Alternate Nixons Part 2

Guest post by Andrew Schneider. Read Part 1 here.

There are any number of minor changes that could have led to a Nixon victory in 1960. The popular vote was the closest in living memory, with just a fraction of a percent separating the winner from the loser. In Barry N. Malzberg’s “Heavy Metal” -- published in Mike Resnick’s short story collection Alternate Presidents -- a last minute fight between Kennedy and Chicago’s Mayor Daley prompts the latter to tilt his city’s returns, and thus Illinois as a whole, into Nixon’s column.

Undoubtedly, the first presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy played a role in JFK’s eventual victory.  Polls conducted after the debate suggested that a majority of those who watched the debate on television believed Kennedy won. But the majority of those who listened to the debate on the radio believed Nixon was the victor. If Nixon had accepted advice from his handlers on how to prepare for the debate – let the makeup people do their work, or you’re going to look unhealthy under the lights – then appearance would have played less of a role in popular perceptions of who won. The fact was that Nixon wasn't in the best of health.  He was still recuperating from an infection he’d sustained by slamming his knee into a car door. Subtract the injury, and Nixon would not only have looked healthier but might have turned in a sharper performance.

A more intriguing turning point to me hinges on the way each of the candidates reacted to the arrest and imprisonment of Martin Luther King Jr. in Georgia on trumped up charges.  Kennedy called King’s wife Coretta to offer his sympathy. Nixon failed to do so, though he apparently did try, without success, to get the Eisenhower Justice Department to intervene to get King released.

Nixon’s 1968 victory came in significant part because of his domestic platform of “law and order,” framed as a coded appeal to whites who resented the civil rights policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The strategy laid the ground work for a massive shift in the states of the South, transforming it over the course of a few decades from a solidly Democratic bastion to an overwhelmingly Republican one. So it’s easy to overlook the fact that Vice President Nixon was a staunch supporter of the civil rights movement.

Jeffrey Frank explores this subject at some length in his recent study of Nixon’s relationship with Eisenhower, Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage. Frank characterizes Nixon as “the one major [Eisenhower] administration official who went out of his way to meet regularly with black leaders” (p. 214). Nixon had been on good terms with King since they met in 1957, and he had the active support of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., a highly influential figure in his own right. As a private citizen, he supported passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- unlike Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Frank characterizes Nixon’s decision not to intervene more forcefully as “cautious, even cowardly,” motivated by fear that he would alienate Southern whites who’d voted for Eisenhower without making any significant inroads among black voters. But JFK took an even greater risk. Nixon could have won without the South. Kennedy could not.  In our timeline, the risk paid off. Kennedy picked up tens of thousands more black votes than he otherwise expected, including in the critical states of Illinois and Texas. Had Nixon shown the courage of his convictions, those votes could have been his.

It’s worth examining what this would have meant for an earlier Nixon presidency. There were any number of Republican presidents prior to 1960 who had campaigned for, and been elected with the help of, African-American votes, but who failed to do anything significant in the way of mitigating the horrors in which African-Americans lived. Nixon may well have been different, if for no other reason than because of the time at which he took office. Nixon saw civil rights as an issue intertwined with the Cold War. America claimed the mantle of leader of the free world, casting the Soviet Union as the enemy of freedom. However obvious that might be in retrospect, it was difficult to make that case to other when the United States visibly denied civil rights (and frequently life itself) to non-white citizens across much of its territory. It was even more difficult in the new nations of Africa, freshly emerging from decades or even centuries of colonial rule.

My guess is that a Nixon elected president in 1960 would have made this argument forcefully to Congress.  With Democrats still in charge of both houses, and segregationist Southerners in charge of many of the key committees, getting any civil or voting rights bills through would have been just as difficult for Nixon as for Kennedy.  It’s possible, though, that Nixon may have been able to pull enough support among Northern Democrats, together with the Republican caucus, to have pushed such measures through. He would likely have shown fewer compunctions than did Eisenhower about using federal authority to integrate southern schools.

