THE CHALLENGE
November 11
Washington, D.C.
Thruston Morton was sure Kennedy had stolen the presidency, and the Kentucky senator was hopping mad. Unlike Nixon, he refused to concede the election. And as the Republican Party national chairman, he was going to do something about it.
He asked Republican leaders in eleven states to look into allegations of voter fraud. Morton believed that could lead to recounts, which could overturn the results.
Morton said there were too many red flags, too many complaints filed by Republican voters all over the country not to investigate.
Most of the thousand fraud accusations came from Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, New Mexico, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.
Morton seemed to have most GOP officials on board.
The RNC issued a news release saying: “We believe we owe it to the electorate to take every legitimate and reasonable step to ensure that the will of the people has in fact been correctly recorded.”
The RNC said its investigators would confer with party leaders in the eight states “where the results were close and where complaints of widespread irregularities and election frauds have been the most frequent.”
Herb Klein said Nixon had not been consulted about Morton’s statement, and that the vice president accepted the decision of the voters.
But did he?
Before he conceded to Kennedy, Nixon had called Eisenhower to talk over the election with his boss. Years later in his memoir, Nixon said Ike had “urged” him to challenge the election. He had even offered to help raise money for recounts in Illinois and Texas.
Nixon said he decided against Ike’s advice—even though there was evidence of substantial voter fraud.
Others said it was Eisenhower who had talked Nixon out of questioning the election loss.
Morton’s push, however, gained traction inside GOP circles. While the issue was no more than a brief article buried inside daily newspapers, Republican officials all over the country knew about it. There was no internet or cable channels or partisan talking heads to explode the story overnight. The issue was a word-of-mouth phenomenon.
The vote margins were razor-thin in states and cities renowned for crooked elections, like Chicago. People began phoning in tips—and some in the Nixon campaign volunteered to look for suspiciously large pro-Kennedy results in eight states.
Maybe, or maybe not. The GOP decided to drill deeper into the precincts and moved forward with investigations, acting independently of Nixon.
November 14
Key Biscayne, Florida
All over the nation, headlines had blared “Kennedy Defeats Nixon.” The news about the election was on every radio and television station. Nixon couldn’t escape it.
Everywhere he looked, Kennedy’s face was there, happy, smiling with his wife and family. Newspaper reporters were fawning over him, delighted to be in the presence of victory. It was all too much for Nixon to take.
And Nixon couldn’t stop thinking about what Leonard Hall had said to him on the flight to Washington the day after the election: Fight. Contest the election. Top Republicans were joining the chorus. But Nixon was exhausted and depressed. He had no energy or desire for more political warfare.
Nixon needed to get away. A few days after the election, he took his wife and daughters to a beachfront villa at the Key Biscayne Hotel to relax in the warm sunshine.
It wasn’t all leisure. Three of his closest advisers came along with their wives: Herb Klein, Bob Finch, and Donald Hughes, his military aide, along with Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods.
Klein had known Nixon for years. As a Navy veteran in his first reporting job, he had covered Nixon’s first run for Congress back in 1946. He had either covered or worked on all his subsequent campaigns.
Key Biscayne, an island just off Miami, was an oasis of sandy beaches, nature preserves, and restaurants—a perfect place to unwind. The group shared quiet dinners and cocktails at Nixon’s place, where they’d talk shop. Klein said that Nixon was “as low” as he’d ever seen him.
During one dinner at the Key Biscayne Hotel, Nixon admitted the election had taken a toll on him. GOP leaders had spent the past week flying in or calling, trying to convince him to challenge the election.
Some of Nixon’s friends worried that a contested election would leave the country leaderless and divided at a critical time in the Cold War.
Still, party leaders pressed Nixon relentlessly. They believed Nixon was cheated in several states, including his home state of California. Although California was still in Kennedy’s column, they believed the absentee ballot count would put Nixon over the top.
Kennedy had 330 electoral votes. If California, Illinois, and Texas flipped, then Nixon would be the winner. Or maybe the House of Representatives would step in to decide the election. They mapped out many different scenarios.
During dinner at the nearby Jamaica Inn on November 12, the maître d’ approached Nixon’s table. He told the vice president a man was on the telephone asking to speak to him. When Nixon picked up the line, it was Herbert Hoover, the former president. He told Nixon that he had just talked to Joe Kennedy. And Joe suggested that since JFK and Nixon were both in South Florida, the two rivals should meet. Nixon couldn’t believe it and thought it was a cheap publicity stunt—and that’s what he told Hoover. But now Hoover was upset. Joe Kennedy’s suggestion was a “generous gesture” and should be treated as so. Nixon thought about it, then said, all right. He’d do it. When he got back to the table, the vice president told his guests about the conversation. Nixon said he was going to call President Eisenhower to tell him what happened. Hughes escorted Nixon to a public pay phone inside the restaurant.
Ike had also been feeling low since Kennedy’s win. He felt it was a rejection of his own presidency. For the past eight years he had worked ceaselessly on behalf of the American people at great cost to his health and reputation…and this was what he got in the end.
Nixon put in a dime and dialed Eisenhower, who was in Augusta, Georgia, the site of the Masters Tournament, to unwind and play golf. While Nixon was talking to Ike, the maître d’s phone rang again. This time it was JFK. Klein took the call.
As he talked to Kennedy, Klein got the feeling that the past few months had cost him, too. The president-elect “wandered in the conversation.” He complimented Klein, saying he dressed “better than Pierre Salinger,” his own press secretary. After more small talk, Klein said the vice president was on the phone with Eisenhower. Nixon would call him back, he said.
And Nixon did. Kennedy said he was at his family compound in Palm Beach and wondered if Nixon would meet with him. Nixon said yes, and offered to drive 80 miles north to Palm Beach. But Kennedy stopped him. JFK said he’d take his private plane to Miami International Airport, then a helicopter to Key Biscayne.
