CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURY
Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960
By Irwin F. Gellman
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. Sixty-one years after its publication, White’s siren song of “a heroic senator defeating an unscrupulous partisan” has lost none of its seductive power, Gellman believes; esteemed historians remain in its thrall and in Kennedy’s camp. Taylor Branch, Robert Dallek, David Greenberg, Jill Lepore, Fredrik Logevall — apologists and idolaters all, in the author’s view. He calls each one out by name, accusing some of carelessness and others of “distorting or falsifying facts” — a serious charge that is in no way substantiated.
What is surprising about this buildup — this raising of stakes and throwing down of gauntlets — is that “Campaign of the Century” is largely a conventional, Nixon-friendly take on the race. Books of this kind are fewer, to be sure, than books by Kennedy partisans, but Gellman’s is hardly alone on the shelf. Nixon has always had his defenders (including, not least, Nixon himself) and Kennedy his detractors. White, for that matter, has been picked apart for decades by scholars of all stripes. When Gellman writes that Kennedy’s operation was “far more corrupt and ruthless than has been presented” and Nixon’s “far cleaner,” this is less a revelation than a familiar brand of spin.
Indeed, Gellman’s thumb is firmly on the scales — or in Kennedy’s eye. From the book’s first pages, Kennedy is cynical and callow, the unscrupulous son of an unscrupulous father. Gellman is at pains to establish that Kennedy was not a family man but a philanderer, that he was not in fine health but was hobbled by Addison’s disease and back problems, and that the news media — besotted by “Kennedy’s youth, his smile,” his winsome wife and child — eagerly overlooked it all. Of course, Kennedy’s infidelities and health issues have long been common knowledge, as have the mores of the midcentury press; even favorable biographies take them into account. Gellman adds nothing here but fresh outrage. In both tone and content, his caricature of Kennedy is an echo of hit jobs like Victor Lasky’s “John F. Kennedy: What’s Behind the Image?,” which was stapled together on the eve of the election and distributed by the Republican Party.
Nixon, by contrast, “had no sexual adventures and no long-term health issues.” And while he was, Gellman concedes, capable of an occasionally vicious attack, he is rendered here as a victim — mainly of a hate-filled press corps that portrayed him unrelentingly “in the worst possible light.” There is some truth to this picture: Nixon did provoke (and return) a particular sort of loathing among liberal reporters, even when he was on his best behavior — as he generally was in 1960, a year when he forswore the low road in the pursuit of high office. Unfairness, yes, but the book fails to show that it made a difference in November. In fact the bias, as Gellman notes in passing, ran in both directions: Nixon was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of daily newspapers — among them, the Hearst and Scripps Howard chains — and the publishing empire of Henry Luce.
As a political narrative, “Campaign of the Century” is strangely lacking in both politics and narrative. It dutifully records the clashes of candidates but offers little context for their disagreements. The book fails to explain, for example, where the distinction lay between Nixon’s anti-Communism and Kennedy’s, or between their platforms on civil rights. There is, moreover, no analysis of Nixon’s position in the widening breach between Nelson Rockefeller, on the left of the Republican Party, and Barry Goldwater on the right. Gellman places his man in the middle, but gives no sense of whether this moderation was ideological or tactical. All is left a muddle while the author sprints off in pursuit of historians who have overhyped Kennedy’s performance in the televised debates.
But the white whale here is proof of a stolen election. This book does not provide it. The case it puts forward is circumstantial — and nothing new. Much is made of “suspicions” in Texas and “irregularities” in Illinois as if such charges are, in themselves, dispositive. In the wake of 2020, we should know better than that. And so should a political historian of the mid-20th century: If fraud was a feature of elections in that era, so were accusations of fraud, wielded as a political cudgel. In 1948, for example, a top Republican official charged three Democratic candidates for Senate with “serious” campaign fraud — more than a week before Election Day. Four years later, pre-emptively again, the Republican National Committee chairman called on federal prosecutors to keep tabs on big-city Democrats — who, he said, would “stop at nothing” to “steal” the election.
None of this is to deny that Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago had a history of ballot manipulation or that votes were likely stolen in Texas. But in recent decades, rigorous studies have underscored what judges and review boards concluded in 1960: To the extent that fraud occurred, it was not enough to change the result — least of all in Texas, where Kennedy’s margin exceeded 46,000 votes. The weakness of the case did not stop Nixon’s men from pushing their allegations. But six decades hence — in the absence of new evidence, at a time when false claims of a stolen election pose a mounting threat to our system of self-government — historians ought to think twice before endorsing them.
