In 1963, during the course of a New York taxi ride, Richard M. Nixon learns that his opponent in the Presidential Election John F. Kennedy has been assassinated. In an article for Readers Digest he recalled hailing a cab after his Dallas-New York flight: "We were waiting for a light to change when a man ran over from the street corner and said that the President had just been shot in Dallas" (however in a subsequent article for Esquire he later said that his cabbie "missed a turn somewhere and we were off the highway .. a woman came out of her house screaming and crying. I rolled down the cab window to ask what the matter was and when she saw my face she turned even paler. She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas").

Kennedy's Heir
By Ed, Jacke Rose, Chris Oakley & Eric OppenHowever there would be no political comeback; he had already told the press that "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference". Because in order to establish commitment with doubtful Californian voters, he had pledged not to run for president in 1964 at the launch of his gubernatorial campaign. But even if he had not, he believed it would be difficult to defeat Kennedy, or after his assassination, Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson. And after his defeat at the hands of liberal Pat Brown, he had retreated into private life, recently becoming a senior partner in the leading New York law firm Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander.

Instead, at the climax of the ugliest Convention in fifty years Republicans selected the conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. And "because he drives Johnson nuts" his running mate would be an obscure Congressman from Western New York, William E. Miller. Of course none of these politicians were natural vote winners who could match Kennedy for charisma and vision. The only individual who could begin to match those attributes was the Mayor of New York City, John V. Lindsay (pictured). Of course by the time that he entered the White House in 1969, the scandals of the Kennedy-Johnson administration had tarnished the "Camelot" years. More damaging was the revelations about the true purpose of Nixon's visit to Dallas. He had met with Pepsi-Cola executives with big business interests in the sugar plantantions in Cuba. Due to Nixon's prominent role as a leading campaign organizer during his Presidential race, the full exposure of "the Bay of Pigs thing" created waves during Lindsay's first year in office.
This post is an article from the Jamaica Bay thread developed by Chris Oakley.