When Pierre Salinger disclosed the meeting to the media, he said that the reason was simple: Kennedy wanted to congratulate his opponent for a hard-fought campaign and resume cordial relations with Nixon.
No one knew what would happen when they saw each other. This was the closest race in U.S. history—and a bitter one at that. And Nixon supporters were pushing for him to contest the election. But when Kennedy traveled to Key Biscayne on Monday, the two greeted each other like a couple of tourists. “Gee, it’s good to see you Jack,” said Nixon, grasping Kennedy’s hand and giving him a firm pat on the shoulder. “You have a nice tan already.”
Kennedy laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten you out of the sun today.”
The two of them headed to Nixon’s villa, number 69 at the Key Biscayne Hotel.
Nixon and Kennedy meet at Key Biscayne Hotel, November 14, 1960
(Richard Nixon Presidential Library)
They emerged after an hour. Kennedy told the assembled reporters they had talked about the transition to the new administration, as well as urgent foreign affairs.
But he said he didn’t offer Nixon a cabinet post in his administration. And he doubted Nixon would have accepted such an offer.
Nixon sidestepped the question. “Only the president can properly make such a disclosure.”
After Kennedy left, Nixon told reporters that he felt the president-elect was very gracious in coming to Key Biscayne instead of waiting for him to visit. Nixon called the meeting an excellent example of the way a democracy works. It was all about the peaceful transition of power.
When the reporters left, he recounted to his friends that Kennedy had offered him a cabinet position, but he’d turned him down, saying that he should instead be the “constructive opposition.”
Nixon also said that he’d told Kennedy he would not contest the election.
Still, it was not over—thanks to GOP officials and a journalist who kept pushing the issue.
November 15
Washington, D.C.
Earl Mazo knew a great story when he saw one, and this was big—the juicy exclusive that he thought would finally win him his Pulitzer Prize for reporting. Mazo was one of the few journalists that Richard Nixon liked or trusted. Mazo believed the election had been stolen, and he was going to prove it.
He told his editors at the New York Herald Tribune he could give them a series about how the election was taken from Nixon. They said yes.
Mazo was short and pugnacious, with a thick, flat nose like a boxer and a shock of wavy black hair. He was outgoing but tough, a Polish Jew who’d grown up in the Deep South. He had learned how to fight to survive.
Mazo scaled the journalism ladder at newspapers in South Carolina, New Jersey, and then New York. In 1956 he became the chief political correspondent in the Herald Tribune’s Washington, D.C., bureau.
When he got to Washington, he began covering the Eisenhower administration. That’s how he became friends with Nixon. He’d often travel to cover stories involving the vice president, including Nixon’s terrifying trip to Venezuela in 1958. There, he wrote how the Secret Service saved the vice president from an angry mob that had surrounded his car.
The same year, Mazo decided to write a Nixon biography. As part of his research for Richard Nixon: A Political and Personal Portrait, Mazo spoke with national figures on both sides of the aisle.
Nixon liked Mazo’s book and shared information with the reporter during the campaign. Now Mazo was on a mission to save Nixon’s candidacy.
His first stories were fairly routine reports on GOP complaints about voter fraud:
Allegations of election irregularities in several states caused Republicans leaders today to closely examine returns in the presidential contest—and wonder if their concessions of victory to Sen. John F. Kennedy might have been premature.
One top-echelon figure in the party hierarchy told the Herald Tribune News Service that if “half the reports we’ve been getting can be run down quickly enough to be proven” it is “quite possible” Vice President Nixon would become President-elect instead of Kennedy.
Leonard Hall, chairman of the Nixon campaign was less optimistic. He said a mass of reports from “almost a dozen states” indicated there had been serious irregularities, especially in Texas and Illinois. But he said his off-hand view was that it may be too late to “catch enough of it” to switch the election result.
But Mazo didn’t want to just report on what others said. He wanted to investigate the allegations. He thought the fraud had happened—and that ran counter to everything he believed in. He persuaded his editors to let him travel to the key states and started cataloging tips—those collected by GOP officials, and others he found himself.
The story was right there in front of him, but he had little time to run it down. Electors would certify the election on December 19. He’d have to push hard to get it in time.
November 16
Sacramento, California
California had landed in Jack Kennedy’s column on election night, with a lead of nearly 35,000 votes. But with all but 20,000 of the 225,000 absentee ballots counted, the balance shifted—Nixon was leading the state by just over 13,000 votes.
California’s 32 electoral votes now went to Nixon. That dropped Kennedy’s electoral votes to 300, while Nixon’s increased to 223. It was still not enough for a victory, but it gave hope to Republicans who were pressing for a recount in other states. Hell, Nixon’s own wife was lobbying for him to contest the results.
Senator Thruston Morton was the public face of the effort. They would go to court if they had to, he promised. “I can say unequivocally that there have been shocking irregularities and fraud in this election,” he would later say.
Many Republicans joined him, but the mainstream media played down the issue. There were stories, but they were buried on the inside pages of most newspapers.
Kennedy and his transition team were much more appealing, and Jacqueline Kennedy was due to give birth in weeks.
For many Americans, the election was over, and Kennedy had won, despite the tight race. At this point, Kennedy led the national popular vote by just under 200,000. But it wasn’t the national vote that mattered—it was the razor-thin margins in eleven states, and what a change in the count might do to where their electoral votes went.
It was the holiday season. Thanksgiving and Christmas meant shopping, parties, visits. In places like Nashua, New Hampshire, and Greensboro, North Carolina, downtowns were decked with sparkling lights and Christmas trees.
The theaters offered up The Magnificent Seven, Spartacus, or The Alamo, and television would soon have the normal slate of specials like the Christmas episode on The Andy Griffith Show. Americans were happy to put the election behind them and think about peace on earth. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” replaced “High Hopes.”