From that standpoint, there might have been little difference in the pace of civil rights legislation under an earlier President Nixon than under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The long-term implications for U.S. politics, though, would have been significant. It would have made a G.O.P. embrace of the Southern Strategy highly implausible. The end result would likely have been a party that was less sectional and more moderate. That raises the question, though, of where conservative southern whites would have taken their votes. In 1968, both Nixon and George Wallace were competing for that bloc. If President Nixon emerged as a champion of civil rights, would that bloc have stuck with the Democrats? Or would have led to a durable third party, aiming both at southern conservatives and disaffected northern whites?

The Nixon of 1960 was a complex man, prone to self-doubt, temper tantrums, and bullying behavior. He had an extremely suspicious nature. He’d demonstrated a willingness to play dirty, both in his first congressional campaign (1946) and in his senatorial campaign (1950). He was not an easy man to like. But he was a long way from the bitter, obsessive, vengeful figure he’d become by 1968. Whether a Nixon elected in 1960 would have been any more effective as president, he would have been far less likely to have broken the law.

Could Nixon have had an even earlier start to his presidency? This is a question Frank comes back to repeatedly. Eisenhower was close to death at least three times during time in office. He suffered his first heart attack in September 1955, a severe gastrointestinal illness in June 1956, and a stroke in November 1957.

The stroke offered the greatest possibility for an early, and successful, Nixon presidency. It brought about widespread, public speculation that Eisenhower was no longer physically capable of carrying about the duties of his office. It was particularly worrisome to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.  Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing, had been secretary of state when President Woodrow Wilson suffered his own debilitating stroke, leaving the government largely under the influence of Wilson’s wife Edith for months. The stroke itself came just weeks before Eisenhower was scheduled to travel to a NATO meeting in Paris. According to Frank, had Eisenhower not recovered sufficiently to make the NATO meeting, he had planned to resign.

There were relatively few crises between 1957 and 1960 that give us much ground for speculation on how Nixon would have behaved differently from Eisenhower. It’s unlikely, for example, that Nixon at this stage in his career would have been inclined to risk war with Mainland China when, in August 1958, it resumed shelling of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, occupied by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces.  Nor is it likely that Nixon would have intervened to prevent the January 1959 overthrow of Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. At this point, it was still unclear that Fidel Castro was a Communist. By contrast, the corrupt Batista was generally regarded as an embarrassment to the United States. The odds are that Nixon would have performed competently.

Would he have then won a term on his own merits in 1960? John F. Kennedy would have had a much tougher time beating Nixon as a sitting president than as a departing vice president. Lyndon Johnson – then the Senate majority leader and the most powerful Democrat in Washington – would have made a more formidable opponent had he been able to rouse himself to pursue the nomination more energetically than he did in our timeline. But Johnson would have faced a serious problem in terms of his geographical origins.  In 1960, no one from South of the Mason-Dixon Line had been elected president in more than 100 years. His support for the 1964 Voting Rights Act and the 1965 Civil Rights Act were far in the future. In fact, LBJ was one of the Southern Democratic leaders who participated in the epic filibuster of the weaker 1957 Civil Rights Act. That might have helped him in the South, but it would have killed him in the North. It’s difficult to envision either of the other major Democratic candidates of 1960 -- Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey -- doing much better against an incumbent Nixon.

What might have happened if Eisenhower had died in 1955 or 1956 is another matter. At this point, Nixon was younger and less seasoned a foreign policy hand. He would have faced the twin crises of the Suez War and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, presumably in the midst of a campaign for a full term as president.
Eisenhower ended the Suez Crisis by forcing Britain and France to withdraw their forces from Egypt, on pain of forfeiting badly needed financial assistance. Israel, then isolated, was pushed to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for United Nations guarantees of its security and freedom of navigation (both of which ultimately proved worthless, leading directly to the Six Day War of 1967). This was one of the few moments since the start of the Cold War when the U.S. and the Soviet Union found themselves taking a common position against the European colonial powers. Nixon let it be known, years later, that he disagreed with Eisenhower’s handling of the Suez Crisis.

Nixon didn’t hold back from expressing his position on the Hungarian Revolution at the time, though. Shortly before Election Day 1956, Nixon gave a speech at Occidental College calling for open support of the rebels as part of a campaign to liberate Eastern Europe from Soviet rule.  Calling for the liberation of Eastern Europe was hardly new for Nixon. Nor was it unique to the vice president. It was a position he shared with his foreign policy mentor, Secretary of State Dulles.

