Hillary: Nixon really won 1960 election

Did you know that young Hillary Rodham grew up a Goldwater Republican conservative? She only became radicalized in the late 1960s.

In 1960, she even found proof that JFK’s political machine stuffed ballot boxes in Illinois, where she lived. Nixon actually won in 1960 in both Illinois and, therefore, the nation.

That story comes from the new biography, “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” by Jeff Gerth and Dale Van Natta Jr. Here’s a summary from CounterPunch magazine (not online) on the 1960 election,

the squeaker where the state of Illinois notoriously put Kennedy over the top, courtesy of [corrupt] Mayor Daley, [Mafia boss] Sam Giancana and [Kennedy mob moll] Judith Exner. Hillary was a Nixon supporter. She took it on herself to probe llegations of vote fraud. From the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chicago’s westside, she journeyed to the tenements of the south side, a voter list in her hand. She went to an address recorded as the domicile of hundreds of Democratic voters and duly found an empty lot. She rushed back to campaign headquarters, agog with her discovery, only to be told that Nixon was throwing in the towel.

What’s amazing is that Hillary was only 13 when she did that.

Can you imagine what would things would have been like had Nixon, who really won in 1960, become president? I think Nixon was a terrible president from 1969-72.

But from 1961-69, Nixon might have been a lot better, an extension of Eisenhower: a prudent foreign policy, not a quagmire in Vietnam. But he probably would not have gone for the Kennedy tax cuts that supercharged the economy in the 1960s, so the economy might have lagged; and so Nixon might even have lost a 1964 bid for re-election.

And a 1960 Nixon victory might have meant Hillary stayed a Republican in Illinois, married an accountant, and became a housewife with six kids in the suburbs whose favorite song was, “Stand by Your Man.”