Whenever one thinks that the MSM cannot get any worse, or purposefully bad on the subject of John Kennedy or his assassination, another reminder arrives showing they can. The latest example of this is Chris Wallace’s Countdown 1960. This book, by former Fox reporter turned CNN employee Chris Wallace, is ostensibly about the race for the presidency in 1960. I say ostensibly because anyone who knows the subject will be able to figure out what this book is really about. And, in fact, Wallace pretty much confesses to his real intent in the acknowledgements section of the book. That section is usually included in the front of a volume, but here its at the end. I will get to why I think that is so later.
I
Like almost every writer who wants to exalt his work on this subject, Wallace begins by saying that the primary system of electing party nominees for the presidency was somehow a novelty in 1960. And Kennedy decided to use it to original effect. This is simply not the case. The primary system was really invented during the Progressive Era, but the first one was held before that, in 1901 in Florida. And just a few years later, 12 states were conducting them. By 1910, the practice of holding state elected delegates to cast ballots for the party winner at the convention was established. And, in fact, there was a memorable donnybrook in 1912 during the primary season between challengers Robert La Follette, Teddy Roosevelt and incumbent president William Howard Taft. And there was another memorable race as recently as 1952 between Dwight Eisenhower and Robert A. Taft.
For me, the only notable differences in 1960 were 1.) The use of television, and 2.) The debates between Kennedy and Nixon. But the first would have happened anyway no matter who the candidates were. It was a matter of the creeping reach and power of the broadcast media. As for the second, this did not really establish a precedent. Because the next presidential debate did not occur until 1976. So right out of the gate, on page 3 to be exact, it can be said that Wallace is aggrandizing his subject. (As later revealed, this ties into his not so hidden agenda.)
Another disturbing aspect of the book is the fact that Wallace and his researchers, Mitch Weiss and Lori Crim, did not seem to me to do a lot of genuine research. In looking at the book’s reference notes, almost every one of them is to a prior book, newspaper article or periodical. There is little that I would call new or original. And, as I will explain later, some of the sources that Wallace uses are quite dubious; or as we shall see, in some instances, even worse than that. These factors combine to make the book not just rather superfluous, but questionable at its foundations.
One of the problematic areas of the book is that very early Nixon is portrayed as an oracle on foreign policy. (p. 14) John Kennedy is portrayed as something of a cliché. That is, the usual rich, handsome playboy portrait. (p. 17) For example, Wallace begins by saying that Kennedy started running for the presidency in 1957, a thesis with which I would tend to disagree. (p. 2) But if you are going to postulate such, how can any honest and objective author ignore Senator Kennedy’s great Algeria speech? Because it was made in that year.
Why is this both important and revelatory? There are two reasons why. First, that speech really put Kennedy on the national map. As Richard Mahoney noted, it provoked a firestorm of newspaper and periodical comments and editorials from all over the country. (JFK: Ordeal in Africa, pp. 14-16; see also, James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 25-28) That national furor ended up placing Kennedy on the cover of Time magazine, with the inside article titled “Man out Front”. So how can that not be related to Wallace’s subject?
The reason I think he does not include it is because that speech was a specific attack on President Eisenhower, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and, most relevant to Wallace’s book, on Vice President Richard Nixon. It assaulted the entire basis of their Cold War foreign policy in the Third World. Kennedy was essentially saying that America should not be backing European colonialism. We should be on the side of nationalism and independence in places like Algeria. And this was not just a matter of American idealism, but one of practicality. He invoked what had happened three years earlier at Dien Bien Phu, where we had first backed the French empire--and it ended up in disaster. He proclaimed that what we should be doing now is assisting France to the negotiating table, in order to save that nation from civil war. But we also should be working to free Africa. (See the anthology The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 65-81)
If one does not refer to this speech, or the trail that led Kennedy to make it, then yes, one can portray the senator as an empty Savile Row suit and Nixon as the experienced sagacious foreign policy maven. But that is simply not being accurate on the facts of the matter. As John T. Shaw commented in JFK in the Senate, that speech made Kennedy the new voice of the Democratic party on foreign policy. Since it challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of Eisenhower and Nixon. As Monice Wiesak wrote, this speech also made Kennedy the defacto ambassador to Africa. Because African dignitaries now began to follow him in the press and visit his office. (America’s Last President, p. 12)
To ignore all of this is to shrink Kennedy and exalt Nixon. If there is an historical figure who should not be exalted, it is Richard Nixon. Because it was this Cold War monomania that first, got us into Vietnam, and then, from 1968 onward, kept us there. Until it became even more of a debacle than it had been under the French.
