The original "October Surprise" derives from the Reagan-Carter election,

[Jackpine Radical]

when the Reagan people dealt with the Ayatollah to guarantee that the US hostages wouldn't be released just before the election, giving Carter an "October Surprise" bounce.

Is there any time when a campaign actually delivered an October Surprise that changed the game, or is this just a general paranoid fear that the opposition could deliver a last-minute bombshell?

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

1. Actually, Kissinger's "Peace is at hand" may have been the original....

....mainly because Nixon feared the same thing in '68 from Johnson to benefit Humphrey in the final days of the campaign, and then thought to use it himself when he was in office. Nixon would have beaten McGovern anyhow, though.

[patrice]

5. That's what I was thinking & more significant too, since it cost, what, a few 10Ks of American lives

& 8 more years of war?

[patrice]

2. I don't understand a Carter "bounce" from that October Surprise. Isn't it conventionally

understood that preventing the return of those hostages is one important factor in what caused Carter to lose?

What bounce?

Or are you being sarcastic?

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

3. He means Reagan FEARED it.

Hence blocking it with the deal.

[Jackpine Radical]

7. Yes.

Reagan (actually his minions) sought to prevent Carter pulling off an "October Surprise" that consisted of getting the hostages released. Had Carter managed to hegotiate a releasd, his popularity would no doubt have surged, and perhaps cost Reagan the election.

Remember the extent to which the hostage story gripped the country for months--Nightline originated as a program dedicated to racking the hostage crisis.

As it turned out, it is thought that the Reaganites offered the Iranians arms (later fulfilled via Iran-Contra), & the Iranians signaled their approval of Reagan by releasing the hostages within hours of his taking office.

[NYC_SKP]

4. Reagan got the bounce.

I remember it painfully well, like a slow motion train wreck that changed everything.

[NoPasaran]

6. I've heard this story but...

The surprise was... there was no surprise. And it seems to me that the Iranian regime loathed Carter so much that there was really no realistic chance that the hostages would be released while he was President, especially if that would have increased Carter's chances of being re-elected.

My candidate for the original "October surprise" would be 1972, when Kissinger announced "peace is at hand", pulling the carpet out from under McGovern's already faltering campaign. Of course, once the election was over, what was really at hand was a final savage bombing campaign against North Vietnam, apparently to reassure President Thieu that he wouldn't be abandoned as much as anything, if Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power is to be believed.

[Gabi Hayes]

8. 1968 check this

The most arresting chapter gives us conclusive reason to believe that
Nixon and his associates -especially Attorney General John Mitchell and
Vice President Spiro Agnew -consciously sabotaged the Vietnam peace
negotiations in Paris in the fall of 1968. Elements of this story have surfaced
before, in books by -- among others -- Clark Clifford and Richard
Holbrooke, Seymour Hersh and William Bundy. But this is the most con-
vincing account to have appeared so far, relying as it does on wiretaps
released to Summers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many senior
Democrats knew this ghastly secret but kept it to themselves, if only
because L.B.J. had lawfully -- if shamefacedly -- bugged Nixon and his co-
conspirators, as well as the South Vietnamese embassy. (The FBI intercept
cables are reproduced here.)

http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.trialhenrykiss.app1.htm

lots more if you google around. I wrote a college paper about this before intertubes

HK was essentially a spy for Nixon, while ostensibly helping LBJ with VN peace talks. highest treason...

[OldDem2012]

9. Nixon was involved in a lot of stuff people don't generally know about...

...As VP under Eisenhower, he was involved with a group known as the 5412 Group which conducted assassinations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

* He was also the White House point of contact for the Cuban Task Force/Bay of Pigs fiasco.

* Nixon denied being in Dallas on November 22, 1963, flying out at almost exactly the same time JFK was shot to death, until he was confronted with his flight manifest. He then tried to claim he was there to attend Coca-Cola board meetings...but none of those meetings took place in Dallas.

* And then there was Watergate.

Oh, by the way, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Bernard Barker had a long association with Nixon...they were with him from the 5412 Group until Watergate. Hunt gave a very interesting deathbed confession involving the JFK assassination...you may know about that, too. And where was George H. W. Bush during all of this time? The truth shall set you free.

[Gabi Hayes]

10. 18 1/2 minute gap = JFK killing

some day it will all come out, like the Lincoln conspiracy

already. too late, though

they won

[arely staircase]

11. bin laden's last minute endorsement of kerry

On Oct. 29, 2004, just four days before the U.S. presidential election, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden released a videotape denouncing George W. Bush. Some Bush supporters quickly spun the diatribe as “Osama’s endorsement of John Kerry.” But behind the walls of the CIA, analysts had concluded the opposite: that bin-Laden was trying to help Bush gain a second term.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/070306.html