by Phil Mason
Franz von Papen, a former Chancellor and now Vice Chancellor, was quietly satisfied that the Nazi firebrand had been neutered: ‘We have him framed in.’ He would learn differently within months.
The United States might have been a monarchy had a German prince made up his mind more quickly. In 1786, as the Constitutional Convention was being planned, a group of senior members of the Continental Congress, Alexander Hamilton, Nathaniel Gortham, the presiding officer of the Congress and James Monroe, who would become a future president, wrote to Prince Henry of Prussia, the younger brother of King Frederick the Great, inviting him to become King of the United States.
If he had accepted promptly, it might have been too awkward later to turn him down when the Convention considered the issue in depth. However, the prince dithered, and then sent a noncommittal reply. By the time the Convention opened the following year, the idea of a monarchy for the United States stood no chance in the staunchly anti-regal gathering.
They were perhaps luckier than they knew. The recommendation had come from Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian-immigrant hero of the War of Independence who had revolutionised military training for George Washington. He was also a closet homosexual. Unknown to the Americans, Prince Henry was also gay, with a reputation as one of the most debauched homosexuals in Europe.
Medical research published in 2004 claimed that a bout of tuberculosis suffered by George Washington when he was 19 years old may have left him infertile and altered the course of American history.
After leading the Revolutionary Army in the War of Independence, Washington spurned the urgings of some of his colleagues to take up a strong military-style leadership of the new nation, or even become king himself. Many feared that a new republican government run under the untested notion of democracy would be fragile while a monarchy under Washington’s benevolent tutelage would be certain to bring stability.
Washington rejected the request to become king (the regal name George I was proposed). His selfless denial of power paved the way for America’s republican constitution. The modern research prompts the alluring question whether Washington did so simply because he knew he would never have any children who might one day inherit his title.
Car tycoon Henry Ford might well have become president of the United States in 1924 but for the unexpected, and possibly suspicious, death of his opponent. The incumbent president, Warren Harding, who has been ranked by American historians as among the worst to occupy the office, led a notoriously corrupt administration pockmarked by a series of financial and political scandals.
As the controversies mounted and the 1924 election approached over the horizon, Ford seriously considered running for president. He was at the peak of his popularity as the creator of the Model T, which had given affordable mobility to mass America. An influential opinion poll in the summer of 1923 showed that he would comfortably defeat Harding in an election.
Then, that August, Harding suddenly died. (Some have speculated that he was poisoned by his wife because of his adultery. She refused to allow an autopsy to be held.) He was succeeded by his vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, a shy, restrained and eminently cautious character. Crucially, in the year left before the election, Coolidge’s calmness restored respectability to the presidency. The country was wealthy and at peace, the economy stable. In 1924, Coolidge ran on a campaign slogan of ‘Keep Cool with Coolidge’. It did. He went on to win an overwhelming victory.
Ford had seen the change of fortune by the end of 1923 and Coolidge’s mastery of the political art. He quietly dropped out of the race. If only it had been Harding fighting for his country’s vote…
In 1940, a 27-year-old struggling lawyer went into partnership with a group of businessmen in his home town of Whittier, California, to manufacture and sell frozen orange juice. He was appointed company president of Citra-Frost, but within 18 months the enterprise failed – surprisingly, as California was prosperous, had plentiful supplies of oranges, and marketing a convenience product should have had wide appeal.
Had the business worked, the company President might have simply become a successful and wealthy local entrepreneur. As it was, he turned to politics and set his eyes on a different presidency. His name was Richard M. Nixon.
Ronald Reagan, the slayer of the ‘Evil Empire’, might have been ruined before his political career began had his attempt to join the American Communist Party succeeded. He was rejected because the Communists thought him too dim.
It emerged in a 1999 authorised biography that he had tried to join in 1938 when starting out as a 27-year-old actor in Hollywood. Some of his closest friends were members. One, scriptwriter Howard Fast, revealed that he had felt ‘passionate’ about it. ‘He felt that if it was right for them it was right for him.’
But the Party refused him. ‘They thought he was a feather brain…a flake who couldn’t be trusted with a political opinion for more than 20 minutes.’ As the anti-Communist purges and blacklisting in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s destroyed many careers, Reagan’s flourished as an actor, then as President of the Screen Actors Guild, the actors’ union. And most importantly, his political credentials remained all-American.
If only the Communists had thought more highly of him, he might never been allowed to rise to be their nemesis half a century later.
President-to-be Lyndon Johnson got his break into the big time in 1948 when he won his first Senate race in Texas in a rigged election. He beat his rival, former state governor, Coke Stevenson, by a mere 87 votes out of 988,000.
In the week before voting day, it looked as if he would lose a tight race. The results from a single precinct swung it. When the returns from the tiny border town of Alice came in they showed that 203 people had voted at the last minute, and 202 of them for Johnson. They had all voted in the order in which they were listed in the tax rolls.
