Richard Nixon elected President - 11 November 1972

Well, as early as ten o’clock last Tuesday night, even the most fanatical lover of American presidential politics had no reason to stay up.

There was never much suspense in this year’s election anyway, but even if there had been, the computer has effectively transformed it. I am not up on my electronics at the moment and I am not sure whether transformed is the word. What I am thinking of, is this – in the old days, after the second war, when electric razors came in, many an American brought his shaver, as they are now called to England, plugged it in and was blown across the room by the different voltage. Nowadays you can have a neat little transformer which absorbs the shock and you can buzz away around the chin safely enough in Chicago or Leeds.

Well, since about 1964 there has been no chance of a television viewer being blown across the room by a surprise win. The computers go to work ridiculously early on the returns from the crucial states, even when there may be no more than a trace of 1% of the total votes in. And these electronic brains rumble and calculate and chatter to themselves, and I suppose if you are a computer programmer, you can get a kick out of feeding in that 1% and waiting for the machine to deliver its judgement. But in no time the electronic brain comes through, and declares the winner. And then you wait, for the remaining 99% of the vote to come in to confirm the calculation of the computers. Which they almost invariably do.

Some computer employers and employees may complain that I have put the date when these spoilsports went to work far too late – 1964. But I am thinking of the election of 1960 when, for several hours the computers were just as human as the rest of us. That Kennedy night was the last cliffhanger that I remember. We usually have in a dozen of our closest friends for an election night party very much the way in the old days the late Gordon Selfridge used to throw on the roof of his store an election party for his 3,000 closest friends.

Since 1952 most of those November evenings have turned into a wake for the Democrats present, and most of them were Democrats, who were madly for Adlai. That night was probably a very healthy workout or shake-up for those of us who were made for a two-party system provided our party won.

It had been happening to the Democrats for 20 years, which took most of our friends back to the first time they ever voted. When you find yourself voting for the same man four times over, 12 years running, and he keeps getting in, you naturally come to think that God's on your side for keeps. And then came Ike once. And twice. So it was a slightly more sober bunch of revellers who gathered in our apartment in November 1966.

By ten o’clock it was looking bad for Kennedy, and by eleven o’clock it was looking worse; so much so, I remember, that most people simply left the television and left it on in my study and retired to have a consoling swig and some funeral baked meats. A few people even went home, their heads down, as if off to the graveyard. One man, an actor who knew nothing about politics, stayed in the study glaring at the box. He came diffidently in on the wake at one point and said, "Pardon me, I may be crazy but I think something is happening". "What," said the tolerant experts, "is happening?". "Well," he said, "Come and look at these figures".

We went back and the totals were now going back into the 40-50 millions and Kennedy and Nixon were apart by only a few thousand. The computers had come through earlier with a firm tick in the margin for Nixon, and then they apologised and withdrew it. First, Kennedy went on top and then Nixon, and Nixon stayed there through the night. But, by a cat's whisker, not till well into the dawn, not till we had all of California and Hawaii, and soldiers votes from Europe, and other absentees, did the final word come in that Kennedy had made it – by another cat's whisker.

I am away from the books but it was no more than 60,000 votes in 60 million. And the Republicans drove themselves into ulcers for the next few weeks, figuring that if a few thousand – or even a few hundred – votes had been switched here in Illinois and Texas and Ohio, Nixon would have been president.

This is a significant memory, and it was an Englishman who anticipated its present significance better than anybody else at the time and he was Mr Richard Crossman. Some of you may remember a book that started a fashion, it was Theodore White's The Making of the President, the first full-length book that followed with a novelist's artfulness the story of a presidential campaign from its first stirrings, two years before election night.

The impression left on most people, I think, by that engrossing book, was that Kennedy represented the best and the most of America, and his triumph was also the triumph of the immigrant, of the sensible huge middle of what Lincoln called "the common people".

