The Election of 1960: Future Presidents Campaign in Lawrence Park

Posted On October 29, 2020

By Sam Pickard

Sixty years ago this October, not one but two future presidents came through Marple Township during their campaign for the White House. Republican Vice President Richard Nixon and Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts were squaring off in a tight race to win the presidency that saw air travel, television, and the suburban vote playing increasingly important roles.

The Candidates

Vice President Richard M. Nixon was the Republican candidate in 1960. Nixon was 47-years-old in October 1960. A native of Southern California, Nixon was raised in relative poverty—first on an orange farm and then in the Quaker town of Whittier. After serving as a Lt. Commander in the Navy during World War II, Nixon was elected to Congress from California in 1946 and then the Senate in 1950. Chosen as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate in the 1952 presidential election, Nixon faced little opposition in securing the Republican nomination in 1960, easily brushing aside a challenge from New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.¹

John F. Kennedy was simultaneously very similar and very different from his opponent. The 43-year-old senator from Massachusetts had been raised in a wealthy Irish Catholic family. His father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., served as the American ambassador to Britain as World War II broke out. Kennedy also served in the Navy during the war, commanding a PT boat and gaining a reputation as a hero after his ship was sunk and he led his surviving crew to safety.²

After the war, Kennedy was also elected to Congress in 1946 and advanced to the Senate in 1952, the same year Nixon was elected Vice President. In 1960, Kennedy faced a number of challengers for the Democratic nomination, but defeated Senator Hubert Humphrey in the primaries and then fended off Stuart Symington, Lyndon Johnson, and Adlai Stevenson (the 1952 and 1956 Democratic nominee) at the Democratic National Convention in August.³

The Election of 1960

While overall the 1950s are remembered for their economic prosperity, during the Eisenhower administration economic growth averaged only 2.4 percent annually. Additionally, the third economic recession during the Eisenhower years began in April 1960, giving Kennedy an avenue of attack against the sitting administration.⁴ In addition to the economy, civil rights continued to be an important domestic issue. The Democrats adopted a strong civil rights plank in their platform while Nixon’s running mate Henry Cabot Lodge promised (without the candidate’s prior knowledge) that an African American would be included in Nixon’s cabinet.⁵

Foreign affairs were at the forefront of the 1960 election and dominated the candidates’ speeches at Lawrence Park. In May 1960, an American U-2 spyplane was shot down over the Soviet Union and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers had been captured. The incident resulted in international embarrassment for the United States and collapse of a summit in Paris between Eisenhower and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In addition to this, Fidel Castro’s government had come to power the previous year in Cuba—just 90 miles off Florida’s coast—and the Soviets had won the race to launch the first satellite into space with Sputnik in 1957. Kennedy would seize on the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy setbacks, forcing Nixon to defend them. In particular, Kennedy talked of an emerging missile gap (whereby the Americans had less nuclear missiles than the Soviets) as a threat the Eisenhower administration had allowed to grow. Ironically, Eisenhower knew there was no missile gap from the U-2 missions but could not disclose the information.⁶

The 1960 campaign is perhaps best remembered for the introduction of the televised presidential debate. Four debates were held between September 26 and October 21—before the candidates visited Marple Township. The first debate has become fixed in American cultural memory as a moment in which television came of age: the tanned, fit, and well-dressed Kennedy was positively contrasted by viewers against the poorly made up Nixon, who was recovering from an illness.⁷

Planning the Visits

The initial announcement of a Kennedy visit to Marple Township appears to have come in late September. On the 22^nd, the Delaware County Daily Times reported that the senator, who would be coming to speak to the Democratic County Committee dinner at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, would fly into Lawrence Park Shopping Center the next day in a helicopter and give a speech. Afterward, it was reported that he would take off again in the helicopter and fly to Chester where he would give a speech.⁸

