tv American Artifacts Plymouth Colony Pilgrims CSPAN October 11, 2022 3:30pm-3:51pm EDT
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charge that nixon was dirty because he was encouraging bigotry same old nixon staff. you do not have to prove it all you have to do is say. >> we have already talked a little bit about fraud, let's close on that topic. nowadays we see every political election in these red and blue maps, the outcome from 1960. and the version of it that i like because you get more original terms is the one by county. of course, red being republican, blue being democratic. i guess when you see a map like this, comment a little bit on a couple of things. what do you see when you see a map like this? an outcome like this. for its own sake but also compared to what eisenhower was doing in the south. ultimately, the big
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west, shun was there fraud? if so, was it decisive? >> the numbers that iran, first of all, say that nixon had every likelihood of winning texas and illinois. had he won texas and illinois he would have been president of the united states in 1960. but, what i say when i look at the entire route is a precursor of what you are experiencing now. the nation is starting to divide, fundamentally, into two sections. the urbanites and the nature of certain block voting, black voting, jewish voting, labour voting, et cetera. that becomes fundamentally democratic, and suburban and rural becomes very republican. what you have now is, i think,
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the most extreme of that. where people of one ilk or another will not talk to one another. there is virtually no intercourse, they are so extreme. it bodes well for partisan voting, which is fundamentally 40% republican and 40% democrat now. but in 1960 the remarkable thing because nick zimmer almost 95% of the republican vote. pretty hard to believe somebody as evil as next and could get 95%. and our hero, jack kennedy, received 84% of the democratic vote. all kennedy had to do was to keep his base. there were 17 million more democratic registers than there were republicans. 40 million republican registers and 57
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million democratic registers. if kennedy had simply kept his base, he could not even do that. the nature of the election was not only so close, it was even closer than anybody believed. because, again, nobody bothered to run any numbers. it is amazing how in corrects the results of the election have been told. i. e., kennedy won the election by 112,000 votes. i ran the election results for different ways. one way, the best he did was about 107,000 votes, the next way iran and he won by 27,000 votes. the next way identity, he won by 137,000 votes, and the final one he won by 56,000 votes. and yet, people to this day continually run these numbers as if they were gospel without evaluating
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what really happened. >> there is plenty more i can get into, i have not even asked you about the debates. i would like to go to the audience, i would like i microphone going around that we would love to get your questions. >> before we begin with the gullets get a round of applause for mr. gellman and dr. nichter. [applause] we will open the floor for questions, if you have questions raise your hand and signal to me and the first question i would like
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to ask, what advice you have four young researchers? where do you think they should start? >> do that again? >> what advice do you have four young researchers and where should they start? >> well, professor nichter and i are lucky that we already have established records. the problem for young people, and i talk to them about this, 20 years ago to now the amount of material written has increased by 10%. the amount of books that are published now is three times as many. very few pages increased, but the number of publications have increased three times. it is very, very difficult to break into writing. if you are able to get
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published, more power to you. some of us get lucky, some of us do not. if i were any of you i would try to write letters to the editors, right in newspapers are magazines, anything you can do to get your name and. or i would find somebody who really knows what they are doing, and asked them to help. generally speaking it is incredibly bleak for young people, even if they do brilliant research, to find a publisher. >> thank you, to your left, over here. >> thank you, doctor gellman, i learned a lot and i have a lot of questions. i have a question for you, you mentioned a couple of times, you repeated the word
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evil nixon. you raise and why some of the perceptions were inaccurate, flawed. but you also said that inaccurate and flawed precepts were accepted, as if they were facts. so, what was causing this? why? why did people feel the way they did? ordinarily people do not believe things that are so easily contradictory. more voters forget over the next, and that is not true. why did they believe that? >> the answer is so complex. one, first of all, democrats. harry truman. he virtually hated the ground that nixon walked on. eleanor roosevelt felt the same way. aly
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stevenson hated nixon with a passion. the leaders of the democratic party went to the fundamental extreme. because nixon was vulnerable, and also because eisenhower was not. they did not attack the great man because it was a waste of your time. so you went after someone that they thought was possible to go after. but what is worse than that is, today in newspapers, magazines, television, you have some of these people who are commentators. i nicely called him idiots. [laughs] they will tell you material that makes no sense at all, and one day one thing, one day the exact opposite thing. but, back in
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the day, in 1960 you had a bevy of famous columnists, newspaper reporters that simply wrote what happened. whereas kennedy had they's great, energetic audiences. nixon had awful audiences. nobody was there. if you saw pictures, kennedy had good audiences. and, surprise, nixon had good audiences. did nixon have people thought he was charismatic? absolutely! did kennedy have people that thought he was charismatic! yes! theater white, for example, and i quote this in the book, goes over nixon's trade in october of 1960s. wearing a win with kennedy lapel button. how tacky can you get? and yet, these
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people, behind the scenes, behaved poorly. to give you my own personal experience, when i talk. especially after i started writing about richard nixon, people would talk to me. i can apply to grant after grants after grants and have support grants, and get thank you so much, no. the nature of writing about nixon, anything other than saying he was darth vader, is not publish-able.. for want of a better word, publishers are greedy and they want to make money. if they cannot sell books they do not publish. now the campaign of the century and my other books have sold pretty well. but, what it means is either i am fooling a lot of people, or there is a certain amounts of belief that the material that has been written so long so
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wrong. i will tell you one last thing. i was nominated for a thing called the pluto arc award in 2015 for the best biography of the year. i got a call from high up in the thing that said there are 257 books nominated. they are going to not narrow it down to the top ten. do not feel bad, you are not going to make it. two months later i get a call from the same guy saying, i have to tell you that you made it to the top ten. but, now, it goes down to the top four. there is no way you are going to be a finalist. forget being a finalist. a month later get a call. you have to sit down for this, you are a finalist. so, i have on my wall, hanging, the finalist for the pul-e-charki word. go figure! i was very pleased, it is always nice to
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be acknowledged. but the man that was telling me this was on the inside, knew how everything was going and there was not a prayer, did not have a chance. and yet, sometimes it changes. >> thank you, right behind? >> yes, doctor, as a communications major i am just curious, could you speak to the televised debate? that we hear so much about, nixon looked angry and kennedy was tan. >> we all know what happened, he was poorly tanned, kennedy looked wonderful, it was a mismatch from the very start me. >> those who watched on television felt kennedy won, but those who listened on radio thought nixon won.
