MATT PORTER: The 60/20 podcast is produced by the JFK Library Foundation, and made possible with the help of a generous grant from the Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation.
HARRY TRUMAN: This is the first national Democratic Convention I shall miss since I became a United States Senator in 1934. And it is a matter of great regret and deep emotion for me to stay away from the proceedings of my party.
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MATT PORTER: Just days before the 1960 Democratic Convention, former president Harry Truman resigned as a delegate in protest. In a press conference, Truman suggested that John F. Kennedy was not ready to become president.
HARRY TRUMAN: I'm going to quote a statement that I'm making to Senator Kennedy. Senator, are you certain that you are quite ready for the country, or the country is ready for you in the role of President in January, 1961?
MATT PORTER: Then-Senator Kennedy had a response for the ex-president from Missouri.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: First, Mr. Truman suggested that I step aside as a candidate in 1960. In response, let me say, I do not intend to step aside at anyone's request. The heart of Mr. Truman's objection, it seems, is his question as to whether I am ready for the country or the country is ready for me in terms of maturity and experience.
Let me say this as objectively as I can. I did not undertake lightly to seek the presidency. It is not a prize, or a normal object of ambition. It is the greatest office in the world.
MATT PORTER: Senator Kennedy had, in fact, thought long and hard about the 1960 campaign. He made his decision to run years earlier. And his plan to take the nomination and the White House had been long in the making.
RICHARD M. NIXON: While it is dangerous to see nothing wrong in America, it is just as wrong to refuse to recognize what is right about America.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. It is time, in short, for a new generation of leadership.
MATT PORTER: 60 years ago, Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon would face off in one of the closest elections in the nation's history. The election would leave lasting impacts on future races right into today. In today's episode, we'll tell you how he had put together a top notch team for his White House bid, a team that showed unprecedented skill in terms of its planning, execution, and use of new campaign strategies and tactics. Despite these advances, victory for Kennedy was anything but inevitable. In fact, Kennedy would only win the popular vote by just 2/10ths of1%.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: If we think about how close this was, we have to ask, well, what was the difference? What were the reasons for Kennedy's victory?
MATT PORTER: We'll ask those questions next. This is 60/20. When John F. Kennedy looked for someone to run his campaign, he turned to one of his most trusted confidantes, his brother. By allowing his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, to manage the day-to-day operations of the campaign, it allowed John F. Kennedy to focus his energy on being the candidate. Historian Frederick Logevall discusses the relationship.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: Robert Kennedy was immensely important. There's no question about this. The brothers had formed, I think, a really tight connection in '52. And by the time we get into ’60, it's very clear that JFK is going to have his younger brother central to this whole endeavor. As the top campaign aide, and the one who drives the bus, in some ways, it's clearly RFK.
MATT PORTER: David Axelrod, chief strategist for President Obama's 2008 campaign, says JFK's approach was copied by the campaigns that followed.
DAVID AXELROD: A good candidate kind of functions as a kind of chairman of the board of their campaign. They don't try and micromanage their campaign. They don't try and enmesh themselves too deeply in the details of a campaign. But they set policy and direction of a campaign.
And they question their team when problems arise, or when concerns arise. And that is what you want in a candidate. And you say, what does it take to be-- but that only works if you have management that you can trust. They were good at the campaign business, and that really mattered.
MATT PORTER: Starting with Robert F. Kennedy's management at the top, the Kennedy team was made up of a young but trusted staff. The staff was aided by a sprawling organization of friends and volunteers. One key player was Larry O'Brien, who helped organize JFK's congressional campaigns.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: Larry O'Brien is a very interesting and important figure in all of this. And I won't say he's forgotten, but we sometimes don't pay enough attention to his genius as a political aide and as an operative. And he had a maxim. He had a saying, the golden rule of politics, which is the more volunteers, the better. And that's sort of what drives much of what Larry O'Brien does.
MATT PORTER: Another key player was Ted Sorensen. Sorensen is well known now as the architect for many of Kennedy's most famous speeches. But in the late '50s, he also flew across the country to Democratic outposts with the young senator from Massachusetts.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: The fact that Jack Kennedy, with Ted Sorensen, is barnstorming the country, speaking often to very small audiences, but nevertheless, seeing all parts of the country, matters a lot when we get down to 1960.
