1960 United States presidential election

• 1. A Headline Too Early

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  The 1960 United States presidential election was still undecided when The New York Times went to press with the headline "Kennedy Elected President." That was before midnight on the 8th of November 1960.

  Turner Catledge, the paper's managing editor, watched the race tighten again as the night went on. In his memoirs he recalled hoping that a certain Midwestern mayor would steal enough votes to pull Kennedy through. Twelve years earlier, the Chicago Tribune had wrongly announced that Thomas E. Dewey had beaten President Harry Truman, and Catledge wanted no repeat.

  When the ballots were counted, 68,832,482 people had voted, and John F. Kennedy led by only 112,827. Kennedy was a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. His running mate was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. Together they had beaten Vice President Richard Nixon and his running mate, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

  The contest broke ground in several ways. Alaska and Hawaii voted for the first time, which made it the first election with fifty states. The District of Columbia was left out for the last time. President Dwight D. Eisenhower could not seek a third term, because the 22nd Amendment now barred it. Both nominees were young enough that America was certain to elect its first president born in the 20th century. At 43 years and 5 months, Kennedy became the youngest person ever elected to the office.

  How did a senator whom party elders called too young win his own party's nomination? Why did four television debates reshape the fall campaign? And once the voting ended, why did so many people argue that the count itself was wrong?

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• 2. A Fresh Face

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  Former President Harry S. Truman was among the Democratic elders who doubted John F. Kennedy before the primaries began. Truman was backing Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri. He and other critics said Kennedy was too young and inexperienced, and they suggested he settle for the second spot on another Democrat's ticket. In 1956, Kennedy had been a candidate for Adlai Stevenson's running mate. The Democrat Jacob Arvey had said Stevenson could have won with him on the ticket.

  Kennedy recognized the suggestion as a strategy meant to keep the public from taking him seriously. He answered frankly: "I'm not running for vice president; I'm running for president."

  The field was crowded. Besides Kennedy, the major candidates were Governor Pat Brown of California, Senators Symington, Lyndon B. Johnson, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and former nominee Adlai Stevenson. Several others ran as favorite sons with no realistic chance. Symington, Stevenson and Johnson all skipped the primaries. Each hoped the leaders would stumble, leaving the convention to choose him as a compromise acceptable to every faction.

  Wisconsin came first, with Humphrey as the opponent. Kennedy's sisters, brothers and wife Jacqueline combed the state for votes. Humphrey complained that he "felt like an independent merchant competing against a chain store." Kennedy won, but some experts said his margin came almost entirely from Catholic areas. His religion was an issue, so Humphrey carried the fight to heavily Protestant West Virginia. The first televised debate of 1960 was held there.

  Kennedy's well-financed and well-organized campaign was not above dirty tricks. Before the Wisconsin vote, Catholic neighborhoods in Milwaukee were flooded with anti-Catholic pamphlets postmarked from Minnesota. People assumed Humphrey's campaign had sent them, and they may have tilted voters away from him. Humphrey's campaign was short of money and could not match Kennedy's advertising or get-out-the-vote drives. Kennedy outperformed him in the debate and gained substantially in the polls afterward.

  In the end, Kennedy beat Humphrey with over 60 percent of the vote, and Humphrey ended his campaign. West Virginia showed that a Catholic could win in a heavily Protestant state. Kennedy had entered only nine primaries, yet Johnson and Symington had entered none. Stevenson had lost twice to Eisenhower in landslides, so most party leaders and delegates went looking for a "fresh face."

  The 1960 Democratic National Convention opened in Los Angeles with Kennedy far ahead but still short of the delegates he needed. Johnson and Stevenson announced their candidacies only the week before. Neither could match the efficient Kennedy team led by Robert Kennedy. Johnson challenged Kennedy to a televised debate before a joint meeting of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations. Most observers thought Kennedy won, and Johnson could not expand his support beyond the South.

  Stevenson launched his campaign publicly only during convention week, so many liberal delegates were already pledged to Kennedy. Even the energetic support of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt could not break that allegiance. Kennedy won the nomination on the first ballot. What he did the next morning surprised many of his own allies.

