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Action & Challenge. With characteristic self-certainty that projected through the TV debates to a nation that scarcely knew him, Kennedy shook the U.S. hard. To the Republican claim that U.S. leadership had halted the march of Communism, he answered with the charge that too little had been achieved for the U.S. to feel safe, that cold-war initiative had been lost to the Soviets, and that as a result, U.S. prestige had dropped to low ebb. Against Republicans' warnings that a Democratic victory would bring a new wave of inflation and Government control, he preached a doctrine of strong federal action in the fields of education, economy, farm policy, housing, unemployment and welfare—promising price stability as well.
In terms of the popular vote accorded Kennedy, the U.S. electorate withheld the resounding mandate that it gave Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. But because he had stirred sufficient numbers of voters to take him and his New Frontier on trust, Kennedy's challenge had been accepted.
The Risk. He had offered remarkably little in the way of specifics. For a nation grown prosperous and comfortable through the eight Eisenhower years (despite recession signs in a number of places), Kennedy's victory presupposed a new willingness to risk much in the '60s. Kennedy's solution to the multibillion-dollar farm scandal—90% price supports —seemed no better than any answer offered before. His welfare programs, despite his reiterated pledge to retain a sound dollar, carried the threat of unbalanced budgets and more inflation at the same time that they strove to satisfy human needs. His pronouncements on the need for new diplomatic vigor in Western Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America were based on the assumption of a U.S. lag and his ability to recreate the atmosphere of F.D.R.'s Good Neighbor policy. But the specifics of foreign policy—on Cuba as on Quemoy—had raised many hackles and some doubts.
Despite this vagueness of program, Kennedy won his victory with the strength of personality and tactic. The U.S. had little known or cared about the boyish, tousle-haired Massachusetts Senator until he erupted on his primary campaign last year. With detached fascination they watched him lift the nomination out of the hands of seasoned pros, felt the incredible force of his bandwagon organization as it coursed over the U.S. Over the months he etched the image of a driving personality, the peculiar quality of his hasty rhetoric that seemed to magnetize though it lacked warmth. Unsmiling for the most part, awkward in gesture, undramatic in tone, he hammered again and again at basically one theme—that the U.S. was caught on dead center in a dynamic age, and he would "get this country moving again."
That single theme, single-mindedly propelled without change of pace, without subtlety of approach, had apparently plumbed an unsuspected concern in the land. Through the pure force of persuasion, Kennedy had won enough Americans to follow him on his own terms.