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The sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim once said that the contrast between the sacred and the profane is the widest and deepest of all contrasts that the human mind can make. In retrospect, in the churchier precincts of the memory, the election of 1960 has, for some, a numinous glow. The election was the prologue to everything that happened after. It was the American politics before the fall. Its protagonists went on to their high, dramatic fates. Perhaps part of the magic of that race is that we know the tale to its dramatic completion.
One man who helped transform that election campaign into instantaneous myth was Theodore H. White. The Making of the President 1960 was the first of a series of five he wrote. White's description of the 1960 race, as one reads it now, seems an endearing period piece. One cannot conceive of writing such prose now, about the 1988 campaign. White invented the form. He absorbed politics and hymned it in an act of reportage and imagination that was a variation on Walt Whitman. White's descriptions of the 1960 race are bardic, Homeric. Political bosses are "chieftains." The "clashes" between Kennedy and Nixon sound like something that occurred between Achilles and Hector outside the walls of Troy. The premise that gives his narrative its dramatic drive is a broad foundation of certitude about the rightness and pre-eminence of American power and, therefore, the absolute centrality of the presidential race in the drama of the world. It was then a Ptolemaic universe, revolving around the White House. What higher story to tell? Americans did not then lose wars. Presidents did not get assassinated, or lie, or have to barricade themselves in the White House.
Heraclitus said a man cannot stand in the same river twice, the flow of things being what it is; 1960 and 1988 are not only different rivers, they run in different courses altogether. It is startling to remember now that Kennedy's Catholicism was the single greatest issue of the campaign and almost unhorsed him in a race he won by less than 120,000 votes. It is a trivia question to ask which two islands off the coast of mainland China received inordinate attention during the second and third television debates between Kennedy and Nixon (Quemoy and Matsu). Both candidates dedicated to strong national defense. The Soviet Union and the Cold War and the nuclear threat dominated everyone's horizon, with anxieties rising over the U-2 spy plane that the Soviets shot down on May 1, 1960, and the Soviets' launching of Sputnik 1 three years earlier. The rocket that took the satellite aloft punched a hole through American self-confidence and made education a central issue.