But a hard-core group of Republicans eyed California’s reversal as a fighting chance for Nixon. And Morton and his colleagues were willing to push it as far as they could.
November 17
Washington, D.C.
J. Edgar Hoover’s job was safe no matter who was elected. JFK said after the election that he would reappoint him as FBI director.
Hoover accepted, but had been in a sour mood for weeks. He summoned Philip Hochstein, editorial director of Newhouse newspapers, to his office.
Hoover launched into a long rant. He told Hochstein that Kennedy was not the president-elect, that the election had been stolen in a number of states, including New Jersey and Missouri.
The FBI director had access to secret electronic surveillance, and he’d heard enough to know about election corruption in places like Illinois.
Hochstein had a feeling that Hoover was trying to push him to investigate the fraud, but Hochstein didn’t do it. It might be a big story, but it wasn’t sexy. The majority of influential journalists had become friends with the Kennedys. They believed allegations of election fraud were nothing more than sour grapes—the GOP complaining about losing the election.
Was there fraud? Maybe. But many journalists believed there weren’t enough irregularities to change the results. So why bother investigating?
November 18
Chicago, Illinois
The GOP in Illinois formed the Nixon Recount Committee. And on November 18, it held a coordinating meeting with groups from other states and announced the opening of a headquarters in Chicago.
Clearly the effort had picked up steam. The office handled inquiries from the Republican National Committee and the White House about recount actions underway in other states.
Harold Rainville, the Chicago office manager for Republican senator Everett Dirksen, said they were moving toward a recount, adding that Nixon was still cutting the vote margins in Missouri, Nevada, and New Mexico.
The Associated Press showed that Kennedy’s lead in Illinois was now only 9,359 out of 4.7 million ballots cast.
William Fetridge, chairman of the Nixon Recount Committee, called a meeting to plan the anti-fraud battle.
The committee said more than $34,000 had been sent in from forty-four states to aid the drive.
A week earlier, Fetridge said, “people interested in fair play and honest elections” should contribute, even if only a dollar.
Republican leaders said that in all their years of poll watching, they had never seen more blatant fraudulent practices. They said Kennedy and the Democrats had stolen massive numbers of votes in the so-called river wards of Chicago. Those were blocs of working-class and low-income wards along the Chicago River that were the mainstay of the city’s Democratic machine. Those neighborhoods regularly produced the machine’s margins of victory.
The Democrats had rolled up “fantastic pluralities” for Kennedy. Republican investigators said they had found as many as forty-five fake voter registrations within just two apartment buildings in Ward 4. That single neighborhood gave Kennedy 25,770 votes, while Nixon got 7,120.
Other neighborhoods had one-sided totals. In Ward 2, JFK received close to 21,100 votes to Nixon’s 5,450. And then there was Ward 24, where Kennedy collected some 24,000 votes to Nixon’s just over 2,130.
Would Nixon get a recount in Illinois? Would Nixon be able to flip other states? No one knew for sure. But the Republican National Committee was pushing that narrative—and they weren’t going to stop.
They were all in to find out the truth. It would be difficult, a long shot, maybe, but when the recounts were over, GOP officials said, Nixon would be declared the next president—especially if they could flip the 27 electoral votes in Illinois.
November 20
Washington, D.C.
Richard Nixon understood that challenging the results was a double-edged sword.
“From the evidence I examined, there was no question but that there was real substance to many of these charges,” Nixon would write in his memoir, Six Crises.
But if the recounts and investigations weren’t successful, Nixon would come across as a sore loser—and that could hurt him if he ran for office again.
Nixon also knew a switch of a few thousand votes from Democratic to Republican in places like Illinois or Missouri, where JFK carried the state by less than 10,000 votes, would give him 259 electoral votes to Kennedy’s 263. That, plus a similar switch in any two of the three other states—New Mexico, Nevada, and Hawaii, where the vote was also very close—would reverse the election results. He could win this.
Chicago mayor Richard Daley was suspected of manipulating vote counts in Cook County, Illinois. So was Lyndon Johnson throughout Texas.
Money would be needed for the recounts—and possible court fights. Republican supporters were filling up the coffers.
But another scenario was emerging—one that focused on slates of unpledged electors who had won in the South. An unpledged elector is just what it sounds like—a person who hasn’t sworn allegiance to any candidate.
Mississippi had eight unpledged electors. Alabama had six. If the recounts resulted in Nixon or Kennedy not collecting 269 electoral votes, the unpledged electors could throw the election to the candidate of their choice.
They were from segregationist states. They were likely unhappy with the federal government telling them to integrate their schools. So, in theory, the candidate who supported their position would get their electoral votes. Would that happen? No one knew. It all depended on what became of the recounts and the court fights.
Of course, if no one reached 269 electoral votes, the election could be thrown into the House of Representatives, and Congress would pick the next president. That had happened twice before: in 1801, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams, and 1825, when Adams’s son John Quincy Adams was selected over Andrew Jackson.
Many of Nixon’s associates urged him to fight as long as there was hope—a chance that he could win. And even if the effort failed, disclosure of election irregularities would be big news. It might help GOP candidates in the 1962 and 1964 elections.
But Nixon was torn. He wasn’t sure that contesting the election was the right thing to do for the country. He had already conceded. So, for now, Nixon would stay in the background.
November 23
Austin, Texas
Texas was a mess. Mazo was still collecting information, but he knew that the first part of his series would raise serious doubts about the outcome of the presidential race there.
He believed he had proof that the state’s 24 electoral votes rightfully belonged to Richard Nixon, not John F. Kennedy—even though the Texas Election Board had already certified JFK as the winner.
