The 1960 election was extraordinarily close. Nixon, the sitting vice president, lost the popular vote to Kennedy, the liberal Massachusetts senator, by 113,000 votes of 68 million cast—a hair’s-breadth 0.2 percent margin. In the Electoral College, Kennedy’s margin was a healthier 303-219 (Dixiecrat Harry F. Byrd got 15), but in many individual states the margins were slender as well.
Everyone knew that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, a key JFK ally, ran a powerful Democratic machine. It was perennially suspected of meddling in important races around Cook County. As numbers came in on election night, rumors circulated that Daley had put his thumb on the scales for Kennedy, who took Illinois by a mere 9,000 votes. There were questions about the vote count in Texas, too, where Kennedy eked out victory by 46,000 votes out of 2.3 million cast—and where associates of Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s running mate, were also reputed to interfere with the count. (Rumors of having cheated in a tight Senate election in 1948 had given LBJ the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”) Together, Illinois and Texas had 51 electoral votes. Moving them from Kennedy’s column to Nixon’s would flip the election.
Republicans saw an opportunity. Some urged Nixon to contest the results. In his first memoir, Six Crises, written shortly after the election, Nixon claimed to reject their advice, and a surprising number of biographers have credulously accepted and repeated his claim. But Six Crises is a notoriously unreliable account from a notoriously unreliable narrator. As Nixon speechwriter William Safire noted in his own memoir, Nixon loved nothing more than to have aides tell him to “take the easy path,” so he could look admirable by defying them. He loved giving the impression of forswearing political calculations and following his own lights, even when it wasn’t the case.
In fact, from election night onward, Nixon hedged his bets. As the vote totals came in favoring Kennedy, the vice president pulled back from a full-throated concession. He cagily couched his formal remarks in tricky caveats. “I want Senator Kennedy to know,” he said on television at 4 a.m., “and I want all of you to know, that if this trend does continue, and he does become our next president, then he will have my wholehearted support.” The wording was pure Nixon, leaving himself abundant wiggle room with that little if.
Nixon’s crew recognized that overturning an election result would be an extreme long shot. They often admitted as much to the press. But that didn’t stop them from trying. They calculated that even if they failed, it would still be possible to cast doubt over Kennedy’s victory, imbuing his presidency with a whiff of illegitimacy. This in turn would rally their base voters for future elections.