With all that I have written about President John F. Kennedy since around the time of the half century mark since his assassination, I figured that this would be something worth sharing as well.
I had heard that this had been an extremely close election that really could have gone either way. For that matter, despite all of the popularity and even adoration that President Kennedy seemed to enjoy during his years in office, the fact of the matter is that the 1964 election was not exactly a sure thing, either. He was in Texas that weekend for a reason. After all, Texas was a big state that Kennedy wanted, and probably needed, to carry in order to secure re-election the next year.
Of course, he never got the chance, one way or the other. His assassination came less than a year before the 1964 election, and months before the election season really got going. The man who served under him as Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, of course was sworn in very quickly after the actual assassination, and then won the 1964 election, promising to continue the vision put forth by Kennedy. It could be argued that the successes of the "Great Society" policies that Johnson managed to force through continued Kennedy's legacy, or at least should have been Johnson's. Instead, the war in Vietnam overshadowed all of that.
Many remember Johnson in a purely negative light, while the legacy of John F. Kennedy seems to remain almost exclusively in a positive light. Everyone seems to like Kennedy, and people who remember the times of his presidency tend to remember him with fondness.
It can be argued that a part of that was, in fact, his having been assassinated while in office. That tends to lend more sympathy to a situation.
But I think it was more than that. While the assassination of Kennedy essentially was the end of that first part of the sixties that felt more like an extension of the fifties, it also in a sense prevented Kennedy from being confronted by the more divisive times that lay ahead. The latter sixties was a time of the counterculture, a rejection of the conformist spirit that prevailed in the fifties. The civil rights movement was coming to a boil, and more and more people were lobbying for greater rights. There was greater mistrust of the government (due at least in part to the perception of some cover up regarding the Kennedy assassination itself), as well as the war in Vietnam (although some maintain that Kennedy would have gotten the United States out of that mess before it really picked up and, obviously, went bad.
All of that is part of another discussion, though.
The focus of the article below is something that did happen: Kennedy's victory over Nixon in the 1960 Presidential Election. In some respects, reading this article reminded me somewhat of the most controversial election during our own times - the 2000 election between Al Gore, who received the popular vote and perhaps should have won Florida, and George W. Bush, who was rewarded the presidency by the Supreme Court.
It is surprising just how strange the 1960 election was. Given Kennedy's popularity, I had believed when younger that he must have won by a considerable margin, but he did not. In fact, despite 58% popularity at the time that he was assassinated, the 1964 election was hardly a sure bet for Kennedy, either.
Pretty fascinating stuff! Take a look at the link below and see for yourself:
"The drama behind President Kennedy’s 1960 election win: Some people still doubt its outcome" The Constitution Center ^ | 11/08/2013 | Scott Bomboy
http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2013/11/the-drama-behind-president-kennedys-1960-election-win/
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