And then J. Edgar Hoover had to ruin everything.
The shadowy FBI Director had long been a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party – FDR had considered dismissing him on a couple of occasions, but feared Hoover’s ability to retaliate with damaging information during an election campaign. Eleanor, however, had decided to be a bright, short flame in office, and when the FBI began investigating unions, civil rights groups, and even the old Rosie Brigades under the “COINTELPRO” program, the President made use of J. Howard McGrath’s new Division of Constitutional Enforcement (“the Dice”), (ironically created as a Republican compromise against her desired Department of Education), to shut down COINTELPRO and subsequently dismissed Hoover.
Hoover’s subsequent charge that the Dice was riddled with Communist infiltrators and his announcement of a Presidential campaign to root out same is popularly viewed as an act of spite against the administration that cost him his job. (Although in his memoirs conservative commentator and former Chief of Staff Thomas Hadley paints the decision as one made out of legitimate fear of a socialist coup, and points out that there did turn out to be some former members of the Communist Party in the DCE, though almost certainly not the vast KGB spy network he might have indicated.)
Regardless, Hoover touched a nerve with the Republicans’ base, conservatives who believed that the country had been lurching towards a socialist economy ever since the New Deal (the Byrd interregnum, in their view, having done little to reverse the trend) and Eleanor Roosevelt was the harbinger of a left-wing New World Order that they wanted no part of. Hoover did well in the primaries, and soon commanded a block of convention delegates that seemed unwilling to support anyone else.
Republicans, convinced that Hoover was unelectable (leaving aside the persistent rumors about his sexuality, Hoover’s blunt, interrogatory style of speaking didn’t translate well to electoral politics), scrambling to find any elected official who could peel off Hoover delegates without alienating the rest of the party, finally settled on young Senator Richard Nixon, who had become known as “the Red Hunter” in his single term in office, and who had implied, at least, that he’d reappoint Hoover if elected. Nathaniel Goldstein, a political protégé of Thomas Dewey and the first Jew to be placed on a major ticket, was chosen as his running mate as a sop to the Eastern establishment and Progressive Republicans (though progressive Senator “Wild Bill” Langer would still go rogue and co-opt the Prohibition Party)*.
Democrats, meanwhile, had somewhat surprisingly nominated Senator Estes Kefauver – while the charismatic populist had largely swept the primaries, his aggressive support of civil rights and his quixotic crusades against political corruption had made him unpopular with the party elite – however, in the end the Democrats were unable to unite around anyone capable of stopping him. In addition, most Democrats felt that they might be forced to run against Hoover, which would end any chance of bringing Victory back into the fold anyway; Kefauver had already bested Hoover once as chair of the Organized Crime Committee; and, it was whispered, he at least had relatively little dirt that Hoover could use against him. To placate the Democratic machine, political dynast John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was selected to go with him.
Meanwhile, the Victory Party would once again run its own ticket, facing two ostensibly pro-civil rights tickets (not to mention two tickets with a non-Protestant on them). While Nixon was somewhat sympathetic to the idea of “moderating the judicial overreach” of the Supreme Court, he decided against open coordination with Victory, feeling that working openly with what was clearly the party of Southern segregationism (despite Owen Brewster’s increasingly awkward posturing) would damage his own image, and besides, Victory would only take states the Republicans didn’t compete in anyway. While this was largely true, it meant that the Republican parties in the south continued to campaign – to little effect in most states, but in others, most notably Texas, it may have split the anti-Kefauver vote.
Nixon instead focused on attacking Kefauver as another out-of-control Rooseveltian liberal, and Kennedy as a corrupt playboy who wasn’t ready for office. Immediately after the conventions, polls had Nixon leading the three-way race.
And then the wheels fell off. First, the Democrats responded to inquiries into Kennedy’s finances by bringing up Senator Nixon’s own political fund, an expense fund maintained by his political backers. While not illegal at the time, the fund, combined with Nixon’s own youth and selection as a ‘compromise’ by the convention allowed Democrats to paint him as a puppet of big Republican donors. Nixon attempted to put the scandal to rest in a televised speech in which he defended himself as a “man of modest means… my wife doesn’t own a mink coat, just a plain Republican cloth coat” and insisted that the only gift he’d kept for his family was a cocker spaniel named Checkers. The “Checkers speech” was widely derided in the press, with the New York Times calling it “an emotional appeal unbefitting of a would-be Commander-in-Chief” and Kefauver retorting that “My means are as modest as his are, but I got my own pet dogs. Some folks say I am a pet dog. But I’m not J. Edgar Hoover’s dog”.
Before he could recover from the Checkers scandal, the suicide of Clyde Tolson and the DCE report on illegal FBI activities brought Hoover back into the news. While the cause of Tolson’s suicide remains officially unknown, and the DCE report made no reference the rumored relationship between him and Hoover, the news brought the old rumors out in force, even as the DOJ recommended charges against Hoover for violation of 1st Amendment Rights and the press began hounding Nixon on whether he still thought that Hoover should be reinstated. Making matters worse, Nathaniel Goldstein, no friend of Hoover, was quoted as stating that “while Hoover has dome some good in his time, he is not above the law and must answer these charges” before Nixon had publically determined to accept the DCE’s findings – while he eventually agreed with the position it led to charges that Goldstein had taken control of the issue and that the ticket was “upside down”. (Indeed, all that most people remember now about the ’56 campaign is Goldstein’s quip about John F. Kennedy, when the latter had pointed out that he was a little older than Harold Stassen in 1944 – “Trust me, I’ve worked with them both, and Mr. Kennedy is no Harold Stassen.”)
Republicans tried desperately to turn the race back to ideology, but the Democrats simply floated above the fray, running on “Kefauver, the man you can trust”. Only in the South was liberalism – specifically racial liberalism – an issue; but while this proved a boon for Victory, the GOP would have the worst result since 1936 – though narrow victories in Ohio and New York would at least prevent a complete electoral blowout.