Post by William December StarrPost by KevrobIf you dispose of the "stealing the election in Illinois"
suspicions. Actually listening to the citizens might have seen
President Nixon in 1960. [Note: aside from a possibly truer
"democratic outcome," I am not positing that as a necessarily
better result for the country.] In the mid-20th century USA, it
was expected that political machines, not all of them urban and
Democratic, would massage election results on a regular basis to
achieve results desired by those in control of those outfits.]
The version of the 1960 election that's always sounded the most
likely to me was that Kennedy stole Illinois from Nixon and Nixon
stole {some other state, I forget which one} from Kennedy, and it
basically balanced out.
That's plausible. But the two large states suspected of being
moved into the Kennedy column, Illinois and Texas, would have to
be offset by other large states, or a lot of small ones.
Here's David Greenberg on Slate, not a right-wing site by any means,
discussing the possibilities. He figures the result was more or less
accurate, but does agree there was some corruption in Cook County.
[In other news, liquid water is wet.]
[quote]
Many of the allegations involved practices that wouldn't be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune, among others, to conclude that "once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen." What's more, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was rightfully Nixon's. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI's findings to the attorney general--as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy--he effectively buried the case.
[/quote]
Seymour Hersh wound up on Nixon's enemies list.
Texas was, of course, the home of "Landslide Lyndon" Johnson.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2000/10/was_nixon_robbed.single.html
1960 was still the era of Jim Crow. People talk of "voter suppression"
nowadays when they object to just the sort of practices that allowed
outfits like the Daley Machine to bring in just the numbers that were
needed to Democratic victories. The real voter suppression was what
was done to non-white voters, especially in the South, and Nixon did
win a third of the black vote nationally, compared to the typical
modern GOP Presidential candidates, who hover around the 10% mark.
See:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/what-nixon-can-teach-the-gop-about-courting-black-voters-121392
It isn't hard to imagine a scenario where "dependable" black voters
are allowed to vote by the local Democratic organization, and the
"unreliable" ones who might vote Republican are kept from voting.
I still think the "election was stolen" camp has the burden
of proof, and there was probably corruption on both sides.
That was par for the course back then.
Kevin R