Will a president with authoritarian tendencies actually try to suspend a constitutionally mandated presidential election?
That’s the question Americans asked in the spring and summer of 1970. At the end of the 1960s, a wave of violence—domestic terrorism, urban riots, assassinations and rising crime—set the public on edge. A presidential panel, decrying a national “crisis of violence,” found that 41,000 bombings or bomb threats had occurred in the U.S. in the last 15 months. Richard Nixon—whose abuses of presidential power would ultimately lead to his resignation—struck his critics as so heedless of democratic norms and the rules of fair play that he was capable of attempting almost anything.
Today, people are starting to ask the same questions. The fiasco over Ohio’s scheduled Democratic primary—with the governor and a judge waging an eleventh-hour war over whether it should proceed—and other states’ postponement of their primaries could well be a preview of a looming Constitutional donnybrook over November’s vote. If the coronavirus is still largely unchecked this fall, the crowds necessitated by a presidential election would pose a huge threat to public health. Worst of all, because President Donald Trump has repeatedly shown contempt for the rule of law and the spirit of democracy, it’s not unreasonable to worry that he could try to use the pandemic as a pretext to cancel the election and remain in power.
Unless Congress acts quickly to provide for national early, absentee, and mail-in voting this fall, these fears will surely multiply. The story of Nixon and the canceled-election rumor of 1970 shows why.
That year, political violence, combined with the age-old suspicion that Nixon’s regard for the Constitution was less than sincere, spawned a rumor that he was planning to cancel the 1972 elections. Rumors are by nature hard to trace, but by one account, this one originated with the countercultural journalist and provocateur Paul Krassner. As early as 1969 Krassner began telling college audiences that, while stoned on LSD at a party, he’d been told by the wife of an executive at the Rand Corporation, the defense-industry think tank, that the Nixon administration had ordered a study of the consequences of canceling the elections. After circulating among students for many months, the rumor seems to have first landed in print on April 5, in the chain of newspapers owned by the Newhouse family: The Staten Island Advance, The Portland Oregonian and others. According to the squib that ran in these papers, the administration had tasked Rand with studying whether “rebellious factions using force or bomb threats would make it unsafe to conduct an election,” as well as how the president should respond.
The journalist Ron Rosenbaum, then a young reporter for the Village Voice, heard about the Newhouse article indirectly, from a Staten Island cab driver who had seen it in the Advance. Rosenbaum looked into it. Eleven days later, he reported in the Voice that Rand and the administration both denied that any such study existed. But he then mischievously pointed out that they would surely deny it if it were true. Rosenbaum added that the country would just have to wait until 1972 to see.
Whether or not Rosenbaum’s cheeky tone encouraged the rumors, or simply failed to quash them, other publications were soon running with the story—from the alternative Los Angeles Free Press to The Nation. Most treated the tale with due skepticism, but some of the more marginal publications presented the study as established fact. The rumor spread fast, assuming sinister connotations. One group called the Urban Coalition claimed that Nixon had commissioned not only the Rand study but also a second study, from MIT, to survey how voters would react to an announcement of suspended elections. Another version of the rumor held that Nixon, to ensure he had pretext for the move, was arranging for provocateurs to instigate acts of violence, to create his own version of the infamous 1933 Reichstag fire, which many people believed to have been a Nazi act designed to justify a power grab (what today might be called a “false flag” operation). “The burning of government buildings in Germany, though first blamed on Communist arson, has since been exposed as the act of Hitler himself,” the comedian and activist Dick Gregory wrote (not quite accurately) in the Freedom News, an underground publication. Nixon, he intimated, was about to do the same.
Nixon administration officials realized the rumor was gaining strength. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then serving as a White House domestic policy aide, tried to squelch the talk in a Fordham University commencement address he gave that spring. In his speech, he said that he knew the story had reached “just about every campus in the nation” and, ever the sociologist, chalked up its currency to students’ “growing distrust of all social institutions.” Moynihan reassured his audience that the report was “not so.” But then—either playing for a laugh or falling victim himself to the pervasive mistrust—he added: “Or at least I think that it is not so.” Like Rosenbaum, Moynihan couldn’t summon enough confidence in Nixon to deny the rumor categorically. At some level, he had to concede that the Nixon-hating conspiracy theorists might well be onto something. His remarks, too, failed to put the concerns to rest.
In July, a new left-wing, countercultural magazine called Scanlan’s Monthly—run by Warren Hinckle, formerly of Ramparts, and Sidney Zion, formerly of the New York Times—joined the fracas. Scanlan’s claimed to have obtained one page of a memo allegedly written by an aide to Vice President Spiro Agnew. The memo, which Scanlan’s published in its August issue, was dated March 11, 1970, and referred to three possible schemes being planned by the administration. The first was to cancel the 1972 elections under the ostensible threat of violence, but in reality to keep the administration in power. The second was to secretly orchestrate pro-administration rallies by labor groups that would purport to be spontaneous. By the time Scanlan’s shared the contents of this supposed memo, Americans knew that the administration had in fact collaborated with labor groups to stage anti-antiwar events in the spring. That knowledge seemed to give the whole memo a whiff of plausibility. The final item in the allegedly official memo was that Nixon would eventually “repeal” the Bill of Rights.
Scanlan’s advertised its “scoop” heavily. At one point, a New York Times reporter asked Agnew about the memo. The vice president erupted in anger, denouncing it as “completely false” and thereby ensuring his reaction would be covered in the paper. But Zion—whether truly convinced of the memo’s authenticity or, more likely, eager to perpetuate a hoax that was winning attention for his fledgling magazine—did not back down. “The document came directly from Mr. Agnew’s office, and he knows it. We do not hesitate to submit our credibility against his,” he said. A week later, Attorney General John Mitchell also denied and denounced the story at a breakfast meeting with reporters, possibly giving it even more oxygen. Nixon personally became so incensed about the rumor, according to White House aide John Dean, that he ordered an audit of the magazine—though as a brand new publication, it turned out, it had yet to file taxes.
It’s doubtful that many people expected Nixon to suspend the election, let alone repeal the Bill of Rights. The journalists who inspected the alleged Agnew memo mostly judged it a hoax. But its authenticity mattered less than the fact that so many people considered it plausible that Nixon might entertain a power-grab at all. The Nation, while stopping short of accepting the rumor, grouped it with such recent “internal security” measures as stepped-up wiretapping and infiltration. Calling Nixon “an old-time Red-hunter,” the editors argued that he was “inclined by temperament in that direction himself.” Ron Rosenbaum, in a follow-up to the pieces he wrote the previous spring, maintained that “the Rand rumor is metaphorically and cosmically true, even if proven mundanely false.” During the Nixon era, he argued, entertaining paranoid fantasies made a certain amount of sense.
It is very unlikely that Trump could get away with postponing the November elections; who knows if he even wants to try. But as the Nixon example shows, that doesn’t mean we won’t all be talking about this as a live possibility as our crisis worsens. Presidents who make a show of flouting norms and arrogating power shouldn’t be surprised when large portions of the population assumes that when the crunch comes, they’ll do more of the same.
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