MATT PORTER: According to historian Tim Naftali, Sorensen remained one of the most valuable members of the Kennedy brain trust.
TIM NAFTALI: Well, Theodore Sorensen had worked for Senator Kennedy. He was Kennedy's main congressional aide. I mean, he was his chief legislative aide. He was his chief speechwriter. He ran Kennedy's Senate office.
The two had, if you will, a mind meld, to use I guess a Star Trek metaphor. Ted Sorensen was an articulator John Kennedy's ideas. John Kennedy was an editor of Ted Sorensen's rhetoric.
MATT PORTER: And then there was Lou Harris. Harris, who would be described as a data nerd today, was Kennedy's chief pollster. He would develop new ways of polling that would not only give Kennedy's campaign a leg up, but his polls would be a model for future races.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: Kennedy and the people around Kennedy had decided that polling was a kind of secret ingredient. It was something that they were going to make use of, and I think they were quite early to this. But when Harris comes along, I think it opens up a whole new set of opportunities.
MATT PORTER: Harris provided accurate polling data down to the county level. His polls also tracked public opinion in those counties over time. Today, this type of polling is done nearly every day during an election cycle. But Logevall says in the '60s, it was still a relatively new practice.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: The campaign feels and he feels that what he's doing here, which is if not unprecedented, I think few campaigns around the country are really-- in terms of Senate races or governor's races, never mind presidential races-- are doing anything like this before.
MATT PORTER: Kennedy's team had a major advantage with Harris, who worked closely with Kennedy and his campaign.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: Nixon's team did much less. They did some of that too. They had their own people, obviously. But I do think the fact that Harris was so close to the candidate, and there was kind of infinite resources available, including from Joe Kennedy, to pay for this market research-- I think that was something that JFK had that you didn't see to the same extent on the Republican side.
MATT PORTER: Historian Tim Naftali says Kennedy's deep war chest had been giving him an edge on polling since his congressional campaign.
TIM NAFTALI: Private polls are expensive. The Kennedys were able to afford private polling throughout John F. Kennedy's career. And this gave them an opportunity to see strengths and weaknesses, and to focus on areas of weakness.
MATT PORTER: One of the biggest arguments against a Kennedy run was his Catholicism. Harris's polls showed despite fears from some Democratic leaders, a Catholic could win the White House, something New York Governor Al Smith failed to do in 1928.
TIM NAFTALI: They could show them polling that a Catholic candidate could win. The Kennedys had done some important polling in 1958 and '59 that showed that a Catholic could indeed win the presidency. And one of the things that the old guard-- and I mean the Catholic old guard, people like David Lawrence of Pennsylvania-- one thing they didn't want was a second failure. So polling is important to the Kennedy story. And Kennedy certainly followed the polling as best he could.
MATT PORTER: After working for Kennedy, Harris went on to successfully run his own polling company. One of his first clients was CBS News. Today, news media widely circulate the Harris polls that bear his name. But more than any individual, what's striking is how the Kennedy campaign worked as a team. Even Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator who would become the Republican nominee years later, admired the team JFK put together. In his oral history with the JFK Library, he said--
BARRY GOLDWATER: These were real savvy, smart young fellows, none of whom had ever been in politics at this level. But they worked together as a team. They had new ideas. They made full use of every modern technique and modern gadget.
MATT PORTER: People, planes, and polling all costs money. And unlike today, primary candidates did not go out raising millions before the convention. That's where Joe Kennedy, the candidate’s father, came in.
TIM NAFTALI: Joe's money by itself-- that wouldn't have been enough. But that money allowed John F. Kennedy to take advantage of opportunities. And 1960 was a time full of opportunity.
MATT PORTER: On the Republican bench, Nixon had assembled his own A-team consisting of a number of seasoned political pros.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: So he's got Leonard Hall, who's sort of the national chairman for his campaign. He has got Thruston Morton, who is also a very important figure in terms of thinking nationally about how to compete, Robert Finch, who is a kind of campaign director. A young man named HR Haldeman is a kind of advance man, and he will of course become important in the Nixon administration. But Haldeman is already on the scene.
