The Making of the President 1960

With this book, Theodore H. White invented a new genre: the blow-by-blow campaign chronicle told by someone who had access to, but was not part of, the candidates' staffs. At the time, it was an exciting concept, and readers felt that they were looking into the smoke-filled rooms, watching political titans in combat. Half a century on, we know that White missed a great deal, particularly about the character of his central figure, John F. Kennedy. He saw the intellectual acrobatics and veneer of high culture - and missed the prostitutes, risky medications, deals with sleazy power brokers and (certainly in the decisive West Virginia primary, very likely on the national election day) outright vote fraud.

Overall, The Making of the show more President, 1960 is a charming book that fits its subject into a naive template. Its innocence makes for pleasant reading, but it shouldn't be confused with history. show less

A wonderful book which manages to impart a real (as closely as I can remember it - I was born in mid 1961) feel for the early 1960s as well as for the characters involved. Paradoxically, though he is far and away less psychologically "attractive" I found myself drawn to the figure of Nixon -- not as a fan of his political stances but as an informal student of human psychology (which we must all be to some extent in order to navigate life). There is real pathos there: conflict, darkness and suffering. I'm of the opinion that this bore fruit in his presidency and eventual disgrace ... but seriously, if one were to draw parallels between this story and that of Milton's Paradise Lost (and those are some REMOTE PARALLELS), Nixon is show more definitely Satan, and more interesting in his way than Kennedy.

And, no, I'm not calling Richard Nixon Satan. Nor am I calling John Kennedy Jesus. I'm merely making a call here similar to William Blake when he said of Paradise Lost "Milton was of the Devil's Party without knowing it." Losers can be more interesting and complicated than winners, and I thought that was the case here.

Note: I always squirm internally when writers use the term "stock" with reference to human groups. White does this a lot. show less

Really a dense and dry, textbook-like read full of an orgy of statistics, personages and granular facts, there is still much enlightenment in the reading. For some reason I previously though of the Kennedy election as a landslide referendum on a fading conservative America at the threshold of the progressive, liberal 60s. This book paints a much more complex picture where the election, on the popular and thus fundamental scale, was a squeaker in Kennedy’s favor. (“…this margin of popular vote is so thin as to be, in all reality, nonexistent. If only 4500 voters in Illinois and 28000 voters in Texas changed their minds, the sum of their 32000 votes would have moved both these states, with their combined fifty-one electoral votes, show more into the Nixon column...The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs...")This seems to have more to do with Nixon’s sabotaging his own chances (dropping the ball during MLK’s arrest, rudely ignoring his own advisors, refusing to engage Eisenhower for support, etc.) than any Kennedy or Democratic Party destiny.

Among the wisdom in this book written by a very able political observer who was embedded with Humphrey, etc. is nuggets such as Adlai Stevenson’s observation on American: “We're a self-indulgent consumption society, and our standards have been so terribly tarnished around the world.” Also, the author’s own observation that “Though Republican politicians use the same public phrases and private techniques as their Democratic rivals, the two great parties operate in different world of reality. Seizure of power on the Republican side is so different from seizure of power on the Democratic side that it sometimes seems that the fauna who contend in these separate jungles come of different orders of political zoology. For despite the cynic's dictum that the national parties of Americans offer only the choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Republican Party is completely different from the Democratic Party […] But one cannot begin to describe Republican reality, as the Party leadership approached 1960, without exploring that spectacular Republican schizophrenia which for a century has baffled all observers.

The Republican Party, to be exact, is twins and has been twins from the moment of its birth—but the twins who inhabit its name and shelter and Jacob and Esau: fratricidal, not fraternal, twins. Within the Republican Party are combined a stream of the loftiest American idealism and a stream of the coarsest American greed.”

It also seems to me that the author could make a case from his knowledge that later punk rock pogoing is derivative of street-side Kennedy fanatics: “The jumpers were, in the beginning, teenage girls who would bounce, jounce and jump as the cavalcade passed, squealing, “I seen him, I seen him.” Gradually over the days their jumping seemed to grow more rhythmic, giving a jack-in-the-box effect of ups and downs in a thoroughly sexy oscillation.”

What really makes the book worth reading and keeping in print a half-century after its events is such insight into the American soul that take my breath away, like “If other nations falter in greatness, their people remain still what they were. But if America falters in greatness and purpose, then Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.” show less

Subtitle: A Narrative History of American Politics in Action.

