Nixon's Secret (85 page)

In fact, if we are going to insist on awarding the state’s popular vote to one Democrat or the other, it probably makes more sense to award it to
Byrd
and not to Kennedy. After all, his electors received the most votes.

Moreover, awarding the Democratic popular vote from Alabama entirely to Kennedy ignores the relevant electoral history: electors who were understood to support a “Dixiecratic-ish” candidate won a majority of the slots in the state’s Democratic primary and probably would have swept the ticket had their votes not been split twenty-four ways to the loyal electors’ eleven.

The fact that many supporters of the unpledged delegates clearly preferred Kennedy over Nixon as a second choice, when forced to make such a pick, really doesn’t change another fact, which is that unpledged delegates were, overall, the most popular choice in the state that year—not once, but twice.

If you award the Democratic popular vote in the state wholly to Byrd rather than to Kennedy—again, probably more defensible than awarding the popular vote in the state wholly to JFK—Nixon wins the popular vote by 205,476 votes. (However, even with Nixon gaining Alabama’s eleven electoral votes, Kennedy’s election would have stood: his EV margin would have shrunk only from 303–219 to 292–230.)

But the bottom line in Alabama is that there really were Democrats who supported the national ticket, and there really were Democrats who supported the Dixiecrats. Had there been options for eleven Kennedy electors and eleven free electors, thousands of votes would have been cast for both, as was the case in Mississippi (although Nixon might well have won the state in that event). Allocating all of the popular votes to Kennedy or Byrd ignores this reality.

You could also award Byrd 324,000 votes in addition to Kennedy’s 318,000 votes (and Nixon’s 237,000 votes), but then you are allocating hundreds of thousands more votes than there were voters.

Probably the fairest way to allocate the votes—a method proposed by Gaines—is to add up the ballots cast for the eleven Democratic electors and then allocate six-elevenths of the total to Byrd and five-elevenths to Kennedy. This reflects the reality of the state’s Democratic Party: it was split between national party loyalists and Dixiecrats.

Adopting this approach results in a Nixon victory of around 60,000 votes, which is how
Congressional Quarterly
originally calculated the results.

In the end, there are three ways to count the popular vote in Alabama: allocate all Democratic votes to Kennedy, allocate all Democratic votes to Byrd, or allocate the Democratic votes proportionally between the two candidates.

Two of those three methods result in a Nixon victory in the national popular vote. Historians choose the one that results in a Kennedy win. I don’t think this is because of any conspiracy, nor is it due to bias. At the same time, though, I don’t think it’s because awarding Kennedy all of those votes is the best method either. Rather I think it’s just due to a lazy counting of votes for Kennedy electors, combined with inertia. It’s probably time for electoral historians to revisit that.

Of course, the most important thing to remember is that we don’t award victories by popular vote, and that campaigns structure their strategies accordingly. Absent an Electoral College, Kennedy probably wouldn’t have selected LBJ as his running mate and instead would have made a play in the vote-rich Midwest. But as a matter of historical accuracy, there are almost certainly five instances where the candidate won the popular vote, but lost the Electoral College.
5

NOTES

1
.     
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/us/general_election_romney_vs_obama-1171.html
.

2
.     
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map_no_toss_ups.html
.

3
.     
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1960&off=0&f=1
.

4
.     
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1960&fips=1&f=1&off=0&elect=0
.

5
.     Sean, Trende, Real Clear Politics, 10.19.12;
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/19/did_jfk_lose_the_popular_vote_115833.html
.

APPENDIX 5

John Dean’s “The Nixon Defense” A
n Analysis by Geoff Shepard

6/27/14

John Dean appears to have collected into one place each and every admission against interest by President Nixon and his senior aides, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell, from various Watergate books, the Nixon and Haldeman diaries, and the White House tapes.

Before deciding whether Dean’s supposed revelations are all that is claimed, it is helpful to reread President Nixon’s 1978 biography,
The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
, particularly the two sections devoted to Watergate: “The Watergate Break-in” (625–665) and “Watergate Recurs” (773–791). One might well conclude that much of what Dean claims to reveal today was already admitted by Nixon over thirty-five years ago.

But there is one overriding area of agreement between Dean and the president—and that is that Nixon did not fully appreciate the serious nature of the Watergate scandal until their meeting of March 21, 1973, when Dean first spoke of a cancer on the presidency. The ramifications will be explored in greater detail, but Dean admits, for all of the earlier bits and pieces that might be mined from earlier conversations, they were not seen as all that significant until very, very late in the day.

It also should be pointed out that the book is profoundly mistitled and that Dean’s methodology is seriously flawed. The book is not Nixon’s defense at all; it is an all-out attack on President Nixon. It’s far more accurate to see the book as Dean’s defense, his last and best effort to paint a picture of how an innocent young lawyer suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in the midst of a cabal of evil-doers—and how he alone struggled to do the right thing. (See footnote 111 at p. 488 for Dean’s tortured explanation of how he ended up with immunity when only wanting to tell the truth and footnote 7 at p. 543 for his rather astounding assertion regarding finding himself in the midst of a criminal cabal.)

More suspect is Dean’s methodology. By focusing only on events mentioned on the tape system and thus skipping any real discussion of what led to the break-in in the first place, of what was done by and between the president’s staff outside of his hearing, and of what transpired after the taping system was removed, Dean’s book presents only a very selective and partial picture of the Watergate scandal. In essence, it takes the taped conversations out of the context of the overall Watergate scandal. Finally, Dean’s supposed verbatim transcriptions have neither been peer-reviewed nor made available for independent verification.

The question was, and remains, why should anyone today believe Dean’s highly selective retelling? It is, in the words of Jim Croce, “like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone.”

