Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Gilbert, of Middlesex, a former teacher and college administrator, and the retired executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.
Even before the votes were counted, all Americans and all the world heard the president of the United States declare our national election a fraud. We knew it was coming: He said publicly four years ago that he would abide by the election’s turnout if he won. The president’s people filed suits of dubious merit in multiple places in multiple states. And the president says he has no intent to concede; to do so would be, to be sure, entirely out of character. The damage to the sacred process of peaceful transfer of power in our government, the stature of the presidency, and the integrity of American democracy itself is enormous.
President Trump’s actions stand in stark contrast with the history of America’s elections and transfers from one administration to another — even when Richard Nixon, President Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, was narrowly defeated by Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose wrote that late on election night, Nixon saw that the returns were not going his way, but he knew that if he won two of three undecided states – Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan – he could still win. Understandably then, going before his supporters that night, he did not concede; he did have the decency to say that the returns were not all in, but that “if the present trend continues, Senator Kennedy will be the next President of the United States.” His supporters began yelling, urging him not to concede. But he continued, “If he does become our next President, he will have my wholehearted support.”
His “wholehearted support.” That doesn’t sound like our current president.
Ambrose wrote that allegations of fraud in Texas and Illinois in 1960 were “too widespread, and too persistent, to be entirely without foundation.” Many people urged Nixon to call for a recount in those states, but that was never really a possibility: It would have taken at least 18 months to do a recount in Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Cook County, and Texas had no provision at all for a recount.
Nixon wrote, “I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.”
That all sounds very noble, but I expect he also knew that in politics, as on the playground, people don’t like sore losers. And because he wanted to have a political future, he bit his tongue.
That doesn’t sound like our president. After all, even when he won the White House in 2016, he alleged that if millions of votes hadn’t been stolen, he would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral vote. He established a commission to look into it, but it found nothing and was quietly disbanded.
History remembers Nixon’s 1960 campaign less clearly than it does his 1968 and 1972 campaigns, when his “Southern strategy,” full of calls for law and order, appeals to the “silent majority,” and other dog whistles brought him victory. But Ambrose called 1960 Nixon’s finest campaign: “On such issues as race, religion, or bringing Joe Kennedy’s or Jack’s girlfriends into the campaign, Nixon was a model of propriety and statesmanship.”
And Nixon didn’t make public a huge national security secret about how much we knew about the Soviet’s missiles for personal political gain by refuting Kennedy’s grossly exaggerated assertion that America had a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union.
That doesn’t sound like our president either.
On the question of who comes out on top in defeat, the decision seems clear: even Tricky Dick Nixon beats out Donald J. Trump.