As he examined the voter fraud complaints collected by the GOP in that state, he discovered what he would later call “many categories of alleged irregularities—from bald fraud to unintentional tally errors.”
Part of the problem was the Texas ballot design. The Lone Star State had gone out of its way to make voting more complicated and confusing. Voters using paper ballots not only had to mark their choice for president but also had to scratch out the names of all the other candidates and the political parties they weren’t voting for. This befuddled many voters, who failed to scratch out the outsider Constitution or Prohibition parties, which were also listed. Why would Texas election officials design the ballot that way? Mazo thought. It was a rhetorical question, of course. He was sure he already knew the answer.
Precinct judges had the power to decide whether ballots that were not fully marked should be counted. It made sense they would throw out more Nixon ballots than Kennedy ones—but only if you knew about the Texas political landscape.
From top to bottom, Texas had been controlled by Democrats forever and “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson was going to be the next vice president. House Speaker Sam Rayburn had been involved in Texas politics for decades. Both men had cut their teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Texas elections, where the outcome of a race could change in a heartbeat. Johnson and Rayburn knew all the right people in every key precinct.
In Texas, Mazo uncovered evidence that some small places reported more votes than they had voters. For example, only 86 people turned out at Precinct 27 in Angelina County, but the vote reported—and approved all the way up to the state canvas board—was 147 for Kennedy and 24 for Nixon. And in Fannin County, 6,138 votes were cast. But only 4,895 people were registered to vote. Similar situations were reported all over Texas.
There were also reports of voter intimidation—people being coerced and intimidated by pistol-packing election officials. There were many cases of fixed machines. Somehow a machine in a GOP district in San Antonio tabulated every vote except those for Nixon-Lodge.
Republican officials said that at least 100,000 ballots might have been illegally counted—that mattered in a state that Kennedy carried by just over 46,000 votes. The plurality might be considered a landslide in a small state like Rhode Island. But in Texas—where nearly 2.3 million people voted—those ballots could be enough to flip the state for Nixon.
Mazo said the most egregious irregularity were the “throw outs,” or disqualified paper ballots. It seemed that election judges in the precincts, practically all of whom were Democrats, varied widely as to what they considered grounds for voiding ballots.
So, in some precincts, notably where there was a heavy Republican presence, Mazo found that up to 40 percent of Nixon votes were disqualified. Meanwhile, in Democrat-dominated places like Starr County on the Mexican border, almost none of the ballots were thrown out. Also in Starr County, the GOP claimed that eighteen Republican voters had come forward saying that they voted a split ticket, which was not reflected in the totals for the county.
Something nefarious was going on, Mazo alleged. Throw out a handful of Nixon votes in this precinct, several hundred Nixon votes in another, it starts adding up—especially in a state with 254 counties, each with dozens and dozens of precincts.
Mazo said that based on the evidence, Republicans were demanding a recount of all ballots. That was the only way “the true results of this election can be determined legally and fairly,” they wrote on a petition claiming an “illegal dilution” of votes for Nixon and Lodge.
Approximately half the nearly 2.3 million votes cast in Texas were on paper ballots. Republican leaders contended a recheck for uniform enforcement of the “negative vote” law would wipe out Kennedy’s lead and give the state to Nixon by more than 50,000 votes.
Did the Kennedy-Johnson ticket really receive a swing of 100,000 votes, as the GOP claimed? In Texas, people had to pay a poll tax of more than a dollar before they could vote. It was used as a way to stop Black people from voting. But it also could be used as a way to track voter fraud. In Rayburn’s Fannin County, the poll tax list showed 4,895 people paid the fee—yet 6,138 people voted on November 8. Kennedy carried the county by a three-to-one margin, collecting 4,282 ballots to Nixon’s 1,844. (Twelve votes went to other candidates.)
Mazo said he found evidence of voters casting up to six ballots at once and precinct chiefs bribing voters.
But the clock was ticking. They had to do something before December 19, when the electors in each state convened to certify the results.
Almost as important, the GOP was too late to ask for a statewide recount. That’s because the state election board—all Democrats—had already certified Kennedy as the winner, giving him the Lone Star State’s 24 electoral votes.
Attorney General Will Wilson, a Democrat, was a member of the Texas Board of Canvassers, which certified Kennedy as the winner. He told Mazo that he “doubted anything could be done about the alleged irregularities.” Maybe they could prosecute people for election fraud.
“I have found that elections are like cement. When they are set, they harden—and that’s it,” Wilson said.
Washington, D.C.
At first, President Eisenhower accepted the election outcome. But now he was beginning to have second thoughts. He had been staying at his cabin in Augusta, Georgia. Now he was back in Washington.
He began asking questions. After Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield expressed concern over possible voter fraud, Ike reached out to Attorney General William Rogers. Was anything being done to investigate the allegations? Yes, the election was over. But the voters deserved to know whether the vote was somehow rigged, Eisenhower said. Rogers said the FBI had been looking into voter fraud in Texas and Illinois, but they had stopped after Nixon objected to the investigation.
November 25
Washington, D.C.
Jack Kennedy wasn’t watching the recounts. He was with his wife, who had given birth to a six-pound, three-ounce boy with a shock of black hair.
Kennedy wasn’t there when his son was born. He was at the family compound in Palm Beach when he got the message: Jackie was in labor. He had to hightail it to Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C., to be by Jackie’s side.
The president-elect smiled as he gazed at his son through a heavy glass window. His namesake was placed in an incubator, a normal procedure for babies born slightly prematurely. He’d be in there for a few days and would be released from the hospital on December 9.
Kennedy was still dragging almost two weeks after the election. He headed to his Georgetown home to get some sleep. As he left the hospital, he told reporters his wife was awake and lively. “She is fine,” he said.
He told them the baby’s name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. It was his first son. His daughter, Caroline, would turn three in just a couple days.