Despite a protest from Stevenson, a court upheld the result. Johnson never looked back. Nearly 30 years later, the election judge in the town admitted that he had rigged the result.
John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential election victory over Richard Nixon remains one of the closest in America’s history. In votes, Kennedy won by just 118,000 in the total of 68 million cast. (He actually won fewer states – 22 to Nixon’s 26 – but prevailed because the states he won carried more delegates in the Electoral Convention that finally elects a US President.)
The election was the first to hold televised debates between the candidates. Kennedy is credited as having won the first in Chicago by coming over as fitter, more composed, tanned and altogether more dynamic. Nixon, by contrast, looked haggard, ruffled, nervous – he sweated profusely under the hot lights – and was judged to be less trustworthy. The images stuck, and there is a strong consensus amongst historians of the first truly televised campaign that Nixon’s chances were severely dented by the performance.
The reason for Nixon’s demeanour was a bang on the knee. Nixon had just come out of hospital where he had spent 12 days on his back after hitting his knee on a car door as he got out of his car during campaigning in North Carolina. He developed an infection which took him out of the contest for nearly a fortnight and, more importantly for the televised debate, drained him of a lot of energy. He had lost weight, which accentuated his gauntness, was still running a temperature of 102°F, which contributed to the sweating, and was still on medication. He was asked whether he wanted to cancel the first debate, but he declined saying he did not want to be seen as a coward. He refused make-up. His choice of a light-grey suit also made him blend into the background and exaggerated his pale appearance.
Seventy million viewers watched the debate. The general reaction was that the younger Kennedy had matched his more experienced opponent impressively. He would be on a roll all the way to Election Day. And he would be the youngest to win a presidential election.
Kennedy is credited as winning his six victories in southern states by controversially selecting Texan Lyndon Johnson as his vice-presidential
running mate. Kennedy won Texas, the most valuable in terms of Electoral College votes, by less than 50,000. He won the northern state of Illinois by an even closer margin – just 9,000 in nearly 5 million votes cast – where deliberate electoral fraud in a few Chicago precincts are now thought to have tipped the balance. Nixon would have triumphed overall had he won those two states.
Kennedy had not originally wanted Johnson as his running mate and only offered him the ticket assuming he would turn it down. He had been astonished when Johnson accepted.
Did the legacy of the 1960 election have a longer impact? Nixon accepted the outcome, although he was heard to moan to guests at his Christmas party that year that the election had been stolen by Kennedy. He nursed a grudge against the Democratic Party for years. When he finally became president and was criticised for his Watergate plot, he cited the Kennedy precedent as justification. If the 1960 election had not been so tainted, might Watergate not have happened?
Kennedy, whose presidency was cut down by assassination , nearly did not even make it to his inauguration in January 1961. A plot to assassinate him following his election was foiled by luck and Kennedy’s own predilections for constant press coverage.
In December 1960, while waiting for Inauguration Day on 20 January, Kennedy and his young family were staying at one of the clan’s houses in Palm Beach, Florida. Richard Pavlick, a 73-year-old retired postal worker from New Hampshire, concocted a plan to rig up a bomb in his car, wait for Kennedy to emerge from the house and crash into the president-to-be’s limousine and detonate the device.
He arrived outside the house on 11 December, and waited. He had not, however, reckoned on Kennedy’s obsession with maintaining a good press. A throng of photographers always congregated outside. Every time he emerged, he would bring wife Jackie and their two-week old baby John Jnr.
Pavlick had nothing against Kennedy’s wife or baby, and kept waiting for a solo opportunity. Remarkably, he sat outside the house in his car for five successive days. He was eventually arrested on 15 December by a local police officer, not for his suspicious behaviour, but for a minor traffic violation. The bomb in his car was then discovered.
No one knows how many times Kennedy came close to being blown up during that week. But the fortnight-old baby John appears certain to have saved his life.
The botched break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic Party that was eventually to lead to the downfall of Richard Nixon nearly went undiscovered. On the night of 17 June 1972 – in the middle of the presidential election campaign – security guard Frank Wills discovered masking tape stuck over a door latch leading into the Watergate complex in Washington which housed the offices of Nixon’s rivals. He assumed it had been put there by a shift worker to make it easier to get in and out of the building, so he tore it off and simply put it in his pocket.
He came across a second taped door lock inside but assumed it was part of the previous scam. He removed that one too, and went off for a snack with a colleague.
It was only when he returned nearly two hours later and found one of the doors that he had earlier cleared, re-taped, that he called the police. They discovered five intruders, who turned out to be equipped with bugging devices. Their identities, and the money they carried, would lead back to maverick secret service and White House connections and eventually to evidence of Nixon’s own attempts to cover up his involvement in the skullduggery.
…And it had so nearly passed Frank Wills by.
The revelation that would lead to President Richard Nixon’s downfall in the Watergate scandal – that he taped all his White House meetings – only emerged when an aide disclosed the fact to investigators on the assumption that they already had the information from other more senior White House staff.
