Nixon 1960 Campaign Make America Great Again

The 1960 election entrada was dominated by rising Cold War tensions between the United states of america and the Soviet Union. In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-fabricated satellite to orbit World. American leaders warned that the nation was falling behind communist countries in scientific discipline and engineering science. Three years subsequently, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet territory and its pilot captured. The incident led to the cancellation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's planned trip to Moscow and the plummet of a pinnacle meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

In Cuba, the revolutionary regime of Fidel Castro became a shut marry of the Soviet Wedlock, heightening fears of communist subversion in the Western Hemisphere. Public stance polls revealed that more than one-half the American people idea war with the Soviet Union was inevitable.

The Candidates

John Fitzgerald Kennedy captured the Democratic nomination despite his youth, a seeming lack of experience in foreign affairs, and his Cosmic faith. On May 10, he won a solid victory in the Autonomous primary in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia. His success at that place launched him toward a first ballot victory at the national convention in Los Angeles—although he did non reach the 761 votes required for the nomination until the final state in the whorl phone call, Wyoming.

After choosing Texas senator Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy told the convention delegates that he would go the nation moving again. He declared that the United States would have the volition and the strength to resist communism around the world.

The Republican nominee, Vice President Richard M. Nixon was 47-years-old, simply four years older than Kennedy. He pointed to the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower administration and assured the voters that he would maintain American prestige, leadership, and war machine forcefulness. He chose Henry Cabot Society, United states administrator to the United Nations, equally his running mate. Nixon struck many voters every bit more mature and experienced than Kennedy and led in the polls afterward the national conventions.

Both candidates sought the support of the steadily growing suburban population and, for the get-go time, tv set became the dominant source of information for voters.

The Debates

The Kennedy and Nixon campaigns agreed to a series of televised debates. Many in the Nixon camp, including President Eisenhower, urged the vice president to reject the debate proposal and deny Kennedy invaluable national exposure. Only, a adept debater, Nixon confidently agreed to share a platform with his rival on nationwide television.
In 1950, only eleven per centum of American homes had television; past 1960, the number had jumped to 88 percent. An estimated seventy meg Americans, well-nigh two-thirds of the electorate, watched the starting time debate on September 26th.

Kennedy had met the day before with the producer to discuss the design of the set and the placement of the cameras. Nixon, just out of the infirmary after a painful articulatio genus injury, did non take advantage of this opportunity. Kennedy wore a blueish suit and shirt to cut down on glare and appeared sharply focused confronting the gray studio groundwork. Nixon wore a gray conform and seemed to alloy into the fix. Most chiefly, JFK spoke directly to the cameras and the national audience. Nixon, in traditional debating way, appeared to be responding to Kennedy.

Almost overnight the issues of experience and maturity seemed to fade from the campaign. Nixon seemed much more poised and relaxed in the iii subsequent debates, but information technology was the first encounter that helped to reshape the election.

Religion and Civil Rights

Kennedy tried to identify himself with the liberal reform tradition of the Democratic political party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, promising a new surge of legislative innovation in the 1960s. He hoped to pull together key elements of the Roosevelt coalition of the 1930s—urban communities of color, ethnicity-based voting blocs, and organized labor. He also hoped to win back conservative Catholics who had deserted the Democrats to vote for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and to hold his ain in the South.

In September, John F. Kennedy eloquently confronted the religious issue in an advent before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He said, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President—should he be Catholic—how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." Merely anti-Catholic feeling remained a wild card in the campaign.

Civil rights had emerged equally a crucial effect in the 1960 campaign. Kennedy faced the challenge of promoting policies that white southern Democrats supported while, at the same time, courtship Black voters away from the Republican Party, the party that many Black voters aligned with after the Civil State of war because it was the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation.

Just a few weeks before the ballot, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested while participating in a protest in Atlanta, Georgia. Although it was politically risky, John Kennedy phoned his wife, Coretta Scott Rex, to express his concern, while a call from Robert Kennedy to the gauge helped secure her hubby's safety release. The Kennedys' personal intervention led to a public endorsement past Martin Luther King Sr., the influential father of the civil rights leader. The publicizing of this endorsement, combined with other campaign efforts, contributed to increased back up amidst Black voters for Kennedy.

Downward to the Wire

In the concluding days of the campaign, the immensely popular President Eisenhower began a speaking tour on behalf of Republican candidates. Several key states seemed to shift toward Nixon, and past Ballot Day pollsters were declaring the election a toss-up.

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president in one of the closest elections in U.Due south. history. In the popular vote, his margin over Nixon was 118,550 out of a total of most 69 million votes bandage. His success in many urban and industrial states gave him a clear majority of 303 to 219 in the electoral vote. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest human e'er elected president, the first Catholic, and the first president born in the twentieth century.

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Source: https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/campaign-of-1960

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