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• 3. The Southern Gamble

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  At 6:30 on the morning of the 14th of July 1960, Kennedy was already at work while Lyndon Johnson slept. Biographers Robert Caro and W. Marvin Watson say the campaign was desperate to win a race forecast to be very close. They say Johnson was needed to carry Texas and the rest of the South. Caro found that Kennedy asked his brother Robert to estimate the upcoming electoral votes, "including Texas."

  Robert called in Pierre Salinger and Kenneth O'Donnell to help. Salinger realized what counting Texas implied and asked whether a Kennedy-Johnson ticket was under consideration. Robert replied, "Yes."

  Between 9 and 10 that morning, John Kennedy phoned Pennsylvania governor David L. Lawrence, a Johnson backer. He asked Lawrence to nominate Johnson for vice president if Johnson accepted. At 10:15 he went to Johnson's suite at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel to discuss a joint ticket.

  Kennedy then returned to his own suite and announced the ticket to his closest supporters and Northern political bosses. He accepted congratulations from Ohio Governor Michael DiSalle, Connecticut Governor Abraham A. Ribicoff, New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., and Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. Lawrence said that "Johnson has the strength where you need it most." Then he left to begin writing the nomination speech.

  Inside Kennedy's circle, the reaction was sharply divided. Robert Kennedy hated Johnson for his attacks on the family and favored labor leader Walter Reuther. He later said his brother offered the job as a courtesy and never expected Johnson to accept. When Johnson did accept, Robert tried to change Johnson's mind and failed.

  Kenneth O'Donnell remembered being angry at what he saw as a betrayal, since Kennedy had cast Johnson as anti-labor and anti-liberal. Robert visited labor leaders who were extremely unhappy and saw how deep their opposition ran. He then ran messages between the two hotel suites, apparently trying to undermine the ticket without his brother's authorization. His aim was to get Johnson to chair the Democratic Party instead. Johnson refused to change plans unless the request came directly from John Kennedy.

  John Kennedy stayed firm. He told Larry O'Brien, his national campaign manager, that Johnson would be vice president. O'Brien recalled that the words were wholly unexpected. After a brief look at the electoral vote situation, he thought "it was a stroke of genius."

  Despite his brother's reservations, the choice proved a master stroke. Johnson campaigned vigorously and helped the Democrats carry several Southern states that were skeptical of Kennedy, especially his home state of Texas.

  Georgia shows how hard both sides fought. On the 26th of August, Nixon rode through a parade in Atlanta and was greeted by 150,000 people. He told them that in a quarter century no Democratic candidate for president had bothered to campaign in Georgia. Kennedy set out to change that statistic. He visited Columbus, Warm Springs and LaGrange, and saw about 100,000 people in the state.

  At Warm Springs, state troopers tried to hold Kennedy back from an immense crowd. He reached out anyway to shake hands with people sick with polio. The town held a special meaning for him, because Franklin D. Roosevelt had spent time at its rehabilitation facility and died there in 1945. Kennedy praised Roosevelt's "spirit of strength and progress, to get America moving." He also laid out a six-point health plan, which many Republicans called an "appeal to socialism." Joe O. Butts, the mayor of Warm Springs, remembered the visit this way: "He must've shaken hands with everybody within two miles of him, and he was smiling all the time."

  Johnson made a last-minute change of plans to add two 12-minute whistle-stop speeches in Georgia. One stop took him to Atlanta, where he spoke from the rear of a train at Terminal Station.

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• 4. Nixon's Stumbles

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  In 1959, it looked as if New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, leader of the Republican moderate-to-liberal wing, might seriously challenge Vice President Nixon. Then Rockefeller toured the nation and found that the great majority of Republicans favored Nixon. He announced that he would not run. At the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago, conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona received 10 votes, and Nixon took the rest. Nixon became the first sitting vice president nominated for president since John C. Breckinridge exactly a century earlier.

  Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a former Massachusetts senator and United Nations ambassador, became his running mate. Nixon wanted to campaign more on foreign policy than domestic policy, which he believed favored the Democrats. Lodge's foreign-policy credentials fit that plan. Nixon had first sought Rockefeller for the job, but the governor had no ambition to be vice president. He later served as Gerald Ford's vice president from 1974 to 1977.

