"... esteemed historians remain in its thrall and in Kennedy’s camp. Taylor Branch, Robert Dallek, David Greenberg, Jill Lepore, Fredrik Logevall — apologists and idolaters all, in the author’s view.... Nixon has always had his defenders (including, not least, Nixon himself) and Kennedy his detractors.... Gellman adds nothing here but fresh outrage.... But the white whale here is proof of a stolen election. This book does not provide it. The case it puts forward is circumstantial —
and nothing new. Much is made of 'suspicions' in Texas and 'irregularities' in Illinois as if such charges are, in themselves, dispositive. In the wake of 2020, we should know better than that. And so should a political historian of the mid-20th century: If fraud was a feature of elections in that era, so were accusations of fraud, wielded as a political cudgel. In 1948, for example, a top Republican official charged three Democratic candidates for Senate with 'serious' campaign fraud — more than a week before Election Day. Four years later, pre-emptively again, the Republican National Committee chairman called on federal prosecutors to keep tabs on big-city Democrats — who, he said, would 'stop at nothing' to 'steal' the election. None of this is to deny that Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago had a history of ballot manipulation or that votes were likely stolen in Texas. But in recent decades, rigorous studies have underscored what judges and review boards concluded in 1960: To the extent that fraud occurred, it was not enough to change the result — least of all in Texas, where Kennedy’s margin exceeded 46,000 votes."From "Did John F. Kennedy and the Democrats Steal the 1960 Election?" (NYT), a review of Irwin F. Gellman's book "CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY/Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960."
White is Theodore White, who wrote the incredibly influential book "The Making of the President 1960." They made a movie of it, which you can watch on YouTube in its entirety.
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