mar 1, 1958 - 1960 election of JFK

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Eisenhower’s successor in the presidency, John F. Kennedy, was a conventional Cold War politician in most regards, raised in an era defined by Munich, Yalta, and McCarthy. Kennedy would introduce new Cold War tactics without fundamentally altering the containment strategy pursued by American presidents since Truman. Born into a prominent Massachusetts family, Kennedy’s rise was steady and fast. He performed heroically in World War II, and he had the familiar Harvard pedigree of previous leaders. But Kennedy used charisma, style, and personality — more than platforms and issues — to define a new brand of politics. Kennedy had inherited his love of political combat from his grandfathers — colorful, and often ruthless, Irish Catholic politicians in Boston. Elected to congress in 1946 and to the senate in 1952, in 1960 he set his sights on the presidency. Ambitious and image savvy, the forty-three-year-old Kennedy made use of his many advantages to become, as novelist Norman Mailer put it, “our leading man.” His chief political disadvantage — that he was Catholic in a country that had never elected a Catholic president — he skillfully neutralized. Thanks to both media advisors and his youthfulness, he cultivated an air of idealism, but his international outlook relied on old-style power politics


John F. Kennedy, the 1960 Democratic candidate for president, used his youth and personality (and those of his equally personable and stylish wife) to attract voters. Here the Massachusetts senator draws an enthusiastic crowd on a campaign stop in Elgin, Illinois.

Kennedy’s Republican opponent in the 1960 presidential election was Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, a seasoned politician and Cold Warrior himself. The great innovation of the 1960 campaign was a series of four nationally televised debates. Nixon, less photogenic than Kennedy, looked pasty and unshaven under the intense studio lights. Voters who heard the first debate on the radio concluded that Nixon had won, but those who viewed it on television favored Kennedy. Despite Kennedy’s success in the debates, he won the narrowest of electoral victories, receiving 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.5 percent. Kennedy attracted Catholics, African Americans, and the labor vote; his vice-presidential running mate, Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, helped bring in white southern Democrats. Only 120,000 votes separated the two candidates, and a shift of a few thousand votes in key states would have reversed the outcome.

Kennedy brought to Washington a host of both young, ambitious newcomers and trusted advisors and academics, who flocked to Washington to join the New Frontier — Kennedy’s term for the challenges the country faced. They included Robert McNamara, a renowned systems analyst and former head of Ford Motor Company, as secretary of defense and Kennedy’s younger brother Robert, who had made a name as a hard-hitting investigator of organized crime, as attorney general. Relying on an old American trope, Kennedy’s New Frontier evoked masculine toughness and uncharted terrain. That terrain quickly proved treacherous, however, as the new administration faced an immediate international incident.

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