I. The Dean Transcriptions

In researching his book, Dean claims to have identified some thousand Watergate conversations on the White House tapes, which he and his team have transcribed, beginning in 2009 and utilizing digitalized copies produced by the National Archives, as well as new software specifically designed for that purpose. He and his team then eliminated duplicative and irrelevant materials to condense these conversations into more readable and understand-able form.

It must have been a prodigious effort. One would have had to review thousands of individual conversations just to identify those that were Watergate-related. And, then to transcribe them “from scratch,” as Dean claims to have done, would be a further Herculean task.

Establishing validity:
All of this effort, however, will be of little use to future scholars or to serious students of the Watergate scandal, since Dean has declined to make these claimed verbatim transcriptions available for cross-checking and verification. As he so nicely put it in his first footnote, “Anyone who wants a verbatim copy is welcome to prepare their own transcripts” (p. xviii).

It appears that Dean expects readers to take his work-product at face value, but it is difficult to see how anyone could. After all, the transcriptions have not been prepared by an independent authority or cross-checked in any manner. And Dean is hardly an objective or independent observer, with an overriding concern for any reputation for veracity. He is, perhaps, President Nixon’s severest critic—and one who obviously feels a very strong need to justify his own criminal actions. Without verbatim transcripts as a reference point, it is virtually impossible to ascertain whether Dean’s transcriptions are accurate and, as importantly, whether his extensive condensations are appropriate or have omitted exculpatory material.

It would be relatively easy, for example, to compare Dean’s newly transcribed versions of certain key conversations with those previously prepared by others, including the White House (and released on April 30, 1974), the House Judiciary Committee (and released in June 1974), and the FBI (for use in the cover-up trial in the fall of 1974). In so doing, one could ascertain rather quickly whether Dean’s transcriptions are truly “new and improved” or closely follow those done some four decades prior.

Besides, Dean has given such assurances of accuracy and completeness before, only to have to eat his own words. In the 1976 preface to
Blind Ambition
, Dean attested to its overall accuracy by asserting that he was willing to take a lie detector test regarding its truthfulness. Yet, when under oath during nine days of depositions taken in 1995–1996 in connection with his lawsuit against the publisher of
Silent Coup
(Dean v. St Martin’s Press, C.A. 92-1807), time and again Dean declined to stand behind the specificity of various quotations and representations in that book. He claimed instead, that much of its dialogue had been a pure invention of his ghostwriter, Taylor Branch, and admitted that he had not even read the final version before it was published.

Selective use and quotation:
Aside from threshold questions of overall accuracy, the outright misuse of tape transcripts is just what Dean’s book is accusing President Nixon of having done many years before:

•     He first explains why tape summaries just don’t work, criticizing Nixon for reviewing Haldeman’s notes about a conversation without listening to the actual tape itself:

It is possible to get the gist of this conversation in real time, which is largely what Haldeman tried to do and indicate in his abbreviated notes. It is not possible for someone who has not listened to the recording, however, to understand it based on a few summary notes made by someone who has listened to it. For example, the tone of voice of the person speaking can be very telling. (p. 541
1
)

Yet, this is precisely what Dean is asking readers to do with regard to his own summations.

•     Dean later accuses the president of providing “misinformation by omitting these facts” (p. 582). Since readers have no idea what Dean may have omitted, he could well be doing precisely what he has accused Nixon of having done.

•     He also asserts that Nixon:

[W]ould use what he could of [the tapes] to his advantage. In fact, he began doing so as he listened to them, using select material he heard to reassure Haig and Ziegler of his innocence. (p. 590)

Again, there is no way a reader can tell if Dean is doing the same thing.

•     He later accused Nixon of selectively choosing material to his advantage:

[T]he president skimmed through the meetings, plucking out occasional statements by me that were consistent with his defense and dismissing matters or spinning them when they conflicted. (p. 603)

Since Dean so readily accuses others of abusive tape usage, who is to say that he hasn’t done many of the same things in his own condensations? Without his verbatim transcripts, there is no way to determine what has been left out.

Honest disagreements:
There also can be authentic differences over the actual wording of particular conversations. For example, Dean assures the reader that Nixon instructed Mitchell to further the cover-up in their conversation of March 22, 1973. Here is Dean’s quoted version (which is virtually a word-for-word duplication of the transcript produced by the House Judiciary Committee in 1973 and introduced at the cover-up trial):

“I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save it, save the plan. That’s the whole point.” But Nixon had to be realistic, too, so he gave the other side. “And I would particularly prefer to do it that other way, if it’s going to come out that way anyway. And that’s my view, that with the number of jackass people that they’ve got that they can call, they’re going to”—The president rephrased his thought. “The story they’ll get out, through leaks, charges and so forth, innuendo, will be a hell of a lot worse than the story they’re going to get out by just letting it out there.” (p. 341)

Here is alternative transcription of this same segment, prepared by the White House in response to the House Judiciary Committee’s version, but never before released:

I don’t give a shit what happens. Go down and sto-, stonewall it; Tell ‘em, “plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up” or anything else, if it’ll save ‘em—save it for them. That’s the whole point.

On the other hand, I would prefer, as I said to you, that you do it the other way [to have everyone tell the truth]. And I would particularly prefer to do it that other way if it’s going to come out that way anyway.

And that my view, with the number of jackass people that they’ve got that they can call, they’re going to. The story they get out through leaks, charges, and so forth, and innuendos, will be a hell of a lot worse than the story they’re going to get out by just letting it out there.

As any reader can see, there is an considerable difference of opinion over the specific words on this tape—with hugely disparate implications—but there’s no way to cross-check or verify Dean’s own transcription and whether it differs at all from transcriptions prepared by a number of other organizations.