Was the 1960 Election Stolen? It’s More Likely than You Might Think.
By Joe from The Gaslight Hour
The 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy was one of the tightest in American history. Most official sources say Kennedy won the national popular vote 49.72% to 49.55% with about 113,000 votes separating them¹. However, the Dixiecratic states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia put up a slate of “unpledged electors” in hopes of influencing a close race complicating the math. Sources disagree about whom the votes for these electors should be credited towards. Some forms of accounting give Nixon the popular vote lead². This is before we consider the possibilities of fraud.
At a cursory glance, the Electoral Vote looks less close (303 to 219.) But, that figure hides how close the margins were in some of the important states. Illinois was 49.98–49.80 Kennedy, Texas was 50.52–48.52 Kennedy, California was 50.10–49.55 Nixon, and Missouri was 50.3–49.7 Kennedy. The raw vote gap in Illinois was especially narrow at 8,858 votes³.
The race went back and forth through the night of the election. Early in the night, NBC gave Kennedy 15 to 1 odds of winning. Later in the night, ABC gave Nixon 10 to 1 odds of winning. The winner would not be obvious until late into the next morning⁴.
In the aftermath of Kennedy’s victory, there were rumors of systematic fraud in key states won by Kennedy, especially in Illinois and his running-mate’s (Lyndon B Johnson) home state of Texas. When I chose to look into the story, I expected the stories to be apocryphal with little solid evidence to back them. However, the evidence forced me to conclude that Illinois was almost certainly stolen and that the results in Texas were never properly investigated, but extremely suspicious.
Illinois
The Kennedys and the Mob
There is copious evidence of a 1959 meeting between Samuel “Mooney” Giancana, the boss of the “Chicago Outfit,” and Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family. This evidence includes a memo from J Edgar Hoover⁵, a biography written by Mooney’s brother⁶, the word of Cook County prosecutor Robert McDonald⁷, and the word of Frank Sinatra⁸. The exact content of this meeting is hard to know, but, William F Roemer, a special agent at the FBI’s Chicago office, claimed to hear Mooney on wiretap discussing a deal: mob support for John F Kennedy in return for a commitment from the FBI to back off from the investigation of Giancana⁹. Mooney’s brother makes a similar claim in his biography¹⁰.
Regardless of whether a deal was made or not, the Chicago Outfit sure acted like one was made. Robert McDonald told Seymour Hersh, “[Mooney] was obsessed with the election of John Kennedy — absolutely obsessed with it. I don’t know what deals were cut; I don’t know what promises were made. But I can tell you, Mooney had so many assets in place. They were capable of putting drivers in every precinct to help out the precinct captains, to get the voters out. And they had the Unions absolutely going for Kennedy… There was no ballot stuffing, I’m not suggesting that. They just worked — totally went all out. He [Kennedy] won it squarely, but he got the vote because of what Mooney had done. I’m convinced in my heart of hearts that Mooney carried the day for Kennedy¹¹.”
Accounts from the mobsters differ on the square part. Mickey Cohen bragged “The presidency was really stolen in Chicago¹².” The Giancana biography claims:
To assure the election’s outcome, guys either trucked people from precinct to precinct and poll to poll so they could vote numerous times or stood menacingly alongside the voting booths, where they made it clear to prospective voters that all ballots were to be cast for Kennedy. Occasionally, some misguided citizen declared his independence from such tyranny and in so doing drew the wrath of Mooney’s zealots; more than a few arms and legs were broken before the polls were closed that day¹³.
Did Richard Daley Cook the Books in Cook County?
The mayor of Chicago at the time of the election was Richard Daley, a man who was both the longest-serving mayor in Chicago history until his son beat his record, and a man associated with corruption fairly or not. There is little doubt Chicago was still a machine city at the time¹⁴. Journalist Benjamin Bradlee claimed Kennedy told him that on election night, Daley said on a phone call, “Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you’re going to carry Illinois¹⁵.” The Giancana biography claims JFK called Daley on the night of the election to express concern about the results coming in and that Daley, in turn, called Mooney¹⁶.
Bill Daley, Richard’s son, claims his father took offense to the allegations that he engineered “hanky-panky” in the 1960 election¹⁷. However, even sources sympathetic to Kennedy such as Kennedy/LBJ biographer Robert Dallek¹⁸, history professor Edmund F Kallina¹⁹, and even certified Nixon hater David Greenburg²⁰ suspect there was at least some degree of “hanky-panky” in Cook County, though perhaps not enough to overturn the results.