II
But there is another way that Wallace exalts Nixon. This is by minimizing the tactics he used to defeat, first Jerry Voorhees for a congressional seat, and then Helen Gahagan Douglas in a race for the senate. The latter is usually considered one of the dirtiest and most unscrupulous political races in American history.
Wallace spends all of one paragraph on it. (pp. 10-11)
Which is really kind of startling. Because illustrious author Greg Mitchell wrote a milestone book on that campaign in 1998. It was titled Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady. I could find no reference to that book in Wallace’s references. In that campaign, Nixon’s team actually accused his opponent of being a conduit for Stalin. (Mitchell, p. 209) As Mitchell notes, up until that time, candidates who made anti-communism their focus usually lost. That was not the case here. Nixon literally demagogued the issue to an almost pathological extent. As Mitchell notes:
Republican and Democratic leaders alike interpreted the outcome as a victory for McCarthyism and a call for a dramatic surge in military spending…. Red baiting would haunt America for years, the so called national security state would evolve and endure and candidates would run and win on anti-Sovietism for decades. (ibid, xix)
Nixon’s win seemed to demonstrate the political power of McCarthyism, which Senator Joe McCarthy had begun that same year with his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. But as Mitchell proves in his first chapter, McCarthy’s speech drew heavily on the actual words of Congressman Nixon. As with Nixon, it was McCarthy’s aim to make anti-communism a political issue, to portray Democrats as not just soft on communism—Nixon actually tried this with President Truman-- but in some cases as commie sympathizers. (This is one reason why Kennedy’s Algeria speech hit home, because it broke through all that Cold War boilerplate with facts and realism.)
As Mitchell reveals—and contrary to what Wallace implies--Nixon had a lot of money in order to smear Douglas. Not only did he get large corporate contributions, but both the LA Times and the Hearst newspapers backed him. Along with Hollywood bigwigs like Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hughes, Harry Cohn, Darryl Zanuck, Louis Mayer, Anne Baxter, John Wayne and Rosalind Russell. (Daily Beast, article by Sally Denton, November 16, 2009) Nixon also used anti-Semitism, since Douglas’ husband was Jewish. Nixon’s campaign made anonymous phone calls saying, “Did you know that she’s married to a Jew?” (ibid) But in addition to anti-Semitism, the campaign utilized racism. In the last days, thousands of postcards were mailed to white voters in suburbs, and into northern California. That postcard was emblazoned with the phony title—note the gender-- “Communist League of Negro Women.” The message was “Vote for Helen for senator. We are with her 100%.” (ibid). Can a campaign get any more scurrilous than that? This is why Nixon had such a deservedly wretched reputation as a political hatchet man. Which somehow, and for whatever reason, Wallace wants the reader to forget.
Nixon lied about what his agenda was both before and after this ugly race. Before it started he said--rather satirically in retrospect--there would be “no name-calling, no smears, no misrepresentations in this campaign.” (Ingrid Scobie, “Douglas v. Nixon”, History Today, November, 1992) And later, he downplayed his tactics for the campaign. One reason the race had a lasting impact is that Nixon’s manager, the odious Murray Chotiner, became a tutor to the likes of later GOP advisors Karl Rove and Lee Atwater.
To relegate all this--and much more--to a single paragraph is just inexcusable. Because, with a trick worthy of a card sharp, it hides two of the most important and unseemly aspects of Nixon’s career, his Machiavellian morality, and obsession with dirty tactics.
As we have seen, Nixon’s Cold War ideology would lead to a hellish ending in Indochina. His political tactics would cause Watergate. Incredibly, Wallace wants to whitewash both.
III
But all the above is not enough for Wallace, who is herniating himself by cosmeticizing Nixon. He now makes a rather curious statement:
In 1960, America moved slowly toward racial equality, partly because of detours placed along the road to civil rights by southern governors. (pp. 23-24)
He then adds something even more curious: Nixon supported civil rights. He uses the crisis at Little Rock’s Central High and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as his evidence for this. All of this relies on the ignorance of his audience to maintain even superficial credibility.
