Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency PDF

Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency Republicans approached the presidential campaign of 1960 with Vice President Nixon as their heir apparent. To many he was a gifted party leader, to others a ruthless opportunist. The “old” Nixon had been a no-holds-barred campaigner, adept at skew...

Kennedy Challenges Nixon for the Presidency Republicans approached the presidential campaign of 1960 with Vice President Nixon as their heir apparent. To many he was a gifted party leader, to others a ruthless opportunist. The “old” Nixon had been a no-holds-barred campaigner, adept at skewering Democrats and left-wingers. The “new” Nixon presented himself as a mature, seasoned statesman. He had gained particular notice in a finger-pointing kitchen debate (definition = Televised exchange in 1959 between Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and American vice president Richard Nixon. Meeting at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, the two leaders sparred over the relative merits of capitalist consumer culture versus Soviet state planning. Nixon won applause for his staunch defense of American capitalism, helping lead him to the Republican nomination for president in 1960.) with Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, where Nixon extolled the virtues of American consumerism over Soviet economic planning. The next year he handily won the Republican nomination. On the Democratic side, John F. Kennedy, a youthful millionaire senator from Massachusetts, scored impressive victories in several primary elections, overcoming the reluctance of many party bosses to nominate a Roman Catholic. A disappointed South was not completely appeased when Kennedy’s closest rival and the Senate majority leader from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, accepted second place on the ticket in an eleventh-hour marriage of convenience. Senator Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic to be nominated for the presidency by either party since Al Smith’s ill-starred campaign in 1928. Smear artists revived the ancient charges about the Pope’s controlling the White House. Kennedy rebutted the attacks and asked if some 40 million Catholic Americans were to be condemned to second-class citizenship from birth. The Protestant, Bible Belt South, ordinarily Democratic, had particular misgivings about the candidate’s faith. “I fear Catholicism more than I fear communism,” declaimed one Baptist minister in North Carolina. But if many southern Democrats stayed away from the polls because of Kennedy’s Catholicism, northern Democrats in unusually large numbers supported Kennedy because of the bitter attacks on their Catholic faith. Television may well have tipped the scales. Nixon agreed to meet Kennedy in four debates. The contestants crossed words in millions of living rooms before audiences estimated at 60 million or more. The debates reinforced the importance of image over substance in the television age, as many viewers found Kennedy’s glamour and vitality far more appealing than Nixon’s tired and pallid appearance. Kennedy squeezed through with 303 electoral votes to 219,Footnote but with a breathtakingly close popular margin of only 118,574 votes out of over 68 million cast. He was not only the first Roman Catholic, but also, at forty-three, the youngest person to date to be elected president. Like Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy ran well in the large industrial centers, where he had strong support from workers, Catholics, and African Americans. (During the campaign, Kennedy had solicitously telephoned the pregnant Coretta King, whose husband, Martin Luther King, Jr., was imprisoned in Georgia for a sit-in. Nixon, eyeing white southern votes, had declined to comment publicly on the arrest and avoided communication with Mrs. King. The contrast offered an early sign of diverging racial strategies between the two parties.) President Eisenhower continued to enjoy extraordinary popularity to the final curtain. Despite Democratic jibes about “eight years of golfing and goofing,” Eisenhower was widely admired and respected for his decency, goodwill, and moderation. The old soldier left office warning of the dangers of a burgeoning “military-industrial complex” (Definition = Term popularized by President Dwight Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address, referring to the political and economic ties between arms manufacturers, elected officials, and the U.S. armed forces that created self-sustaining pressure for high military spending during the Cold War. Eisenhower also warned that this powerful combination left unchecked could “endanger our liberties or democratic process,” favoring defense concerns over more peaceful goals that balanced security and liberty.), and crestfallen at his failure to end the arms race with the Soviet Union. America grew not only economically under his watch, but geographically as well: Alaska and Hawaii attained statehood in 1959.