Over a year after the botched break-in, Alexander Butterfield, Nixon’s overseer of administration, was interviewed by Senate staff investigating the alleged White House connection. He was shown what he recognised to be a transcript of a Nixon meeting. He thought he was simply corroborating someone else’s testimony about the existence of the taping system. Unbeknown to him, it was the first evidence the investigators had. They had been working on a hunch.
Three days later, Butterfield was subpoenaed to testify to the Senate committee in public and a stunned world learned the strangest secret of the Nixon White House.
At a point in the investigations when the trail appeared to be going cold, and against Nixon’s protestations of ignorance and innocence, the discovery would reveal damning evidence of the President’s involvement in covering up the break-in at the election headquarters of his opponents during the 1972 presidential election. The White House would endure a further 13 months of legal battles to prevent the tapes being divulged to prosecutors, but the game was up. In August 1974, Nixon became the first and, to date, only president to resign from office.
If Ronald Reagan had had an off day on 2 March 1987, he would have become the second president to be removed from office prematurely while still alive.
Six years into his presidency with two more still to go, the oldest president ever to take office – he was 16 days short of his 70th birthday at his inauguration – was giving increasing concern to his staff regarding his apparent declining mental capacities. (Famous for his slow, confused and work-shy style, Reagan was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease five years after leaving the White House.) It emerged in 1999 that his new Chief of Staff, Howard Baker, issued an instruction to senior staff members that they should all observe the President carefully on that March day. If they agreed with Baker that the President was ‘disoriented’, he would consult lawyers with a view to invoking the Constitutional provisions allowing a president to be removed from office on the grounds of incapacity.
In the event, Reagan reportedly bounced into the Oval Office full of energy and vigour that day and in full control of his faculties. The issue of his mental competence was never raised again while he was in office.
Over half a century before both Nixon and Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, leader during the First World War, would have been America’s first president to resign from office if he had been defeated in the November 1916 election. At a time when the victorious president had to wait until March the following year before being formally inaugurated, Wilson concocted a plan to ensure that he would not have to serve as a ‘lame duck’ president for four months when overseeing the war effort required concerted political leadership.
If he had lost the voting on 7 November, he would have appointed his Republican rival Charles Evans Hughes as his Secretary of State. Wilson and his vice-president would then have immediately resigned, and under the succession provisions of the Constitution at the time, the presidency would have formally devolved to… the Secretary of State. Hughes would quite legally have become president four months before he should ordinarily have done.
In the event, Wilson narrowly won the election, by only 600,000 votes in nearly 18 million, and carried on for a second four-year term.
On the death of Israel’s first president Chaim Weizmann in 1952, Israeli leaders approached Albert Einstein and asked him to be their second president. He declined, giving as the only reason that he had no head for human problems.
Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro could have been a professional baseball player in the United States had his trial as a 21-year-old with the Washington Senators in 1947 turned out differently. And America might have been spared decades of headaches too.
After the failure of the direct assault on Castro’s regime in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the spring of 1961, the Pentagon and CIA adopted an altogether different approach to undermine him. Had astronaut John Glenn not returned safely from the first attempt to put an American into orbit in February 1962, the authorities would have laid the blame on Cuban radio interference for the disaster. A Pentagon plan, disclosed in 1997, detailed how ‘various pieces of evidence could be manufactured which would prove electronic interference by the Cubans’.
It
is tantalising to speculate what the impact on world opinion would have been of such a space disaster. Would the Russians, themselves charging ahead in the space race, have been suspicious of their protégé and perhaps of future blackmail? It is now known from Soviet archives published in 2005 that they harboured doubts at the beginning about Castro’s Marxist commitment and Nikita Khrushchev had accused the Cuban leader of dangerous ‘adventurism’.
In the event, Glenn successfully orbited three times and returned to Earth quite safely.
The iconic end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, was accidentally precipitated by an offhand remark by an obscure official at the end of a dull press conference being held that evening.
All day, in response to growing street demonstrations, the ruling East German Politburo had been working to agree a temporary arrangement to allow emigration from the country. Guenter Schabowski, the Politburo’s media spokesman, who had not been at the meeting which approved the new regulations, was handed the dense document just before the government’s regular six o’clock televised press conference. Within it was an announcement that further details would be issued the following day explaining the procedures for people to apply to leave the country.
At the end of a turgid hour of questions, the travel permit issue was reached. Exhausted and visibly sweating under hot TV lights, Schabowski read the stiltedly-worded regulations out in full. He leaned back in his chair, expecting no questions.
A journalist asked when the rules would come into force. Schabowski, unfamiliar with the intentions, and forgetting the part referring to plans for an explanatory statement the next day, had to shuffle through his papers to re-find the document, scanned it and replied in an uncertain tone that ‘as far as I know… this is immediate, without delay.’