Richard Nixon was not initially supposed to travel through, much less make a speech in Marple Township. The vice president’s original itinerary would have taken him from a speech in Chester up the relatively rural US 322 to West Chester. The route was changed just days before, perhaps at the suggestion of local supporters, to follow PA 320 to West Chester Pike, which would expose Nixon to residents of the newly built-up suburban areas.⁹

Vice President Nixon’s Visit: Saturday, October 22, 1960

At 10:16 a.m., Nixon’s plane landed at Philadelphia International Airport. He was 15 minutes late because he’d kept the plane circling while he personally drafted a reply to Kennedy’s statements on Cuba. Nixon and his wife Pat were driven to Chester, where he spoke to a crowd of about 8,000 people in Market Square after being introduced by Delaware County Congressman William H. Milliken. During his 13-minute speech, Nixon attacked Kennedy for his statements on Taiwan and Cuba. Noting that while he didn’t question that his opponent had the best of intentions, the vice president warned “that America… cannot sleep well at night if we have a man like [Kennedy] with that kind of judgement in the White House for the next four years.”¹⁰ He further emphasized that Kennedy’s suggestions that Eisenhower should apologize to Khrushchev for the U-2 spying or accepting Communist expansion in certain areas as a price for peace would backfire. “We cannot afford to have a president that makes that kind of mistake.”¹¹

After Nixon’s speech, he paid a brief visit to John J. McClure, the aged Delaware County GOP boss, before proceeding toward Newtown Square on PA-320 in a convertible. Crowds of supporters, protestors, and the curious lined the route, and the candidate made an unscheduled speech at Springfield Shopping Center. Further down the road at Lawrence Park Shopping Center, Nixon’s motorcade stopped for another unscheduled speech.¹²

Speaking to a cheering crowd of several thousand people,¹³ he began by noting that “This is our first visit to Lawrence Park, and after this demonstration, you can be sure we’ll be back. We’re glad to see you, and this also gives you a chance to see Pat.”¹⁴ The remainder of the speech hit on the same themes and points as the Chester speech, though the Delaware County Daily Times reported that the vice president shouted “Cabot Lodge [Nixon’s running mate] and I are men, not supermen… We know what it takes to keep the peace.”¹⁵

Excited crowds seeking a glimpse of the vice president lined West Chester Pike as Nixon’s motorcade continued through Marple Township into Newtown Township.¹⁶ The candidate’s itinerary that Saturday afternoon would take him to West Chester, Paoli, Valley Forge, Norristown, and Levittown before he departed for Allentown by plane from Northeast Philadelphia Airport.¹⁷

Senator Kennedy’s Visit: Saturday, October 29, 1960

Two days before Kennedy’s visit, Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned in Georgia on trumped up charges. Many in both campaigns felt that they had no authority to intervene, but Kennedy was convinced to call MLK’s wife, Coretta Scott King and express his sympathy on October 27. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy called the judge who had sentenced King. Also facing pressure from Georgia’s governor, the judge allowed King’s release on a $2,000 bond. This chain of events framed Kennedy in contrast to Nixon as a civil rights supporter.¹⁸

Kennedy flew into Philadelphia International Airport three hours late on the rainy night of Friday, October 28 and was escorted to Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square by State Troopers. The candidate passed through Marple that night on West Chester Pike and the motorcade actually made a wrong turn onto Media Line Road before making a loop around the block and back onto the Pike.¹⁹

After a 1:45 a.m. speech, Kennedy spent the night at a King of Prussia motel before he was driven to Lawrence Park Shopping Center (the idea of a helicopter had apparently been dropped). Though originally scheduled for 9 a.m., the senator’s speech was pushed back an hour because he slept in after his late night. Roughly 2,500 to 4,000 people began assembling in the shopping center as early as 7:45 a.m. on the cold, rainy Saturday morning to get a good view of the candidate while he made his speech.²⁰ Among those attending the campaign stop was Havertown teenager Bob Eberle. Eberle’s mother Margaret wrote that her son told her “the crowd was so dense, [that] there were lots of lost children.” One sobbing child was even hoisted onto the stage in front of the Snellenburg’s department store until his parents could be found.²¹

When Kennedy finally arrived in his convertible, he was introduced by Pennsylvania Governor David Lawrence before making his own seven-minute speech.

