Earl Mazo, 87, Nixon Biographer Alleged 1960 Election Was Stolen
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Earl Mazo, a biographer of Richard Nixon and former political correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, died Saturday at a Maryland hospital. He was 87.
Mazo, who wrote “Richard Nixon — A Political and Personal Portrait” (1959), knew Nixon in the 1950s from when he covered the White House for the Herald Tribune. He accompanied the vice president on his 1958 trip to Venezuela, where he wrote about how the Secret Service saved Nixon from a mob intent on dragging him from his car and killing him.
Born in Warsaw, Mazo immigrated to the United States as a toddler and served in the Army Air Corps. During World War II, he was a reporter for Stars and Stripes in Europe. After the war, he worked at newspapers.
When John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 , Mazo smelled a rat. “There’s no question in my mind that [the election] was stolen,” he told the Post in 2000. “It was stolen like mad. It was stolen in Chicago and in Texas.”
On a reporter’s tip, Mazo went to Chicago, obtained lists of voters in precincts that seemed shaky, and started checking their addresses.
“There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted,” he recalled. “I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for Kennedy in that house.”
Mazo also found fraud, but on a smaller scale, in Republican areas downstate. He then headed to Texas, where he documented similar Democratic electoral shenanigans. Mazo began writing what he and his editors envisioned as a 12-part series on election fraud. By mid-December 1960, he had published four installments, which were reprinted in papers across the country, including The Post.
Nixon called and asked Mazo to stop writing his series because the country couldn’t afford a constitutional crisis at the height of the Cold War.
“I thought he was kidding, but he was serious,” Mazo told The Post. “I looked at him and thought, ‘He’s a goddamn fool.”‘
Failing to convince Mazo, Nixon called the reporter’s bosses at the Herald Tribune and asked them to stop running the series. The editors pulled him off the story.
“Nobody told me why,” he said. “I know I was terribly disappointed. I envisioned the Pulitzer Prize, for chrissakes.”
Mazo later worked for Reader’s Digest, where he was a roving correspondent, and as a commentator for WTOP-TV in Washington, as a commentator.
