My first political experience was handing out bumper stickers and literature for George McGovern, and Richard Nixon was akin to the Devil to my parents. I was 8 years old, so I should be forgiven for my youthful mistake.

Obviously, my politics changed over the years, but it wasn’t until graduate school that I really revised my view of Kennedy as a president, and Kennedy as a man. Even as a conservative, I was moved by Kennedy’s rhetoric and I admired his anti-communism and his support for civil rights. I never knew about his tendency to use, even pimp out women. Almost nobody did until recently. We just thought he was something of a rake, not a rapist.

My primary field of study in grad school was political philosophy, but my secondary subject was security studies, which at the time meant studying the Cold War primarily. My studies led me to a conclusion: the election of John Kennedy was a disaster for the United States.

I believe that if Richard Nixon had won in 1960–and many people argue that he actually did win if cheating had not occurred–history would have been completely different and much less disastrous for the United States in the 60s and 70s.

My theory:

The historical view of Richard Nixon has been shaped by the Watergate scandal. Most Americans think of Nixon as a petty, vengeful man and even as a loser. It’s hard not to, given his downfall.

Now I have no particular love for the man Nixon, nor any nostalgia for his presidency or his policies as president. As a domestic president, he was actually pretty liberal, creating the EPA, imposing wage and price controls to battle inflation, and he pushed very aggressive affirmative action policies. Nixon was arguably much better as a foreign policy president, although there is tremendous debate about every aspect of his foreign policy. Arguably if he has remained in office the Vietnam War would have ended in a stalemate, not a defeat, with the enforcement of the Paris Peace Accords. We will never know, although I believe Congress cost the US the war in 1975.

None of that matters, though, for my theory, which is very simple: President Kennedy took the Cold War and heated up the temperature dramatically, leading to a much more aggressive Soviet Union that threatened the US and our allies far more than it would or should have.

If you take a look at world history during the 1960s, you can easily see how the relatively quiescent 1950s under Eisenhower turned into the tumultuous 1960s under Kennedy and Johnson, and I would argue that it is Kennedy’s fault. Johnson was a hideous president and escalated the Vietnam war, sparking enormous social unrest, but he was in his own mind continuing Kennedy’s policies there. He felt trapped into the war.

It all began with the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

Kennedy had been very bellicose toward the Soviet Union during his presidential campaign, claiming that the Eisenhower Administration was too soft on the Soviet Union and that his policies had led to a “missile gap” (which turned out to be an utter myth). His inaugural address–which I love rhetorically–was similarly bellicose. The rhetoric was great, but the policies inspired by it were downright dangerous, leading directly to the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Revisionist historians claim that if Nixon had won he, too, would have supported an invasion of Cuba, and we will never know whether that is true. I personally doubt it–certainly, the claim that Eisenhower was all for it is unsupported by the evidence, despite the CIA backing it all the way. Had Nixon approved the Bay of Pigs he certainly would not have botched the invasion plan in the way Kennedy most certainly did. I hate to rely on a capsule history from Wikipedia, but it provides a decent summary:

As the invasion force lost the strategic initiative, the international community found out about the invasion, and U.S. President John F. Kennedy decided to withhold further air support.[7] The plan, devised during Eisenhower’s presidency, had required the involvement of U.S. air and naval forces. Without further air support, the invasion was being conducted with fewer forces than the CIA had deemed necessary. The invading force was defeated within three days by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (Spanish: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias – FAR) and surrendered on 20 April. Most of the surrendered counter-revolutionary troops were publicly interrogated and put into Cuban prisons.

The invasion was a U.S. foreign policy failure. The Cuban government’s victory solidified Castro’s role as a national hero and widened the political division between the two formerly allied countries. It also pushed Cuba closer to the Soviet Union, setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

What was devastating about the Bay of Pigs was not that it failed, although that was bad enough. It was Kennedy’s vacillation and withdrawal of support once he committed others to danger. Air support that had been promised never arrived, and Kennedy not only looked weak but acted weakly. He talked tough, but once the smell of gunpowder was in the air he cut and run.

This led to Kennedy’s next foreign policy fiasco: the Berlin Wall. 

Most people who were not adults in 1961 assume that the Berlin Wall was constructed in the late 40s or in the 1950s, but that is actually not true at all. There was no wall until August 1961; it began construction after a failed summit with Kruschev. The construction of the Berlin Wall was hardly inevitable; the Soviets thought they could get away with it because Kennedy appeared to be weak.

They were right. They did get away with it because Kennedy was weak. The Berlin Wall exists because Kennedy, when faced with a choice to support the allies he sent to Cuba decided to sacrifice them to avoid a conflict. The Bay of Pigs led to the Berlin Wall. In 3 months the Soviets humiliated the United States twice.

The Berlin Wall, in turn, eventually led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In two major showdowns with the United States, the Soviet Union had clearly won the battle of wills. Kruschev clearly believed he could win a third.

Kennedy had brought the US to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and while he is celebrated for navigating the country and the world through the crisis, it was a crisis that never would have arisen if Nixon had been president. As an understudy to Eisenhower and himself a fervent anticommunist, Nixon too had been a fervent advocate of the US policy of not provoking conflict but promising massive retaliation for overstepping lines.

