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Z 30 Z chapter 3 CIvIL rIghTs and The 1960 CaMPaIgn In November 1960 the country elected a new president. For the first time a president would be elected who had been born in the twentieth century. For the first time since 1948, Democrats had a chance of winning. Dwight Eisenhower’s post–World War II popularity had been so broad that he probably could have won the presidential nomination of the DemoZ cratic Party. Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns against him in both 1952 and 1956 had been noble holding actions, giving the Democratic Party a nominee of eloquence and dignity, but one doomed to defeat. By 1956 John F. Kennedy, a World War II hero, had been in elective poliZ tics for a decade, as a Massachusetts congressman for six years and a U.S. senator for four. At the 1956 Democratic Convention Stevenson threw open the nomination for vice president. In an exciting contest with Tennessee senators Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, Kennedy had gained stature and a new national audience. His loss to Kefauver was a blessing in disguise, for when Stevenson was swamped by President Eisenhower in the election, Kennedy took none of the blame. Nostalgia, respect, and a powerful nominating speech by Senator EuZ gene McCarthy of Minnesota led some Democrats to support Stevenson for a third try in 1960, when for the first time he might have had some realistic hope of winning. Other liberals supported McCarthy’s Minnesota Senate colleague, Hubert H. Humphrey, a strong influence on the national party since his fervent speech on civil rights at the 1948 convention. And there was the man from Texas who had delivered on civil rights legislation, Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy was fighting not only his youth but also the prevailing belief, since Al Smith’s defeat in 1928, that no Roman Catholic could be elected president. Kennedy’s primary victory over Humphrey in heavily Protestant Civil rights and the 1960 Campaign Z 31 Z West Virginia helped his cause, but West Virginia had only a small black population. The New Deal had brought blacks into the Democratic coaliZ tion.1 For Kennedy to defeat Richard Nixon in November, he would need a large turnout of black voters in the key industrial states, and he would need to receive the overwhelming majority of those black votes. Harris Wofford had corresponded with Kennedy after the senator’s stirZ ring speeches in Poland and about Algeria in 1957. Wofford, a Notre Dame professor and counsel to the Civil Rights Commission in 1959, became a civil rights advisor to Kennedy. He found Kennedy “had no entrenched positions at all in this area, but he was learning, and he was offended by the discrimination.”2 Robert Kennedy said of his brother: He voted in favor of the jury trial amendment (to the 1957 Act), so there were some reservations about him on that. Nixon didn’t have a bad record as far as Negroes were concerned, so they were reasonably interested in him. . . . The Negro vote in the 1960 election was there to be won or lost.3 Party platforms are generally read only by members of platform comZ mittees, opposition researchers, and some of the media. But what is written about them can have great effect. The Democratic Platform Committee chairman in 1960 was a respected party elder statesman, former congressZ man and ambassador to India Chester Bowles of Connecticut. Federal fair employment practices (FEP) legislation was frequently talked about at this time but generally dismissed out of hand because of hardZcore southern opposition. Bowles assumed there would be some wateringZdown of his civil rights plank to placate the South and went all the way, including FEP legislation in what would be “the strongest platform ever adopted by the Democratic Party.”4 Political campaigns are generally chaotic. During national conventions, the left and right hands may lose touch. Such a breakdown occurred here. Robert Kennedy, managing his brother’s campaign, did not realize that the platform proposed to the delegates was not the more moderate version that Bowles had envisioned would be adopted, but rather the hardZline first version. The word was passed, and Kennedy delegates resisted any attempt to amend the report of the Platform Committee.5 Included in the platform was endorsement of the “peaceful demonstrations for firstZclass citizenZ ship which have recently taken place in many parts of the country” and of [3.135.198.49] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 19:13...

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