Chris Wallace's Countdown 1960: Pure Rubbish

[James DiEugenio]

This is really one of the worst books I have ever read about both Kennedy and the election of 1960.

It is really a piece of hackery.  Wallace tries to elevate Nixon.  Yes you read that correctly.  Nixon, as more and more papers have been declassifed, looks even worse.

And he tries to diminish Kennedy, who looks better with declassification.

He uses two discredited sources to say the 1960 election was stolen:  Judy Exner, and Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot.  Whew.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/review-of-countdown-1960-1

 

[James DiEugenio]

One of the most astonishing things in the book is that he tries to make Nixon out to be a champion on civil rights.

And he says Kennedy did little or nothing about speaking out on the issue.

Dead wrong as I show in the review.

[Michael Griffith]

10 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

This is really one of the worst books I have ever read about both Kennedy and the election of 1960.

It is really a piece of hackery.  Wallace tries to elevate Nixon.  Yes you read that correctly.  Nixon, as more and more papers have been declassifed, looks even worse.

And he tries to diminish Kennedy, who looks better with declassification.

He uses two discredited sources to say the 1960 election was stolen:  Judy Exner, and Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot.  Whew.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/review-of-countdown-1960-1

One of the most astonishing things in the book is that he tries to make Nixon out to be a champion on civil rights.

As usual, you insist on injecting your far-left politics into the JFK case. What does Wallace's book have to do with the assassination? Nothing. But, allow me to address your arguments.

Nixon most certainly was a champion of civil rights. As president, Nixon ended school segregation in the South. Affirmative Action began under Nixon. Nixon ended discrimination in companies and labor unions that were given federal contracts. As vice president, he spearheaded the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Thus, it is not "astonishing" at all that Wallace would make the point that Nixon strongly supported civil rights. More info on Nixon and civil rights can be found here.

Who has discredited Judy Exner as a source? Who has discredited Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot? Plus, Exner and Hersh are by no means the only authors who have concluded there was serious election fraud in the 1960 election. Just because the far-left wing of the JFKA research community has attacked Exner and Hersh does not mean they have been "discredited." You've also claimed that Dr. Marc Selverstone's widely acclaimed book The Kennedy Withdrawal has been "discredited." But, your review of it simply ignores most of the evidence it presents, and then pretends to have debunked it--based on your fringe assertion that JFK was going to unconditionally abandon Vietnam after the election, a claim that even the vast majority of liberal scholars reject.

Whether or not Nixon and JFK look worse or better with declassification is very much in the eye of the beholder. If we include disclosures in the mix, which have revealed JFK's sleazy personal life, one can make the case that Nixon looks better by comparison. For the sake of visitors and newcomers, I should add that JFK's seedy personal life should be weighed against the great good that he did as president, and should also be considered in light of the severe health issues that JFK faced.

Edited Thursday at 04:26 PM by Michael Griffith

[James DiEugenio]

Mike:

JFK began affirmative action when he signed the first AA order in March of 1961.  

Secondly, NIxon never supported Brown vs Board in 6 years as VP.  Then once he became president, he used white backlash in order to turn the south into a GOP stronghold.

Jackie Robinson, who Wallace uses as a source, discovered that belatedly.  And he wrote a letter saying that he had been wrong about Kennedy, and that Nixon was a poseur.

If you read the article, I showed how Exner changed her story about four times and how she was exposed as being a fabricator because she could not keep her own BS straight. I traced her from 1975 to 1997 and beyond to specifically show this.  Michael O'Brien, who wrote a Kennedy biography, said the same.

As per Hersh and his hatchet job of a book, you cannot be serious can you?  Hersh's book was discredited before it was even published.  How can you not be aware of that?  And then Peter Jennings was so humiliated he tried to cover up for Hersh, because incredibly ABC had not tested the documents before they bought them. Then Jennings humiliated himself on TV with another piece of Hershian baloney, this time--as I describe-- about Martin Underwood.  And from what I know, it was Gus Russo who brought Martin into the Hersh orbit.

As I show, if the whole thing about Chicago that Wallace is talking about were true, it would have been reflected in the Roemer tapes, and in the Chicago ward voting stats.  It is not.

As per the significance of it, the whole basis of  the book/novel Double Cross is that the Chicago Outfit organized the murder of Kennedy over this (imaginary) dispute.

Secondly, there is more than one way to assassinate someone.  That is why I wrote my long essay "The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy."

And please stop it with this leftist stuff.  Facts are facts.  And the more you have of them the better.  Wallace conceals them.  The truth is that JFK did more for civil rights in three years than FDR, Truman and Ike did in three decades.

[Gil Jesus]

14 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

And please stop it with this leftist stuff.  Facts are facts.  

Agreed. Doesn't matter what your politics are.

Facts are facts. You may not like them, you may not agree with them, but facts are facts.

There is only one truth.

Edited 23 hours ago by Gil Jesus

[Robert Morrow]

On 10/17/2024 at 12:36 AM, James DiEugenio said:

This is really one of the worst books I have ever read about both Kennedy and the election of 1960.

It is really a piece of hackery.  Wallace tries to elevate Nixon.  Yes you read that correctly.  Nixon, as more and more papers have been declassifed, looks even worse.

And he tries to diminish Kennedy, who looks better with declassification.

He uses two discredited sources to say the 1960 election was stolen:  Judy Exner, and Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot.  Whew.

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/review-of-countdown-1960-1

 

Absolutely the Democrats stole the 1960 presidential election for JFK. Mayor Richard Daley did it in Chicago by putting in a large amount of fraudulent votes in the black precincts in Chicago and the Texas Democrats did it at the precinct level by throwing out hundreds of thousands of GOP ballots with small technical errors while letting every slightly marred Democratic-voting ballot survive. In Texas in 1960 if there was a small problem with a ballot you could throw the whole thing out, not just the area on the ballot that was a problem.

LBJ biographer Robert Caro has concluded that Texas Democrats stole the 1960 election for the JFK/LBJ ticket.

Kennedy should have lost Texas if the election had been fair.

And I think every major Daley biographer has concluded that he stole the Illinois electoral votes for JFK. Which is why in spring 1961 John Kennedy went to a "thank you" dinner for Mayor Richard Daley and while he was at that dinner, JFK went downstairs to the bathroom and that is exactly where he met Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden for the first time.

It was not the "Mafia" that stole/manufactured the voted for JFK; it was Mayor Richard Daley and his patronage machine that did it. The same Mayor Richard Daley who was extremely likely to endorse Robert Kennedy after he won the June 5. 1968 California Democratic presidential primary.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/life-of-john-f-kennedy/fast-facts-john-f-kennedy/closeness-of-1960-presidential-election 

Edited 5 hours ago by Robert Morrow

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks Gil.

Robert,  you did not read the book.  

What Wallace does is go with the Giancana angle.

Secondly, the reason Nixon did not challenge Illinois is that it would have been exposed that the GOP stole votes in the southern part of the state. One of the worst things about the book is it tries to portray Nixon as some kind of  a good, clean guy.

This is literally impossible today for all we know about the man. Nixon was a dirtbag, and it goes back to his races against Voorhees and Douglas.  Those set the bar for ugly behavior in post war American politics.

Edited 2 hours ago by James DiEugenio