When John Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, he also won the right
to put his own spin on the victory--whether as an underdog's heroic
triumph or a liberal crusader's overcoming special interests. Now
W. J. Rorabaugh cuts through the mythology of this famous election
to explain the nuts-and-bolts operations of the campaign and offer
a corrective to Theodore White's flawed classic, "The Making of the
President."
War hero, champion of labor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author,
JFK was long on charisma. Despite a less than liberal record, he
assumed the image of liberal hero--thanks to White and other
journalists who were shamelessly manipulated by the Kennedy
campaign. Rorabaugh instead paints JFK as the ideological twin of
Nixon and his equal as a bare-knuckled politician, showing that
Kennedy's hard-won, razor-thin victory was attributable less to
charisma than to an enormous amount of money, an effective campaign
organization, and television image-making.
The 1960 election, Rorabaugh argues, reflects the transition
from the dominance of old-style boss and convention politics to the
growing significance of primaries, race, and especially TV-without
which Kennedy would have been neither nominated nor elected. He
recounts how JFK cultivated delegates to the 1960 Democratic
convention; quietly wooed the still-important party bosses; and
used a large personal organization, polls, and TV advertising to
win primaries. JFK's master stroke, however, was choosing as a
running mate Lyndon Johnson, whose campaigning in the South carried
enough southern states to win the election.
On the other side, Rorabaugh draws on Nixon's often-ignored
files to take a close look at his dysfunctional campaign, which
reflected the oddities of a dark and brooding candidate trapped
into defending the Eisenhower administration. Yet the widely
detested Nixon won almost as many votes as the charismatic Kennedy,
even though Democrats outnumberd Republicans by three to two. This
leads Rorabaugh to reexamine the darker side of the election: the
Republicans' charges of vote fraud in Illinois and Texas, the use
of money to prod or intimidate, manipulation of the media, and the
bulldozing of opponents.
White and others helped shape persisting impressions of both
candidates, influencing the way Nixon conducted subsequent
campaigns and the Democrats nurtured the Kennedy legacy. The Real
Making of the President gives us a more sobering look at all of
that, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of one of the
nation's most memorable elections.
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