This is where Mr Crossman came in. The book had marvellous reviews on both sides of the Atlantic but only Mr Crossman, I think, spotted the flaw in the general impression. Mr White, Mr Crossman thought, having been born in Boston and gone to a famous and exacting school there, and then gone on to Harvard, tended to exaggerate the power and general influence of the Wasps, the white Anglo-Saxon establishment. And also, er, which is characteristic of Wasps, sentimentalised somewhat the strong Democratic impulses of the immigrants, and the sons and daughter of the immigrants. This seemed to be absolute, but a little odd, since Mr White is himself the son, or grandson, of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Anyway, Mr Crossman examined the evidenced and saw that the Kennedys – the brothers and the family and all the influence and the money they could bring to bear – had exerted themselves to the last gasp in practically every one of the 3,000-odd counties of the United States. No campaign was ever so thorough, no candidate ever exhausted himself so carefully, so scrutinised the map of the United States as a political battleground, and dashed off so bravely to reinforce an attack here, plug a gap there, hold a retreat in some other place. If the country had been strongly inclined to Kennedy, little of this would have been necessary. Nixon rushed around every one of the 50 states but it was much of a slapdash, old-fashioned, barn-storming expedition. Unlike the Kennedys, he didn’t know half so well where he was strong, where he was fatally weak. And yet Kennedy won, by an eyelash.

What this proved, which only Mr Crossman had the wit to see, was that in 1960 America was hell bent for Nixon, and just failed to get him. I say the memory of that campaign is significant now, because it shows a turn in American majority opinion which most people are saying has just happened. It may well be that the historians will look back and say that the great Roosevelt coalition – of labour, the ethnic groups, the liberals, the big cities – began to come apart in 1960.

The Democrats have forgotten that it’s been a quarter of a century, 25 years to be exact, since Roosevelt died. The poor immigrant sons have had a rough time during the Depression, and Roosevelt and the war factories put them on their feet. After the war their sons came back, and several millions of them wanted no more of the industrial cities – they were getting to be prosperous, they had small children, and eventually they started new suburbs.

I followed Nixon in 1960 and he had evidently – I mean it’s evident now – spotted something, that the ordinary folks politicians used to embrace in the city streets were more prosperous than their parents and were now in the suburbs, and were no longer Democrats – they could afford to become Republicans, just as the British working people in the cities who moved from a row house to a semi-detached amazed the Labour party in 1955 by voting Conservative. I covered that election and there was a sort of busman’s holiday and I remember calling it the "semi-detached revolution".

Well, Nixon used to get his best, his most automatic, applause in the new suburbs, and they have grown and multiplied in the last 12 years, till an actual majority of Americans now lives in them. And in those 12 years the middle-class city whites have had more and more pressing reasons to move out – crime, and property taxes suddenly, and the threat, which is a reality in New York City, of a personal city income tax, and... the blacks. Many types melded in the new suburbs, and they are, on the whole, classless, impatient with permissiveness, more conservative than their parents, and have strong opinions about welfare and work.

So how come that the Democratic party still has many more registered voters than the Republicans? Why didn’t they arrest Tuesday’s landslide? Well, the cities still have masses of Democrats, working people of immigrant extraction, who are sore that they cannot afford to move out. They are left to cope with the city's blight and with the growing population of the blacks – they hate it. And they went out and voted for the Democratic Congressman who knows the troubles of their bailiwick, but they also voted for Nixon, who is against busing white children to black neighbourhoods, and against the abuse of welfare, and takes their view of McGovern as an extremist, or a wobbly and ineffective politician.

Also, this year, less than 60% of the people who are qualified voted, which can only mean that an awful lot of Democrats stayed home and sulked – not an effective gesture in a going democracy. In short, though I don’t know of any simplification that can explain the enormous sweep of Mr Nixon, there is one that was so simple, so painful, to the Democrats that they tried to ignore it. America has been moving from left of centre to right of centre not for four years but for 12 years.

This fact was covered up by the persistence of party loyalty when it came to voting for Congress, which has still denied Mr. Nixon a majority in either house. And it's more than a consolation to the Democrats to control both houses – it’s the only way they can throw up a road block to Mr Nixon and his most sweeping plans.

The word from the Democratic hospitals, by the way, is that the old city and state machines, which McGovern spurned so disastrously, or flirted with too late, are now going to try and take over the party again – or argue with the blacks, the young, the radicals and the liberals for control of it, or set-to in a free-for-all brawl, and hope there are some survivors to bind the wounds and lift the flag.

Anyway it looks as if the Democrats were more out of touch with the American people than at any time since the 1890s and the early 1900s. For it's fair to say that the great silent majority found its voice last Tuesday, and for some time to come, wherever Nixon stands, there stand they.

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