1960 - Kennedy vs. Nixon
The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon Debate; Courtesy of the National Park Service
For the first time, a presidential campaign features a candidate, Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who comes from a wealthy family. In addition to its direct contributions, the Kennedy clan helps by forming Ken-Air Corporation, which buys a $385,000 Convair airplane and leases it to JFK’s campaign at a cut-rate cost of $1.75 per mile. Throughout the pivotal West Virginia primary, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, Kennedy’s chief rival, complains of the difficulties of competing with “Jack’s jack.” Humphrey’s complaints about JFK grow even more bitter. “I don’t have any daddy who can pay the bills for me,” he says. “I can’t afford to run around this state with a little black bag and a checkbook.”
Humphrey isn’t just grousing. By his own later account, Raymond Chafin, a political boss in Logan County, is asked by Kennedy backers what it would take to get him to switch his support from Humphrey to Kennedy. Chafin tells them “35,” meaning $3,500, but the Kennedy forces apparently misunderstand him. A few days before the election, Chafin is handed two sealed briefcases containing $35,000 in cash. When he calls the Kennedy campaign to report the mistake, he is told to keep the extra money, which by his own later admission, he spends bribing voters. Vote-buying allegations threaten to taint JFK’s victory in West Virginia, but nothing comes of a subsequent Justice Department investigation. Kennedy himself will joke about the expensive win, saying that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had complained that JFK was supposed to “rent the state, not buy it.”
In the general election campaign, Kennedy and his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, spend more than $24 million (the equivalent of $160 million in today’s dollars). Although the GOP out-raises the Democrats by a slight margin, once contributions from labor unions’ political action committees are factored in, JFK has $12.9 million to spend, compared with Nixon’s $11.3 million. (Nixon, however, does benefit from independent expenditures by the Swift-Boaters of his era — religious groups that shell out an estimated $750,000 to print and distribute tracts attacking Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith.)
On election night, Kennedy edges out Nixon by just two-tenths of a percent in the popular vote, a painful loss that will contribute to Nixon’s lasting fixation on raising money. As he will tell campaign aides eight years later, “I never want to be outspent again.”
SOURCES: Herbert E. Alexander, Financing the 1960 Election, Citizens Research Foundation, 1962; Gil Troy, “Money and Politics: The Oldest Connection,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1997; George Thayer, Who Shakes the Money Tree? — American Campaign Financing Practices from 1789 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster), 1973; Meg Vaillancourt, “JFK Campaign Allegations; W. Va. Politician Writes of Buying Votes for Candidate in ’60,” The Boston Globe, July 17, 1994; Robert Rupp, “Undermining Religious Bigotry — Kennedy’s Primary Win Was Victory for Tolerance,” The Charleston Gazette, May 9, 2005.
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Next election year: 1956 - Eisenhower vs. Stevenson