Most people don’t know this but during the 1950s the US military was relatively small and not fit for aggression. The implicit deal with our adversaries was: we won’t threaten your territory unless you threaten ours; but if you do, we will wipe you off the face of the Earth. It was a simple, brutal, and very effective strategy. It was relatively cheap, which was the point, and it worked. The Soviet Union stuck to its sphere of influence, more or less, and in return, they had no particular fear of the US challenging their sphere.

What it lacked in idealism it made up for in simple effectiveness.

Ironically that meant that the Soviets didn’t bother building much of a nuclear arsenal, even though the US had a huge deterrent force. In 1960 the US had 18,600 nukes. The Soviets just 1605.

The Cuban Missile Crisis changed the calculus for the Soviets.

When Kennedy flipped from appearing weak to threatening nuclear war with the Soviets, rightly challenging their attempt to put nukes in Cuba that could directly threaten the US, the Soviets buckled. They also made certain that they would never again have to face a US nuclear threat due to their own position of weakness.

By the end of the 1960s, the Soviets had 11,600 nuclear weapons. By 1980 they had 30,000, or 7,000 more than the US. They had determined to reverse US nuclear superiority after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they did.

That is the real legacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis: the Soviet nuclear buildup and much higher tensions. When the Cold War finally ended the Soviets had nearly 40,000 nukes, and I would argue that this was primarily due to Kennedy having to push back on them in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which in turn happened due to his earlier weakness in Cuba and Berlin.

On Vietnam the record is mixed. Kennedy seemed to vacillate on the deployment of US troops to the country. On the one hand, he sent thousands of troops to the country in the two years after his disastrous first year in office, and publicly declared support for the struggle against the communists; on the other, he clearly wanted to extricate US troops from the country. It is impossible to know what his ultimate policy would have been.

One thing is clear, though: Kennedy increased US troop levels in Vietnam by a factor of 16. And as a lover of unconventional warfare, he destabilized the South through Diem’s assassination.

Why would Nixon have been better?

For all his flaws, Nixon was a very smart and practical man. He was extremely savvy, and until 1960 he was a winner. Elected Vice President at 39 years old, his rise in Republican politics was meteoric and he was a solid understudy of Eisenhower. Eisenhower and he were not close, but there is plenty of reason to believe that the Soviets would have been much more averse to testing his mettle than Kennedy’s. Domestically he was far to the left of modern Republicans, but his policies were quite mainstream for the period. He was friendly and very supportive of Martin Luther King and had worked with him during the Eisenhower Administration, although he alienated King when Kennedy phoned him while imprisoned and Nixon did not.

Still, Nixon would likely have been an advocate of civil rights without inspiring quite as much animosity as Johnson did. He was a supporter of school desegregation and the civil rights movement.

Had Nixon become president I believe that the Bay of Pigs, and hence the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis would almost certainly not have happened. I suspect that he would have maintained some level of support for South Vietnam, but Diem would never have been assassinated with US support, and Nixon’s record in office was entirely focused on extricating the US from a losing war.

Vietnam blew up under Kennedy and Johnson, and my own sense–and there is, admittedly, zero evidence because this is a counterfactual–is that the US would never have wound up with half a million troops in Vietnam. That was the brainchild of Kennedy’s “the best and the brightest” Harvard men.

This is why Bob Dole once growled about “Democrat wars,” referring to Korea and Vietnam in particular.

Even Watergate is a legacy of the 1960 election. Nixon believed he had been cheated of victory in 1960–a position held by many political scientists both at the time and today–and he wound up feeling very ill-used and ridiculed unfairly. He had taken what he considered to be the high road by conceding despite tremendous internal pressure to challenge the results, and in return, he was labeled a nasty loser.

He had been called a war criminal for winding down the Vietnam War. He inherited a troop level in Vietnam of over half a million Americans, and by the 1972 election, the number was less than 25,000. There were about 50 when he left office. Yet Nixon was blamed for the war in the popular mind. I still know people who blame the war on Nixon.

So despite his commanding lead in the 1972 election, Nixon was defensive, even paranoid. He had turned from being a winner in 1960–one of the most successful young politicians in American history–into a paranoid surrounded by unsavory characters. Nobody knows what he would have been like in 1961 as a newly elected president, but it is easy to imagine his outlook would have been much sunnier and less cynical.

In short, I believe that if Nixon had been elected in 1960 there would have been no Bay of Pigs, no Berlin Wall, no Cuban Missile Crisis, and a much smaller Soviet nuclear buildup. Kruschev would likely have continued his reforms in the Soviet Union, so no Brezhnev either. Nixon would have been a better and less paranoid president than he turned out to be, and the 1960s would likely not have turned the country into the cynical, riot-torn country it became in the late 60s. 

Not only that, the inflation of the 1970s–a result of the grotesque overspending in Vietnam and the “war on poverty” would never have arisen, and we would be much more prosperous.

Although, it is true, we may never have reached the moon. We certainly would not have by 1969.

All this is idle speculation, of course. But for 30 years I have believed it to be true. It’s all a “what if.”

What do you think? Am I crazy?