  In August, President Eisenhower held a televised press conference. Charles Mohr of Time noted Nixon's claims to have been a valuable adviser. He asked for an example of a major Nixon idea that Eisenhower had heeded. Eisenhower replied with a flip remark: "If you give me a week, I might think of one." Both men later said he was joking. The line still hurt Nixon, because it undercut his claim to greater decision-making experience than Kennedy. The Democrats turned it into a television commercial.

  At the Republican convention, Nixon had pledged to campaign in all fifty states. In August, the pledge began to backfire. He injured his knee on a car door while campaigning in North Carolina, and the knee became infected. He stopped campaigning for two weeks while doctors treated it with antibiotics at Walter Reed Hospital.

  When he left the hospital, Nixon refused to drop the pledge. He spent valuable time in states he could not win, states with few electoral votes, and states he would almost certainly carry anyway. The vital weekend before the election found him in Alaska, which had only three electoral votes. Kennedy was campaigning in populous New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

  Lodge ran a lethargic campaign and made several mistakes. He pledged, without approval, that Nixon would name at least one African American to a Cabinet post. Nixon was furious. He accused Lodge of spending too much time with minority groups instead of the white majority. Newspapers still favored the Republican ticket: 731 English-language papers endorsed Nixon, against 208 for Kennedy. The 208 was the most for a Democratic candidate since 1932.

  Nixon carried the weakness from his hospital stay into a Chicago television studio on the 26th of September.

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• 5. Four Television Debates

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  Four presidential debates were held in the fall of 1960, and there were no vice presidential debates. They were the first presidential debates ever and the first held on television. Only the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, for senators from Illinois, had come before.

  The first took place on the 26th of September 1960, at WBBM-TV in Chicago, and drew 66.4 million viewers. Nixon had insisted on campaigning until a few hours before it began. He looked pale, sickly, underweight and tired. His eyes moved across the room, and sweat was visible on his face at various moments.

  He also refused make-up, so his facial stubble showed prominently on black-and-white screens. The set looked darker once its paint dried, and Nixon's suit blended into the background, reducing his stature. His mother called him right after the debate to ask if he was sick. Kennedy, by contrast, had rested and prepared extensively. He appeared tanned, confident and relaxed.

  A popular story says that people who watched on television overwhelmingly believed Kennedy won, while radio listeners favored Nixon. That claim has been disputed. The evidence comes mainly from a market survey by Sindlinger and Company. Among radio listeners, 49 percent named Nixon and 21 percent named Kennedy. Among television viewers, 30 percent named Kennedy and 29 percent named Nixon, which looks like a tie.

  No details about that sample were ever reported, so it is unclear whether the results hold for the country. One study also noted that 87 percent of American households had a television in 1960. Homes without one were concentrated in rural areas, especially in southern and western states unlikely to hold many Catholic voters. Gallup polls in October still showed Kennedy moving into a slight but consistent lead, after a statistical tie through August and September.

  For the remaining debates, Nixon regained his lost weight, wore television make-up, and appeared more forceful. The second, on the 7th of October in Washington, drew 61.9 million viewers. The third came on the 13th of October, and the fourth, on the 21st of October in New York City, drew 60.4 million. Political observers at the time felt Kennedy won the first debate and Nixon won the second and third. They called the fourth a draw and saw it as the strongest showing by both men.

  The third debate changed how debates were staged. Split-screen technology put two men on opposite sides of the country into a conversation in real time. Nixon was in Los Angeles and Kennedy in New York, yet they appeared to share a room because the sets were identical. Each candidate had a monitor carrying the feed from the other studio. Bill Shadel moderated from a third studio in Los Angeles.

  The main topic was military force. Should it be used to keep Quemoy and Matsu, two island archipelagos off the Chinese coast, from falling under Communist control? Those islands would return to the campaign in its closing days.