MATT PORTER: Nixon had existing relationships with many of his advisors before running for president. Len Hall served as a former head of the Republican National Committee, and had practically saved Nixon's vice presidency in 1956. Ted Rogers worked as Nixon's media strategist. He helped Nixon secure the VP nomination in '52. Despite having some heavy hitters in his corner, Tim Naftali says Nixon trusted his own instincts more than the people working under him.
TIM NAFTALI: Party heavyweights had imagined a structure for the Nixon campaign that didn't happen. Party heavyweights thought they would establish a headquarters in Washington, which would set the schedule for Richard Nixon. Nixon would be in charge of the strategy. It was his campaign, after all. But the details would be set in advance by this committee. Nixon decides to throw that away, to abandon this idea that a group in DC, which included his national campaign chair, Leonard Hall. And his campaign manager, Bob Finch, would make all these decisions.
MATT PORTER: Bob Finch, a senior Nixon campaign advisor, said, quote, "Nixon did everything but sweep out the plane," end quote. Frederick Logevall says Nixon's inability to trust his deputies proved to be a major weakness.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: It's a kind of one-man operation. You have a much stronger sense that with Kennedy, it is a kind of team operation. He is the head of that team, but there's input. They strategize. They talk for hours about what they should be doing. They have subordinate teams underneath the big team that will debate this or that issue. They delegate.
But with Nixon, I have much less of a sense of this. And at least to some degree, it seems to me a kind of solo operation, which is fascinating. But my sense already, as I look at them side by side, in terms of the professionalism, in terms of the sophistication, in terms of the reach, various indices that we would use, Kennedy's seems to me the stronger operation.
MATT PORTER: Coming up, we'll look at how each campaign sought to win the electoral battle in November, including their choice of running mates.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Are you listening to our podcast and wondering if there's more to the story? Of course there is. If you want to learn more about what you've heard today, we have links to resources from the JFK Library's archives, including photos, films, and primary source documents. We also have oral history interviews from some of the key members of the Kennedy campaign. Visit jfklibrary.org/6020 to get started.
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REPORTER: It started in July, when the Democratic party nominated Senator John F. Kennedy for president of the United States, and for vice president, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.
MATT PORTER: In a presidential campaign, one of the most important decisions a candidate has to make is the choice of their running mate. In our second episode, we spoke about how Lyndon B.Johnson landed on the Kennedy ticket. Both men had just finished a bitter campaign against each other. However, Kennedy was able to mend fences with the Senate majority leader.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON: As an American, as a Democrat, as a warm, good friend, I am proud to stand beside and stand behind the next president of the United States, Jack Kennedy.
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MATT PORTER: Johnson was a favorite among Southern Democrats, whose support would be crucial to a Kennedy victory.
TIM NAFTALI: But it becomes a very successful marriage of convenience. Because Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson proved to be superb campaigners in the South. And they pulled together enough support for Kennedy to actually do better than Adlai Stevenson in the South, which he had to do to win. A Democrat could not win in 1960 without a solid a South as possible.
MATT PORTER: Johnson also represented Texas and its 24 electoral votes.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: I think that Lyndon Johnson turned out to be an asset on the ticket. It's not to say he wouldn't have won with Symington, or with Humphrey, or somebody else on the ticket.But I think Johnson proved to be a shrewd choice.
MATT PORTER: Political strategist David Axelrod says few vice presidential nominees since Johnson have had the same electoral effect on the ticket.
DAVID AXELROD: But what Johnson did bring was the ability to deliver an important state in Texas. There aren't that many figures-- I can't think of one really, who can bring that same advantage to a presidential candidate. Look, one of the many reasons why Barack Obama chose Joe Biden was because he was from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was a strong state. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He was from Delaware, obviously, and that was one advantage that he had. But we didn't have any illusions about any guarantee that he could deliver a state in the way that Kennedy probably felt that Johnson could deliver Texas.