“It is nine in the morning and this will be a quiet, dignified speech,” Kennedy began, seemingly ignoring the time and earning some laughter from the crowd. He went on to remind those before him that in choosing the President of the United States, they were also choosing the leader of the free world. The United States’ prestige and its international position was something that he and Nixon had disagreed on, Kennedy reminded the crowd, noting that he wanted other countries to “look at the United States, not only as a powerful leading nation, but also a nation which personifies the ideal of what freedom can accomplish.”²²

Kennedy pointed out that a State Department survey found that most people in ten countries polled thought that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States in both military and scientific terms during the 1960s. He ascribed this to the policies of the Eisenhower Administration, which he felt had not been “foresighted” enough. “I don’t believe they have understood the kind of revolutionary world in which we live. If they had, we would not be second in space.”²³

The senator concluded his brief speech by contrasting the two choices he felt voters had. It was not just a contest between Nixon and Kennedy or Republican and Democrat—“It is a contest between the comfortable and the concerned, those who are satisfied with things as they are, and those on the other hand who wish to move forward.”²⁴

Already behind schedule, Kennedy departed for Chester where he spoke to a crowd of approximately 25,000. Later that day, he gave speeches in Upper Darby and Cheltenham Shopping Center.²⁵

After the Visits

As the campaign approached the election, polls showed nearly a tie between the two candidates. On Election Day, November 8, Kennedy took an early lead. While Nixon gained as the night went on, he was never able to totally overcome his challenger’s lead. At 6:00 am the next morning the vice president conceded the election.²⁶

Not counting the 6,500 absentee ballots from across the county, Marple township residents cast 5,335 votes for Nixon and 4,355 for Kennedy (as well as 22 for third party candidates). While Nixon also won Delaware County as a whole, he did not carry Pennsylvania, which Kennedy won by 116,326 votes, giving him the state’s 32 electoral votes (DT; White, Making of the President, 385).²⁷

Kennedy won the election with a comfortable Electoral College margin of 303 to 219, though the popular vote margin was the closest since 1888. Kennedy won 49.9 percent of the total popular vote and Nixon 49.6 percent. With the close vote, it was alleged that Kennedy supporters had stuffed ballot boxes in Chicago and Texas, and Nixon supporters had done the same in southern Illinois. Deciding to spare the nation a protracted election fight, Nixon chose not to contest the results.²⁸

Some historians have argued that Kennedy did just about everything right in the election and Nixon just about everything wrong²⁹—ranging from Kennedy’s selection of Lyndon Johnson as a running mate to Nixon not using a professional television makeup artist for the debate. Theodore H. White, who wrote The Making of the President 1960, noted Kennedy’s suburban focus as one of the key strategies the campaign executed to win the election. The then-senator’s speech in Lawrence Park was part of what White called his “October decision to hammer away at the great suburban belts in the large states.” Kennedy appealed “to the younger voters in the developments,” and was able to increase the Democrat’s vote-share in areas that had been traditionally Republican.³⁰ When announcing Kennedy’s victory, the Delaware County Daily Times noted that 1960 was the closest a Democrat had come to winning the county since 1936.³¹

Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. After a failed run for the governorship of California in 1962, Richard Nixon would go on to win the presidency in 1968 and then again in 1972. In his second term, Nixon shared one final similarity with Kennedy—with his resignation in the wake of the Watergate Scandal in 1974, he and Kennedy became the last two presidents who failed to complete the term to which they were elected.³²

I’d like to extend a special thanks to Rich Paul, who provided pictures of Nixon’s visit on the behalf of the Marple Historical Society (as well as a humorous anecdote of being the last car up West Chester Pike before Kennedy’s motorcade drove by). I’d also like to thank Steve Eberle, who made available the letter written by his grandmother Margaret Eberle to his father in 1960. Margaret, who worked at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, saw Kennedy later that day when he passed through Darby.