Scholars who have chosen to focus on the Cook County election in particular have suspected that Daley and the party machine cared more about preventing Republican Benjamin Adamowski from becoming attorney general than they did about the presidential ticket²¹. A Republican in the AG spot would likely be dangerous for the dubiously legal Democratic Machine operating in the city. When professor Kallina analyzed the data from the later recounts, he found that Adamwoski indeed lost way more votes to “miscounting” than Nixon did²². Mayor Daley allegedly defended his city by claiming “You look at some of those downstate counties, and it’s just as fantastic as some of those precincts they’re pointing at in Chicago²³.” Fortunately, Kallina also compared the degree of “miscounting” in Chicago to the degree of “miscounting” in the counts of Cook County towns, and found that indeed, the counters in Chicago were much “sloppier²⁴.”
Investigations
Even before the election, there was suspicion of incoming “hanky-panky.” Chicago Corporation Counsel David H. Brill formed a group called the Committee on Honest Elections in October before the election. This group found evidence of irregularities in six wards and sent it to a grand jury. The investigation found “voters” living in vacant lots, barbershops, taverns, and stores with no living quarters. The committee also found people who had been registered multiple times. These were just some of the irregularities found on the voter rolls²⁵.
There would be more investigations to come. A day after the election, Adamowski, the Republican AG candidate mentioned above, said that “Daley has stolen the White House.” The Republicans soon asked for a recount, which Illinois law allowed if they paid for it. The recount showed that the counting indeed seemed to favor the Democratic candidates. Daley and the Election board attempted to attribute it to human error, but this was unconvincing, and Daley was forced to permit a special prosecutor to investigate. Prosecutor Morris Wexler was appointed to investigate, and brought charges against over 600 poll workers and precinct captains. A judge from downstate was brought in to prevent a fix, but the judge turned out to be a faithful organization Democrat and dropped all the charges²⁶.
Years later, professor Kallina attempted to calculate the number of votes Nixon lost to miscounting in Chicago based on the results of the recount. He came to an estimate of 7,968 votes, which isn’t far from the 8,858 margin in Illinois²⁷. In a later paper, he states that a loss of 20,000 votes would be necessary to make a strong case for the election being stolen²⁸. However, he even admits in his earlier paper that a recount will only catch counting fraud and not the numerous other types of fraud alleged. I think that given that accounting for just one type of fraud almost closes the margin, it’s almost certain that the state of Illinois was given to Kennedy due to fraud.
Some Kennedy sympathetic scholars such as Dallek²⁹ and Kallina³⁰ argue that the result of the Illinois election didn’t matter in the end, because Kennedy would have had enough electoral votes to win the election without it. This is true, in a sense, but it’s misleading. If you subtract 27 electoral votes from Kennedy’s final total and add them to Nixon’s, you get 276–246 in favor of Kennedy. But, there is a problem with this frame.
The 276 for Kennedy includes the 12 unpledged electors from Georgia that eventually decided to vote for Kennedy. If we subtract those, Kennedy would have 264 electoral votes, which is under the 269 majority he’d need to take the presidency. This would have put the Dixiecrats in the position of kingmakers. They could have used this leverage to extract concessions from Kennedy and the Democratic party at large. If Kennedy and the Dixiecrats failed to come to a deal, the election would have been bumped to the House of Representatives. And, of course, Illinois was not the only state where fraud was alleged to be at play.
Texas
The Machine of Lyndon Johnson
Unfortunately, unlike in Illinois, there was never a serious investigation of the voter fraud allegations in Texas. This may be just as or more attributable to pre-Voting Rights act Southern “traditions” around elections than anything Johnson or the Kennedys did, but the result is that what evidence we have is of much lower quality than what we have in Illinois. Nevertheless, in his autobiography, Six Crises, Richard Nixon cites a few examples of what he believes to have been fraud in Texas:
(1) Fannin County, Texas (which went 3 to 1 for Kennedy): there were 4895 voters on the official “poll tax list” but 6138 votes were counted. (2) Angelia County, Texas, 27th Precinct: 86 individuals were officially recorded as having voted — but the final tally was Kennedy, 147–Nixon, 24. (3) Fort Bend County, Texas, two adjoining precincts: in one, which voted Nixon over Kennedy, 458 to 350, 182 ballots were declared void at the “discretion of the judges.” But in the other, 68 to 1 for Kennedy, not a single ballot was declared void.³¹
JFK and LBJ biographer Robert Dallek stated, “Daley’s machine probably stole Illinois from Nixon (before the final tally was in, he reported Illinois for Kennedy), but Jack would have won even without Illinois. As for Texas, 46,000 fraudulent votes would have been more than the most skilled manipulator of returns could have hidden³².” The most prominent biographer of LBJ, Robert Caro, was less confident. Caro said, “The truth of the Republican allegations was never examined in the depth necessary to ascertain their validity…Today, the passage of time has made it difficult — impossible, really — to ascertain, in trying to assess the election results in Texas…³³”
As far as I can tell, Caro is the only major scholar to have assessed these allegations seriously and in-depth, so I will lean on his work heavily for the rest of this section.
