How Would History Have Been Different if Richard Nixon Had Won the 1960 Presidential Election?

This question originally appeared on Quora.

By David Hood, Quora User

An interesting question for sure! This is the stuff that comes to mind, in no real order. But really, after '76 all bets are off.

Positives:

• Vietnam would not have happened for the U.S., as Nixon would have continued the previous administrations policies that he was part of creating.

• Watergate would not have happened because Nixon would have been the standard barrier for the party. In the '70s, Reagan was in the wings and things were changing, feeding his paranoia.

• Perhaps connecting with China would have happened sooner, blunting some of the negative effects of China's rise because it would have been more staged.

• I don't think the Bay of Pigs would have happened at all, but rather just a continuation of trying to engage Cuba while slowly isolating it, which Nixon was instrumental in setting up in 1959.

• Reagan would have become president in '68 instead of '80 thanks to Ford/Nixon being out of the way. This makes his presidency drastically different due to a totally different set of circumstances and being in much better health with a much different group of people around him.

• Goldwater would have never happened in '64.

• The Democrats wouldn't have had a credible chance to take the White House until '76, but likely would have had considerable power in Congress if not outright majorities led by the Kennedys. Due to this, I think Nixon and later Reagan would have moved forward with robust legislation on Civil Rights because it would have brought the Democrats to the table on other issues.

• Neither Bobby nor Jack Kennedy would have been assassinated because they did't get into the position to be real targets during the turmoil of the era.

• The Bush dynasty would have been unlikely because if Reagan won in '68, he likely picked a different VP -- probably Rockefeller to balance his ticket.

• The Cold War would have ended sooner without all the proxy fights happening. I can see Nixon, and later Reagan, using China as a proxy to kill the USSR either via military action or economic action.

• The Supreme Court would look radically different today.
• There would never have been the political will to overturn our banking and investment regulations.

Neutral:

• Ford never would have become president -- maybe senator, but not president.

• Due to a likely second term for Nixon, LBJ never would have become president either, as he would have been too ill in '68 to run.
• Our history would have been drastically different after '76, to the point that it is unrecognizable.

• Either Bobby or Ted Kennedy would have been elected president in '76 with either Carter or Jerry Brown as VP.

• Ross Perot possibly becomes president as a Republican in the 1980s.
• I think both Clinton and Gore would have still happened -- just much differently.

Negatives:

• Jack Kennedy never would have become president and the country would have watched as he had to leave the Senate and die a horrible death from Addison's disease or complications from it.
• Marilyn Monroe never would have reached the level of notoriety she had because there was no scandal with JFK and no "happy birthday" event. She probably still would have taken her own life at some point though.

• Neither Medicaid nor HMO's would have ever happened, likely resulting in us being a backwater of medical science.

• Though there would have been many gains for civil rights, the Black Power movement would have been crushed, resulting in those gains not really meaning anything to average folks for a long time.

• We probably never would have gone to the moon -- space yes; moon, no.
• Due to its more robust involvement in the Cold War, China would have risen and overshadowed us faster -- if not handled well, that could have been very bad.
• Due to there being no Vietnam, we would still have a draft that can be used at any time instead of the ghost of one that we have now.
• Because our banking and investment regulations stayed mostly intact, the huge growth we saw in the 1990s would not have been possible.

More questions on historical "what-ifs":

• How could the South have won the Civil War?
• What would have happened had Robert E. Lee won at the Battle of Gettysburg?
• If the South had never seceded or the conflict became militarized, how long would slavery have lasted in this country?

 

Follow Quora on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Quora

Comments

[Johnny Grieco]

12:23 PM on 05/24/2012

What thought provoking fiction.

"What if" scenarios are always entertaining if not innately flawed, and become even more so as you move forward from that point of the initial change.

I would submit that "all bets are off" within a few months, not the 16 years the author postulates.

Hindsight quarterbacking is not much different or reliable than sitting in that proverbial armachair as the news rolls by in our real time.

[suetonius101]

12:13 PM on 05/24/2012

Did you use your little brain to think this up all on your own?

[All Heart]

09:59 AM on 05/24/2012

Great points, I also often think what would have happened if the mighty Supreme Court would not have handed the 2000 election to GW. With Al Gore as President, we would not have had those unfunded tax cuts, we would not have started two wars and who knows, 9/11 might have been avoided (Clinton and Gore took the warnings serious). policy might be today. Not to mention where our energy ... One can only dream!