MATT PORTER: For the Nixon team, Frederick Logevall says Henry Cabot Lodge added a certain depth to the ticket.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: What Lodge brought for Nixon is a prominent name. This was a respected name in Republican Party history, a kind of Boston Brahmin name. He had an important World War II service record. He had been senator of Massachusetts. Most recently, he was US ambassador to the United Nations. So pretty good credentials. That's not a bad CV.
MATT PORTER: But unlike Johnson, Lodge, as the former US senator from Massachusetts, would not help Nixon win Kennedy's home state and its 16 electoral votes. As the campaigns moved into the final stretch, the polls narrowed. According to Nixon's internal polling, JFK had taken a 10-point lead after the Democratic convention. But after the Republican convention and heading into August, Gallup had Nixon in front by six points, 50 to 44.
To turn the momentum around, the Kennedy team focused on a key issue facing the campaign, the candidate's religion. The team debated what to do into the final months of the election. But by early September, they finally decided to address the issue head on. In a make or break moment, Kennedy gave a speech on his Catholicism in front of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. The stakes were high, and Ted Sorensen reportedly told a friend, we can win or lose the election right there in Houston.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured, perhaps deliberately in some quarters less responsible than this. I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.
But let me stress again that these are my views. For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
MATT PORTER: The event was broadcast live across Texas on 20 stations. Tim Naftali explains the strategy behind the decision.
TIM NAFTALI: So Kennedy knew the fact he was Catholic was inescapable. The question was whether to confront bigotry. That was the question. And that's what he does in Houston. And the way most Americans would like to remember it is that Kennedy said to Americans, do you want to be bigots?
Because if you discount me as a candidate for the presidency simply because I'm Catholic, you're a bigot. You may not agree with me for other reasons, and that's fine. You may vote against me because of my views on this policy or that policy. Great. But if you're voting against me just because I am Catholic, you're a bigot.
MATT PORTER: President Kennedy had not commented on his religion very much since the West Virginia primaries. So what drove him to make the speech in Houston in September? Jill Lepore is the author of If Then, a new book about a research firm made up of MIT mathematicians called Simulmatics, and how they planned to leverage data for Democratic campaigns.
Unlike polling, where data is collected to try to measure public opinion, Simulatics used their data to try to predict actual voter behavior. The company was hired initially by the Democratic National Committee, and then by Robert F. Kennedy after the convention.
JILL LEPORE: A bunch of social scientists and computer scientists came up with the idea that the next revolution in American politics was going to be not public opinion measurement, per se, but public opinion prediction. And they built what they advertised as a people machine. They could ask their people machine essentially any question.
But if Kennedy were to speak forthrightly about his Catholicism, how would that affect Jewish voters in the Northeast? How would that affect Protestant voters in the Midwest? They would sort of sort and resort, and ask questions again and again and again. So that was the promise, that they could predict the behavior of voters the way meteorologists could predict the weather.
MATT PORTER: Lepore said the Kennedy team paid attention to the reports put out by the Simulmatics team.
JILL LEPORE: What the report says is Kennedy should speak forthrightly about his Catholicism. Because Protestants who would oppose him because he was a Catholic already opposed him because he was a Catholic. But his weakness was with Jewish voters and with black voters. And Jewish voters and black voters were very sensitive to questions of prejudice. And if he came out as a Catholic who understood what it was like to be the object of discrimination, that they would identify with him, and he would draw their support.
MATT PORTER: Just as Lou Harris advised JFK to confront the issue in West Virginia, the report by Simulmatics recommended that JFK had more to gain than to lose by speaking out about his religion. The report predicted JFK was going to lose 110 electoral votes no matter what he did, because he was Catholic. His religion, in effect, a sunk cost.
TIM NAFTALI: So getting people to examine their prejudice was helpful to some degree, but it did come with some political costs.
MATT PORTER: But the report said he could gain as many as 132 electoral votes, mainly in Northern states, where voters would respond positively to addressing the issue. In addition to taking on the issue of his religion, Kennedy and his campaign pioneered new approaches to reach black voters in the North, while minimizing losses among white voters in the South. The campaign helped secure a progressive civil rights plank in the party platform.
It designated a specific department, led by African-American attorney, Marjorie Lawson, to build important relationships with black leaders. The Kennedy campaign saw that they need to do more to win over black voters. And a report from Simulmatics in late August confirmed that JFK was underperforming among this group.
