Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin America's Split Election Verdict THE PRESIDENTIAL election of 1960 followed the pattern of a football game in which one side piles up what looks...
...Kennedy showed an America slumping in international prestige and in the performance of its domestic economy, and promised to "get it moving" without showing very clearly how to bring this about...
...His youth, his crusading ardor and his glamorous war record were strong assets...
...The country was almost evenly divided and those who like to indulge in postmortems can calculate the small numbers of changed votes in Illinois, California and Texas that would have put Nixon in the White House...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin America's Split Election Verdict THE PRESIDENTIAL election of 1960 followed the pattern of a football game in which one side piles up what looks like a secure comfortable lead and then is almost overtaken in the second half...
...Perhaps it might be said that Nixon made a good pitch in terms of Main Street values—but not so many Americans now live on the country's Main Streets...
...Religion was not the sole factor in this shift, which evidently took place all over the country, but there seems little reason to doubt that it was definitely a contributing factor...
...Late on election evening Kennedy, with about a third of the votes counted, had a lead of about 1.5 million popular votes, enough to have given him a sweeping majority of four or five million if the trend continued...
...Kennedy has received no such blank check as Franklin Roosevelt received in 1932 and in 1936...
...However, large concentrations of Catholic voters are more strategically located in the large cities of states with substantial electoral votes...
...I suspect this is what happened...
...To this observer, at least, neither candidate was satisfactory in coming to grips with specific issues...
...Of half a dozen of my Catholic friends and acquaintances, every one voted for Eisenhower and every one voted for Kennedy...
...But this did not happen...
...The voter did not get a thorough exposition of clear-cut opposing viewpoints but rather two sets of contrasting blurred images...
...as both candidates agreed, had no proper place in the election at all: Senator Kennedy's Roman Catholic faith...
...Nixon's very strong showing west of the Mississippi and in such Southern and border states as Virginia, Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee was due in part to the unwillingness of some Protestants, especially in small towns and rural areas, to vote for a Catholic candidate...
...Allowing for the fact that Nixon also possessed certain advantages— the endorsement of a popular President, the image of experience in public affairs, the fear among some voters that the Democratic party is the "war party"—the Vice President, I think, ran a technically competent campaign and came out rather better than might have been expected...
...By a hairline the voters expressed a preference for change over stability, but the narrowness of the margin suggests that there is no demand or desire for radical and sweeping change...
...Nixon made an unexpectedly strong showing in the states west of the Mississippi, apart from California, and Kennedy's final margin, in popular votes, was only a fraction of one percentage point...
...Indeed, one got the impression that there was something of a last minute trend toward Nixon, which fell just short of being strong enough to put him over...
...So were such factors as his trade union support, the position of the Democrats as the majority party and the appeal of his candidacy to all groups which have felt a little cold-shouldered by the tradition that the Presidency is a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant preserve...
...Once again, although in a different way, the American electorate has rendered a split verdict...
...Vice President Nixon stressed the positive achievements of the last eight years and promised to build on and improve the record of the Eisenhower Administration—again without much specific detail...
...In pre-election comment on this page I suggested several times that a good many votes would be swayed by sympathy with, or antipathy to, Kennedy's religion, and that, on balance, this would help Kennedy more than it would hurt him...
...Indeed, although much patient analysis will be needed before the facts could be established, it seems probable that the outcome was strongly influenced by a factor which...
...Four years ago there was the striking vote of personal confidence in President Eisenhower, accompanied by an equally striking vote of lack of confidence in the Republican party, expressed in the return of a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress...
...Of course religion was not the only force that worked in Kennedy's favor...
...This time the voters were almost equally divided between Kennedy and Nixon and the Democratic victory celebrations were a little tempered by the realization that the Republicans gained a score of seats in the House of Representatives, a very unusual accompaniment to a Presidential victory...
...In an election in which opinion was so evenly divided on the whole, it seems that the massive shift of Catholic voters from Eisenhower to Kennedy may well have been decisive...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 45