As mentioned above, Eisenhower refused to intervene in the Hungarian Revolution. Would the young Nixon have shown similar restraint? The pairing of Suez and Hungary would have presented him with an international crisis to match what Kennedy faced in October 1962. Like the Cuban Missile Crisis, this could all too easily have escalated into a nuclear confrontation.

Frank presents earlier points of divergence for Nixon. There were concerted efforts to dump Nixon from the Republican ticket, both in 1952 and again in 1956. Eisenhower appeared to support these efforts at times, particularly during the financial scandal that Nixon sought to stem with his famous “Checkers” speech.  Eisenhower never liked to fire people. He much preferred to have other people deliver the bad news, or to encourage the offenders to resign. Various lieutenants in the 1952 Eisenhower campaign – including New York Governor Tom Dewey, twice the former GOP standard bearer – passed the word to Nixon that Eisenhower wanted him to resign from the ticket. Ike himself said nothing directly, and Nixon declined to fall on his own sword.

Eisenhower could have demanded Nixon’s resignation, though, which would have left the vice presidential nominee with little choice. Most likely, Nixon’s replacement on the ticket would have been William Knowland, the senior senator from California and Nixon’s bitter rival. Knowland was an experienced foreign policy hand, a staunch conservative, and an ally of Eisenhower’s main opponent for the Republican nomination, Ohio Senator Robert Taft. An Eisenhower-Knowland ticket would likely have triumphed in November 1952, although the upheaval might have made it a closer race than Eisenhower actually enjoyed against Stevenson. Whatever the outcome for Eisenhower, though, it’s unlikely Nixon would ever have had another shot at national office.

There is one still earlier divergence for Nixon that is particularly intriguing. In 1937, fresh out of Duke University School of Law, Nixon applied to become an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Nixon’s full application has since been declassified and is available for viewing on the FBI’s website. It appears that Nixon’s application was in fact approved. What happened next is unclear.  According to one telling, Nixon’s decision to postpone his accepting the post until after he’d taken the bar exam led to the offer being withdrawn.

Nixon himself later claimed Hoover told him the only thing that kept Nixon from being made an agent was that Congress hadn't appropriated the necessary funds in 1937 -- entirely possible, given that 1937 was a year of budget cutbacks, but this doesn't appear as part of the original FBI record. Either way, had Nixon joined the Bureau, it’s unlikely he would have served in the Navy in World War II, and less likely still that he would have entered politics. Instead, he may well have spent the balance of his career hunting Communists and other alleged subversives with a badge and gun. And the shape of post-war American politics would have been unimaginably different.

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Andrew Schneider is the business news reporter for KUHF Houston Public Radio. His work has appeared in print in The Kiplinger Letter and The Writer, as well as online at KUHF.org. He is currently writing a memoir of his time in Afghanistan as a war correspondent. You can follow him on Facebook or on Twitter.

Alternate Nixons Part 1

Guest post by Andrew Schneider.

With the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination rapidly approaching, there have been quite a few new JFK histories floating around.  Thurston Clarke’s JFK’s Last Hundred Days provides some useful insights into how President Kennedy’s policy ideas were evolving in the last few months of his life, shaped in part by the traumatic loss of his baby son Patrick.  Jeff Greenfield’s If Kennedy Lived takes several of Clarke’s themes a step further – considering how Kennedy would have handled U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the civil rights struggle at home had he been reelected in 1964.

But there was another anniversary earlier this year that has been largely overlooked.  January 9 marked the centennial of the birth of Richard Nixon. Rarely have two opposing candidates for the presidency been so shaped and defined by their rivalry as were Kennedy and Nixon.

In 1960, Kennedy was the junior senator from Massachusetts.  He had wealth, charisma, and an inspiring war record, but a very thin record of legislative achievement. He was a Roman Catholic in a country where anti-Catholic sentiment was still common, particularly in the traditional Democratic strongholds of the South. He had name recognition, true, but that came from being the son of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. -- a man cast into the political wilderness for his disastrous turn as ambassador to Britain when that country was fighting for its life during World War II. Harry Truman – in 1960 the only living Democrat to have occupied the White House – was one of many concerned that Ambassador Kennedy would have an outsized influence if his son achieved the prize that had eluded him. “It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of,” Truman said. “It’s the Pop.”