[bangorexpress]

09:19 AM on 05/24/2012

What is missed in the Cuban Missle crisis. JFK surrounded himself with all sorts of opinion, he took a great risk with his decision not to invade. Nixon was a cold war hard liner who's position probably would not h ave been able to solve the crisis short of a nuclear exchange.

[bonncaruso]

04:15 AM on 05/24/2012

This is all interesting conjecture and a lot of it I can buy, but the point about the Vietnam War is probably not so. In order to separate himself from Eisenhower and begin to establish his own legacy, more likely than not a President Nixon in 1961 would have listened to his generals just like Jack Kennedy did and would indeed have gone to war in Indochina.

As for Gerald Ford, though I am not a Republican by a longshot, I consider his "accidental" 2 year presidency to be one of the luckiest things to happen to our Republic in a while. I believe that history will smile upon Gerald Ford more than people realize.

[wcb59]

01:09 AM on 05/24/2012

Along with no Bay of Pigs, I assume that you are also positing that there would be no Cuban Missile Crisis. If Nixon has followed the advice of the generals and invaded Cuba, there well could have been a nuclear exchange. Once that started, could it have been stopped short of WWIII?

[catboycolo]

12:38 AM on 05/24/2012

We would be slag from a full-scale nuclear exchange with the USSR in 1962.

[NimbaCan]

12:04 AM on 05/24/2012

How Would History Have Been Different if:
1. The Internet was not invented?
2. Reagan was not nominated by the Repub Party and elected by Americans?
3. Huffpost did not exist?
4. there was no mcdonalds big mac?
5. No sugar in the USA?

I just want to know...

[scholarbilly]

12:02 AM on 05/24/2012

You make some interesting points. Then again, we might have been nuked.

[nothingchanges]

11:37 PM on 05/23/2012

Personal opinion..........

If the United States had followed President Carters energy policies, 9/11 never would have happened,

We wouldn't have wasted over 4 Trillion dollars on wars in the Middle East region over "cheap" oil.

And terrorists would simply be characters in a cheap novel.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-energy/

[insanityfollows]

11:15 PM on 05/23/2012

I think Bobby Kennedy would have been an incredible president. It breaks my heart every time I think about what this nation was robbed of because of his assassination, and Jack's too. I seriously wish Nixon had never come onto the scene. Reagan, Bush and Bush, either. All of them damaged our nation badly, especially Nixon, and W. I can't help but think about the great things we could have accomplished with Bobby Kennedy as president, and I also think he would have been better than his brother. He was a remarkable, kind and extremely intelligent man. What a shame losing him was, and what a disgrace Nixon was. I don't care if he did open China, which was cool, Watergate overshadowed everything he did, and put our democracy in danger. Interesting article.

[greytunes]

01:00 AM on 05/24/2012

The greatest negative was the loss of Bobby Kennedy.

[SeenItBefore]

11:07 PM on 05/23/2012

And if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a Buick. Stick with more probable guesses... had Nixon, after he resigned, been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Ford would have been re-elected, resulting in no Carter. After his term and a half, people would be so sick of his mediocrity they would have flocked to any reasonable Democrat in 1980, so no Reagan. In 1988, sick of the Democrats, people would have re-elected a Republican. Most important, with no Reagan, the sillies who parroted 'deficits don't matter,' would have never been part of any administration and maybe we wouldn't be in the crapper at this moment.

[dannyo152]

10:06 PM on 05/23/2012

I think your central premise about Vietnam is flawed. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese ambitions and successes were not predicated on Kennedy. US escalation occurred because the South Vietnamese military lacked daring leadership. According to Sheehan "A Bright Shining Lie" US advisers were very frustrated that the generals would not take initiatives.

Cold Warrior Nixon would not have allowed an Asian nation to go Communist, not after he and the GOP bashed Truman and the Democrats in 1948 over "Who lost China."

As to rapprochement with China, without the quagmire in Vietnam and the need to find a counter-weight to the USSR regarding nuclear and other treaties, I don't see it happening. China may have needed the failed Cultural Revolution as a pre-condition.

You do not discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis. The USSR's strategic motives would have been the same.

But, let's assume there's no Vietnam, would 1960 Nixon who elevated Quemoy and Matsu to campaign rallying points have sat on his hands or would he have been trying to restore Chiang Kai Shek in China?

There are too many ways a Nixon, uninformed by post-Johnson escalation and futility, to have engaged in either a direct or proxy war with the two largest Communist powers. Even with clear disenchantment in 1969, Nixon escalated with secret bombings and the Cambodian incursion. The latter achieved no military goals and was a domestic disaster, making Vietnam Nixon's, and not Johnson's war.