July 25, 2006
Nixon: A Gracious Loser? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:15 PM EST Apropos of our ongoing dialogue on Richard Nixon, it’s worth mentioning that some relatively new scholarship has changed our understanding of the 1960 election, whose results, John Steele Gordon reminded us in his last post, were painfully close and potentially tainted.
Around the time of the 2000 election, the historian David Greenberg and the author Gerald Posner published articles in two online journals, Slate and Salon (respectively), revealing that Nixon had not accepted his loss to John F. Kennedy so graciously after all. Contrary to Nixon’s carefully designed election lore, President Dwight Eisenhower did not encourage his Vice President to contest Kennedy’s victory; Ike rejected a recount a day after the results were announced. Instead, while Nixon maintained public silence on the matter, his campaign aides Bob Finch, Len Hall, and Peter Flanigan began investigating possible irregularities in Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey, while Republican national chairman Thruston Morton began officially seeking recounts in all three states.
The tangled history of November and December 1960 is a fascinating one, best chronicled in Greenberg’s and Posner’s articles, which can be found at Slate and Salon.
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