A New Leader

Through the long night and into the next day the U.S. watched the ebb and flow of the political tides until, with an almost imperceptible surge, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected the 35th President of the United States.

It was, as Richard Nixon had prophetically promised last summer, the closest election in modern times. In popular vote as of the morning after, the two candidates were only a percentage point apart--and more than half the 600,000 votes that separated them were rolled up by Kennedy in one state, New York. Nixon was actually leading in more than half the states, though Kennedy's close margins in the big states provided the electoral vote power to put him over.

The closeness of the election proved that the pollsters were justified in their pre-election jitters, and the two candidates were right in their decision to campaign down to the ultimate moment of election eve.

No Lament. It was so close that pundits, politicians and the voters themselves would be debating for a long time just what the returns proved, what Kennedy's mandate was, and what might have gone differently.

There was no lament on Nixon's part, even in the numbness of fatigue, other than the sadness written on Pat Nixon's face as Nixon all but conceded defeat. Once it had been thought that if Nixon lost, he would be thrust aside in favor of a Rockefeller or a Goldwater. Instead, he emerged still a potent figure in the Republican Party. There would be many who would say that the TV debates did Nixon the most harm, giving the unknown Kennedy a chance to show himself. There would be Republican post-mortems over where an ounce of extra energy might have tipped the balance. Republicans might well wonder whether defeat came because Dwight Eisenhower had failed to dramatize the real gains of his Administration, or whether one or two more presidential speeches might have made the difference. The Kennedy forces would re-examine their overconfidence in places such as Ohio and Wisconsin and Alaska.

No Precedent. But the closeness of the popular vote could not mask the real measure of Jack Kennedy's victory. He was the first Roman Catholic ever to be elected President, and he achieved this without leaving any important scars. He had propelled himself by sheer drive into the Democratic nomination, had rebuilt the old Democratic coalition of Northern big cities and Southern conservatives, outdoing even Franklin Roosevelt in rallying the support of Catholic, Jewish and Negro voters. He had broken all precedent by persuading a nation to make a massive change in its vote when his predecessor's term had, in net, brought both peace and prosperity.

Kennedy had done it all not with any specific program, or even any very specific catalogue of faults. He had done it by dinning home the simple message of unease, of things left undone in a world where a slip could be disastrous. But most of all he had done it by the force of his own youthful and confident personality, which seemed to promise freshness and vigor. The U.S. had quite literally taken Jack Kennedy at face value.

He had, in fact, been given a blank check drawn on a sound and thriving nation. He would go into the White House with a Democratic House and Senate, and with a Vice President whose talents lay in handling Congress. The nation that Jack Kennedy had persuaded to endorse him would expect much, would demand much, and, conceivably, would receive much.

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