Most of America was looking forward to pictures and news of the Kennedy baby. The infant’s arrival again relegated the GOP election recount efforts to the inside sections of newspapers.
November 30
Washington, D.C.
With under three weeks remaining before the Electoral College met, the GOP was still pushing for statewide recounts. They had already started in Chicago.
JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, said the president-elect wasn’t worried.
But Democrats thought there was no damn way this was going on without Nixon’s backing.
It was frustrating. Kennedy and top Democratic leaders knew the GOP was casting doubt on Kennedy’s legitimacy. That would resonate with some Americans. They would believe that Kennedy wasn’t the real president—that somehow, he’d bought the office just like he had bought the Democratic presidential nomination. That was the real danger.
Proving widespread voter fraud was a dangerous game at a dangerous time. With the Soviet Union making inroads all over the world, would a divided America be able to stop the advance?
Some Democratic Party leaders felt it was like a coup—the GOP was trying to seize power and undermine the democratic process, even though Kennedy had won.
At the beginning, part of the Republican strategy was to take small developments and rumors and embellish them. But now new and relevant details seemed to emerge almost every day. Would it be enough?
There were some people hoping it would. A few newspapers in the South had started an editorial campaign to persuade southern electors to reverse their support for Kennedy when the Electoral College met, thus putting the election in the hands of U.S. House members.
The Mobile Press Register Inc., which published two newspapers, said that might lead to the election of a southern Democrat who believed in states’ rights.
Could that really happen? If it did, there’d certainly be chaos when the Electoral College met on December 19. Nobody wanted it to play out that way. Or did they?
December 4
Chicago, Illinois
When Earl Mazo got to Illinois he discovered it was just as bad as Texas.
And it didn’t take long before he reported some of the tricks being used to inflate numbers in Cook County.
Election rolls were supposed to keep track of registered voters. But they were rigged so the names of the dead would still appear, allowing others to vote in the deceased’s name.
Now Mazo had company. Since the election, the Chicago Tribune had been reporting on widespread voter fraud in the city. Their findings could be summarized by that newspaper’s editorial board: “The election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Richard Nixon] was deprived of victory.”
In another editorial, the conservative newspaper said the U.S. district attorney in Chicago should investigate the disappearance of a ballot box critical to an election fraud probe.
The missing records were for Ward 2, Precinct 50. Nearly eighty votes were cast—even though that precinct only had twenty-two registered voters. The box was being kept in a locked vault. When the safe was opened, the box was gone. Election judges were supposed to look for suspicious activity at the polls. But it was often difficult to find Republicans to volunteer for the job. So, Democrats would pretend to be Republicans to fill those vacancies.
Newspapers all over the country began to look more closely at the allegations. The Newark Ledger-Dispatch in an editorial quoted Mazo’s reporting:
Take for example, a couple of incidents turned up only yesterday, while certain Cook County ballot boxes were being checked in Chicago as part of the Republican initiated “discovery” procedure leading to a probable vote recount. Two boxes were empty. The ballots that had vanished from them had added up to a majority of about 500 votes for Senator Kennedy. Furthermore, 50 ballot boxes were brought to the inspection room without seals, and 23 with broken seals. All ballots have been in custody of the Democratic-controlled Election Board since election night…. The chairman said the seals probably dropped off or were broken accidentally when workmen moved the boxes.
Every day, it seemed like Mazo was uncovering more stories of suspicious activity surrounding the results of the election.
This wasn’t a fishing expedition. This was evidence. Mazo argued that the integrity of the nation’s election system was at stake.
But time was on the Democrats’ side—and they knew it. They only had to run out the clock.
December 6
Washington, D.C.
Mazo kept investigating. Then he got a call from Richard Nixon. The vice president wanted to see him.
Mazo had just published the fourth installment in his series. He knew he had more than enough material for twelve installments. His editors were behind him. His stories were being picked up by newspapers all over the country—and generating buzz.
He had been doing some of the best reporting of his career. In Chicago, he had obtained lists of voters in precincts that seemed suspicious. And when he started checking their addresses, he found they were cemeteries where the names on tombstones were registered and had voted.
There was no question in his mind that the election was “stolen like mad…in Texas and Illinois.”
He wondered why Nixon wanted to see him. He hadn’t heard from him since he began his series. Maybe the vice president was going to praise him for his hard work.
Mazo made his way to Capitol Hill and Nixon’s office. But when he sat down in the vice president’s office, Nixon looked glum.
“Earl, those are interesting articles you are writing,” Nixon said. “But no one steals the presidency of the United States.”
He said he wanted Mazo to stop writing more stories on election fraud. At first, Mazo thought Nixon was kidding. He wasn’t. He was dead serious.
Nixon said it had gone too far. The nation needed to know who was the new president, especially at the height of the Cold War. Mazo explained that the election fraud he uncovered would make a difference. He might be elected president.
But Nixon said it didn’t matter. The cost was too high.
“Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis—and I damn well will not be a party to creating one just to become president or anything else,” Nixon said.
He didn’t want to undermine the new administration. And it could take years in the court system to settle the issue. And then what? The nation’s enemies would gain ground. No, Nixon didn’t want to take that chance.
Mazo took a deep breath. He thanked the vice president and left his office. Even though Nixon urged him to stop, Mazo wasn’t going to give up.
He told his editors about his exchange with the vice president. And that he was going to keep going.
But then Nixon called Mazo’s bosses at the Herald Tribune and implored them to stop Mazo’s investigation. And they did.
Mazo’s reporting on the subject was over. His chance for a Pulitzer was gone.
Six years later, Nixon would respond to a letter written by Mazo offering advice. Then Nixon brought up voter fraud. He said he hoped someday “some enterprising reporter in the future” would “write a story about the voter fraud of 1960.” He said such a story “might have great national impact.”
