In the run up to the Presidential election of 1960, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Harvard historian and Kennedy courtier, published a book called Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? Schlesinger had to struggle to find reasons to claim that it was important that Kennedy win.
It came down mainly to noblesse oblige. Lucky for him that JFK’s opponents had started out as poor boys. He’d have had to delve deep into his bag of tricks if Averell Harriman, not Hubert Humphrey, had run against his aspiring Prince in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries; or if Nelson Rockefeller, not Richard Nixon, had been the Republican nominee.
Schlesinger’s argument was a stretch, but the question he asked needed answering. In mid-century America, Democrats and Republicans were very much alike, and everyone knew it. So were Kennedy and Nixon.
Kennedy, of course, had style. Everyone now knows about his many ailments, including Addison’s Disease, his addiction to painkillers and his compulsive philandering. However, at the time, he seemed youthful, athletic and vigorous.
He was, by all accounts, a family man of unimpeachable loyalty, not just to the Kennedy clan and to his daughter (Jackie was pregnant with John John when Schlesinger’s book appeared), but to Jackie as well. She was, after all, every fellow’s dream. In less than a decade’s time, she would become the ultimate trophy bride.
Jack was socially connected and self-assured; he had impeccable taste. He was witty, accomplished, handsome, sexy and rich; a Harvard man out of central casting.
But one with immigrant roots and, like all Kennedys, the common touch. Few resented him; many aspired to be him.
Meanwhile, the conspicuously asexual Nixon seemed uncomfortable in his body, common and gruff. He sported a five o’clock shadow. The contrast was striking.
When it came to substantive political differences however, it took a keen eye to discern any at all. To get liberals on board, the campaign therefore put Schlesinger to work, conjuring up affinities between JFK and his father’s sometime nemesis, Franklin Roosevelt.
Schlesinger wisely chose not to ask — Democrats or Republicans, Does It Make Any Difference? Had that been his question, his ingenuity would probably not have been up to the task of finding reasons for the conclusion he wanted to draw.
There were true liberals in Democratic ranks in 1960 and, for the most part, Democrats were more liberal than Republicans. But then there was the solid (segregationist) South, dragging the party to the right.
Southern Democrats supported the New Deal as long as it didn’t put white supremacy in jeopardy. Northern liberals, needing their votes and being loathe to take on institutional racism in any case, happily went along.
Without the South, the New Deal would not have been possible. But the need to keep the South on board limited its scope and therefore ultimately its reforming zeal. Ira Katznelson tells the story in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013).
By 1960, the civil rights movement was underway; accommodations with Southern racists were therefore becoming harder than they had been to maintain. But, for Democrats trying to elect a President, it was still necessary to keep the South on the Democratic side. That imperative continued to force liberals to moderate their views.
The result was that, even outside the South, the two parties stood pretty much at the same place on the political spectrum.
Race, not religion, was the main concern of the forces pulling the Democrats to the right. Evangelical Christians had yet to forge a distinctive political identity, and the Catholic Church was still more interested in integrating its parishioners into American life than promoting its patriarchal, socially retrograde “moral” teachings.
In 1960, with Kennedy running for President, the Church was especially disinclined to assert its power in ways that might stir up anti-Catholic animosity. They remembered what happened to Al Smith in 1928, the first time a Catholic ran for the office.
Evangelicals who lived in the South were Democrats and so were Catholics in immigrant communities in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. Most of the former would become Republicans once blacks got the vote, and many of the latter would become Reagan Democrats. At the time, though, these constituencies still voted in accord with their economic interests, and there were many New Dealers within them.
However, it is plain in retrospect that the seeds of conflict between economic and social liberals were already in place. That conflict would erupt full-blown in the Reagan years; it has blighted our politics ever since.