What If?

The news from California made Republican hearts skip a beat. One week after election day, Vice President Dick Nixon moved into a steady 20,706-vote lead in his home state on the strength of the trickling count of absentee ballots. The switch of California's 32 electoral votes reduced Jack Kennedy's electoral count to 300, gave Nixon 223 of the 269 needed to win. Then Kennedy's lead in Minnesota (II) dropped on recheck to a shaky 22,011 (out of 1,537,844 votes cast). Since Kennedy's margins in such heavy-electoral-vote states as Illinois (27) and New Jersey (16) were less than 1%, Republicans were tantalized by the thought that a series of hard-nosed recounts could give Nixon the magic 269 after all.

The chances were something like hitting the daily double five days in a row, but the Republican high command began to wonder if they weren't worth a bet. Three days after election, G.O.P. National Chairman Thruston Morton had asked party leaders in eleven states to evaluate the narrow Democratic results and see whether expensive recounts (e.g., $50 a ballot box or voting machine in Pennsylvania) would be worthwhile. Most of the party leaders sent negative replies. But last week, after an emergency meeting of the National Committee in Washington, G.O.P. investigators moved into eight marginal states (Illinois, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, New Jersey and Pennsylvania) for a "close, hard look at the situation." Illinois Republicans, scanning a shaky 10,157 Kennedy lead--mostly in machine-run Democratic Cook County--had already ordered a re-count of more than 5,000 precincts. "If in Illinois and several other states Nixon receives a fair and accurate count," said Nixon's Illinois Lieutenant Bill Rentschler confidently, "then Nixon will be inaugurated in January."

Congenial Ticket? If the Republicans could dream, so could certain disgruntled Democrats who hope the South will rise again. In Montgomery, Ala., Lawyer R. Lea Harris ("just an interested citizen") called for a conference of Southern electors with Jack Kennedy to force Kennedy to agree to certain "requests" (e.g., restoration of states' rights). If Kennedy declined the invitation, said Harris, the 128 Southern electors should seek a coalition with Republican electors to name a more congenial ticket, composed of a Southern Democratic President (such as Georgia's Dick Russell) and a Republican Vice President (such as Henry Cabot Lodge or Barry Goldwater). Even though most of the Southern electors are pledged to vote for Kennedy, reasoned Harris, they are not bound to do so if their consciences forbid it.

More practical Southerners dreamed of a re-count reversal as a possible road to throwing the election into the House of Representatives. If both Nixon and Kennedy fell short of a majority, the unpledged electors of Mississippi (8) and Alabama (6) would back a third candidate--reportedly Virginia's Harry Byrd--and the election would go to the new Congress for decision. Meeting in joint session next Jan. 6, with Vice President Nixon presiding, the Senators and Representatives would receive the official count of electoral voting, and then adjourn, with each body reconvening immediately in its own chamber, the House to elect a President, the Senate a Vice President. There would be little doubt about the choice of Vice President: the Senators, voting individually, would divide along partisan lines, with 64 Democrats to 36 Republicans--and Texas' sitting Senator Lyndon Johnson would have the rare privilege of voting for himself.

Capricious Congressmen. In the House's balloting for President, each state delegation would cast a single ballot. The voters' choice in each state would make no difference (Nixon won 27 states, Kennedy 22), and the delegations presumably would follow historical precedent and vote along rigid party lines. Nixon could count on 17 votes from states with a majority of Republican Congressmen (including four states that voted for Kennedy in the general election). Kennedy could rely on 28 (including ten that cast their electoral votes for Nixon). Four states with evenly split delegates would probably cast tie votes, be disqualified. And maverick Mississippi presumably would go for Byrd. Mathematically, Kennedy could still expect to win, but a few capricious Congressmen might change everything.

Such were the dreams of the dissatisfied in the aftermath of the closest election of the century--with Kennedy's popular-vote margin at week's end down to a mere 179,069 out of 67,611,819 votes cast. So far there were no signs that the man whom the world was learning to think of as President of the U.S. was having any corresponding nightmares.

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