As a follow-up to my previous post, "Dick Armey's conservative victimology shtick adds data point for 'conservative victimology ratio'", I want to pick up on something from David Dayen at FDL, who noted about the Dick Armey story:
Basically conservatives refreshed a dubious data point about the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election and ran with it for 50 years. I'm surprised Armey low-balled it so much; you'd think he'd get into double digits.
In addition to the Slate article by David Greenberg that D-Day points to, I did an interview with Greenberg for Alternet at the time, and I contributed information about it as well to the somewhat widely circulated fact sheet, "13 Myths About The Results Of The 2000 Election."
There were all sorts of twists and turns to the real story of what went on after the polls closed in 1960, but two really pertinent pointa stand out for me. First is that The GOP effort in Illinois eventually collapsed, in part because the downstate GOP's hands weren't exactly clean. Greenberg told me a bit about this in our interview that I didn't use. But the Cook County Reps remained adament to the end--despite turning up nothing in the way of an organized effort. As Greenberg wrote for Slate:
National GOP officials plunged in. Thruston Morton flew to Chicago to confer with Illinois Republican leaders on strategy, while party Treasurer Meade Alcorn announced Nixon would win the state. With Nixon distancing himself from the effort, the Cook County state's attorney, Benjamin Adamowski, stepped forward to lead the challenge. A Daley antagonist and potential rival for the mayoralty, Adamowski had lost his job to a Democrat by 25,000 votes. The closeness of his defeat entitled him to a recount, which began Nov. 29.
Completed Dec. 9, the recount of 863 precincts showed that the original tally had undercounted Nixon's (and Adamowski's) votes, but only by 943, far from the 4,500 needed to alter the results. In fact, in 40 percent of the rechecked precincts, Nixon's vote was overcounted. Displeased, the Republicans took the case to federal court, only to have a judge dismiss the suits. Still undeterred, they turned to the State Board of Elections, which was composed of four Republicans, including the governor, and one Democrat. Yet the state board, too, unanimously rejected the petition, citing the GOP's failure to provide even a single affidavit on its behalf. The national party finally backed off after Dec. 19, when the nation's Electoral College certified Kennedy as the new president--but even then local Republicans wouldn't accept the Illinois results.
So, not even close to the cloud that Nixon was able to create--even in the minds of a lot of progressives today.
Second pertinent point: There was also an attempt to steal the election in the electoral college as Greenberg explained in my interview:
Q: There's been a lot of media talk about a "constitutional crisis," something they never bother to define. But in 1960, there really was the possibility of a constitutional crisis due to Southern efforts to block Kennedy's election. Tell us about this side of the story.
DG: There were a lot of Southern Democrats who were steadfastly opposed to Kennedy taking the White House. Ross Barnett, the segregationist Governor of Mississippi, talked about getting these electors who were not faithful to Kennedy to join together in an effort to deprive Kennedy of the White House. This was also advocated by two daily papers published by the Mobile Press-Register, so both in Alabama and Mississippi you had this groundswell against Kennedy because of opposition to Civil Rights for blacks.
In the end, the effort failed, because most Southern electors didn't go along, but there was serious talk about organizing them to vote for Senator Byrd instead. In the end Byrd got roughly half of the Alabama electors and all of Mississippi's. But for several weeks there were all sorts of ideas bandied about that maybe if you overturned Illinois and could unify all the Southern segregationist electors you might keep Kennedy out of the White House.
Q: I recall that Nixon was once asked if he thought that history would be kind to him and he replied that it would because he intended to write it.
DG: There's another thing Nixon said, I'm just paraphrasing here, history may not repeat himself but historians tend to repeat each other. That's generally a legitimate, even a necessary practice, but it can lead to error. And error can be very difficult to correct.
These things just never change.
These things just never die.
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