JILL LEPORE: So Simulmatics was in some ways formed to try to convince the DNC that Democrats could not win back the White House unless they took a stronger stand on civil rights. So then they were left in the position of trying to tell Kennedy this, who also needed to hear this, for sure. Because the numbers really do work out this way, that the Democrats needed African-American voters to get a Democrat in the White House.
MATT PORTER: To strengthen the Kennedy campaign civil rights team, they brought in Louis Martin to help improve JFK's profile in the black media. Martin helped secure the support of Adam Clayton Powell and other black leaders, whose endorsements were prominently featured in the black press. As mentioned in our last episode, Martin and the civil rights team then helped orchestrate JFK's key appearances at Howard University and in New York City at the National Conference on Constitutional Rights in early October. This, of course, was followed by JFK's role in helping free Martin Luther King Jr. from prison in Georgia, and the famous Blue Bomb that spread the news to the black community.
TIM NAFTALI: When the campaign sends out those Blue Bombs-- those blue pamphlets and brochures-- and sends them all across African-American communities, largely in the Northeast, they’re making the point that Martin Luther King is free.
MATT PORTER: A critical strategic decision for the Blue Bomb was targeting it only to black churches and other focal points in black communities. According to historian Taylor Branch, Harris Wofford and Louis Martin's plan was to avoid doing anything that would filter into the white press. They even established a fake committee of preachers to protect the Kennedy campaign against being identified as the pamphlet's sponsor.
The impact black voters made in the electoral vote in 1960 is difficult to estimate. But we do know that JFK received about 10% more votes from black Americans than Adlai Stevenson earned in 1956.That's about half a million incremental voters. In an election where JFK won by razor-thin margins in places like Illinois and New Jersey, this increase in black voters could have been the difference between victory and defeat in the 1960 electoral vote. Jill Lepore says the recommendations and timing of reports from the Simulmatics team looked like a roadmap to win.
JILL LEPORE: So if you look at Simulmatics's reports-- the reports that they submitted both to the Democratic National Committee and to the Kennedy campaign-- every single thing that they suggested the Kennedy campaign do, the Kennedy campaign had not then done. And after receiving the reports, the Kennedy campaign did then do those things. And we now think of those things as having been crucial to Kennedy's victory.
MATT PORTER: In contrast, the Nixon campaign took a more hands-off approach.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: He didn't do very much to try to woo African-American voters in the campaign. And he could have done much more. This was a glaring mistake on Nixon's part. Because the opportunities were there for Nixon. He didn't, it seems to me, seize them.
MATT PORTER: If Richard Nixon did have a bold new strategy, it was his plan to campaign in all 50 states. This was in sharp contrast to Kennedy's plan to focus on a smaller group of battleground states.
TIM NAFTALI: He didn't think it was right to write off parts of the United States because Republicans tended not to do well in those parts of the United States. He thought there was an opportunity to win some states in the South. Nixon also was hoping to win a couple of states where presidents had never bothered to visit. And he felt that every electoral vote mattered.
MATT PORTER: In late August, Nixon would suffer costly setbacks, including getting very ill during one of the most crucial periods of the race. His advisors implored him to change his strategy, but Nixon refused.
TIM NAFTALI: He was advised to drop the 50 state approach. It was going to be hard enough. He'd lost two weeks of the campaign in hospital. And he had an opportunity to drop it without being viewed-- he's a young man, or comparatively young man. He would regain his strength, but not immediately.
It seemed pointless, because there were some states that he wasn't going to win. But the candidate persevered, and it was a mistake. So I think that Richard Nixon's campaign was Richard Nixon. And he had made an inflexible commitment to the 50 state strategy.
MATT PORTER: Naftali said the hospitalization offered Nixon the perfect excuse to change his plan of attack for the final months of the campaign.
TIM NAFTALI: And he had an opportunity to drop it without being viewed as being scared after he spent time in the hospital. He had an absolute excuse that Americans would have accepted.