A Gallup poll at the end of September had Kennedy and Nixon running even in the South, both at 46 percent. In October, LBJ began to fear that they might lose Texas. He confided in the future-governor of Texas, John Connally, that he was “deeply disturbed about Texas. … We just must not win the nation and lose Texas. Imagine when we win how the next Administration will look upon us.”
The final count was indeed close, Kennedy won by only 46,257 votes. It did not take long for the Texas Republican party to allege fraud. The Party alleged that tens of thousands of votes were fraudulent and that tens of thousands of other votes were fraudulently invalidated.
Many counties used “paper ballots” which required the voter to sign a numbered poll list, making it rather obvious who they voted for.
The main allegations of fraud, however, centered around a new state law requiring voters to not just mark the candidate they wished to vote for, but to scratch out the names of all the candidates they didn’t wish to vote for. The law did have a clause to count votes if the voter’s intent was clear. The Republicans alleged that this clause was abused to invalidate Nixon ballots while not choosing to invalidate similar Kennedy ballots. Due to the long tradition of the “Solid South,” a tradition in which Southern states only elected Democrats, the electoral machinery of the state was almost entirely controlled by Democrats. There were also allegations of systematic fraud in the ethnic border areas. To quote from Robert Caro:
In some of the Mexican-American areas, the local border dictators, in Texas political parlance, didn’t “vote ’em,” but rather just “counted ’em.” In those areas, most of the voters didn’t even go to the polls: the jefes’ men would, as one observer put it, simply “go around to the Mexicans’ homes. Get the numbers of their [poll tax] receipts. Tell them not to go to the polls. Just write in a hundred numbers, and cast the hundred votes yourself,” or, after the polls closed, would simply take the tally sheets and add to the recorded total whatever number was needed to give their favored candidate the margin he desired. “You get down on the border, and it didn’t matter how people [the Mexican-Americans] felt,” Ed Clark would explain. “The leaders did it all. They could vote ’em or count ’em, either one.” Between 1948 and 1960, little had changed³⁴.”
Another phenomenon recounted by Republicans was the seeming “slow-counting” of votes in certain counties such as Duvall, allegedly to allow them to see what margins they’d have to cover out of other counties.
In the 13th precinct of Jim Wells county, better known to aficionados of Texas history as “Box 13,” Johnson’s ticket won by a margin of 1,144 to 45. This precinct was infamous for giving Johnson the 200 votes he needed to win his 1948 senate race. The ink on the 1948 ballots were all the same color, and the names were in alphabetical order.
However, no serious official investigation was made of any of the 1960 allegations because a three-man canvassing board consisting of Governor Price Daniel, Attorney General Will Wilson, and the board’s chairman, Secretary of State Zollie Steakly, all men known to be active Johnson supporters, blocked the Republican petition. There is much to be suspicious about looking at the results out of Texas in 1960, but there’s a good argument to be made that the behavior of the Texas election machinery here was not atypical for a Southern state pre-Voting Rights Act. But that just calls into question a lot more elections.
The Aftermath
There were suspicions of fraud leading up to, during, and after the election. Nixon himself was suspicious of the results, but did not get involved in any of the legal attempts to get the results overturned³⁵. The general narrative, and the one I believe, is that he did this to avoid the appearance of America having an illegitimate government at the height of the Cold War. But, some Nixon averse scholars such as David Greenburg³⁶ allege Nixon played a more active role in the legal efforts than he let on. But, I can’t find any evidence to support these allegations outside of innuendo. It seems to me that he made the decision that would be best for the country, or at least for his future political career. From his autobiography, we know that he knew that attempting legal means to overturn the result in Texas was a lost cause, stolen or not³⁷. Without overturning Texas, it’s unlikely he could have won the presidency.
Despite failing to win the presidency, the Republican party gained 22 seats in the House of Representatives and 2 seats in the senate. Nixon ran ahead of the candidates in the majority of the districts, making it likely he helped the down-ballot ticket³⁸.
Deke Deloach, deputy director of the FBI under J Edgar Hoover, gave an amusing interview to Seymour Hersh where he recalled an incident between him and a Republican senator from Illinois:
I told him the FBI had received considerable information and we sent that information to the Department [of Justice]. We’d be glad to receive his information, or any other information, and refer it to the Attorney General. But, Senator Dirksen said, ‘You say turn it over to the Attorney General?’ I said ‘ that’s the only recourse we have.’ And he said ‘thanks a hell of a lot,’ and slammed the phone down. He knew that Bobby Kennedy was Attorney General³⁹.
