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WI: Eisenhower declines to run in ‘56

The question now is, how would a Late 50s Nixon Presidency differ from Eisenhower’s?

I can suspect that Nixon may handle stuff like Little Rock in a more awkwardly.
 
The question now is, how would a Late 50s Nixon Presidency differ from Eisenhower’s?

I can suspect that Nixon may handle stuff like Little Rock in a more awkwardly.

He’d constantly be stuck between mimicking Eisenhower and trying to set his own course, all the while complaining about having to do the balancing act in the first place.

If Nixon does win in 1956, which again I’d argue is far from certain, the only benefit of his re-election would be his incumbency.
 
I think the convention in 1960 IOTL going crazy for Stevenson and thus scaring the hell out of the Kennedy people, strongly points to a convergence in a no Ike situation. Not to mention Stevenson already proving he can keep the party together, of running in 1952 with Sparkman and still retaining the loyalties of liberals. No way in 1956 does LBJ have that kind of status.

I don't see LBJ bucking his OTL 1960 refusal to just get off his arse and campaign for the job.
 
And yes, Nixon is the obvious favourite in an election which is before the late fifties recession, before Sputnik and the angst about the 'missile gap'.

Not to mention Stevenson being the last Dem nominee to backscratch Jim Crow. That's a big inhibitor of success in the north for the Dem nominee. Sure, Ike in this election OTL did so well with minority voters partly because he was Ike, but there was a repulse effect on them going on from the other side, too.
 
And yes, Nixon is the obvious favourite in an election which is before the late fifties recession, before Sputnik and the angst about the 'missile gap'.

Not to mention Stevenson being the last Dem nominee to backscratch Jim Crow. That's a big inhibitor of success in the north for the Dem nominee. Sure, Ike in this election OTL did so well with minority voters partly because he was Ike, but there was a repulse effect on them going on from the other side, too.

So Nixon wins in 1956 against Stevenson. In your opinion does Nixon win in ‘60?
 
So Nixon wins in 1956 against Stevenson. In your opinion does Nixon win in ‘60?

I really feel unqualified to say on that one, I wouldn't exactly class myself as a Nixon scholar. It shouldn't be a totally uncompetitive election for the reasons above, (And because Nixon in office) but I feel like Nixon having full power of the oval office to politick around the dawning of the civil rights era shouldn't be discounted as a serious problem for the Dem coalition in an alt 1960. I certainly don't think it can be assumed to just be a replay (or rematch) of the OTL election, no.
 
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I really feel unqualified to say on that one, I wouldn't exactly class myself as a Nixon scholar. It shouldn't be a totally uncompetitive election for the reasons above, (And because Nixon in office) but I feel like Nixon having full power of the oval office to politick around the dawning of the civil rights era shouldn't be discounted as a serious problem for the Dem coalition in an alt 1960. I certainly don't think it can be assumed to just be a replay (or rematch) of the OTL election, no.
Civil rights could go either way IMHO - I think Nixon would be likely to be more strongly in favor of a civil rights bill than Eisenhower, but I'm not sure how clearly that translates to added action on the issue with the ball in Congress's court. If Nixon is viewed as overstepping, and if calls for civil rights are less popular coming from the mouth of a young Californian as opposed to an unambiguous national hero without strong regional loyalties, things could even go worse - or maybe it just means stronger polarization earlier but the same policy outcomes?

Also worth questioning whether the recessions of 1958 and 1960 still happen - I suspect they would, but I also wonder if Nixon would be more willing to support inflationary policy to keep unemployment down, as he did IOTL (or, for that matter, whether he'd be as effective without de facto control of the Federal Reserve through Arthur Burns) - and whether Nixon does anything differently with regard to the Cold War (a Khrushchev-era detente policy seems at least vaguely plausible and would be a fun scenario).

My gut instinct is that Nixon is at least slightly favored here - OTL 1960 was tough sledding for Nixon for a number of reasons (the economy, Sputnik, Kennedy's charisma, his own campaigning mistakes, civil rights to some extent), but if his policy legacy is similar to OTL Eisenhower's second term, then he has everything he had IOTL without the baggage of being young and inexperienced ("if you give me a week, I might think of one"), and IOTL he very nearly won. But it could go either way.
 
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I mean, today, "Major Party Candidate is Propbably a Pedophile" would be something the mainstream media would publish

Wait, is this a general statement about the media environment using Kefauver’s general closetful of horny skeletons as a jumping-off point, or was he himself also a paedo?
 
Civil rights could go either way IMHO - I think Nixon would be likely to be more strongly in favor of a civil rights bill than Eisenhower, but I'm not sure how clearly that translates to added action on the issue with the ball in Congress's court.