MATT PORTER: In the last days of the election, one of Nixon's top advisors, Len Hall, pleaded with him to focus on key swing states like Texas and Illinois, states that accounted for 51 electoral votes, and would decide the election. But instead, Nixon stuck with his 50 state promise, visiting states like Alaska, with just three electoral votes.
TIM NAFTALI: In the end, this was Nixon's campaign. The decisions were Nixon's alone. A number of people tried to change his mind about the 50 state pledge, and they did not succeed.
MATT PORTER: In a tale of two campaigns, Kennedy's team was able to act quickly, take risks, and seize new opportunities. Meanwhile, Nixon rejected his team's advice and stuck to a 50 state strategy, costing him valuable time and energy. Coming up-- even with the best staff that money can buy, what really makes a campaign sink or swim are the candidates themselves. We'll talk about how the personalities of Kennedy and Nixon changed the race, and also look ahead at the evolution of modern campaigns since 1960.
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JAMIE RICHARDSON: Are you enjoying the 60/20 podcast? This podcast is just one of many initiatives, programs, and resources supported by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The JFK Library Foundation is a nonprofit that provides financial support, staffing, and creative resources for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Learn more about the JFK Library and the Foundation at jfklibrary.org.
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MATT PORTER: Besides choosing the right staff and picking the right strategies, one of the most important parts of winning an election falls to the candidates themselves. Tim Naftali describes John F.Kennedy as a very different candidate than his opponents.
TIM NAFTALI: He startled traditional politicos in the way in which he drew audiences. He drew crowds that they sometimes had a hard time drawing. And he drew crowds far away from Massachusetts. He drew crowds in the South. He drew crowds in the Midwest. He drew crowds in the West.
MATT PORTER: His civil rights director, Marjorie Lawson, described Kennedy, as quote, "always being positive in his approach to people."
TIM NAFTALI: But there was something about Kennedy that made him attractive, interesting, hold your attention, and he was such a contrast from the political heavyweights of the Eisenhower period.And that drew a lot of journalists to him.
MATT PORTER: Frederick Logevall described Kennedy as having an intangible quality that suited him perfectly for politics in the modern era.
FREDERICK LOGEVALL: I think you would have to chalk it up at least in part to his winning personality. I think this was clear going back to his earlier campaigns, which was voters simply liked Jack Kennedy. To listen to Jack Kennedy, somebody said, is to like him. To hear him on the campaign trail is to like him. So personality, I think, mattered.
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MATT PORTER: JFK was also a perfectionist. When Kennedy first entered politics, his speaking style was less disciplined, and he spoke in a manner that wore out his voice quickly. Kennedy improved his speaking style with help from speech coaches during his time in Congress, and through the campaign. This helped him slow his tempo and speak more forcefully.
TIM NAFTALI: He became a better speaker. If you listen to John Kennedy's speeches, or look at them from earlier in his career during his congressional years, you'd see a somewhat less than polished Kennedy. He actually spoke too quickly. And he learned with the help of at least one speaking coach to slow down, to enunciate more clearly.
The Kennedy of the inaugural speech-- the tempo of the inaugural speech was something learned by John F. Kennedy. It was not natural. And on the stump, in the campaign of 1960, in the primaries,John Kennedy is getting better.
MATT PORTER: Kennedy's pragmatism and his willingness to learn from past mistakes are traits that would carry him through the campaign and into his presidency. It also reflected his competitiveness. JFK lost the VP nomination fight in '56, and was determined that if he entered the 1960 campaign, he would do everything it would take to win. Historian Jill Lepore explains how one of Kennedy's closest advisors described him.
JILL LEPORE: Arthur Schlesinger, who describes him as ruthless-- Schlesinger, who greatly admired him-- it wasn't that he thought he was unprincipled. I think he was a very principled person. Now I'm not sure that I agreed with all of his principles. But acting on what he believed was if something that should happen, he would do anything to make it happen. That's the ruthlessness of him.
MATT PORTER: For Richard Nixon, there was no question of his devotion to the campaign and his intellect. But Nixon was unable to delegate to his key advisors, or listen to them on shifting his 50state strategy to focus on key states instead. And as Tim Naftali explains, by the end of the campaign, Nixon was too slow to utilize what many said was his most powerful asset.
