Nixon's Secret (23 page)

Chicago Republicans paid for a partial recount. In many of the city’s 3,327 voting machine precincts, the numbers that remained visible on the machines disagreed with the official tally sheets. The bigger problem, however, was in the 634 precincts that used paper ballots, where numbers on the tally sheets often bore no relationship to the ballots in the ballot box, when they were recounted at the courthouse in the presence of Republicans. In 1960 vote counting on election night in most jurisdictions in the United States was done in the precincts with counted ballots and completed tallies then taken to the courthouse. Nor was it reassuring that about 60 percent of the ballot boxes had seals that were either missing or broken when they were brought from storage into the counting room.

In many precincts, an inspection of the ballots showed that Republican votes had been erased. In Ward 27, Precinct 20, there were fifteen straight Republican ballots in a row that had been spoiled by an extra X being placed into the Socialist Labor Party column. Although impossible to prove, it was easy to conclude that the marks had been added during the counting. The tally sheets almost always favored Democrats more than did the recount of the actual ballots. Apparently, local precinct officials had simply made up results to provide the margins that Daley had demanded. The press identified 677 election judges in 133 precincts who had stolen votes. The investigation, however, accomplished little. One Chicago politician told the journalist Alistair Cooke, “When a vote is stolen in Chicago, it stays stolen.”
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Election night 1960 was a stressful time for all involved. The Kennedy campaign, driven by the twin pillars of Joe Kennedy’s money, and Bobby Kennedy’s unwavering refusal to lose, had retreated to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Across the country the Nixon camp was established in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Both sides had reason for optimism, but confidence was probably too strong a word to describe the mentality of either side.

In 1960, with the Democratic hold on the South still relatively solid (there was a nascent move to send unpledged electors by Southern Democrats unwilling to cast votes for a Catholic liberal, which sent a number of unpledged electors from Mississippi and Alabama who would end up voting for Democratic Senator Harry Byrd), the Democratic camp could expect the election to develop in a somewhat predictable manner. As expected, Republicans were able to jump out to leads in most of the northeast on the backs of suburban and rural voters, only to have democratic votes in eastern cities change the calculus and send Kennedy into the lead.

By 11 p.m., on the backs of large margins of victory in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston, Kennedy had taken a lead of an estimated one million votes, according to the campaign’s internal estimates.
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The Kennedy campaign was concerned and only became more so as the returns began coming in from the Midwest and Farm Belt. The campaign was underperforming across the entirety of the Midwest, at that time still the cradle of the Republican Party.

Shortly after Ohio was called for the Nixon ticket, Jack Kennedy approached his brother to ask for an update—four key states remained outstanding: California, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota. Jack Kennedy looked at his brother upon hearing of the silence out of Illinois and asked him if he had spoken to Daley yet. Bobby immediately called Daley’s office and had a brief conversation with the mayor, upon the conclusion of which Bobby relayed to Jack that, “[Daley] said we’re going to make it with the help of a few close friends.”
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Those “friends” were Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and the Chicago family.

The victory wasn’t going to come easy for Daley and the Chicago gang; the Kennedy campaign was in significant trouble, as their ticket ran significantly below their projections in the rest of the state. The political calculus of Illinois in 1960 was straightforward for both parties. In Chicago, Democrats were going to win, and they were going to win big; everywhere else in the state, the Nixon ticket was going to run away with a victory—in short, if Kennedy was going to win the state’s twenty-seven electoral votes turnout would have to be so high in Chicago, and the margin so great, that the rest of the state could not cancel out Chicago. Both sides were well aware of this facet of Illinois politics, and as such the state was notorious for its poor turnaround time in reporting votes; after all, it is easier, to say nothing of drawing less attention, to wait for your opponent to play his hand before rigging your own. It’s not impossible to discover votes had been “misplaced” after a precinct was already reported (as indeed, Lyndon Johnson showed on many occasions during his own crooked career) . . . but it does tend to draw attention.

