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,...