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• 6. Faith, Rights, And Missiles

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  Southern Baptists and Lutherans were among the Protestants who feared a Catholic in the White House would give the Pope undue influence in the nation's affairs. Radio evangelists such as G. E. Lowman wrote that the Roman Catholic system "demands the first allegiance of every true member." The issue grew so large that Kennedy gave a speech to the nation's newspaper editors. He criticized them for giving religion more prominence than foreign policy and other topics he thought mattered more.

  On the 12th of September 1960, Kennedy spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He told them: "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic." He promised to respect the separation of church and state and not to let Catholic officials dictate public policy to him. He also asked whether one-quarter of Americans should be treated as second-class citizens because they were Roman Catholic. He became the first Roman Catholic elected president, and 60 years passed before Joe Biden became the second.

  Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Georgia while taking part in a sit-in, and Kennedy's campaign saw an opening. Nixon asked President Eisenhower to intervene, but Eisenhower declined. The matter was under state jurisdiction, and the president had no power to pardon King. Nixon took no further action. Kennedy placed calls to local political authorities to get King released, and he called King's father and wife. Kennedy also wrote to Georgia's governor, Ernest Vandiver, asking him to look into the harsh sentence.

  King's father endorsed Kennedy, and the campaign gained favorable publicity among Black voters. Harris Wofford, a friend of King's on Kennedy's civil rights team, helped hand out a pamphlet to Black churchgoers on the Sunday before the election. It read: ""No Comment" Nixon versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy." On election day Kennedy won the Black vote by wide margins in most areas. That may have helped his margin in New Jersey, South Carolina, Illinois and Missouri. Republican national chairman Thruston Ballard Morton called the African-American vote the single most crucial factor.

  The issue that dominated the election, though, was the Cold War. The Soviets had launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth, in 1957. American leaders soon warned that the nation was falling behind in science and technology. In 1960, Fidel Castro's revolutionary regime in Cuba became a close ally of the Soviet Union. Polls showed that more than half of Americans thought war with the Soviets was inevitable.

  Kennedy pledged to "get America moving again." He charged that Republican leadership had let the Soviets pull ahead militarily and economically, and he pointed to a perceived "missile gap." He proposed a bi-partisan congressional investigation into whether the Soviets led in missiles. In an October 18 speech, he noted that senior military officers had long criticized Eisenhower's defense spending. He also said the Republicans had ignored the need to catch up in the Space Race. The Eisenhower administration had established NASA in 1958.

  Nixon promised to continue the "peace and prosperity" of the Eisenhower years. He argued that his greater political experience made him more qualified and called Kennedy "too young and inexperienced." Yet the two men were only four years apart in age. Kennedy turned his youth into an asset. His campaign slogan praised a man "seasoned through and through/but not so dog-gone seasoned that he won't try something new." Frank Sinatra, Henry Fonda and Harry Belafonte endorsed him.

  As the campaign entered its final two weeks, the polls and most pundits predicted a Kennedy victory. Eisenhower, who had largely sat out the race, then made a vigorous tour for Nixon over the last 10 days. His popularity ran around 60-65 percent through 1960, and some historians fault Nixon for not using it more. The tour gave Nixon a badly needed boost. He also accused Kennedy of showing weakness toward Communist aggression, because Kennedy had said Quemoy and Matsu fell outside the treaty protecting the Nationalist Chinese. By election day, the polls indicated a virtual tie.

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• 7. The Long Count

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  Nixon watched the returns from his suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy followed them at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Early returns from Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago gave Kennedy a large lead. Later returns from rural and suburban areas in the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states and the Pacific Coast steadily closed the gap.

  At about 3 a.m., Nixon gave a speech that hinted Kennedy might have won. Reporters were puzzled, because it was not a formal concession. He said only that Kennedy would be elected if "the present trend continues." Nixon finally conceded on the afternoon of the next day, and Kennedy claimed victory.

  The Electoral College result was 303 to 219 for Kennedy. The popular margin of 0.17 percent was the closest of the 20th century. Only the 0.11 percent margin in 1880 was narrower. Of 3,129 counties and county-equivalents, Nixon won 1,857 and Kennedy 1,200. Kennedy won 27 of the 39 largest cities. He also became the first candidate to win the presidency while carrying fewer states than his opponent, which would not happen again until 1976.

