Kennedy vs. Nixon
We remember this iconic election today for the wrong reasons
What may have been the most legendary election in American history, and certainly one of the closest, came exactly sixty-five years ago today, when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon. The popular vote was a virtual tie:
Kennedy 34,221,463
Nixon 34,108,582
The electoral vote was less close (303-219), but a switch of fewer than 25,000 popular votes in Texas and 5,000 in Illinois would have made Nixon president. Not till the George Bush -Al Gore election in 2000 would we have an election closer or more dramatic.
Though everyone who is old enough to remember that election talks about the drama of the cliffhanger of an election night, it actually didn’t seem that way until the wee hours of the morning. The election night broadcasters and commentators had no idea what they were looking at. Kennedy early on was more than two million votes ahead, and the networks thought he’d win by five million or so and 400+ electoral votes.
But back then Democratic cities had quick-tallying voting machines, and rural Republican areas had paper ballots, and after midnight, Nixon slowly caught up. (You can still watch most of that coverage on YouTube.) NBC finally declared Kennedy the winner at 7:19 when they said he had won California. But in the end Nixon won California, and Kennedy’s victory was not sure till noon.
Most of us know the Greek tragedy-like events that later befell both Nixon and Kennedy and their families, but the thing we ought to remember was this:
Both these men were flawed, but they differed little on their loyalty to America and the Constitution. Nixon gave a baffling semi-concession at 3 a.m. (JFK said he wouldn’t have done so) and very graciously conceded later and went to meet with Kennedy, to show the world our country was united. And had either man cozied up to Russia that fall, or done any of a dozen other things Donald Trump has done, his party would have repudiated him and thrown him off the ticket if they could have.
Many things are better now than they were in 1960, but we were a far more united democracy. By the way, the best and loveliest book ever written about a political campaign is Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President, 1960.
Read the first four paragraphs of the first chapter, and you’ll know what both prose poetry and democracy should be.
And hopefully, hate fascism even more.
Can you imagine what would have happened if Nixon had said that t
he the election was stolen. Remember that one deciding factor according to Teddy White’s book was Nixon’s regret to campaign in all 50 states. A last minute trip to Alaska supposedly cost him some crucial campaigning time.
I was 8 years old and liked Peter, Paul and Mary… about as radical as an 8 year old could get… but the sadness of 1963, brought a fight to my mind that this country cannot bear such things. I became a Democrat from then… and LBJ put icing on the cake for Civli Rights that most folks know as the legacy for JFK but I know in his heart, LBJ was a witness to the sadness of his students lives in that Texas School he taught at and fought his Southern colleagues on the mat in Congress with arm twisting, phone calls and brow beating to win it, too.