December 8
Chicago, Illinois
Just because the vice president told Mazo to stop didn’t mean the GOP didn’t keep trying.
The Republicans filed a lawsuit to keep Kennedy from getting Illinois’s 27 electoral votes.
But circuit court judge Thomas Kluczynski, who had been appointed by former Democratic governor Adlai Stevenson, rejected a GOP demand that the Chicago and Cook County election canvassing boards revise their vote tallies to correct alleged irregularities.
The Republicans had charged that a recount of Chicago paper ballots showed Nixon picking up more than 5,500 votes from ballots that were improperly thrown out; according to the tally of the Democratic-dominated election board, Nixon gained less than 1,000 votes.
Kluczynski paid no attention to the Democratic or Republican figures. He merely ruled that the canvassing boards had already certified the election results and could not be reconvened.
On the basis of the latest figures, Kennedy won Illinois by only 8,858 votes out of nearly 4.8 million cast.
One of the attorneys for the Chicago Nixon Recount Committee said they’d decide in a few days whether to appeal.
Meantime, they presented their case to the State Election Board, where they hoped to get an impartial hearing. But the board certified the state’s 27 electoral votes to Kennedy.
Morton said they didn’t know whether they’d appeal. It could take two years for the courts to decide on voter fraud cases in Illinois and Texas. By then, it would be far too late to reverse the election outcome and make Vice President Nixon the chief executive.
“As a realist, I don’t think there is a chance,” he said.
December 10
Austin, Texas
Two days later, in Texas, Republicans went to court, too. The Republicans filed a federal lawsuit asking a judge to order a recount of more than 1 million paper ballots. They claimed that could change the outcome of the election in Texas.
The Democrats tried to stop it. But a federal district court judge signed a temporary restraining order prohibiting certification of Texas’s 24 electoral votes pending a hearing on a Republican lawsuit challenging the validity of the November 8 general election.
The GOP said the suit was filed to protect “both the GOP presidential electors and all Nixon voters in the state.”
U.S. district court judge Ben Connally held a three-and-a-half-hour pretrial conference on the lawsuit. Republican attorneys argued that some election judges threw out ballots that were improperly marked, but other judges did not. They wanted a recount of all 1,277,184 paper ballots cast in Texas’s 254 counties to find out how many were marked improperly but still counted.
Texas’s twenty-four electors were pledged to Kennedy. And attorneys for the electors argued that it was not in the jurisdiction of the federal judge because the GOP didn’t exhaust all the state courts. The Republicans argued that Connally did have jurisdiction because the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution provides for equal rights for citizens and protects the right to vote.
But Connally dismissed the lawsuit, saying there was insufficient evidence of civil rights violations—violations that could change the outcome.
The Texas canvassing board met and, relying on Connally’s decision, said it had no authority to order a recount. And it added that none of the allegations, even if true, would have changed the outcome. So, the board certified the victory of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket.
It was the end of the road for the GOP in Texas. And soon it was the end in Illinois and other states. Without any paths left to rectify the wrongs GOP leaders saw in those big, close states, it was over.
It didn’t mean that election fraud didn’t happen. All sides agreed that it did. It was a question of the extent of the fraud: Would it have been enough to overturn the results in key states like Texas and Illinois? And if a few select states were lawfully restored to Nixon, could the course of history have gone a different way?
To this day, the questions remain unanswered.
December 19
Washington, D.C.
They began arriving at state capitals all over the nation—a ritual dating back to the birth of the United States. And when they were finished, a new president would be chosen.
Under the U.S. Constitution, electors were the ones who actually selected a president. Yes, the popular vote mattered, but only in the sense that if a presidential candidate carried a state, he’d pick up its electoral votes. That was the theory. Of course, things didn’t always go as planned.
And with this contentious election, no one really knew what would happen at statehouses where 537 electors would cast their ballots. A candidate needed 269 to win. (This would be the only election with that threshold, since it was the first election for Hawaii and Alaska, which had become states since 1956, but the last before the District of Columbia participated.)
It was a crazy system and every four years it seemed that some people would call for it to be scrapped. They’d ask why it wasn’t the popular vote that determined the outcome of presidential elections—just like in gubernatorial, senatorial, and mayoral races. But as soon as the presidential race faded from the nation’s collective memory, so did efforts to reform the system.
It was a compromise made at the birth of the nation. The Founding Fathers debated whether the people or Congress should pick a new president.
They came up with the Electoral College, where each state would be given a certain number of electors based on its population. A populous state like New York had 45, the most in the nation, while sparsely populated ones like Alaska, Wyoming, and Vermont had three.
It got complicated at the state level, where political parties would choose a separate slate of electors. If a Republican presidential candidate won a state, the GOP slate would go to the Electoral College meeting.
But there was a wild card: Nothing in the Constitution said an elector had to vote for the party’s candidate. And this year, some electors in southern states had already publicly stated they’d support Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, a staunchly conservative seventy-three-year-old who seemed like he had been around forever.
Would other electors do the same thing? As the day wore on, it became clear that the electors were sticking to the script. And by the time they finished, Kennedy had 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219. Byrd collected 15.
And so, it was finally over. Kennedy was officially the thirty-fifth president of the United States, an anticlimactic end to a dramatic presidential election.
In a few days, it would be Christmas and the nation had already turned its attention to the holidays. In Palm Beach, Florida, John Kennedy would spend the time at the Kennedy mansion, surrounded by family and friends.
A fourteen-foot-high Christmas tree stood near the fireplace, adorned with seven angels and topped with a lighted Santa Claus. The base of the tree was covered with a silver spangled blanket.
Jack was there with his newborn son, John Jr., and daughter, Caroline. It was a house filled with laughter and promise. Good days were ahead.
For Nixon, the future was uncertain. He had spent fourteen years in Washington, as a congressman, senator, and vice president.
