1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies, by David Pietrusza (Union Square, first published 2008). My rating: 5 of 5.
You probably know the outline of the 1960 election. Kennedy beat Nixon, the debates were on television, and Illinois was close. What you may not know is how much of the story turns on three men who each wanted the same job, and who would each get it. Pietrusza tells it as a character study, and that is what makes it work.
What the book covers
The book follows the race through the primaries, the conventions, the debates and election night. Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon get most of the attention, but the supporting cast is large: Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson, Stuart Symington, Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph P. Kennedy and Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago. Pietrusza is frank about each man’s flaws. Nobody comes out of the book looking like a saint, and he does not try to make them look like one.
What stayed with me
Nixon and Kennedy as mirror images. Pietrusza writes, “When Richard Nixon looked at Jack Kennedy he saw what he never could be,” and he goes on to say Kennedy saw in Nixon what he himself had become. The two men entered Congress together in 1947, and that rivalry shapes the whole book.
Johnson, the self-serving altruist. Pietrusza does not soften Johnson’s early record of rigged campus and staff elections. He also shows a man with a real, lifelong concern for the poor of the South, white and Black. The portrait is complicated, and the author lets it stay complicated.
Religion in the campaign. Kennedy’s Houston speech on church and state is one of the best parts of the book. Just as interesting is Pietrusza’s account of Nixon refusing to let his campaign use Kennedy’s Catholicism against him, which the author thinks was a matter of principle.
Truman, the inconvenient ghost. By 1960, Pietrusza writes, Truman was an awkward reminder for his own party. “Harry Truman may not have invented grudges, but he may well have perfected the art form.”
The machine at work. The book reports Daley’s 2:00 a.m. call to Kennedy on election night and the questions that have followed the Illinois count ever since. Pietrusza lays out what is known and lets you weigh it.
Who should read it
Anyone interested in American political history, the presidency, or how campaigns actually run behind the speeches. It is long, about 544 pages in the original edition, but it moves quickly because it is built on people, not policy papers. If you read Dewey Defeats Truman, this makes a natural next book. Several of the same names show up in both.
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