Would Replacing Nixon On The VP Ticket Hurt Eisenhower?
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  Would Replacing Nixon On The VP Ticket Hurt Eisenhower?
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Question: Would replacing Nixon after the campaign finance scandal hurt Eisenhower if "The Checkers Speech" backfired?
#1
Yes
 
#2
No Difference
 
#3
No
 
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Total Voters: 16

Author Topic: Would Replacing Nixon On The VP Ticket Hurt Eisenhower?  (Read 594 times)
Vice President Christian Man
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« on: September 25, 2021, 02:18:23 PM »

Would replacing Nixon after the campaign finance scandal hurt Eisenhower if "The Checkers Speech" backfired?  In this case I assume he would've chosen senator William Knowland. Discuss with maps.
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President Johnson
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« Reply #1 on: September 25, 2021, 02:51:02 PM »

No difference in my opinion. The 1952 and 1956 elections were always about Ike, a popular war hero. Not much would have changed with Nixon being replaced by a standard Republican lawmaker at the time.
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Fuzzy Stands With His Friend, Chairman Sanchez
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« Reply #2 on: September 25, 2021, 03:15:21 PM »

It would have sank Eisenhower.

Eisenhower, himself, thought so.  In Stephen Ambrose's biography of Nixon, Ambrose noted that Eisenhower's first response to the Mink Coat allegations was that if he had to replace Nixon on the ticket, there was no way they could win the election.  Eisenhower, himself, actually said that to his advisers.  His reasoning was that if the American people saw that his first major decision was the selection of a cheap crook, there was no way he'd recover from that, politically.  (The response to McGovern's having to replace Eagleton bears that out; had he not had to replace Eagleton he'd have taken less of a shellacking that what he took.) 

Nixon was a big deal to the GOP in 1952.  Anti-Communism was an issue, and while Joe McCarthy sucked up all of the oxygen on that issue, the fact is that it was Richard Nixon that actually proved Alger Hiss to be a fellow traveler.  That was no small feat, and it was a feat that gave the GOP the high ground on the Communism issue from 1948 onward.  Nixon, far more than Joe McCarthy, made Communism in government a legitimate issue because he was actually able to prove his point.  Conservatives in the GOP appreciated that, and Nixon, after Robert Taft, was THEIR candidate (although some viewed Nixon's support of Eisenhower both self-serving and a sell-out of what was then the conservative movement in the GOP).

Nixon's Checkers Speech, far from the laughingstock liberals tried to make it out to be, proved to be a smashing success.  It angered Eisenhower because Nixon challenged Stevenson and Sparkman to disclose their tax returns as he was so doing.  (Ambrose wrote that Eisenhower was so mad that he jammed his pencil through his paper and broke the point because he knew then that HE would now have to disclose HIS tax returns.)  Eisenhower knew now that he was "stuck" with Nixon, but being "Stuck with Nixon" was the outcome Eisenhower wanted all along.

Ambrose's biographies of both Eisenhower and Nixon make clear that Eisenhower hated William Knowland, and the feeling was somewhat mutual.  Knowland would never accept a spot on Ike's ticket and Eisenhower would never have put him there.  There were others Eisenhower considered, but none of them fit the mold of what Ike needed as Nixon did.
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Agonized-Statism
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« Reply #3 on: September 30, 2021, 07:25:03 PM »

Swapping out the VP is never a good look. It makes the administration look unstable, Roosevelt being an anomaly because he had an unprecedented coalition and served an unprecedented amount of time in unprecedented conditions. That said, Eisenhower still wins in a landslide.
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Schiff for Senate
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« Reply #4 on: October 13, 2021, 04:46:18 PM »

It definitely would've hurt him but he would still have won in the end and then been reelected in 1956.
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