Even many of Kennedy’s liberal supporters firmly believed that, such as United Auto Workers union chief Walter Reuther, who had argued passionately during the 1960 primaries that no Catholic could be elected because anti-Catholic prejudice among Baptist and Methodist Democrats was too strong. 100 Years of Presidential Election Results by Bob Vetrone Jr. , Posted: November 6, 2012 The staff here at BoopStats are certainly not the political junkies that exist elsewhere at … Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–61), Lodge—whose grandfather had 30 years earlier led the Senate opposition to U.S. participation in the League of Nations—was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and as such the principal U.S. spokesman in that world organization. victory in Texas by 57 votes, which earned him the sobriquet, "Landslide Lyndon." Prior to the first debate, the mood among onlookers at most Kennedy rallies had been friendly but no more. Access hundreds of hours of historical video, commercial free, with HISTORY Vault. November 8, 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the presidential election of 1960, which still very much interests those who care about disputed elections and how best to resolve them. A third reason for the continuing scholarly interest in the presidential election of 1960, closely related to the TV and Catholicism factors, was that the outcome was an upset. Nixon compounded that mistake in the eyes of Eisenhower and other leading Republicans by failing to prepare properly for the debates, which left him feeling and looking weak and tired for the crucial first one. One newspaperman called him a “young man in a hurry.” Kennedy felt that he had to redouble his efforts because of the widespread conviction that no Roman Catholic candidate could be elected president. All Rights Reserved. All Rights Reserved. Nevertheless, Kennedy won the nomination on the first ballot, with 806 votes. There were, he said, stimulating “new frontiers” to be crossed by the United States. From January until the West Virginia primary in May, Kennedy and Humphrey crisscrossed the country in quest of delegate votes for the Democratic convention. The GOP was much the weaker of the two parties nationally in 1960. Thus, as the 1960s opened, the prevailing view among the experts was that Republicans would retain the White House and the country probably would not change very much. (For those of you who can't be here in person, you can take a virtual tour.) An unprecedented series of four television debates between the two nominees constituted the highlight of the campaign. He made his 1958 race for reelection to…. Terms of Use The 1960 election also remains a source of debate among some historians as to whether vote theft in selected states aided Kennedy's victory. Exhausted and irritated after a long press conference, Eisenhower replied, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. Kennedy was also the first president born in the 20th century. Nixon, was 47. Until the televised debates, most knowledgeable observers of the American political scene had assumed that Nixon would ultimately prevail. They did, however, provide voters with an opportunity to compare the two candidates. What Would the Founding Fathers Make of Originalism? The closeness of the election combined with the record turnout to put the maximum possible strain on the nation’s electoral apparatus, and ultimately led to problems in election administration. What Would the Founding Fathers Make of Originalism? A system of free and fair elections in the modern sense had not yet taken hold on the ground there in 1960. Nixon, the first presidential nominee to campaign in every state, emphasized that he would carry on the basic policies of the Eisenhower administration, but he also indicated that he would improve upon them in such areas as welfare programs, foreign aid, and defense. Thus, as the 1960s opened, the prevailing view among the experts was that Republicans would retain the White House and the country probably would not change very much. Before the first televised presidential debate on September 26, most polls showed him behind. (There followed three wrong answers such as 'the check is in the mail'). On the evening of September 26, when the two candidates arrived at the CBS broadcast facility in downtown Chicago for the first televised presidential debate in American history, Nixon’s streak of bad luck continued. By Election Day Eisenhower had become certain of a Nixon loss and deeply angry with him for the way he had run his campaign. The 14 unpledged electors in Alabama and Mississippi and 1 pledged elector in Oklahoma cast their votes for Sen. Harry F. Byrd, a Democrat from Virginia. When the first debate ended, the future first lady reportedly concluded, “I think my husband was brilliant.” Meanwhile, Nixon’s mother immediately called her son to ask if he was ill. A month and a half later, Americans turned out to vote in record numbers. November 8, 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the presidential election of 1960, which still very much interests those who care about disputed elections and how best to resolve them. He would become only the second Roman Catholic ever to be nominated for president by a major party (the first was Democratic Gov. Start your free trial today. Home 2020 Election Results Election Info Weblog Forum Wiki Search Email Login Site Info Store Note: The Google advertisement links below may advocate political positions that this site does not endorse. Eisenhower's Vice President, Richard Nixon, who had transformed his office into a national political base, was the Republican candidate, whereas the Democrats nominated Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy. When asked after the election how he had managed to defeat Nixon, Kennedy replied crisply “television.”. Roosevelt won 98.5 percent or 523 of the 538 electoral votes up for grabs that year. Some of the most recent include Gary A. Donaldson’s The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); William J. Rorabaugh, The Real Making of the President: Kennedy, Nixon and the 1960 Election (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); and Edmund F. Kallina, Jr., Kennedy v. Nixon: The Presidential Election of 1960 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). Texas presents a different kind of problem. Gov. In that speech, on September 12, he declared: I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. For one thing, television was a relatively recent addition to America’s living rooms, and politicians were still seeking the right formula for interacting with the public in this new, more intimate way. Even more striking was the high turnout. A provision of the Federal Communications Act had been suspended by Congress earlier in the year to permit the networks to broadcast the debates without having to provide equal time for candidates of minor parties. victory in Texas by 57 votes, which earned him the sobriquet, "Landslide Lyndon." The first account of the election, Theodore White’s classic entitled The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961) was written by a Kennedy partisan. They also heralded the central role television has continued to play in the democratic process. No one understood all that more than Kennedy himself. Those problems have also fueled continuing scholarly interest in the 1960 presidential election because of the difficulty in determining whether Kennedy really won through honest means or corrupt ones. Kennedy’s surprising victory helped alter that situation. In the other thirty-five, however, turnout was typically well above the national average. On the domestic front, the struggle for civil rights and desegregation had deeply divided the nation, raising crucial questions about the state of democracy in the United States.At a time when the need for strong leadership was all too obvious, two vastly different candidates vied for the presidency: John F. Kennedy, a young but dynamic Massachusetts senator from a powerful New England family, and Richard Nixon, a seasoned lawmaker who was currently serving as vice president. For Kennedy’s Catholic supporters in particular, the real “Massachusetts miracle” was not that state’s economic comeback in the 1980s but rather Kennedy’s victory in 1960, which altered assumptions about who could realistically hope to hold high public office in the United States and paved the way for the next person who was not a white, male, Protestant to win:  Barack Obama in 2008. Likewise Lyndon B. Johnson's Congressional Leaders of both parties considered Lodge a formidable choice. Kennedy’s victory, like Obama’s, also serves as a source of encouragement to many of those in the over 70 percent of the American population that is not white, male and Protestant. The problem with answering the question of how he prevailed there is twofold in nature. I can never believe JFK won Illinois honestly in 1960, any more than I can believe HST was not crooked when he worked for the Prendergast machine in KC. Throughout the administration of Pres. Although the debates were sometimes compared to the historic debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas (see also Lincoln-Douglas debates), they were more in the nature of joint press conferences, with reporters asking questions.