Nevertheless, Kennedy broke out of a heavily contested field in 1960 to claim the Democratic nomination.
As the incumbent vice president, Nixon had superior name recognition. He was a native Californian, who could count on what was then the second-largest state bloc of electoral votes. He lacked any serious opponent for the Republican nomination, enabling him to save his resources for the general election. He was just a few years older than Kennedy and, as has been since been revealed, in considerably better health (Kennedy having suffered for years from Addison’s disease and near crippling back ailments).

Nixon certainly lacked Kennedy’s charisma. But he had something that was arguably a more valuable asset at the height of the Cold War. He had eight years of experience in the fields of foreign policy and national security. And he’d learned at the right hand of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the greatest military leaders the country had ever produced.  The race was his to lose. But lose he did. The great irony was that, in large part, Kennedy won by calling into question the record of Eisenhower and Nixon on national security, stressing a missile gap with the Soviet Union that turned out to be non-existent.  On this basis, he convinced a reed-slender majority of voters that he would do a better job of keeping the country safe. In essence, he out-Nixoned Nixon.

Kennedy spent much of his term defined by the Cold Warrior mold he’d cast for himself. The late David Halberstam was one of the first to make this case in The Best and the Brightest, arguing that the McCarthy era still very much defined the acceptable bounds of foreign policy in the early 1960s. Any sign of weakness in confronting Communism anywhere in the world could lead to a sharp domestic backlash. “Who lost China?” may have lost its potency as a rallying cry in American politics by this point, but would Kennedy really want to chance having it come back as “Who lost Indochina?” Kennedy knew how this worked better than anyone, having cut his senatorial teeth on McCarthy’s Investigations Subcommittee. While McCarthy was dead, the veteran Red hunter Nixon was still very much alive.

Nixon remained a credible threat to Kennedy’s reelection until late 1962. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nixon’s withdrawal from politics after losing the California governor’s race upended the table. It gave Kennedy the room to pursue one of his most significant foreign policy achievements, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the U.S.S.R. Even getting this through the Senate required some quiet support from former President Eisenhower. But Kennedy was still concerned enough about his right flank that he was reluctant to do anything as dramatic as pulling U.S. military advisors out of Vietnam until after he was safely reelected.

The degree to which Kennedy shaped Nixon’s career, as opposed to the other way around, is the stuff of legends. Kennedy and Nixon had both been elected to Congress in 1946. This was an era when it was possible for American politicians of different parties to be friends. And for the better part of fourteen years, the two men were friends. The 1960 campaign ended that and left Nixon with a deep sense of betrayal. The narrow margin of Kennedy’s victory, dependent as it was on the votes of Lyndon Johnson’s Texas and an Illinois dominated by Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, convinced Nixon that Kennedy had stolen the election from him. His failed comeback bid in 1962, with Kennedy campaigning against Nixon on behalf of California Governor Pat Brown, only deepened his sense of resentment.

There was always a streak of suspiciousness in Nixon. During his own presidency, this metamorphosed into what has often been described as paranoia. As Henry Kissinger himself observed, though, “Even paranoids have enemies.” Few people had done more to earn Nixon’s enmity than the Kennedys. From the day he took office in 1969 until well into 1972, Nixon was convinced that JFK’s sole surviving brother, Ted Kennedy, was the biggest threat to his political survival. The Chappaquiddick Incident, and the younger Kennedy’s involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, made this highly unlikely. But by this point, Nixon was taking no chances.

Ultimately, it was Nixon’s determination to break his enemies, real and imagined, before they could break him that led to Watergate and forced his resignation in disgrace.

Kennedy’s assassination has been described, both at the time and in the half century since, as a tragedy.  The violent murder of a relatively young and apparently vigorous leader was certainly a national trauma.  There is ample evidence that Kennedy would have sought to wind down America’s commitment in Vietnam starting in 1965, had he lived and won reelection. By that measure, the bullets fired at Dealey Plaza may have been a contributing factor to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, not to mention well over a million Vietnamese. But a tragedy, at least in the classical sense of the term, is something that is at least partially self-inflicted. And by this measure, the term tragedy more accurately describes Nixon’s fate.

