Did John F. Kennedy and the Democrats Steal the 1960 Election?

Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy debate during the 1960 election.

“For Richard Nixon, the holiday season of 1960 was a sullen affair. Weeks before, on Nov. 8, he had lost an exceedingly close presidential election to Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Near the end of December, while President-elect Kennedy received national security briefings at his family’s estate in Palm Beach, Nixon hosted a cheerless Christmas party at home in Washington. ‘We won,’ he groused to his guests, ‘but they stole it from us.’ Nixon’s complaint — which, today, has a dismally familiar ring — is the central contention of ‘Campaign of the Century,’ by the historian Irwin F. Gellman. For more than two decades now, Gellman has undertaken a rolling rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. In previous books, he cast a sympathetic glow on Nixon’s years in Congress and reframed Nixon’s relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he served loyally but awkwardly as vice president. In this new volume, Gellman seeks to upend our understanding of the 1960 race, not least the matter of which man won it. There is a cycle to the waging and relating of presidential elections: A campaign, typically, begins with a plan, tumbles into chaos and improvisation, and gets neatened up after the fact by participants and journalists who distill it into a few pat postulations. Much of this is mythology, and it can be hard to root out. To that end, Gellman has, arguably, logged more hours and examined more documents in the Nixon archives than any other historian to date. That doggedness, he says, has yielded new information and insights into the events of 1960. There is much ballyhooing in this book of its author’s willingness to follow facts wherever they lead. ‘It is long past time,’ Gellman proclaims, ‘to tell the story without a partisan thumb on the scale.’ This is a wide-ranging dig. It is directed, first, at Theodore H. White. Gellman regards White’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative, ‘The Making of the President 1960,’ as the original sin, visited upon succeeding generations. …”
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