Citations

1. Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, “Richard M. Nixon,” from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” WhiteHouse.gov, 2006, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/richard-m-nixon/; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (Rev. ed., New York: HarperPerennial, 2009), 65-66, 73-74.
2. Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, “John F. Kennedy,” from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” WhiteHouse.gov, 2006, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/john-f-kennedy/.
3. Freidel and Sidey, “John F. Kennedy”; White, Making of the President, 29-49.
4. “The Rise of American Consumerism,” The American Experience, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tupperware-consumer/; Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 127.
5. Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 78-79, 130-131.
6. White, Making of the President, 115-117, 181-183; Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 103, 127-129.
7. Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 109-111, 115-118.
8. “Dems Plan for Kennedy ‘Copter Stop,” Delaware County Daily Times, 22 September 1960, 21.
9. “Aids Jump Dick to 320,” Delaware County Daily Times, 18 October 1960, 1.
10. “Nixon Sees County, Ailing McClure,” Delaware County Daily Times, 24 October 1960, 11.
11. “Nixon Sees County, Ailing McClure,” Delaware County Daily Times, 24 October 1960, 11.
12. “Nixon Sees County, Ailing McClure,” Delaware County Daily Times, 24 October 1960, 11.
13. “Nixon Sees County, Ailing McClure,” Delaware County Daily Times, 24 October 1960, 11; “Nixon Cheered by Thousands in Penna., Calls Kennedy’s Cuban Stand ‘Reckless’,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 October 1960, 1-2.
14. “Nixon Cheered by Thousands in Penna., Calls Kennedy’s Cuban Stand ‘Reckless’,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 October 1960, 2.
15. “Nixon Sees County, Ailing McClure,” Delaware County Daily Times, 24 October 1960, 11.
16. “Nixon Sees County, Ailing McClure,” Delaware County Daily Times, 24 October 1960, 11.
17. “Nixon Cheered by Thousands in Penna., Calls Kennedy’s Cuban Stand ‘Reckless’,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 October 1960, 1-2.
18. Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 131-133.
19. Harry Maitland, “Jack’s Fans Smile, Sing, Sink in Mud,” Delaware County Daily Times, 29 October 1960, 1; “Wrong Turn Zigs Route,” Delaware County Daily Times, 29 October 1960, 1.
20. “25,000 Stand in Rain To Hear Kennedy Talk At Broomall, Chester,” Delaware County Daily Times, 29 October 1960, 1, 4; “Neither Rain, nor… Stops Kennedy Supporters Here,” Philadelphia Daily News, 29 October 1960, 2; Joseph E. Miller, “Suburbs Give Kennedy Huge Ovation,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 October 1960, 1-2.
21. Margaret Eberle, letter to Bill Eberle, 29 October 1960, courtesy of Steve Eberle.
22. Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files. Series 12. Speeches and the Press. Box 914, Folder: “Lawrence Park Shopping Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 29 October 1960”.
23. Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files. Series 12. Speeches and the Press. Box 914, Folder: “Lawrence Park Shopping Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 29 October 1960”.
24. Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files. Series 12. Speeches and the Press. Box 914, Folder: “Lawrence Park Shopping Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 29 October 1960”.
25. Miller, “Suburbs Give Kennedy Huge Ovation,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 30 October 1960, 2.
26. Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 144-147.
27. “Chester, UD Fall To Dems,” Delaware County Daily Times, 9 November 1960, 1; “County Vote By Community,” Delaware County Daily Times, 9 November 1960, 17; White, Making of the President, 385.
28. Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 151-152.
29. Donaldson, First Modern Campaign, 133.
30. White, Making of the President, 353.
31. “Chester, UD Fall To Dems,” Delaware County Daily Times, 9 November 1960, 1.
32. Freidel and Sidey, “John F. Kennedy”; Freidel and Sidey, “Richard M. Nixon”.