Presidential Election 1960

As the United States was exiting the 1950s and entering the 1960s, one thing was perfectly clear; the coming decade was going to be a decade of great change when it came to culture, politics, war, and peace.  A decade of fictitious safety with images of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Father Knows Best, and a Leave It To Beaver way of life were ebbing into history.  To meet the challenges of such a demanding decade of change the United States would have to turn away from the old ideas of Herbert Hoover; although he was still very much alive in 1960, and build on the ideas of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower that helped build a strong and prosperous middle-class.  The United States would need a new generation of leadership that was not afraid of change.

For the first time in history, there was a presidential contest where a majority of the candidates for president were in fact, born in the Twentieth Century.  In fact, on Election Night 1960, David Brinkley of NBC quoted a survey of the demographic of candidates for Congress and they were mostly in the forties, college educated, lawyers, and veterans.  That fits the description perfectly of a candidate for President in 1996 who ran for the House of Representatives in 1960 named Bob Dole.

Adlai Stevenson, two time loser of the presidency against General Eisenhower in the 1950s was making a third try for the Democratic Party Nomination.  Former President Harry Truman was backing his state's favorite son, Stuart Symington.  Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson was noncommittal until after the legislative work of the Senate was done and he would enter the race just a week before the Nominating Convention.  But the real contest in the Democratic Party took place in the nation's primaries between Senator John F. Kennedy and Senator Hubert H. Humphrey with the two biggest contests being in Wisconsin and West Virginia.

To win the Nomination, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. pulled out all of the stops.  He not only put tons of his own money into fulfilling his lifetime dream to first make eldest son, Joe Jr. the first Irish Catholic President, with that dream being dashed after the young Kennedy was killed in the war the dream went to his understudy; Jack, but he got Hollywood involved most famously with Frank Sinatra redoing a campaign version of his song; HIGH HOPES.  Hubert Humphrey said that he felt like a small grocer going up against a big chain of supermarkets.

But this introduction of John Kennedy was not new.  In 1956 Adlai Stevenson decided to throw the choice of a running mate to the delegates.  Kennedy, along with Senator Humphrey and Senator Estate Kefauver and Senator Albert Gore, Sr. were in contention.  The elder Kennedy advised Bobby Kennedy not to let Jack do it citing that Stevenson was a loser.  The Kennedy brothers ignored their father's advice but Jack Kennedy lost to Estes Kefauver.  Bobby Kennedy was so angry with the Democratic Party that he voted for Eisenhower and Nixon in 1956.  Joe Kennedy looked at the loss as great because had his son been on that ticket and seeing as how badly Stevenson lost again, Kennedy would have been to blame because of his Catholic faith.

In 1960, Richard Nixon was the incumbent Vice President so he seemed the heir apparent for the Republican Party Nomination for President, but there was a newcomer who represented the more liberal Northeast wing of the Republican Party named Nelson Rockefeller to Nixon's left, and then there was the John Birch Society Southwest wing in Senator Barry Goldwater to Nixon's right.  Neither was a huge threat and Vice President Nixon, along with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts balanced the Republican ticket.

The Democratic Party still had grumblings leading up to the Convention.  Former President Harry S Truman withdrew his delegation to the Convention because he felt that the convention was rigged and predetermined.  He didn't doubt Kennedy's future abilities, but he felt that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to be president.  Keep in mind that while he was all of forty-three years old, he had been in the Congress since 1947 and before that had served in the United States Navy.  Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were an issue.  Jack Kennedy had offered Johnson the vice presidency and Bobby Kennedy tried to dissuade the Majority Leader by arguing that the vice presidency was much too small for him.  Johnson ignored Kennedy's dissuasion and was determined to make the vice presidency much more powerful.

Now that the tickets were established, there was still the issue of Kennedy's Catholic faith.  He addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to assure them that his decisions would be made based on that as an American and as a Democrat and not based on his personal faith.  He said it best when he said that he was not the Catholic candidate for President, but the Democratic Party's candidate who happens also to be a Catholic.

A major pioneering introduction to American politics in 1960 was a series of debates between the two major political party candidates.  Historians have said that if you watched the debates on television Senator Kennedy won the debates and if you listened to them on the radio Vice President Nixon won the debates.

By Election Night it was clear that this was going to be a long night.  It's ironic that in 1960, the two youngest men in recent history took a long time to determine the winner and in 2020, it took a long time in a campaign between the two oldest men; Donald Trump and Joe Biden to determine the winner.  John Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by one tenth of one percent with 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon's 49.6 percent.  Ironically, by the time of his death in 1963, more than fifty percent of the American voters said that they had voted for him.

See also:

• Presidential Election 1940
• Presidential Election 1944
• Presidential Election 1948
• Presidential Election 1952
• Presidential Election 1956
• Presidential Election 1960
• Presidential Election 1964
• Presidential Election 1968
• Presidential Election 1972
• Presidential Election 1976
• Presidential Election 1980
• Presidential Election 1984
• Presidential Election 1988
• Presidential Election 1992
• Presidential Election 1996
• Presidential Election 2000
• Presidential Election 2004
• Presidential Election 2008
• Presidential Election 2012
• Presidential Election 2016
• Presidential Election 2020