  A tiny shift would have changed everything. Kennedy won Illinois and Missouri by less than 1 percent each. Moving 18,838 votes there would have left both men short of the 269 electoral votes needed. That would have forced a contingent election in the House of Representatives. Kennedy won five states by less than 1 percent: Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey and New Mexico. Had Nixon won all five, he would have taken the presidency with 282 electoral votes.

  The total of 537 electoral votes was up from 531 in 1956, because Alaska and Hawaii each added two senators and one representative. The House was temporarily expanded from 435 members to 437. That made 1960 the only presidential election in which 269 electoral votes decided it.

  California, Nixon's home state, showed how thin the lines were. When all precincts reported, Kennedy seemed to lead by 37,000 votes. A week later, the absentee ballots were counted, and Nixon came from behind to win the state by 36,000.

  Hawaii took far longer. Official results showed Nixon ahead by 141 votes, and the state was called for him early Wednesday morning. Acting Governor James Kealoha certified the Republican electors, who cast Hawaii's three electoral votes for Nixon. Clear discrepancies existed in the tabulations, though, and Democrats petitioned for a recount in Hawaii circuit court. The challenge was still unresolved at the safe harbor deadline set by the Electoral Count Act. Even so, Democratic electors convened at the ʻIolani Palace on the 19th of December and cast their votes for Kennedy.

  The recount finished before Christmas, and Kennedy was declared the winner by 115 votes. On the 30th of December, the circuit court ruled that Hawaii's three electoral votes belonged to Kennedy. A new certificate was needed, with only two days left before Congress convened on the 6th of January 1961. A letter saying one was on the way went out by registered air mail. Both slates of Hawaii's votes were presented, and Nixon presided over the count. He said "without the intent of establishing a precedent" and asked for unanimous consent that the Democratic votes for Kennedy be counted.

  Fifteen electors refused to vote for either Kennedy or Nixon. Eight were from Mississippi, six from Alabama and one from Oklahoma. They voted for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, a conservative Democrat who was not a candidate and had not sought their votes. Many Southern Democrats opposed voting rights for African Americans. Segregationists had hoped unpledged electors could extract concessions from either party in a close race. The 14 unpledged Democrats voted for Strom Thurmond as vice president, while the faithless Republican in Oklahoma chose Barry Goldwater.

  Alabama also made Kennedy's popular vote hard to measure. Voters there chose electors individually. The Democratic slate held five electors pledged to Kennedy and six unpledged ones, and all six unpledged electors voted for Byrd. Under one method of dividing the Democratic votes, Kennedy would have 34,049,976 votes nationally to Nixon's 34,108,157, which would make Nixon the popular-vote winner.

  The map also pointed toward the future. Democrats had relied on dominating Southern states to win the Electoral College, but Kennedy won without carrying a number of them. It was the first election in which a Republican carried Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, Virginia or Idaho without winning the presidency. Later elections followed that pattern, with Northern Democrats relying on the Northeast and Midwest, and Republicans on the former Solid South and the Mountain West. It was also the last time a Democrat won without Wisconsin.

  A University of Michigan team interviewed people who voted in both 1956 and 1960. It found that Nixon lost 28 percent of the Eisenhower voters, while Kennedy lost only 15 percent of the Stevenson voters. In his victory speech, Kennedy warned that "a supreme national effort will be needed to move this country safely through the 1960s."

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• 8. Cries Of Fraud

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  In Texas, where Johnson was a senator, and in Illinois, home of Mayor Richard J. Daley's powerful Chicago political machine, allegations of vote fraud were widespread. Those two states mattered. If Nixon had won both, he would have been elected with 270 electoral votes. Republican senators Everett Dirksen and Barry Goldwater said fraud "played a role in the election" and that Nixon actually won the national popular vote. Earl Mazo, a journalist who was Nixon's biographer, made accusations of his own.