To the memory of Kennedy campaign aide Kenny O’Donnell, Daley called Kennedy headquarters around 3 a.m. to complain about the competition between the Republican and Democratic machines in Illinois: “Every time we announce two hundred more votes for Kennedy in Chicago, they come up out of nowhere downstate with another three hundred votes for Nixon. One of their precincts outside of Peoria, where there are only fifty voters, just announced five hundred votes for Nixon.”
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While there were certainly voting irregularities on both sides, Daley’s complaints are hypocritical almost past the point of humor. The unofficial motto of the Daley political machine was (as was later documented in a book of this title), “We don’t want nobody [that] nobody sent.” The election of 1960 raised this corruption to an art, and Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and the Chicago mob were at the operation’s heart. On Election Day the mob deployed approximately nine hundred of their goons to work the polls by destroying opposing ballots, “helping” voters cast their ballots, and intimidating those whose commitment to the cause was considered insufficiently pure. Bones were broken. Poll watchers for Nixon provided Polaroid photographs of money changing hands for votes outside of polling places. In mob-run territory the Kennedy ticket received over 80 percent of the vote. In the end, the fraud was enough to hand Kennedy the victory with a margin of 8,858 votes out of 4.75 million counted, a margin of 19 percent.
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Mayor Daley was known for rigging elections, and vote quotas were handed out to ward bosses and precinct captains. Two recounts of Chicago-area voting proved that the old Democratic machine had likely stolen tens of thousands of votes for the Democratic ticket. Special prosecutor Wexler’s April 1961 report found “substantial” miscounts in the 1,367 precincts it examined, which included unqualified voters, misread voting machines, and math mistakes. In one precinct, free lunches were handed out by a ward boss. In another, free hams were raffled to buy eligible voters. In many precincts, boardinghouse bums and vagrants were promised and given shots of whiskey for votes. There is substantial evidence that these fraudulent voters were shuttled from polling place to polling place and were “repeaters.” Wexler’s inquiry was hampered by the noncooperation of Cook County officials and the Democratic machine, where Wexler was stonewalled. Wexler brought contempt charges against 667 election officials, but a Democratic judge dismissed the cases. Three people were convicted on criminal charges.

Historian Edmund Kallina noted, “Winning Illinois would not have been enough to propel the Republican into the White House; [Kennedy] would have had to carry Texas or a combination of other states to give him the 269 electoral votes needed then to win.” That is, of course, the point. The evidence of voter fraud in Texas, where the Kennedy-Johnson ticket carried the state by a scant fifty thousand votes, was as widespread and odious as that of the daily machine in Chicago.

Thousands of Texas ballots were thrown out on the technicality that all of those who went to the polls did not scratch out the names of the candidates for the presidency for whom they did not want to vote, as the law required. Republicans—who were not joined by Nixon, who was graceful in defeat, if privately furious, charged this had taken the state’s electoral vote away from the vice president. The requirement was applied in some counties and not in others. Lyndon Johnson’s vote stealing capabilities marred his first election to the Senate, where ballot boxes disappeared while others were stuffed, requiring a US Supreme Court ruling, by which Johnson stole his US Senate seat from Conservative Democrat and former Governor “Coke” Stevenson.

I believe that the 1960 election was stolen famously in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, but the theft was only completed by vote rigging in Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. Johnson’s prowess in rigging elections was legendary. Readers of my book
The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ
know that Johnson stole his 1948 Senate election with two hundred nonexistent votes in Box 13 in Jim Wells County, where the local Patron was a Johnson crony. Texas Governor Allen Shivers would publicly accuse Johnson of ordering the murder of deputy sheriff Sam Smithwick, who was preparing to testify to a grand jury regarding the voter fraud.

The Johnson machine would outdo themselves in 1960. In Texas that year the state ballot was designed so that rather than circling the candidate’s name you preferred, voters were required to cross off the names of all the candidates they were
not
for. Not all counties applied this standard vigorously, but in many large counties controlled by Lyndon Johnson and his cronies, this was used to void the ballots of thousands of voters who had circled the name of Nixon and Lodge. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket would carry Texas over Nixon and Lodge by a scant forty-six thousand votes. Lyndon Johnson’s flunkies would invalidate 100,000 votes in Dallas County alone.

