American History Revised (51 page)

Said Lincoln several years later, his losing against Trumbull was “the best thing that could have happened.”

1860
He was the luckiest man to run for president: He won with only 39.8 percent of the popular votes cast—the smallest percentage ever recorded. He had no help from his running mate: he only met his vice president Hannibal Hamlin on Election Day. How did Abraham Lincoln manage to win?

The remaining 60.2 percent was split among three other candidates: Stephen A. Douglas (29 percent), John C. Breckenridge (18 percent), and John Bell (13 percent). Had it not been for the presence of
two
“third-party” candidates—Breckenridge and Bell—Lincoln might not have been elected. (In that year there were four candidates because each of the two parties had nominated an upstart Southern candidate as well as an official Northern one.) Says the historian Jay Winik:

Lincoln’s victory “was in many ways a fluke and nothing more.”

Naturally, lacking a strong “popular mandate,” Lincoln had a difficult time leading the country. In 1864, with the Civil War going badly, Lincoln made preparations to go home, fully expecting General George McClellan to be his successor. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten,” he told a friend,
“but I do
and unless some great change takes place
badly beaten.”
It was only when Lincoln finally found two generals who could win battles—Ulysses Grant and William Sherman—that his popularity began to rise, and the ideas he fought so hard for began to receive a fair hearing.

Still, Lincoln’s popularity was never great. Lucky to be elected president, he was even luckier to be reelected. Observes the historian James McPherson, “If the election had been held in August 1864 instead of November, Lincoln would have lost.” Not only that, but he would have lost in the
friendly
half of the country. The Southern states had seceded, meaning they couldn’t vote. According to Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald: “Fifty-four percent with your enemies not voting is not such an overwhelming vote.”

If Abraham Lincoln was the luckiest man to run for president, who was the unluckiest? This man was probably the most impressive man to run for president and not make it. What’s more, he lost by only the
narrowest of margins at the last minute, after everyone thought he had won. In fact, he had gone to bed thinking he had been elected president.

When late returns came in with an unexpected loss in California in the 1916 election, a reporter called to ask Charles Evans Hughes to comment on his surprising defeat. “The president has retired,” said Hughes’s valet.

“When he wakes up,” the reporter snapped, “tell him he’s no longer president.” Hughes, whose résumé included a college Phi Beta Kappa, highest honors from law school, the governorship of New York, and the post of justice of the Supreme Court, eventually went on to an even more illustrious career as a self-made millionaire, secretary of state (ranked among the three greatest), and chief justice of the Supreme Court (ranked as the greatest since John Marshall). Oh, if only he had been elected president!

If Wilson were to run against Hughes today, the winner definitely would be Hughes. Imagine a full medical history of Woodrow Wilson falling into a rival campaign manager’s hands (like the Thomas Eagleton blow-up in 1972). It would have read as follows: Woodrow Wilson has been “in frail health all his life, easily tired, not able to work more than five hours a day, and unable to cope with stress. In student days the strain of study was too much for him; severe indigestion forced him to drop out of college and out of law school, and headaches and nerves caused breakdowns in graduate school.” The report would go on to reveal that beginning in 1906 Wilson had lost the use of his right arm for a while owing to a neuralgia attack, followed by a stroke that destroyed central vision in his right eye, followed in turn by a series of small strokes, plus continuing hypertension and arteriosclerosis. This explosive information, of course, was covered up—just as occurred later, when he suffered a massive stroke as president.

Anybody who thinks luck doesn’t play a pivotal role in presidential elections should look again. In the 1960 election, the front-runner was Vice President Richard Nixon, confronted by a young senator of no great distinction. Trailing Nixon, John Kennedy (long before he was “JFK”) took a gamble in agreeing to the first-ever presidential debate against an experienced opponent who had been a champion debater in college. Kennedy arrived at the debate suntanned and immaculately dressed, but so nervous his arms were dripping with sweat.

As bad luck would have it, Nixon had just gotten out of the hospital. He was pale, he had lost so much weight his collar was a full size too big, and he refused to have any makeup applied to spruce up his appearance. Worse things were to come. He arrived first and was sitting under a microphone in the control room when Kennedy arrived. Jumping up to greet Kennedy, Nixon banged his head into the microphone, totally disoriented. After the
debate, Nixon rushed out so fast he forgot to pick up his coat and briefcase.