Anyone who uses the web can find out that Eisenhower let the students at Central High be terrorized for 20 days while doing nothing. The courts had ordered nine African American students to enter Central High. Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent this. While this was boiling over, Eisenhower actually went on vacation to Newport, Rhode Island. He was then played for the fool by the redneck governor of the state. Faubus came to Newport and told Eisenhower he would now abide by the court ruling and withdraw the National Guard, who had worked against the students. He did not. And the court ruled against him. He then removed the Guard. Now the crowd had direct contact with the nine students the court had approved for attendance.
Humiliated by Faubus and with the press now turning on him, Eisenhower had no choice but to call in federal troops.(LA Times, 3/24/1981, article by Robert Shogan.) Then he and Nixon tried to use a face saving device by submitting a weak civil rights bill to congress. They had no interest is expanding civil rights. What they wanted to do was split the Democratic party in two: the northern liberals from the southern conservatives. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson did all he could to try and modify the bill so it would not be so polarizing to the southerners. (“The Kennedys and Civil Rights”, Part 1, by James DiEugenio) Because of this, the act ended up being little more than an advisory commission with virtually no real enforcement power. So what Wallace is trying to sell here about Nixon on civil rights is transparent bunk.
But again, what he leaves out makes Wallace’s efforts worse than bunk. The Eisenhower/Nixon team worked against civil rights. As Michael Beschloss has revealed, Eisenhower tried to convince Earl Warren not to vote for the Brown vs Board decision. And, in fact, both Eisenhower and Nixon failed to support that decision. In the 1956 Autherine Lucy case at the University of Alabama, Eisenhower let an African American student be literally run off campus, even though the court had supported her attendance. He did nothing to protect her. (Irving Bernstein Promises Kept, p. 97; Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes, p. 64) This was two years after Brown vs. Board.
In a full eight years, the Eisenhower/Nixon administration filed a total of ten civil rights lawsuits. What makes that even more startling is that six of those years were under the Brown v Board decision. Two of those lawsuits were filed on the last day of Ike’s administration. (Harry Golden, Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes, p. 104) And recall, during the Eisenhower/Nixon years, not only did you have the Brown decision, you had the Montgomery bus boycott. In other words one had some ballast to push ahead on the issue.
Its not enough for Wallace to disguise the real facts about Eisenhower/Nixon on the issue. He now utterly distorts what Kennedy’s public stance was. He says that JFK had been silent about civil rights. (p. 24, p. 160). This is more rubbish from a book that will soon become a trash compactor. In February of 1956 Kennedy said the following:
The Democratic party must not weasel on the issue….President Truman was returned to the White House in 1948 despite a firm stand on civil rights that led to a third party in the South…..We might alienate Southern support but the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.
It is hard to believe that Wallace’s research team missed this speech. Why? Because Kennedy made it in New York City and the story appeared on the front page of the New York Times for February 8th.
But in case that was not enough for Wallace, in 1957 Kennedy said the same thing. This time he made that speech—the Brown decision must be upheld-- in the heart of the confederacy: Jackson, Mississippi. (Golden, p. 95) As noted in the first speech, JFK made his opinion public knowing full well he would lose support in the south. Which, as Harry Golden noted, is what happened.
One of the most bizarre things that Wallace writes is that Kennedy voted for the watered down version of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. What Wallace somehow missed completely is this: Kennedy did not want to vote for this bill at all. As he wrote a constituent, it was because it was so weak. He had to be lobbied to vote for it by Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. LBJ sent two emissaries to convince him to do so, but Kennedy resisted. Johnson now personally went to Kennedy to lobby him in person. Kennedy still was reluctant, but he was instructed by some Ivy League lawyers who said it would be better than nothing. (See Lyndon Johnson: The Exercise of Power, by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, pp. 136-37)
What was the result of all this back and forth? Essentially nothing. Because as Harris Wofford wrote in his book Of Kennedys and King, Eisenhower and Nixon resisted just about every recommendation the Civil Rights Commission—which originated with the act—made. He should know since he was the lawyer for the agency. (p. 21)
So the inactivity on civil rights in the fifties is clearly due to three men: Eisenhower, Nixon and Johnson. When JFK came into office, as Judge Frank Johnson said, it was like lightning. Things changed that fast. Including going directly at those southern governors Wallace was talking about.
