Thanks to TV debates, Kennedy wins in 1960

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - The 1960 campaign gave American politics three legacies that have influenced elections ever since.

First, the iconic image of the debonair candidate representing a new generation: Democrat John F. Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts.

Second, the televised debates as the campaign’s defining events: Many journalists and voters judged Kennedy to have done better than his Republican rival, Vice President Richard Nixon.

And third, the romantic narrative of the campaign: Theodore H. White’s classic The Making of the President 1960, which helped create the Kennedy aura and set the standard for future campaign journalism.

And the 1960 election resembles this year’s contest in three ways:

• One of the protagonists, Kennedy, was young (43 years old), suave, and the favorite of many people in the news business.
• The election took place at the end of a two-term Republican presidency. But unlike President Bush today, Dwight Eisenhower was ending his presidency in 1960 as a respected and even a beloved figure for most Americans.
• Like Sen. Barack Obama trying to break the color line in presidential elections this year, Kennedy was trying to break the religious bar: The tradition that held that no Roman Catholic could be elected president.

After clinching the nomination at the convention in Los Angeles, Kennedy defied the liberals in his party as well as most of his closest advisors by picking Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, as his running mate.

Powerful Southerners, such as Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, persuaded Kennedy that he needed Johnson on the ticket to keep the South Democratic.

The Kennedy-Johnson ticket ended up carrying six of the 11 states of the old Confederacy.

Kennedy addresses religion issue
At a decisive moment in the fall campaign, Kennedy decided to challenge the anti-Catholic prejudice that threatened to sink his bid for the White House.

In 1959, one out of four voters interviewed by the Gallup Poll said they would not cast their vote for any candidate who was a Catholic.

Unwilling to cede so much of the electorate to Nixon, Kennedy went to Houston to address a gathering of Protestant ministers.

“I believe in an America where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act… where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind,” he told them.

He pledged to make decisions as president “without regard to outside religious pressure or dictate.”

Kennedy-Nixon debates AP September 26, 1960 October 7, 1960 October 13, 1960 October 21, 1960   Watch the first-ever televised presidential debate from the Commission on Presidential Debates

Two weeks after delivering that speech, Kennedy faced Nixon in Chicago for the first televised presidential debate.

Reading the transcripts of the four Kennedy-Nixon debates today, nearly 50 years after they took place, one is struck by how pedestrian they now seem.

On many issues the differences between Nixon and Kennedy were matters of degree, not of fundamental principle.

In some ways, Kennedy and Nixon not dissimilar
And the two weren’t vastly different in their resumes: Nixon was only four years older than Kennedy, both men were veterans of the Second World War, both had won election to Congress in 1946, and both were staunch anti-Communists.

Of course, Kennedy was the scion of one of America's wealthiest and most politically influential families. Nixon came from humble roots, a fact he sometimes mentioned in a maudlin way on the campaign trail.

Nixon argued that he was the more tested candidate on the issue of war and peace, having traveled the world conferring with heads of state and having gotten the better of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at their impromptu “kitchen debate” in Moscow in 1959.

But it was the image on the screen on the night of Sept. 26, 1960 that counted.

Kennedy looked tanned and relaxed.

According to Theodore H. White, Nixon was weary, having campaigned without letup since recovering from a staph infection that had put him in the hospital.

He looked “tense, almost frightened, at turns glowering and occasionally haggard-looking to the point of sickness.”

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