illinois margin had been made possible by the massive and highly suspicious 450,000-vote margin of victory in Chicago. That surge was Democratic Mayor Richard Daley’s gift late in the night, announced only after Boss Daley, who controlled the votes from Chicago in the grand style of an unreformed urban machine, was clear on how many votes Jack needed. As Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party, Daley personally oversaw the final reporting of all precinct returns. His ward heelers, dependent on him for the continuance of their city jobs, literally had to look him in the eye as they declared their district vote yield. Reliable ward heelers were the ones with the biggest margins: men Daley could count on year after year. Nixon’s men aggressively challenged the outcome in Cook county and in the end, 677 indictments were served. Three men went to jail for election fraud.[17]

“We won but they stole it from us,” Nixon remarked at a 1960 Christmas party. But, as the Chicago Tribune wryly observed: “Once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.” The same was even more true of Jim Crow Texas, where there wasn’t even a legal mechanism for recounts.[15] While it is still possible that known cases of fraud were not sufficient to throw the election unfairly, as Kallina has argued, the impact of the appearance of a stolen election, especially in Nixon’s mind, are of the greatest importance.[16] As David Greenberg notes, “Nixon nursed the grudge for years, and when he was criticized for his Watergate crimes he would cite the Kennedys' misdeeds as precedent. He may have felt JFK's supposed theft entitled him to cheat in 1972.”[17]
 
Had Nixon, not Kennedy, been inaugurated on 20 January 1961, the world would certainly be a far different place today. Although it is impossible say how, it is rather easy to say why. Epochal geopolitical events that eventually took place, beginning with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion--which Nixon had actually helped to plan while sitting on the National Security Council—­would certainly have been dealt with differently by Nixon. Events such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, or the long string of Civil Rights crises and actions, including the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, developed in the ways they did through highly complex interventions by the Kennedy cabinet and NSC. Contingencies were so numerous in each of these events that we can be absolutely certain that an entirely different cabinet and a president with very different temperament and leadership style would have handled them differently.

Thus began the winter of Nixon’s discontent. Nixon, already stamped with an image as a cheater—Tricky Dick—and underhanded dealings, knowing in his heart that he was the rightful winner, was also the homely and plain candidate. He had to watch Kennedy’s greatest hours, the glamorous, style-setting Jack and Jackie Kennedy.   [INSERT WS HERE]

But the 1960 loss shook Nixon’s nice guy discipline and the 1962 loss threw him off the wagon completely. The effect of Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination on Nixon is difficult to assess. On the one hand, of course, he was glad to be a contender again. But on the other, it also looked like the product, somehow, of the Cold War, and just how tough the game is really played. Nixon had been neck-deep in the planning of Castro’s assassination, so his return to the political underworld took little effort.

Despite the impossibility of knowing just how much of his growing cynicism about electoral democracy can be credited to the perception of a stolen Kennedy presidency, it is certain that 8-9 November 1960 was “the longest night of Nixon’s life,” and it only inaugurated a period of humiliating failure.[20]

After cleaning out his West Wing office, the undeterred Nixon returned to Los Angeles to begin a campaign for the California Governorship in 1962. His loss to the liberal Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown produced Nixon’s notorious sore-loser performance at the Beverly Hilton, his “Last Press Conference,” including his angry denunciation of the press and lament that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Regrettably, Nixon could not keep that campaign promise.  He never stopped organizing for his next attempt to gain the White House. 
 
NOTES

[1] White House Tapes, 30 June 1971. Quoted in Los Angeles Times 1 March 2003, p. A16.

[2] Levine (1988).

[3] "Nominee for Veep," Time Magazine, 21 July 1952 (accessed online at www.time.come 18 March 2008.  This quotation is presented by Time as "Favorite family anecdote," giving no date for the incident, but the year 1924 is supplied by Ambrose (1987): 29.

[4] Ambrose, (1987): 43; Matt Roth 6th­Street Bridge essay.

[5] Transcript in Gamio, El inmigrante mexicano, 327 Author’s translation.

[6] Ambrose (1998): 45-6.

[7] “Three Orators Stir Contest,” Los Angeles Times, 3 April 1928, p. A7.

[8] “Whittier Picks Best Orators: Richard Nixon Wins First in Elimination” Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1929, p. A9; Quotations in Ambrose (1998): 47. Ambrose, who apparently was not familiar with California’s laws, expresses incomprehension of Nixon’s references to such persons abusing their Constitutional privileges.

[9] “Orators Named By Six Schools,” Los Angeles Times, 29 April 1930, p. A9.

[10] LA Times, *** relocate article.

[11] Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” originally published in Esquire, November 1960. Mailer (1963): 37-8.

[12] Mailer (1963): 32-3.

[13] Mailer (1963): 38.

[14] Mailer, “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, or The Wild West of the East,” first published in Esquire, republished in Mailer (1963): 87.

[15] Facts and quotations from Greenberg (2000); Nixon’s own account was he refused to challenge the election for patriotic reasons, not wanting to throw the nation into confusion and make it look weak to the Soviets is told in his two memoirs: Six Crises (1962) and RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978). Stephen Ambrose repeats this perspective in Ambrose (1987): 604-608, but Greenberg (2004) has definitively debunked that Nixonian myth.

[16] Kallina (1988).

[17] Greenberg (2000).

[18] “Transcript of a meeting between the President and H.R. Haldeman in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972 from 10:04 to 11:39 AM.” National Archives, White House Tapes.

[19] Wills (1970).

[20] Quotation from Ambrose (1987): 605.

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