Again, we must rely on the meticulous work of W. J. Rorabaugh in his monograph
The Real Making of the President.
Lyndon Johnson and his cronies had perfected voter fraud as an art form:

After the election, the greatest complaints concerned Illinois and Texas. If both states had voted for Nixon, he would have won. Virtually all locally elected officials in Texas were Democrats. So were the precinct judges. Furthermore, Texas law made no provision for challenging a presidential election. In fact, in many places there were more votes cast than registered voters in the jurisdiction. In Fannin County, 4,895 voters cast 6,138 ballots. In Navarro County, Dawson Precinct, 479 registered voters cast 315 votes for Kennedy and 219 for Nixon. In some heavily Democratic jurisdictions, votes for president and vice president were added, giving each side double the number of votes. In Angelina County, Precinct 27, 86 people voted. Kennedy got 147 votes and Nixon got 24. The judge had added 74 votes for Kennedy to 73 votes for Johnson. In Lee County, Precinct 15, 39 people voted but 64 votes were counted for president. By comparing poll books to the vote count, it was clear that 100,000 votes had been counted that simply did not exist, but Republicans were prevented from seeing any actual ballots.

Texas voting law also contained one oddity, which resulted in an ingenious way to manipulate the result. Although thirteen counties containing about half of Texas voters used mechanical voting machines, the rest of the state voted with “negative” paper ballots. In 1957 the law had been changed to require that voters strike out the names of all the candidates they opposed. In 1960 there were four candidates on the Texas presidential ballot. Thus, a voter had to cross out three names to cast a valid vote. In some counties, it was charged, Democratic election officials disallowed votes that had only Kennedy struck out, but they counted votes for Kennedy that had only Nixon struck out. In Wichita Falls, middle-class Eagle Lake gave Nixon 475, Kennedy 357, and had 234 voided, while lower-class Precinct 54, which went to Kennedy by six to one, presented only two voided ballots. A certain amount of variation simply reflected the whim of the officials in each precinct. In rural Wichita County, Precinct 43, 3 percent of ballots were invalidated. In adjacent Precinct 35, an essentially identical rural precinct, 22 percent of ballots were invalidated.

The evidence suggests that Democratic officials purposely used different standards in different kinds of precincts of counties in order to manipulate the overall result. For example, in some precincts that voted heavily for Nixon, 40 percent of the votes were voided, while in Starr County, a poor county on the Mexican border that voted more than 93 percent for Kennedy, only 1.5 percent were thrown out. In Fort Bend County, Precinct 1, Nixon drew 458, Kennedy drew 350, and 182 were disallowed. In Precinct 2, Kennedy received 68 voted, Nixon 1, and none were voided. In one strong Kennedy precinct where a recount in a local election allowed outside observers to see the ballots, about 200 Kennedy votes were seen that should have been voided for striking out only Nixon. Republicans charged that more than 100,000 Republican ballots had been disallowed in Texas, and thousands of Democratic ballots with the same type of error had been added in. Kennedy’s margin was 46,000. However, without an official investigation, there was no way to know whether this kind of vote counting fraud provided Kennedy’s margin of victory in the Lone Star State.
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Texas Republicans were also hurt by a last-minute Johnson dirty trick. In an appearance in Dallas, Johnson and his attractive wife, Lady Bird, were subjected to a small-scale version of some of the unpleasantries that Nixon and his wife had encountered in their tumultuous visit to Latin America. The Johnsons were jostled and heckled as they inched their way through a crowded hotel lobby. There was some spittle aimed at them as they made their way across the street to another hotel. It was one of those things that most Texans don’t like to have happened to their own, particularly to a Texan accompanied by his lady. Johnson charged that Republican Congressman Bruce Alger organized the demonstration and that Republican money paid for the preparation of the Johnson-scorning placards that were borne aloft by an unruly crowd in an attempt to downgrade Johnson as the native son. Alger told Senator Barry Goldwater that both were patently false and that Alger was not on the scene. The crowd was likely part of Dallas’s bustling right-wing community, but Johnson exploited the situation adroitly. It is interesting to note that Alger was handily reelected.