Election

Nights used to provide better drama than they do now, in the era of exit polls

and rapid data analysis … analysis that sometimes happens without any data.

One of the most dramatic of all was on November 8,

1960, when the candidates were then-Vice President Richard Nixon and a young

U.S. Senator named John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy took a big early lead, but after midnight, his

margin fell dramatically till it became a photo finish that wasn’t settled till

late the next morning.  Nixon would have

won had he carried Texas and Illinois, but there were rumors of major

hanky-panky in counting those votes.

President Eisenhower and others urged him to contest

the results, but Nixon refused.  He said

it would dangerously divide the nation, something we couldn’t risk during the

Cold War.

In fact, if he had tried, the odds were overwhelmingly

against Nixon succeeding at even getting recounts, let alone winning them, and

he knew it But at some level, he genuinely seemed to be concerned about the

nation’s interests, not just his own.

Frankly, I’ve yet to see any sign of that from Donald

Trump, who during his campaign, said he might not accept the results of the

election if he lost.  Nixon was also a professional

politician who knew how Congress and the major parties worked.  He was quite capable of forging effective

compromises, when he wasn’t crippled by his lifelong paranoia. He wasn’t

especially ideological, and in foreign policy, was something of a genuine

visionary.

Few remember today that Nixon not only opened the

relationship between this country and China, but that his administration

started the Environmental Protection Agency.

Both Nixon and Trump were suspected of misusing their

presidencies to the point where they committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” sufficient

to justify impeachment.

We have no idea how this will play out in the Trump

administration.  But there was a big

difference in the way Nixon viewed the world.  

Nixon never really challenged conventional morality or ethics – he

merely lied about what he had done.

In a way, Watergate was like a Shakespearian morality

play, in which the ruler is accused of foul misdeeds.  He denies this, but at length proof emerges that

he is guilty, and the bad king slinks into the shadows.  When the jig was up, Nixon made no attempt to

defy the Supreme Court; he just turned over the tapes, and then resigned.

I haven’t seen any reason to believe that we could

count on President Trump to behave the same way.  That’s not to justify Nixon.  He helped open the door to much of the

present ugliness in our politics. Even as a young would-be congressman, he

smeared his opponents, slyly hinting they were Communist sympathizers or worse.

Nixon may have colluded with a foreign agent to

prevent the Vietnam War from being settled while he was running for

President.  After he won, he was obsessed

with politically destroying his enemies, but destroyed himself instead.  His downfall began, you may remember, when a team

of stumblebums called “the plumbers” were caught trying to bug Democratic National

Headquarters during a presidential campaign.

The irony is that was an election that Nixon couldn’t

have lost if he tried.

But by trying to rig the system, he lost it all.