But soon, he’d be out of work. In a way he’d be starting over. He was too young to retire. But he had been around for so long, would there be a political future for him?
As the year came to an end, that was a question he knew he’d eventually have to address.
January 6, 1961
Washington, D.C.
The Count
Richard Nixon greeted his fellow lawmakers inside the Senate Chamber in the U.S. Capitol. He smiled like a man on his way to the dentist. It was going to hurt, but it had to be done.
With senators following him, the vice president walked slowly to the other end of the Capitol, passing through the Great Rotunda, their footfalls echoing off the marble floors. They reached the House of Representatives Chamber, another roomful of lawmakers.
Nixon stepped inside and was greeted with a rousing, bipartisan ovation. He smiled and headed over to sit next to House Speaker Sam Rayburn, on the upper level of the rostrum.
Under the Constitution, it was Nixon’s job as president of the Senate to preside over a joint session of Congress for the formal counting of the electoral votes.
The ballot-counting ceremony dated all the way back to George Washington. The ritual symbolized the peaceful transfer of power in the United States from one administration to another.
Nixon tried to put aside his disappointment—at least for one day. He watched as the senators and representatives found their seats, arranged in a semicircle on tiered platforms facing the front of the room.
The “People’s House” was magnificent. The House Speaker’s rostrum had lower, middle, and upper tiers, each filled with people responsible for different tasks: the sergeant at arms, the journal clerk, and the parliamentarian, who oversees the processes and rules.
Behind the rostrum stood Ionic columns made of black Italian and white Alabama marble, and an American flag flanked by two bronze fasces. In front of the rostrum were two lecterns—one for Democrats, the other for Republicans.
The chamber’s lower walls were paneled in walnut, with light gray marble pilasters. A gallery for visitors and the press corps ringed the chamber on the upper level.
Nixon lifted the gavel and banged it against the desk, calling the session to order. A hush fell over the room.
First, Nixon wished House Speaker Rayburn a happy seventy-ninth birthday. There was no love lost between the two men. During one midterm election, Nixon was believed by Johnson and the Democrats to have called them “the party of treason.” And Rayburn considered Nixon “a crook.”
Congressional pages carried in two shiny boxes of inlaid wood. The certified electoral votes had been kept inside since they were sent to Washington by each state’s officials.
The actual vote counting was done by tellers. As they scanned each paper, they took turns announcing the results out loud. Members of the House and Senate scribbled down notes and added up the numbers for themselves.
Everything went smoothly until the roll call reached Hawaii. There were two slates of electoral votes for the state. The tellers threw the issue in Nixon’s lap.
Hawaii had only just become a state in August 1959 and was holding its first presidential election. Turnout had topped 93 percent, and the state’s result was close.
On Election Day, Nixon carried the state by just 141 votes. A recount wasn’t done by the time the electors met on December 19. So the issue fell to the vice president. Now Kennedy led Nixon by 115 votes. Nixon settled the dispute by certifying the Kennedy electors.
It all had to hurt. Kennedy won Hawaii by less than two-tenths of one percentage point. And Kennedy had barely edged Nixon in the nationwide popular vote, winning 34,226,731 ballots to Nixon’s 34,108,157.
The fraud cases went nowhere. When Senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader from Illinois, asked the FBI to investigate voter fraud in his state, he was told they’d forward his complaint to the new attorney general: Bobby Kennedy.
Standing on the rostrum after the count was complete, Nixon told his colleagues that this was the “first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the results of an election in which he was defeated, and announced the victory of his opponent.”
He paused.
“I don’t think we can have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our Constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing and respecting and honoring institutions of self-government,” Nixon told the joint session.
Nixon congratulated Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who were in the audience, wishing them the best as “you work in a cause that is bigger than any man’s ambition, greater than any party—it is the cause of freedom and justice and peace for all mankind. And it is in that spirit that I now declare that John F. Kennedy has now been elected president of the United States and Lyndon Johnson vice president of the United States.”
The members of Congress cheered and gave Nixon a standing ovation—even Rayburn, who rarely applauded from the rostrum. But today, Rayburn smiled at Nixon and said, “That was a damn fine speech, Dick. I will miss you here. Good luck.”
The final presidential tally: 303 electoral votes for Kennedy, 219 for Nixon, and 15 of the unpledged electors for Harry Byrd, the segregationist senator from Virginia.
Nixon was praised for the way he’d handled the joint session. It didn’t heal the deep personal wound; he would carry that for the rest of his life.
But he set an example for all to follow: Democracy works when there is a peaceful transition of power after an election—especially from one political party to another. Peaceful transitions require all lawmakers and citizens to uphold democratic institutions and norms, including the rule of law, despite their personal interests. Without that common agreement, democracy dies.
The standard Nixon set would come perilously close to collapsing during another joint session of Congress sixty years later. But on that January 6, 1961, Nixon reaffirmed the democratic tradition, and set an example for history.
January 20, 1961
Washington, D.C.
Inauguration Day
John F. Kennedy stood at the podium, squinting a little in the brilliant winter sunshine. He wore neither hat nor coat. He stood slim and tall on a bitterly cold day in the nation’s capital.
Hundreds of thousands of people huddled in front of the pillared platform erected on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for Kennedy’s inauguration ceremony. Tens of millions watched the festivities on their televisions or listened to their radios.
Dolly Bellavance and John Latvis from Nahua, New Hampshire, where Kennedy had made the first stop of his campaign on a snowy day almost exactly a year earlier, were there in spirit. So were Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, the students who had sparked a national movement when they sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, back in February.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, watched from their home in Atlanta, Georgia. Kennedy’s telephone call to Coretta Scott King seemed to translate into votes.
