Fans of pseudo-historical nonsense received a dose of satisfaction this month when Politico published an article under the headline, “How Kennedy Narrowly Defeated Nixon — and Why the Alternative History Would Have Been Devastating.” (The sub-headline followed: “The 1960 election was closer than you think. And had Nixon won, it might have meant nuclear war.”)

Greenfield makes significant factual errors on the 1960 election, and his speculations on the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis are without any foundation.

The author is Jeff Greenfield, who is identified as a “journalist,” a “contributing writer at POLITICO,” and “a five-time Emmy-winner” who has “written multiple books about American politics” — Politico failed to mention that he was also a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy in 1968 — and the piece is part of a series in which Greenfield examines “narrowly decided presidential elections” to show how different outcomes would have “changed American history forever.” As a historian who has written on the 1960 presidential election, I can confidently report that in this piece Greenfield has already changed American history, though I hope it is dismissed as factually inaccurate and his speculation as worthless. (READ MORE from Irwin F. Gellman: Victory by Fraud)

The article consists of two parts:  an account of how Kennedy won the 1960 election, followed by speculation on how Nixon, had he been president in 1961 and ’62, would have managed the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The first part contains a series of mistakes; the second part is absurd.  

Greenfield begins by agreeing with everyone that the 1960 presidential election, if not necessarily “closer than you think,” was indeed one of the closest in American history. He then moves on to make several errors. He repeats the myth that Nixon performed poorly on the first Great Debate because of his sallow appearance. That is not the reason Kennedy did better. Shortly before the program, Nixon told President Eisenhower that he intended not to attack Kennedy because, as the more experienced candidate, he thought he should be more statesmanlike. His restraint troubled Republican partisans who expected their candidate to be tougher on his opponent, while Kennedy’s more aggressive approach pleased Democrats.  The polls, however, barely moved. 

Greenfield also declares that Kennedy won the national popular vote by an “official plurality” of 112,827; the government did not release any “official plurality.” There are several options for counting the popular vote, including some in which Nixon wins a plurality. In describing the closeness of the election in several states, Greenfield minimizes Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s fraud, which gave Illinois to Kennedy. The journalist Ben Bradlee, a close friend of Kennedy’s, recalled that the nominee said he had no doubt that Daley’s interference was responsible for the Illinois result. Greenfield also ignores the controversy in Texas, where Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, had never won a statewide contest without relying on fraud. His victory in the 1948 senatorial campaign earned him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon” because he won by 87 votes in an election rife with fraud.  Republicans did not challenge the Texas presidential vote in 1960 largely because, at the time, there was no legal mechanism for doing so.

A far more serious error is the importance Greenfield attributes to the African American vote.  Ignoring that Nixon had a better record on civil rights than Kennedy, he asserts that a critical element in Kennedy’s win was the telephone call JFK made to Coretta King on October 26, 1960, after her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., was arrested and taken to a Georgia prison. “If that call hadn’t happened,” Greenfield writes, “Kennedy might not have been elected.” But he brings forward no empirical evidence that the phone call had any effect on Black votes and Greenfield mentions King Sr.’s often-quoted line, “I’ve got a suitcase full of votes,” which the civil rights leader’s father planned to mobilize on Kennedy’s behalf. King Sr. was sincere, but even his Atlanta precinct went for Nixon. 

Kennedy’s call to Coretta King, while admirable, probably made no appreciable difference in the outcome.  The nationwide Black vote in 1960 was approximately 3,000,000, less than 5 percent of the total.  Except in the Eisenhower landslide of 1956, Black voters had gone two-thirds Democratic and one-third Republican in every presidential election since 1936; they did the same in 1960. Civil rights were not a major part of the Kennedy campaign’s strategy. Other voting blocs, like labor unions and religious groups, especially Catholics, were far more crucial. Greenfield could have easily avoided these mistakes by consulting several scholarly books, especially those by Edmund Kallina Jr., W.J. Rorabaugh and mine, that provide accurate information. (READ MORE: Martin Luther King and I)

When he turns to speculation about how Nixon would have conducted foreign policy in 1961 and 1962,  Greenfield moves from the merely inaccurate to the irresponsible and outrageous. He starts with the debacle of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, declaring that the planning for it started under President Eisenhower. Kennedy acolytes like Theodore Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Pierre Salinger earnestly promoted this thesis. Some commentators still promote it.  The truth is that while Eisenhower did form a secret group to study how to overthrow Fidel Castro, there was no planning for an amphibious invasion. President Kennedy’s younger brother and most trusted adviser, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, wrote to the columnist Stewart Alsop in July 1961 that Eisenhower had no role in the invasion’s preparation. President Kennedy could have easily telephoned his predecessor, but he never asked Eisenhower for advice until after the disaster. At that point, in May 1961, Eisenhower explained to Kennedy precisely why the invasion was a bad idea from the start. To write, as Greenfield does, that Nixon as president “almost certainly would have signed off on the Bay of Pigs invasion” is without merit. Eisenhower had planned and successfully executed the largest amphibious invasion in world history, and he and Nixon maintained regular contact throughout the 1960s.  Nixon would not have ignored his mentor’s counsel. To imply that Nixon would have done worse than Kennedy here is ridiculous.

Greenfield further pursues his tortured theme in moving from the Bay of Pigs to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which he claims, “ended as a huge triumph for Kennedy.” The most recent scholarship points out that both Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were terrified of starting a nuclear war. Both also acted on faulty intelligence. The United States, for example, did not know until decades later that the Soviets had stationed nuclear weapons in Cuba. Yet the possibility of a successful bluff like Kennedy’s apparently does not apply to Nixon: “The strong probability is that a President Nixon would have signed off on air strikes against the missile sites, and an invasion as well.” When he asks whether “a President Nixon would have unwittingly taken us on a road that would have led to a nuclear war,” the answer is a foregone conclusion: “In all probability: Yes.”  But if Nixon had become president in 1961, the next two years would surely not have unfolded the same way, and as Greenfield notes, Khrushchev might never have placed missiles in Cuba at all if Nixon were president.  We cannot know.  To simply plunk a counterfactual Nixon down into a situation Kennedy had been managing to that point is to guarantee that one is talking about a scenario that could never have happened.

Greenfield makes significant factual errors on the 1960 election, and his speculations on the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis are without any foundation. The result does not remotely resemble history; this is more a kind of soothsaying from which readers learn nothing.

Irwin Gellman has written three books published by Yale University Press on Richard Nixon, including Campaign of the Century: Kennedy, Nixon and the Election of 1960 and The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952–1961, which includes a chapter on Eisenhower and Fidel Castro.