Present at the debate was Chicago mayor Richard Daley. Recalled CBS president Frank Stanton, the man who organized the debate, “Daley asked me if I wanted a ride downtown. As we walked down the hall he said, ‘You know, I’m going to change my mind and tell my men to go all out for Kennedy.’ He meant that he hadn’t been supporting Kennedy with any enthusiasm until that debate. And his support made an enormous difference, because Illinois determined the election.”

1864
No one would associate Abraham Lincoln with the ruthless tactics of campaign managers like Mark Hanna or Karl Rove, but to put him far above the fray would be a mistake. Lincoln, too, could play hardball when he had to.

In the middle of an unexpectedly long war that had—in Walt Whitman’s memorable words—turned the nation into “one vast central hospital,” the president needed all the help he could get in his faltering reelection bid. His primary support came from soldiers and those who continued to believe in the war.

Of the twenty-five states of the Union, only fourteen permitted soldiers to vote in the state they happened to be in while fighting. Soldiers from the remaining eleven states would be out of luck because they were not home. One of the critical states was Indiana. The state’s Republican governor went to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and told him that without the support of Indiana’s fifteen thousand soldiers, Lincoln would lose. How about giving the soldiers “sick leave” so they could come home to vote?

A letter immediately went out, signed by the president, to General William Tecumseh Sherman: “Indiana is the only important State victory in October, whose soldiers cannot vote in the field. Anything you can do to let her soldiers, or any part of them, go home to vote at the State election will be greatly in point.” Never in the history of warfare had soldiers been permitted to go home to vote, thought Sherman when he read the letter, but then, this was different. “Our armies vanish before our eyes and it is useless to complain,” he wrote his wife, “because the election is more important than the war.” (He also knew if Lincoln lost, he would be out of a job.)

Acting on Lincoln’s instructions, General George Thomas issued an order one week before the election granting furloughs to all enlisted men “who are in hospitals or otherwise unfit for field duty: Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Connecticut and Massachusetts … transportation to be ordered to and from their homes.”

The Democrats were furious when they heard what Lincoln had done, but there
was nothing they could do, lest it impugn the patriotism of their fighting men. They became even more frustrated when they saw what happened on Election Day. From every direction, thousands of soldiers got off the train to vote and sweep Lincoln to victory. Exactly who these thousands of troops were, nobody could be sure. It was, in the words of one historian, “the day that Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio voted in Indiana.”

1881
What president mailed a letter to himself? This is not a trivia question, it is actually a very serious one. Think again: What president mailed a letter to himself, and why did he do it?

Chester Alan Arthur never intended to run for president of the United States. He reluctantly accepted the role as running mate with James A. Garfield because as vice president he wouldn’t have to do much work, at least no more than he did as chief of the New York City Customs Office. Ever the dilettante, Chester Arthur was known for his good cheer and dapper clothes. But to everyone’s surprise, when circumstances changed, Chester Arthur rose to the occasion and became a serious man.

As Garfield lay on his deathbed for several months after being shot, Arthur had time to reflect on his potential responsibilities. “I pray to God that the President will recover,” he said. “God knows I do not want the place I was never elected to.”

When Garfield finally died, the vice president, at home in New York City, decided he should take the oath of office immediately, rather than wait until he got to Washington. His friends went out into the street looking for a judge, and at 2:15 in the morning Chester Arthur was sworn in as president. Unable to sleep that night, the new president got up and wrote a proclamation summoning the Senate to a special session to choose a president pro tempore. Because there was no vice president, and Arthur was concerned what might happen if he was assassinated before he got to Washington, he wrote this important letter to ensure an orderly line of succession. Fearful that the letter might fall into the wrong hands if he sent it to Congress, Arthur decided the safest course was to send it to himself at the White House. That way, should he be killed, the letter surely would be read.

1896
Of all the presidential candidates, one man fit the description “Boy Wonder of American Politics”—William Jennings Bryan, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic Party candidate in 1896, who uttered the powerful words, “You shall not press down the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify
mankind upon a cross of gold!” Bryan lost to William McKinley by 600,000 votes out of 13.6 million cast. Bryan ran again in 1900 and 1908, with declining results, and was “washed up” at the age of forty-eight.