Tricky Dick and Don

A tale of two very different January 6ths 

Who was the nastiest, most self-seeking president in the second half of the twentieth century? My guess is that most Americans would say Richard Nixon, driven out of office in 1974 after Watergate scheming and lying.

A new biography, though, suggests that even for “Tricky Dick” some things were sacrosanct. Paul Carter’s Richard Nixon: California’s Native Son quotes Nixon’s response to reporter Earl Mazo’s investigation of voter fraud in the 1960 election: “Earl, those are interesting articles you are writing—but no one steals the Presidency of the United States.”

Mazo’s investigation revealed that in Texas, which John F. Kennedy won by about 46,000 votes, at least 100,000 officially tallied votes appeared to be “nonexistent.” In Illinois, which Kennedy carried by only 8,858 votes out of nearly five million, “mountains of sworn affidavits by poll watchers and disgruntled voters” testified to cheating. 

When several weeks after the election Mazo spent an hour giving Nixon the facts, Nixon said he would take no action. Mazo was flabbergasted. According to the Washington Post’s Mazo obituary in 2007, the reporter considered Nixon “a goddamn fool”—but Nixon did not want to damn the United States by creating the “partisan bitterness and chaos that would result from an official challenge of the election result.” 

Carter reports that Dwight Eisenhower was willing to raise money to support a legal challenge. But Nixon said the U.S. “couldn’t afford to have a vacuum in leadership,” and even if Republicans won in the end, “the cost in world opinion and the effect on democracy in the broadest sense would be detrimental.” 

Carter quotes Nixon saying that African, Asian, and South American countries saw the United States as a nation in which democracy works. So “if in the United States an election was found to be fraudulent, it would mean that every pipsqueak in every one of those countries would be tempted, if he lost an election, to bring a fraud charge and have a coup.”

Compare Donald Trump’s incendiary words on January 6, 2021 with what Nixon said to a joint session of Congress when he was doing his election-certifying job as vice president on January 6, 1961: “In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win.” 

Nixon then did just that, extending to President-elect Kennedy “my heartfelt best wishes” for success “in a cause that is bigger than any man’s ambition, greater than any Party. It is the cause of freedom, of justice, and peace for all mankind.” 

Fools rush in where even Richard Nixon feared to tread. 

Marvin Olasky is former editor-in-chief at World magazine and is now chairman of Zenger House and an Acton Institute affiliate scholar. He writes a weekly column on homelessness for the Fix Homelessness website and a monthly Olasky Books newsletter.

^{photo credit: Motus AD}

RECOMMENDED READING

The Nixon Library has released another recording in which Billy Graham and Richard Nixon discuss Jews and the “Synagogue of Satan” On January 6, 2021 there was violence on the House floor. Violence almost broke again on January 6, 2023 Billy Graham to Richard Nixon: Satan was working through the Jews, but Hitler handled it all wrong Three Evenings in Plains