The US presidential election campaign of 1960 was hard-fought and closely run. The Democratic candidate John Fitzgerald Kennedy (or JFK as he became known) beat the Republican Richard Nixon by only 100,000 votes. Nixon had been the favourite until a series of live televised debates (the first in US history) saw the more charismatic Kennedy nudge ahead in the polls. The election itself on 8 November 1960 was ‘too close to call’, although the eventual emergence of Kennedy as the victor promised to some a new era in US politics. Kennedy was the youngest president in American history.
Hugh Brogan, a modern historian, writes about the election of Kennedy:
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