Philip Hochstein, editorial director of the Newhouse newspaper group, reported that Deloach’s boss, FBI director J Edgar Hoover told him “Kennedy isn’t the president-elect.” Supposedly, J Edgar Hoover then ranted about the states that Kennedy stole including New Jersey and Missouri⁴⁰.
Ironically, Bill Daley, Richard Daley’s son, would go on to be chairman of Al Gore’s campaign, a campaign some would argue suffered a similar fate to Nixon’s.
Plugs
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Citations:
- 1960 United States presidential election. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1960_United_States_presidential_election&oldid=989372522 archive
2. Did JFK Lose the Popular Vote? | RealClearPolitics. (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2020, from http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/19/did_jfk_lose_the_popular_vote_115833.html archive
3. 1960 United States presidential election. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1960_United_States_presidential_election&oldid=989372522 archive
4. Pietrusza, D. (2008). 1960: LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon : the Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies. Sterling Publishing Company.
5. Mahoney, R. D. (2011). The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby. Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
6. Giancana, B., & Giancana, C. (1992). Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America. Grand Central Publishing.
7. Pietrusza, D. (2008). 1960: LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon : the Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies. Sterling Publishing Company.
8. Hersh, S. M. (1998). The Dark Side of Camelot. HarperCollins.
9. ibid
10. Giancana, B., & Giancana, C. (1992). Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America. Grand Central Publishing.
11. Hersh, S. M. (1998). The Dark Side of Camelot. HarperCollins.
12. Pietrusza, D. (2008). 1960: LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon : the Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies. Sterling Publishing Company.
13. Giancana, B., & Giancana, C. (1992). Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America. Grand Central Publishing.
14. Richard J. Daley. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_J._Daley&oldid=987207614 archive
15. Hersh, S. M. (1998). The Dark Side of Camelot. HarperCollins.
16. Giancana, B., & Giancana, C. (1992). Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America. Grand Central Publishing.
17. Keen, J. (n.d.). Chicago ties cast shadow on 1960 presidential win—USATODAY.com. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-09-26-jfk-chicago-politics_N.htm archive
18. Dallek, R. (2003). An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963. Little, Brown.
19. Kallina, E. F. (1978). The State’s Attorney and the President: The Inside Story of the 1960 Presidential Election in Illinois. Journal of American Studies, 12(2), 147–160.
20. Greenberg, D. (2000, October 17). Was Nixon Robbed? Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/10/was-nixon-robbed.html
21. Royko, M. (1988). Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. Plume.
22. Kallina, E. F. (1978). The State’s Attorney and the President: The Inside Story of the 1960 Presidential Election in Illinois. Journal of American Studies, 12(2), 147–160.
23. Carlson, P. (n.d.). Another Race To the Finish. The Washington Post. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/11/17/another-race-to-the-finish/c810a41c-7da9-461a-927b-9da6d36a65dc/
24. Kallina, E. F. (1985). Was the 1960 Presidential Election Stolen? The Case of Illinois. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 15(1), 113–118.
25. Pietrusza, D. (2008). 1960: LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon : the Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies. Sterling Publishing Company.
26. Royko, M. (1988). Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago. Plume.
27. Kallina, E. F. (1978). The State’s Attorney and the President: The Inside Story of the 1960 Presidential Election in Illinois. Journal of American Studies, 12(2), 147–160.
28. Kallina, E. F. (1985). Was the 1960 Presidential Election Stolen? The Case of Illinois. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 15(1), 113–118.
29. Dallek, R. (2003). An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963. Little, Brown.
30. Kallina, E. F. (1978). The State’s Attorney and the President: The Inside Story of the 1960 Presidential Election in Illinois. Journal of American Studies, 12(2), 147–160.
31. Nixon, R. (2013). Six Crises. Simon and Schuster.
32. Dallek, R. (2003). An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963. Little, Brown.
33. Caro, R. A. (1982). The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Knopf.
34. Caro, R. A. (1982). The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Knopf.
35. Nixon, R. M. (1978). RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. Grosset & Dunlap.
36. The Time Nixon’s Cronies Tried to Overturn a Presidential Election. (n.d.). POLITICO. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/10/the-time-nixons-cronies-tried-to-overturn-a-presidential-election-428318 archive
37. Nixon, R. (2013). Six Crises. Simon and Schuster.
38. Nixon, R. M. (1978). RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. Grosset & Dunlap.
39. Hersh, S. M. (1998). The Dark Side of Camelot. HarperCollins.
40. Ibid