A few years ago, David Pietrusza wrote an excellent book about the election of 1920,
Even though he deals with three larger-than figures, Pietrusza does an excellent job of getting “inside the head” of each of the three great protagonists of the 1960 campaign and, as he did in the previous book, gives us plenty of surprises along the way.
We learn, for example, of the extent of the anti-Catholic bigotry that Kennedy faced when he headed to West Virginia for what could have been a do-or-die moment for his candidacy, a bigotry championed by none other than one Senator Bobby Byrd. There’s plenty of juicy details about Kennedy’s relationship with Frank Sinatra and The Rat Pack, including the problems that Kennedy’s campaign nearly faced when Sammy Davis Jr was set to marry a tall, blond Swedish model. In the end, that wedding was postponed until after the November election, although the incident seems to have soured Sinatra on further involvement with the campaign. There are also plenty of tidbits about Kennedy’s relationship with the Mafia, including the suggestion that Sam Giancana, with whom he apparently shared a mistress, helped JFK pay off a woman who was threatening to reveal an affair she had with Kennedy on the eve of the election.
Pietrusza does a similarly excellent job of painting a portrait of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and, to say the least, neither one of them comes off looking very good. Johnson comes across as a bombastic, opportunistic Texas Senator who found himself trapped into taking the Vice-Presidential nomination after he realized that being Senate Majority Leader under a President John F. Kennedy wouldn’t be quite as powerful as he would have liked it to be.
Nixon, meanwhile, comes across the worst of all. His decisions throughout the campaign were often erratic to say the very least — Exhibit A being his choice of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr as his Vice-Presidential running mate — and he seemed to miss every opportunity presented to him to during the course of the campaign. He could have made a more forceful statement regarding Martin Luther King’s arrest in Atlanta in the early part of the General Election campaign, but instead choose to stay silent for fear of upsetting Southern whites he deemed crucial to victory. As a result, Nixon lost black support that Eisenhower had built up over the previous eight years and sent the Republican Party on a spiral that it has yet to recover from when it comes to support in the African-American community.
There’s plenty more there, of course. Cuba gets a lot of coverage, and the back-and-forth between Nixon and Kennedy in October 1960 is made all the more interesting by the fact that both of them knew at that point that the United States was backing an insurgent invasion that would ultimately turn into President Kennedy’s first foreign policy crisis.
In all honesty, nobody comes across as a hero in this book. Nixon and Johnson are easy targets, of course, but Pietrusza also doesn’t fall for the Camelot myth either. Jack and Jackie are portrayed as distant at best, and on the verge of divorce if JFK losses the election at worst. Bobby Kennedy is portrayed as such a dictatorial figure that you find yourself happy that he didn’t become President, because a personality like that doesn’t belong in the Oval Office, as Richard Nixon himself later proved to us quite well.
Most of all, though, Pietrusza brings the 1960 election to life in a way that merely reading election returns and news reports cannot, and for that reason alone it’s worth a read.
