American History Revised (71 page)

Myths do not die easily. After Kennedy’s death, a plaque was placed on the building from which Oswald fired his shots: “On November 22, 1963, the building gained national notoriety when Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy.”

Later it was replaced by a new plaque that said, “ … when Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot and killed President John F. Kennedy.”

Why “allegedly”?

2000
“A single vote?” you say. “Impossible!” Yes, indeed. Only in this case, the 2000 election, there are several people who qualify for this dubious honor. At the
top of anyone’s list would be Katherine Harris, Florida secretary of state responsible for certifying all the ballots, who had a clear conflict of interest in doing everything possible to ensure victory for her political party, the Republicans. But then, she was the occupant of the state job in accordance with all proper procedures, and who is to say a Democratic equivalent might not have done the same? If anything is to blame for Katherine Harris’s conflict of interest, it is the system, not the occupant. “If men were angels,” goes the old saying, “government would not be necessary.”

Many unhappy Democrats blamed the Republican-dominated
*
Supreme Court for giving Bush the election by a one-vote margin, 5–4. This is incorrect. The critical vote was the one where the court ruled 7–2 that selective recounts violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The subsequent 5–4 vote confirmed the remedy, not the violation of the law.

Anyway, the whole imbroglio was started by the confusing “butterfly ballot,” which had been approved by Theresa LePore, a Democrat. The incredible sloppiness of this one person threw a presidential election into chaos, an election that subsequent independent newspaper surveys of a statewide recount indicated that George W. Bush had won anyway. Even more interesting, as the journalist Jeff Greenfield pointed out, Gore lost the election not because he lost Florida but because he also—most important of all—lost his home state, Tennessee (the first time in American history this has happened). And not only did Gore lose his home state, he also lost Bill Clinton’s home state next door. Now, that takes a real effort.

The election of 2000
was
decided by a single person. But it wasn’t Katherine Harris or Theresa LePore, or any of the five Supreme Court justices—though they all played a role in the mess as they tried to sort out proper voting procedures.

The real culprit was Ralph Nader. By making himself a candidate, though he had to know he was hurting Democrats more than Republicans, he garnered 2.8 million votes that prevented Al Gore from becoming president. Never before in American history had a third-party candidate managed to subvert a presidential election.

But wait! What matters is not the total number of votes, but how those votes affect the electoral votes. In this election, there were several candidates, as in 1860 when Lincoln was so lucky as to have many candidates dividing up the opposition vote. Same for 2000: not only was there a third-party candidate—Nader—who got 2.7 percent of the vote, there was a fourth candidate—Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party—who got 0.4 percent of the vote. Now here is where it gets interesting:
in Florida—Palm Beach County, to be more specific—Buchanan got an unusually large number of votes: more than two thousand. And it wasn’t because Buchanan was a potential dark horse, it was because of the butterfly ballot. Even Buchanan saw it that way. Appearing on the
Today
show, he said, “When I took one look at that ballot on election night … it’s very easy for me to see how someone could have voted for me in the belief that they voted for Al Gore.”

So maybe it was Pat Buchanan, not Ralph Nader, who cost Gore the election. Take your pick.

The 2000 election, wild though it was, was hardly an aberration. Three other elections also have been decided by a kingmaker. In 2000, everyone was looking at the other ultra-tight election, 1876, but was ignoring two other disputed elections where a single person called the shots: 1800 and 1824. For all of us Americans who take pride in our country founded on “the will of the people,” the following does not make for happy reading.

1800
Thomas Jefferson had a problem, a big problem: his future career as president was about to be blown away.

As vice president of the United States, he had the duty—one of the very few duties assigned by the Constitution to this otherwise unremarkable job—to count the electoral votes of a presidential election.

Problem was, Jefferson himself was one of the candidates. When he looked at the ballot coming from Georgia (a state he had counted on to win), he saw irregularities that possibly called for rejecting the ballot, thereby jeopardizing his candidacy. The procedure for a ballot was very specific in accordance with a 1792 congressional statute, and had been followed by every other state: the ballot was to be in a sealed envelope accompanied by a “certificate of ascertainment” signed by the state’s governor, confirming the validity of the state’s electors. But in this case there was no separate certificate. Georgia’s envelope “contained only a single sheet of paper; the defective ‘ballot’ was written on the back of the certificate of ascertainment.”

Where was the original ballot?

