Nixon didn't take defeat by JFK lying down

Fuzzy maths - and fuzzy history, too. Pundits, who should know better, and politicians keep citing the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon election as a model for how great men should behave in the little local difficulty we have here in the US. They are all basically trying to put pressure on Al Gore to go quietly into the night, saying this is just what the noble Richard Nixon did after the 1960 squeaker when he put country above ambition and refrained from challenging the legitimacy of Kennedy's votes.

Such ignorance! First the facts. Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago machine voted the graveyards to give Kennedy the 27 votes of Illinois and the presidency. For a start, Kennedy did not need those votes. Michigan put him over the top at 5.45 a.m. Nixon would have also needed the 24 votes of Texas. Flagrant fraud was alleged to have been perpetrated there by Senator Lyndon Johnson's henchmen and it is the combination of Texas and Illinois that could have given Nixon victory.

The myth is that he took all this lying down. Nixon cultivated that idea because "charges of `sore loser' would follow me through history" and remove any possibility of a further political career. But Nixon and his allies did mount a massive challenge. His friend and biographer, Earl Mazo, whipped up a frenzy in the press while keeping Nixon's name out of it.

Republican Party leaders went to enormous lengths to undo the results, right up to the electoral college that certified Kennedy as the winner by 303 electoral votes to 219. On November 11th, three days after the election, Senator Thruston B. Morton, the party's national chairman, and senatorial allies launched bids for recounts or investigations in no fewer than 11 states - not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

The effort was prodigious. Recounts were won in Illinois and New Jersey. There was some fraud but not enough proved to change the outcome. In Illinois the final recount showed that Kennedy's 8,858 majority had been overcounted by 943, but in 40 per cent of precincts checked, Nixon's vote was found to have been overcounted. That is quite a contrast with Florida today where the contested Bush majority of 1,784 has dwindled to an unofficial 327, where absentee votes remain to be counted, and where the protests of 20,000 disenfranchised voters in Palm Beach County are of an altogether different order to those of 1960.

Both sides today have legitimate grievances. The Bush campaign is justified in its complaint that Republican voters may have been deterred from going to the polls by the reckless prediction of the TV networks that Gore had already won. They would be entitled to seek recounts in other close races. And the Gore campaign is right to want an investigation of significant ballot irregularities.

It has a duty to do that. Yes, we all know that every election has some mix-up or other, but this one affects many thousands of voters. It is bizarre that the Republicans and so many commentators are acting as if these citizens are eccentric nuisances for insisting on the basic principle of American democracy. The consternation should be instead about why Bush is trying to claim the presidency before he has won it, an impudence incited but not justified by Gore's stupidly premature concession.

The postal votes or the very necessary manual recounts resisted by the Republicans may produce a clear winner, but unless it is quite substantial I doubt whether any "final" count figure favouring either Bush or Gore now will dispel the dismay and anxiety throughout the country.

The improprieties are too glaring and the result of a handful of votes too prodigious. America cannot afford to have a new president start his administration under a cloud. For Gore to assume the presidency in these circumstances would incite Republicans forever to say he gained it only by street demos and legal manoeuvre, and by the mischief wrought by television. For Bush to assume the presidency, it would always be with the taint of why the ballots were so screwed up in his brother's state.

Short of a decisive recount, the best solution is submission to the people best qualified to know the mind of Palm Beach - the community of voters. A rerun in Palm Beach County open only to those who voted on November 7th would legitimise the successful candidate like nothing else can, whether its effect is pro-Bush or pro-Gore. There are plenty of state precedents for reruns. Better the fuss of this than a president with a mandate anchored in Florida's fuzzy maths. - (Guardian Service)

Harold Evans, a former editor of the Times and Sunday Times of London, lives in New York.