About a year before the November 1960 election, Theodore H White began studying the likely candidates. He focused on a handful of men with aspirations and/or apparent qualifications: Humphrey, Kennedy, Stevenson, Johnson, Nixon, Rockefeller. He travelled from state to state reporting on the primaries or state caucuses / conventions. (In that era, there were only sixteen states that held primaries!) He attended the Democratic and Republican national conventions. And he closely followed the candidates as they campaigned for the presidency.

I was fascinated to learn some of this history, and the first-hand look at the “political machines” that produced these two candidates, show more and ultimately President John F Kennedy. I also found this a surprisingly nostalgic book … It was published in 1961, shortly after Kennedy’s inauguration, so there is no hint of what is to come in November 1963.

It’s somewhat dated – the process is different more than half a century later. And yet, there is something timeless about this story. Serious issues of race, the economy, potential for nuclear war, etc still plague our country. Good men and women still struggle to find solutions. My face-to-face book club had a fascinating and spirited discussion of this work. show less

It is fascinating to read an "in-the-moment" account of history, as opposed to a historical look back at history. This really gave me a great sense of the issues of the day and the sense of driven energy JFK used, not to mention a good bit of family connections and money, to win the 1960 Presidential race. It also was interesting to see how when the chips were down, Kennedy acted without regard to politics, calling Coretta Scott King at a crucial moment in the campaign. Nixon, in contrast, refused to comment because that was the politically astute play, in his mind. Nixon considered the political outcome, rather than the morality of his action, or inaction. In that sense, JFK earned the right to be President.

Theodore White taught a whole generation of us to read a presidential campaign. He did so at precisely the time in USAmerican history when presidential campaigning was being transformed. I remember the summer of 1962, sitting on the tree-shaded campus of George Peabody College (not yet a part of Vanderbilt University), reading The Making of the President 1960 (Atheneum, c1961). I was teaching at Peabody Demonstration School, with plenty of work to do (papers to grade, lessons to prepare, encyclopedias to sell—well, teachers have to make a living on the side), but every day I’d permit myself time at lunch to read one more chapter. I remember saying to myself, and how right I was, that this is the future of presidential campaigning.

I show more had voted for the first time in the election of 1960, but I had been following politics ever since the national conventions of 1948, when I was twelve. I had clipped an article out of the newspaper with a thumbnail sketch of each candidate, and I followed their efforts on the radio each day of the convention, taking reports to my father at his work. It was at that Democratic Convention that the young mayor of Minneapolis spoke, rasing a ruckus. Supporting a civil rights plank in the Democratic platform, he told the Convention: "To those who say, my friends, to those who say, that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years too late! To those who say, this civil rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!" His heart-felt speech caught the attention of he delegates, and the civil-rights plank was narrowly adopted. A number of Southern delegates walked out of the hall to form the Dixiecrat Party. That young mayor was Hubert Humphrey. He went ahead to become senator in the election that fall, running as the Democratic Farm Labor Party candidate in Minnesota. He also became a voice for the people and, almost immediately, a prospect for the presidency.

I had not followed the primaries carefully in the spring of 1960. I was accustomed to decisions about the nominee being made at the conventions. That’s what had happened when my hero, Estes Kefauver in his coonskin cap, won the primaries in 1952 but was supplanted by Adlai Stevenson with the support of party leaders in the back rooms of the convention hall. What does it matter who wins the primaries, I said to myself in bitter disappointment. I did not live in a state that had a presidential primary in 1960 (and in the eleven campaigns since, I have never lived in a state where the presidential primary has been influential in the final decision). So when I settled in to watch the 1960 Democratic Convention on television, I was expecting to witness the decision being made. It was not to be so. For all practical purposes, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had already been selected. Oh, there was a last-minute flourish of opposition on which I pinned my hopes (for I was not a Kennedy supporter), but to no avail.

Therefore, my reading of Theodore White filled me in on the history I could have followed more carefully but had not. I remember coming away from that reading with three distinctive convictions about the future: (1) Henceforth, primaries not conventions or caucuses would be decisive, and the early primaries would test the candidates and be important in determining the final winner. (2) Image rather than issues would dominate the media, and manipulation of the media would be of overwhelming importance. The Kennedys, with their young, handsome, articulate candidate, knew that and established the campaign pattern for at least the next five decades. (3) Affluent families would have a decided edge; their opponents would be required to spend more time and effort in raising funds than in addressing voters. White taught me all that with his first Making of the President, and of course White was right.