TIM NAFTALI: Richard Nixon's mistake was that he campaigned in too many places. He exhausted himself. And he found out at the end of the campaign that his strongest weapon was actually Dwight Eisenhower. The polls start to narrow when Dwight Eisenhower starts campaigning for Richard Nixon at the end of the election.
MATT PORTER: JFK himself saw the impact of President Eisenhower's last minute campaigning for Nixon. On October 28th, Eisenhower gave a televised address to the nation which made clear his full support for Vice President Nixon. JFK watched the address, and commented to his close friend, Red Fay, quote, "with every word that Eisenhower utters, I feel the votes leaving me. If the election were held tomorrow, I'd win easily. But six days from now, it's up for grabs," end quote.
Much has been written about why the Nixon campaign didn't better utilize President Eisenhower. One explanation was that Nixon was warned that the president's health would make it difficult to travel.But by not having Eisenhower appear on television earlier and more often, Nixon appeared to have missed an opportunity. David Axelrod describes Nixon as his own worst enemy when it came to managing the national campaign.
DAVID AXELROD: My observation was that Nixon didn't run a very good campaign. My view is that campaigns always flow from the person at the top. If the person at the top is smart, secure, and a well-grounded candidate, the campaign reflects that. If the person at the top is not-- is anxious, is paranoid, is whatever the quality is-- the campaign will reflect that as well. And my guess is that he was plagued by a little of that.
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JOHN F. KENNEDY: Today, our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.
MATT PORTER: When JFK addressed the tens of thousands of attendees at the Democratic National Convention, he was outlining his vision for the future of America. But he was also making a comparison of his campaign to Nixon's.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: The Republican nominee, of course, is a young man. But his approach is as old as McKinley. His party is the party of the past, the party of memory. His speeches are generalities from Poor Richard’s Almanac.
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But I believe that the times require imagination, and courage, and perseverance. I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that new frontier.
MATT PORTER: And so, as the new frontier dawned, Kennedy's organization, strategy, and tactics would influence future campaigns. Today, data collection by candidates has become a multi-million dollar industry and a staple of modern campaigning. And we look at the electoral map as a series of battlegrounds to be fought, made up by key swing states.
But most importantly, we see that campaigns are massive operations. And when we think about what it takes to win, we see that it's about building a trusted team that's flexible, and takes advantage of change and new opportunities. Here's Amy Dacey, former head of the DNC, and executive director of the Sine Institute of Policy and Politics, as she describes the scope of the modern presidential campaign.
AMY DACEY: Some of these campaigns, it's thousands and thousands, and it reaches a level of like what many companies look like. And you have whole departments that might not have existed in the past, when you think about the social media, the digital, the whole new entities within these campaigns. You have so many different tracks within each campaign, whether it's the research and the communications, and digital and social, and fundraising, and political and community engagement.
There's a lot of different components to the campaign. And I think you do see national campaigns, especially when you get into a general election-- they become very large entities, you know? And there's so many moving parts, and you can get a lot of staff on a national campaign, for sure.
MATT PORTER: While the size and scope of campaign staffs have exploded since 1960, Dacey says the core strategies are still very much the same.
AMY DACEY: You certainly want trusted advisors around you-- so however you coordinate that and make people involved-- but you do need a core team, and you need a manager who trusts certainly the direct reports under them, and puts really good people around you to help do that.
MATT PORTER: There was one other element of the 1960 campaign that we haven't covered in this episode, a new technology broadcasting in living rooms across the country that would prove to be a major factor in influencing the results of the election. We'll tell you that story next time on 60/20.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of 60/20. Along with Jamie Richardson and myself, Matt Porter, 60/20 is made possible with the help from our co-producer, Rick King. Thank you to our research assistants, Megan McKee and Cassie Marando. Special thanks to our foundation colleagues, in particular Meaghan Hohl and Executive Director Rachel Flor.
Our music is composed by Blue.Sessions, and artwork by Brian Kang. We also thank all of our guests for lending their voices and expertise to this podcast. And of course, none of this would be possible without the work by archivists and other staff of the JFK Library Museum, who make much of the material discussed available to all online, and to visiting researchers.
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