Unlike in Florida in the year 2000, there was no way to conduct a fact-finding mission to the disputed state to examine all the paperwork and try to determine “original intent.” It was the middle of a snowy winter: a trip from Washington to Georgia would take at least a week, and there were only three weeks left before the inauguration.

On that fateful day, February 4, 1800, Thomas Jefferson and the members of Congress were in session to tally the states’ ballots. When the tellers opened the Georgia envelope and handed Jefferson the ballot, they told him in front of all the congressmen that “there was a problem with it.” Jefferson, performing his
constitutional duties, examined the ballot, pretended nothing had happened, and handed it back to the tellers to be included in the total.

Had he not done so, the man inaugurated as president on March 4 probably would have been Charles C. Pinckney.

1824
Like 1876, this anomaly of a national election being decided by a single vote occurred when the democratic election failed to produce a clear-cut winner, the solution devised for the House of Representatives to vote also failed to produce a winner, and so the choice was made by a single wavering vote at the last minute as both sides pressured this voter to go their way.

In 1824 the House of Representatives vote between Andrew Jackson—the front-runner—and John Quincy Adams (only tied with Jackson because of the last-minute support of Henry Clay) came down to the vote of a single congressman, Stephen Van Rensselaer of New York. Van Rensselaer was not a happy man. Cast in the role of kingmaker in this electoral tie, he tried to shirk the responsibility by voting for a third candidate, William Crawford. The two leading sides would have none of it, and arm-twisted the poor fellow nearly to tears. Burying his head in his arms, he prayed to the Lord for a providential sign. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was a banner with the word “Adams” written on it, and so he cast his vote for Adams and made John Quincy Adams president of the United States. Anyone think banners don’t count?

1876
He won the popular vote, but today few people know his name. To see his name, go to New York City, to the magnificent New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, and look up at the portico: the Samuel J. Tilden Trust. This is the legacy of a man who was one of the top lawyers in the country and the first self-made millionaire since Washington to run for president.

As governor of New York, Tilden enjoyed national prominence, so much so that his Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, recruited as his vice presidential running mate Tilden’s lieutenant governor from New York, William A. Wheeler. But even stranger things were to happen in this election, ranging from bribes to gunfire. In the meantime, as Election Day drew near, newspaper surveys had Tilden winning by odds of 5 to 2.

Tilden was not a man who smiled much. It was said of him that he looked like a man “who smelled something bad.” In the election of 1876, he smelled something very bad.

On the morning after Election Day, he woke up the winner. He had 4,300,590 popular votes and 196 electoral votes compared with Hayes’s tally of 4,036,298 and 173. But as the baseball player Yogi
Berra was to say many decades later, “It’s not over till it’s over.” While Tilden and the Democrats savored their victory, the losers noted that not all states had sent in their formal tallies. The victor needed 185 votes. Tilden had 184 votes for sure; Hayes had 163. Still to be confirmed for Tilden were the 22 votes from South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon where he already had the lead. For Tilden to win, he needed just one of these votes. For Hayes to win, he needed them all.

That looked like an impossibility. Tilden had 51.5 percent of the popular vote; Hayes, 48.5 percent. The major political leaders of both parties—including President Grant and the two candidates—presumed Tilden had won and would be inaugurated on March 4, 1877. “Tilden Elected President” was the common newspaper headline of the day, and Tilden started work on his inaugural speech.

The
New York Times
, however, had other ideas. In a nefarious scheme hatched in the newspaper’s offices, editor John Reid and his assistants mounted a campaign announcing that the election was not a foregone conclusion and that a Republican victory could still be attained. Working closely with the Republican National Committee, the
Times
’s editor sent telegrams to trusted Republican leaders instructing them how to claim the votes in their states. Not mentioned in the telegram were time-tested means of winning elections: bribes and forged votes. The Republican stalwarts went to work.

Shortly thereafter, two sets of ballots—one Republican, the other Democrat—were presented by each of the four states. To the dismay of his campaign managers, who knew he had the popular vote, and to the astonishment of his legal advisers, who knew his love for the U.S. Constitution, Tilden agreed to the creation of an arbitration body (the Electoral Commission) not provided for in the Constitution. In bypassing the Constitution, Tilden was jeopardizing his sure advantage, for the Constitution states that in case of deadlock the House shall elect the president and the Senate the vice president, and in 1876 the House was controlled by the Democrats. But Tilden was confident of victory even under the arbitration setup, because the commission had one more Democrat than Republicans.