The Tradition of Suppressing October Surprises

Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials.

American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James A. Garfield claimed he wanted more immigration from China, a position so unpopular it nearly cost him the election. Weeks before the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary kneed a Black police officer in the groin, just as the president was trying to woo skeptical Black voters. (Roosevelt’s response made history: He appointed the first Black general and created the Tuskegee Airmen.)

But the scandal that has ensnared Donald J. Trump, the paying of hush money to a pornographic film star in 2016, is in a rare class: an attempt not to bring to light an election-altering event, but to suppress one.

The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Trump can trace its lineage to at least two other episodes foiling an October surprise. The first was in 1968, when aides to Richard M. Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to thwart peace talks in the closing days of that election. The second was in 1980. Fresh revelations have emerged that allies of Ronald Reagan may well have labored to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the defeat of Jimmy Carter.

The tortured debate over precisely which election law might have been violated in 2016 is missing the broader point — all three events might have changed the course of history.

The potential criminal charges against Trump for his role in the passing of hush money to Daniels — falsifying business records to cover up the payment and a possible election law violation — may seem trivial when compared to the prior efforts to fend off a history-altering October surprise.

This month, a former lieutenant governor of Texas came forward to say that he accompanied a Reagan ally to the Middle East to try to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the 1980 election.

And notes discovered in 2016 appeared to confirm that senior aides to Nixon worked through back channels in 1968 to hinder the commencement of peace talks to end the war in Vietnam — and secure Nixon’s victory over Hubert H. Humphrey.

“Hold on,” Anna Chennault, Nixon’s emissary to the South Vietnamese, told Saigon government officials, as she pressed them to boycott the Paris peace talks. “We are gonna win.”