For history’s sake, White’s book is still a good read. If you do not have time or interest to read the whole book, at least you might want to check out Chapter Four, “The Art of the Primary: Wisconsin and West Virginia.” There were only sixteen state primaries at the time: Humphrey could afford only five. He had neither the time (he was an active, conscientious senator) nor the financial backing for more. Kennedy chose seven: he had to make the point that a Catholic from New England could attract attention and gather votes in Middle America. From their very first, lonely day on the campaign trail in snow-covered Wisconsin, White followed them both. He was with them; he heard what they said and saw what they did behind the scenes. So how did Kennedy win these two primaries? First, there was image.

“Above all, over and over again there was the handsome, open faced candidate on the TV screen, showing himself, proving that a Catholic wears no horns. The documentary film on TV opened with a cut of a PT boat spraying a white wake through the black night, and Kennedy was a war hero; the film next showed the quiet young man holding a book in his hand in his own library receiving the Pulitzer prize, and he was a scholar; then the young man held his golden-haired daughter of two, reading to her as she sat on his lap, and he was the young father; and always, gravely, open-eyed, with a sincerity that could not be feigned, he would explain his own devotion to the freedom of America’s faiths, and the separation of church and state.”

Second, there was money, and the organization that money could buy. In West Virginia, the Kennedy campaign spent $34,000 on television alone; the total budget for Humphrey was $25,000. And the financial figures are deceptive, for Kennedy had supporters from family, Harvard classmates, and wealthy supporters who could work full-time as volunteers, hence providing a staff that would otherwise not have been affordable, even to him. “Up and down the roads roved Kennedy names, brothers and sisters all available for speeches and appearances . . . .” There were sixteen campaign headquarters in West Virginia, with at least fifty highly educated and talented staffers (free!); Humphrey’s total staff was less than ten. With this kind of staff, incidentally, every local volunteer was made to feel a vital part: “. . . every citizen likes to feel he is somehow wired into the structure of power; that making a man or woman seem useful and important to himself (or herself) in the power system of American life takes advantage of one of the simplest and noblest urges of politics in the most effective way.” The organization was there to give make-work jobs to all local volunteers, incorporating them into the mainstream.

Third, and perhaps the ultimate deciding factor in West Virginia, was the issue that was a non-issue. Kennedy had to prove that he could appeal to non-Catholic voters—in a state in which only five percent of the population was Catholic. How could he attract those voters? He did it in this proud, independent country by making tolerance his principal issue: prove you are tolerant by voting for this handsome, open young Catholic who says it would be a sin to violate the separation of church and state. Of course, there could have been no opponent who would have been more tolerant than Humphrey, who had staked his whole political career on human rights, tolerance, and fair play, not to mention separation of church and state. On real issues, both men were liberals, and Humphrey had by far the more active and more effective record. But, with the help of the press, the media, and the volunteers, the Kennedys could make Humphrey’s issues (and his record) non-issues. Media and money, image and organization, non-issues and not previous records: the Kennedys taught campaigners and candidates from then on out how to win primaries; and Teddy White taught his readers what to look for in primary campaigns.

Humphrey, as always, spoke from the heart, and from his solid record, but in this new age of USAmerican politics, even he sensed that that would not be enough—though he spoke with hope to the last: “To elect a President,” he said near the end of the campaign in Wisconsin, “it’s more important that he be good of heart, good of spirit, than that he be slick, or clever, or statesmanlike-looking.” One could wish! show less

I enjoyed this book less than I thought I would, but it was OK. Kennedy's run for President was, for me, at a time when I was barely becoming aware of a world beyond my own small childhood life. I finally understood why the US did not have princesses (beyond daddy's little ones) nor why people never talked about driving to England but talked about driving to New York or Florida from my Rocky Mountain home. I knew who Kennedy was because my family was Democrat but I was unaware of Nixon. I was 7 when this election occurred.
The process by which competitors fighting both Kennedy and Nixon were removed from the race was intriguing. The role of the running mates was given some consideraton, but not a great deal. The section on the debates show more and their structure, being they were the first televised, marked a significant difference between those and the debacle that defined the "debates" between Trump and Biden. show less