Nixon was a man driven to achieve great things by monumental ambition, and who ultimately succeeded. But the cost was immense. What he went through in order to achieve his goals magnified his character flaws –distrust, jealousy, self-doubt, bitterness, to name just a few – until they overwhelmed not only his talents but his reason. There are few clearer statements of tragedy in American political rhetoric than the most memorable line in Nixon’s farewell address: “Always remember, others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” In the process, he nearly tore the country apart.

A tragedy, any kind of tragedy, is one that naturally invokes the question, “What if?” “What if Kennedy had lived?” is one that people have been asking ever since November 22, 1963, and it is by far the most popular starting point for any alternate history focused on JFK.  Nixon, by comparison, is a far less popular figure either for AH fiction or counterfactual analysis.

Because Nixon did ultimately win the presidency, such speculation tends to focus on what happened during his time in office, particularly the Watergate scandal. Alan Moore’s Watchmen is set in a world where Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were murdered, the 22nd Amendment was repealed, and Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as president. This required not only altering history but bending the laws of physics. Watchmen, after all, is set in a world where superheroes exist and where the U.S. won an outright victory in the Vietnam War, thanks to the nuclear-powered Dr. Manhattan.

Less frequently explored is the question of how Nixon would have behaved as president had he won the 1960 election.  Harvey Simon explored this last year in The Madman Theory: An Alternate History of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  There are at least two major problems with this book.  One is that, as the title indicates, it presumes a President Nixon in 1962 would have acted with the same degree of irrationality as the real Richard Nixon did in the later years of his presidency.  Even if one argues that the earlier Nixon had the same psychology of the later one, this ignores Nixon’s behavior during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which itself could easily have turned into a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets.

My bigger problem with the book is that it jumps straight from Nixon’s election to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis, though, was in no small part the result of Kennedy’s decision first to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion, then to deny the Cuban exile forces any direct American military support, and finally to abandon them. The debacle convinced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that Kennedy, despite his anti-Communist rhetoric and policies, was a weak leader who would fold rather than risk a confrontation.
It’s unlikely a President Nixon would have conducted the Bay of Pigs the same way. Indeed, his own advice to Kennedy in the wake of the debacle -- “It is essential that you act as big as you talk” -- reflects this. Nor is it likely that Khrushchev, who had met Nixon and undoubtedly knew far more about him than he did about Kennedy in 1961, would have viewed Nixon as someone he could bluff or bully.

Had Nixon gone full bore into Cuba, with air support and naval support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev would have trumpeted it as another example of American imperialism. For this, he would have gotten a positive hearing from at least some Latin American nations, as well as any number of nations around the world that had just emerged from colonialism. Would Khrushchev have escalated the crisis into a superpower confrontation?  I doubt it.  Nixon was a close observer of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He would have been the first to remind Khrushchev that the U.S. had stayed its hand when the Soviets used force against a country they considered part of their sphere of influence.

The result might have been a quick victory for the American/anti-Castro Cuban forces, or it might have turned into a guerrilla war that would have ground on for years. Either way, it would have meant no Cuban Missile Crisis. It also may have headed off deeper American involvement in Vietnam.

One of the reasons Kennedy felt obliged to shore up the Saigon government was to draw a line in the sand against the further spread of Communism after having failed to do so in Cuba.  Nixon had been all for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam in 1954, in order to shore up the French at Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower had scotched the idea.  By 1960, the U.S. was providing military advisors to support the government of President Diem, but little more. Nixon would have been under far less pressure to step up that aid, much less to send combat troops.

Learn more about the alternate history of this controversial president in Alternate Nixons Part 2, coming out tomorrow.

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Andrew Schneider is the business news reporter for KUHF Houston Public Radio. His work has appeared in print in The Kiplinger Letter and The Writer, as well as online at KUHF.org. He is currently writing a memoir of his time in Afghanistan as a war correspondent. You can follow him on Facebook or on Twitter.