  Nixon's campaign staff urged him to demand recounts and challenge the result in several states. They focused on Illinois, Missouri and New Jersey, where large majorities in Catholic precincts had handed Kennedy the election. Three days after the election, Nixon gave a speech saying he would not contest it. Thruston Ballard Morton, the Republican national chairman, visited Nixon in Key Biscayne, Florida, where Nixon had taken his family on vacation. Morton pushed for a recount. He challenged the results in 11 states and kept the cases in court into mid-1961. Their only result was Hawaii going to Kennedy.

  Kennedy won Illinois by less than 9,000 votes out of 4.75 million cast, a margin of 0.2 percent. Nixon carried 92 of the state's 101 counties. Kennedy's victory came from Chicago, with its large Catholic and African-American populations. His margin in the city was 318,736 votes, and in Cook County it was 456,312. Daley was alleged to have phoned the Kennedy campaign with a promise. In the words attributed to him: "With a little bit of luck and the help of a few close friends, you're going to carry Illinois."

  The Republican Chicago Tribune went to press when 79 percent of Cook County precincts had reported, against just 62 percent of precincts statewide. Nixon never led in Illinois, and Kennedy's lead merely shrank as the night went on.

  The Illinois challenge was led by Cook County state's attorney Benjamin Adamowski, a Republican who also lost his own re-election bid. It found some precincts with errors favoring Nixon and Adamowski, a sign of error rather than fraud. Totals still fell short of reversing the result. A Daley-connected circuit judge, Thomas Kluczynski, threw out a federal lawsuit contesting the totals. Kennedy later appointed him a federal judge on Daley's recommendation. The Republican-dominated State Board of Elections unanimously rejected the challenge. There were also signs of irregularities in downstate areas controlled by Republicans, but Democrats never pressed them.

  More than a month after the election, the Republican National Committee abandoned its Illinois voter fraud claims. Even if Nixon had carried Illinois, Kennedy would still have won 276 electoral votes to 246. A special prosecutor charged 650 people, but the charges were later dropped. Three Chicago election workers were convicted of voter fraud in 1962 and served short jail terms.

  In Texas, Kennedy defeated Nixon by a margin of 51 to 49 percent, about 46,000 votes. Some Republicans argued that Johnson's formidable political machine had stolen enough votes in counties along the Mexican border. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy's speechwriter and special assistant, answered that the margin was simply too large for fraud to be decisive. Mazo wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that "a minimum of 100,000 votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket simply were nonexistent."

  Fannin County had only 4,895 registered voters, yet 6,138 votes were cast, three-quarters of them for Kennedy. In one Angelina County precinct, Kennedy received 187 votes to Nixon's 24, though only 86 voters were registered there. Defenders replied that registration figures counted only people who had paid the poll tax. Veterans, senior citizens and some other groups were exempt from it. Republicans demanded a statewide recount. They learned that the state Board of Elections, whose members were all Democrats, had already certified Kennedy as the winner.

  Mazo never changed his view. In 2000 he told The Washington Post: "There's no question in my mind that it was stolen. It was stolen like mad. It was stolen in Chicago and in Texas." He said he found the names of the dead voting in Chicago, and a gutted, empty house with 56 votes for Kennedy. He also reported Republican fraud in southern Illinois, but said it did not match what he found in Chicago. After he published four parts of an intended 12-part series, he said Nixon asked his publisher to stop the rest to prevent a constitutional crisis.

  The Chicago Tribune, which endorsed Nixon in 1960, wrote that the election was marked by "gross and palpable fraud." A 1985 academic study analyzed the ballots of two disputed Chicago precincts. It found a pattern of miscounts favoring Democrats, but Nixon suffered less from it than Republicans in other races. The estimated error would have cut Kennedy's Illinois margin from 8,858 votes to just under 900. The study concluded there was insufficient evidence that Nixon had been cheated out of the state.

  Nixon declined to fight on, despite pressure from Eisenhower, his wife Pat and others. In his memoirs he explained that every state had different election laws, and some had no provision for a recount. A recount might take months, leaving the nation without a president. In Six Crises, he also feared that the United States would set a bad example for newly independent countries. He warned that it would create "open-season for shooting at the validity of free elections throughout the world."

  Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and was succeeded by his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon won the 1968 election. That left Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as the only one of the four major nominees who never became president.

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