Editing Charles Haughey (section)

===1966 presidential election===
[[File:Charles Haughey 1967 (cropped).jpg|thumb|left|200px|Haughey in 1967]]
Haughey was appointed by Fianna Fáil to run President [[Éamon de Valera]]'s re-election campaign for the [[1966 Irish presidential election|1966 presidential election]]. [[Fine Gael]] chose a comparatively young [[Teachta Dála|TD]] and [[barrister]], [[Tom O'Higgins]] (nephew of [[Kevin O'Higgins]]), to run against de Valera. By then, de Valera was 84 years old and almost blind. Haughey knew this might compare unfavourably to O'Higgins, whose campaign drew comparisons with the equally youthful [[US President]] [[John F. Kennedy]], and launched what was seen as a political stroke. He insisted that it was beneath the presidency to actively campaign, meaning that de Valera would have a low profile. Therefore, in the interests of fairness, the media was asked to give O'Higgins an equally low profile, ignoring his speeches and publicity campaign. The print media, both nationally and locally, ignored Haughey's suggestion. But the state-run [[RTÉ]], facing criticism from Lemass's government for being too radical in other areas, agreed and largely ignored the O'Higgins campaign.

De Valera got a high media profile from a different source, the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the [[Easter Rising]], of which he was the most senior survivor. While O'Higgins's campaign was ignored by RTÉ, de Valera appeared in RTÉ coverage of the Rising events regularly. To add further to de Valera's campaign, Haughey as Agriculture Minister arranged for milk price increases to be given to farmers on the eve of polling, as a way of reducing farmer disquiet after they had effectively become an opposition movement to the government.<ref name=dib>{{cite web |url=https://www.dib.ie/biography/haughey-charles-james-c-j-a9531 |title=Haughey, Charles James (C.J.) |work=[[Dictionary of Irish Biography]] |last1=Maume |first1=Patrick |access-date=12 January 2023 |archive-date=29 April 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240429125720/https://www.dib.ie/biography/haughey-charles-james-c-j-a9531 |url-status=live }}</ref>

O'Higgins came within less than one per cent of winning the vote, with de Valera re-elected by a narrow margin of ten thousand votes out of a total of nearly one million. De Valera came to distrust Haughey; [[Frank Aiken]], [[Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade|Minister for External Affairs]] under de Valera and his lifelong political confidant, dismissed Haughey's political motives as being entirely selfish, and believed he was motivated to hold power for its own sake and not duty.