Kennedy landed 68 percent of the Black vote, up from the 1956 Democratic presidential ticket’s showing of 58 percent. But that was still lower than in 1952, when 79 percent of Black voters supported Democrats.
The young president would have to prove himself to King. He’d have to show him that civil rights were a priority in the Kennedy White House.
Frank Sinatra was there in Washington, D.C. He’d spent one night that week at Bobby Kennedy’s Virginia home, called Hickory Hill. The Kennedys seated him at a piano and had him sing song after song, until he finally told Bobby to “get him a drink.”
Sinatra and Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford arranged a glittering inauguration gala for twelve thousand people, but a howling snowstorm meant only three thousand could attend. The fortunate few saw Gene Kelly dance, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole sing, and other Hollywood entertainers and actors like Sidney Poitier give speeches.
Sammy Davis Jr. was conspicuously absent. He was asked by Kennedy—at the request of his father—to stay away. Davis had married May Britt in November, and the Kennedys believed his appearance would still be too controversial. (Davis would become a big Richard Nixon supporter in the early 1970s.)
Frank Sinatra escorted Jacqueline Kennedy to the presidential box at the gala that night. Her husband took a microphone and said he was “indebted to a great friend, Frank Sinatra.”
“You cannot imagine the work he has done to make this show a success,” JFK said.
Would their friendship continue once Kennedy took office? And what about Sam Giancana, the mob boss who’d helped Kennedy’s campaign? Would new attorney general Bobby Kennedy go easy on the mob? And then there was Cuba. With no action to take down Castro before the election, Kennedy’s campaign received a boost, especially when he took a hard-line stance against the Cuban dictator. Now he had inherited the plans Nixon hadn’t been able to talk about publicly. And Fidel Castro would hand the new president his first international crisis. How would he handle it?
As cold winds whipped across the inauguration platform that morning, Judith Campbell watched from her home in Los Angeles. She and Kennedy still talked, and occasionally met each another—even during the busy campaign. How would Kennedy behave as president?
So many people on the platform that day had high hopes for the new commander in chief. Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, sat on one side of Kennedy, while President Eisenhower sat on the other with the new first lady.
Former president Truman was on the platform. In the row behind them were Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife, Rose, and the Kennedy sisters. Joe raised his high silk hat and beamed at Pat Nixon.
The eighty-six-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Robert Frost was there to recite one of his works.
The moment came for Kennedy to take the oath of office. He placed his left hand on the Bible held by Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States. And when JFK swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God,” Kennedy officially became the thirty-fifth president of the United States. A thunderous roar rose from the crowd.
Nixon was still bitter about the election. A few thousand more votes in key states and he would have been in Kennedy’s place today. As he told a friend before the ceremony, “We won but they stole it from us.” But Nixon buried his disappointment and moved swiftly to Kennedy’s side to shake his hand and offer his congratulations.
JFK taking the oath of office, January 20, 1961
(John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
Kennedy turned and looked out over the massive crowd on the snow-covered plaza before him. It was 22 degrees—so cold that with every breath, the spectators released small misty clouds of smokelike vapor.
JFK’s face was a mask. He didn’t show any emotion—and that reflected the gravity of what had just transpired. He was now the most powerful man in the free world. Powerful and reckless. Brilliant and self-absorbed.
Kennedy knew that the inaugural ceremony could be a defining moment in a president’s term. He’d written a short, clear speech devoid of partisan rhetoric, focused on foreign policy. Every sentence was worked, reworked, and polished.
Richard Nixon congratulating John F. Kennedy
(New York Daily News/Getty Images)
He took the podium, with tens of millions of people watching, and delivered the speech of his life.
Kennedy warned “friend and foe alike” that the generation of Americans now taking power was “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.”
Then he pledged: “Let every nation know whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
He addressed other issues in broad sweeping phrases, a policy of peace through negotiation, backed by a strong military. He dedicated himself and his new administration to the two shining goals of freedom and peace in the world, as it was then, at a new precipice of unknown challenges.
“I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it,” Kennedy said.
His voice was firm and emphatic. Cheers thundered up from the crowd. And he warned enemies not to underestimate the power of the United States.
“To those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction,” Kennedy declared.
“So let us begin anew—remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate,” he said.
And then, he encouraged Americans to get involved in the country’s future, saying, “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
Kennedy’s inaugural address was an emotional appeal for peace—and a warning to America’s adversaries—at a time of great uncertainty.
Almost a year earlier, at a dinner party a few days after Kennedy had announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, he was a guest at his friend Ben Bradlee’s house. Another journalist, James Cannon, was there, too—and he recorded the dinner conversation.
Kennedy described his career choices, including why he decided to run for president. He said he could never see himself as a lawyer, dealing with wills and trusts. That was too boring.
After he entered politics, he wanted to see how high his ceiling was. He had been a member of the House and the Senate. But president, that’s where the real power was, he said.
“The presidency is the source of action…. All the things you’re interested in doing, the president can do,” he said, adding, “The presidency is the place to be…if you want to get anything done.”
And he described himself as a new age politician. He was an introvert and didn’t like shaking hands or talking to voters. “I’d rather read a book on a plane than talk to the fellow next to me,” he said.
But he admitted that there were parts of campaigning that he enjoyed, including making speeches.
“It’s stimulating. Life is a struggle and you’re struggling in a tremendous arena. It’s like playing Yale every Saturday in a sense. How could anything be more interesting than this sort of checkerboard chess struggle of the next seven months?” he said.
Now, just a year later, it all was his. He was the center of action. The Cubans. Soviets, gangsters, assassins. After everything he had been through on the campaign trail, Kennedy was a hardened political veteran.
He was older, tougher, and more purposeful. He was prepared.
He felt strong. In the past, he’d depended on family and friends to make it all happen. They had helped to create him, but he was the man on top now.
It was time for Jack Kennedy to stand on his own.