While Attorney General Herbert Brownell certainly was the leading advocate for civil rights in the cabinet (his original version of the bill before it was watered down in the Senate was actually far closer to the one passed in 1964 than what ended up passing), Nixon was the one who stood for most of the White House's efforts to actually get the bill through. In all probability, in particular when you consider his later Southern Strategy, Nixon was far more interested in the political harvest the Republicans would reap if they were seen as the party who were the force behind the new Civil Rights Bill. Though African-Americans had (and since always have) voted for the Democrats in much higher numbers than for the Republicans since Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidency (prior to that they had staunchly backed the Party of Lincoln), and it looked very unlikely that the Republicans would ever again win a majority of the black vote, that didn't really matter. During Eisenhower's presidency, around 30% of African-Americans voted Republican, and Nixon calculated that if he could get that figure up to 35 or even 40%, that would greatly benefit the Republicans in a number of swing states, like New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, California, etc.

Meanwhile, throughout the battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Eisenhower was for the most part somewhere between uninterested and apathetic to the whole enterprise. Indeed, Eisenhower would on occasion, during informal drinks and dinners, try to persuade his interlocators that, you know, those Southerners like Russell and Eastland and Thurmond, they weren't as bad as people seemed to think. They were reasonable. They weren't racist. All they wanted was that their sweet, innocent little girls shouldn't be forced to sit next to 150 pound ██████ in school.
 
Also worth questioning whether the recessions of 1958 and 1960 still happen - I suspect they would, but I also wonder if Nixon would be more willing to support inflationary policy to keep unemployment down, as he did IOTL (or, for that matter, whether he'd be as effective without de facto control of the Federal Reserve through Arthur Burns) - and whether Nixon does anything differently with regard to the Cold War (a Khrushchev-era detente policy seems at least vaguely plausible and would be a fun scenario).

I think Nixon would fire Ezra Taft Benson pretty much first day on the job. Benson was known for his penchant for cutting farm subsidies and dismantling New Deal agencies during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, and this made him thoroughly unpopular among America's farmers in a time when the nation was far more agricultural than it is today. It went so far that David O. McKay, Prophet-President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, urged Eisenhower on one occasion to sack Benson behind Benson's back. Benson, who was a member of the Church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, was the most high-profile Mormon in the country, and McKay worried that keeping Benson as agricultural secretary would harm the Church's image in the eyes of the American public.

Eisenhower, however, refused, and kept Benson, purely out of personal loyalty to the man.

Benson would of course later on reward this loyalty by endorsing a pamphlet by the John Birch Society which claimed that Eisenhower was, either knowingly or unknowingly, a tool of international communism.

Anyway, Nixon, whose view of the Presidency was that any member of his staff, even the cabinet, should always be willing to take a bullet for the Commander-in-Chief, would likely have acted very differently.
 
While Attorney General Herbert Brownell certainly was the leading advocate for civil rights in the cabinet (his original version of the bill before it was watered down in the Senate was actually far closer to the one passed in 1964 than what ended up passing), Nixon was the one who stood for most of the White House's efforts to actually get the bill through. In all probability, in particular when you consider his later Southern Strategy, Nixon was far more interested in the political harvest the Republicans would reap if they were seen as the party who were the force behind the new Civil Rights Bill. Though African-Americans had (and since always have) voted for the Democrats in much higher numbers than for the Republicans since Franklin D. Roosevelt's Presidency (prior to that they had staunchly backed the Party of Lincoln), and it looked very unlikely that the Republicans would ever again win a majority of the black vote, that didn't really matter. During Eisenhower's presidency, around 30% of African-Americans voted Republican, and Nixon calculated that if he could get that figure up to 35 or even 40%, that would greatly benefit the Republicans in a number of swing states, like New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, California, etc.

Meanwhile, throughout the battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Eisenhower was for the most part somewhere between uninterested and apathetic to the whole enterprise. Indeed, Eisenhower would on occasion, during informal drinks and dinners, try to persuade his interlocators that, you know, those Southerners like Russell and Eastland and Thurmond, they weren't as bad as people seemed to think. They were reasonable. They weren't racist. All they wanted was that their sweet, innocent little girls shouldn't be forced to sit next to 150 pound ██████ in school.
Oh, I think it’s very likely that Nixon would be more strongly in favor of civil rights (the one source of doubt on this is that I don’t think the turn towards race-baiting he made during his presidency came out of nowhere) - I just think that it’s slightly more likely to fail or go worse, in part because Nixon was so obviously unsympathetic to his Southern counterparts. It seems more likely that he might overreach in a way that undermined congressional efforts to pass civil rights legislation.
 
Wait, is this a general statement about the media environment using Kefauver’s general closetful of horny skeletons as a jumping-off point, or was he himself also a paedo?
I mean his horny skeletons weren't always with women of age, so...

Either way, it's probably something that wouldn't get published by the mainstream press. Maybe some hints by the Hollywood Confidential types, but even then.
 
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