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>> all of that is nonsense, it never happened. it was just a story that was done. no one in 60 years has done any serious race or john the great debate. do you know what happened? what happened was far easier. the night before the first debate, nixon is talking to eisenhower and says, you know, i am going to fool them. i am not going to be the adversarial nixon, i'm going to be a kind and gentle nixon. and so, the next night he goes on the first debates and he is the kinder and gentler nixon. and all of the people that are watching as partisans for the kind, or general next and say what is wrong with you? go get them! do what you do best. so, the basic thing is, if you listen to the first debates nixon says in some way or another, 16 times, i agree with you. and his
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people did not want nixon agreeing. in the following three debates nixon was different. he was nixon, adversarial, attacking kennedy where he was weak and doing quite a good job. but after the first debate as a communications major, how do you think the newspapers responded? it was a tie. it becomes untied over 60 years and it becomes kennedy winning the first debate by a mile. but the initial reaction and all of the newspapers was that there was no difference between the two of them, they both did equally well or equally bad. the whole story of the kennedy being this wonderful guy. what did happen, and i didn't say,
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was the greatest thing that john kennedy did was run for office. there was a wonderful campaigner. and by staying up, and not making any massive mistakes in the first debate, what happened was's democrats said, this guy is a lot better than we thought, and might be able to do a good job. so they rallied around the flag and kennedy got more adulation after that first debate because he did not blow it. not because he did great but because he did not too badly. >> we have one last question, over here. >> doctor, clearly senator johnson helped senator kennedy in his campaign, how much did ambassador lodge help vice
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president nixon, given that lodge was from massachusetts and, clearly, kennedy was going to win his home state. >> first of all, a man that should really answer the question is the pro. >> i will let you answer most of it, i would simply say the thing that i wonder about, if the nixon and lodge ticket had been for eisenhower's wages, after eight years as president they to people that eisenhower owed the most to after eight years were nixon nixon and lodge for all they did during his presidency. and so, i think eisenhower began to groom both of them at the beginning of 1958 and 59 in various ways, leading up to 60. and when you look at the schedules of the two top democrats and two top republicans, lodge was actually
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the only one of the for not to miss a day of campaigning due to illness, or injury, or something else. in fact, i found in lodges papers in boston he has repeatedly cloying out to the people on the next inside of the campaign saying, use me more, i can do more! i am not being affective because i cannot control my schedule. my schedule is being made entirely by the next inside and i am not even approving of the debates. so, i think he wanted to be used more during that campaign. the last thing i would say, and you can villain where i've gone astray, is he was older. he was older and more like an eisenhower figure. he was born in 1902. he is a full 15 years older than john f. kennedy. he is six years older than lyndon johnson. 11 years older than richard nixon. we had this idea of the vice presidential candidate being the attack dog, going out to do the things that are unpresidential, the things that the top of the order does not want to do. more often than not that has been the pattern in the last 50 years. it was different than. i think that
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henry cabot lodge jr was a way to ensure the eisenhower continuity to the nixon presidency. he bought maturity that nixon, do not forget, how young he was. 47 years old, you've been vice president for eight years, you lose the run for the presidency and you are just turning 48 years old. that is not so bad, you have options and a future. lodge, i think as a running mate with nixon, it was really a different era. >> the only thing i have to add to that is, the real story is, as professor nichter says. or the fable. that lodge did not campaign he was lazy. if you do not look at the records you can lie all you want to. they fast is my examination of what lodge did in the 1960 campaign when nixon was in the hospital for two weeks he was the guy carrying the campaign. and surprise surprise, he was
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campaigning all over new york with nelson rockefeller. and going to the beach etcetera, etcetera and doing well but, because people picked up on a story after and time magazine that he had to take a nap every day and get into pajamas, what would you rather have? he was in pajamas and campaigning like -- or that he was in pajamas and not doing anything? >> it is literally muddy what you can get away with if you do not do the research. >> when it is a gentleman, would you please join me in dock thanking doctors gellman and nichter. [applause] the book is the campaign of the century and dr. gellman wilson copies of the book tonight, and
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