Ralph Nader is an American political activist involved in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes. He is a perennial presidential candidate. His 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized the automotive industry for its safety record, helped lead to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966.
A Presidential election was held in the United States on November 4, 1952. Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Democratic Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II in a landslide victory, becoming the first Republican president in 20 years. This was the first election since 1928 without an incumbent president on the ballot.
Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 5, 1968. Republican nominee, former vice president Richard Nixon, defeated both the Democratic nominee, incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey, and the American Independent Party nominee, former Alabama governor George Wallace.
Adlai Ewing Stevenson II was an American politician and diplomat and who was the United States ambassador to the United Nations from 1961 until his death in 1965. He previously served as the 31st governor of Illinois from 1949 to 1953 and was the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in 1952 and 1956, losing both elections to Dwight D. Eisenhower in landslides. Stevenson was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson, the 23rd vice president of the United States. He was raised in Bloomington, Illinois and was a member of the Democratic Party. He served in many positions in the federal government during the 1930s and 1940s, including the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, Federal Alcohol Administration, Department of the Navy, and the State Department. In 1945, he served on the committee that created the United Nations, and was a member of the initial U.S. delegations to the UN.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his acerbic epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays interrogated the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Vidal was heavily involved in politics, and unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives, and later in 1982 to the United States Senate.
Henry Warren Beatty is an American actor and filmmaker. His career has spanned over six decades, and he has received an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards. He also received the Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1999, the BAFTA Fellowship in 2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2007, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2008.
Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American film noir neo-Western film directed by John Sturges with screenplay by Millard Kaufman. It stars Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The film is a crime drama set in 1945 that contains elements of the revisionist Western genre. In the plot, a one-armed stranger (Tracy) comes to a small desert town and uncovers an evil secret that has corrupted the entire community.
Eugene Joseph McCarthy was an American politician, writer, and academic from Minnesota. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and the United States Senate from 1959 to 1971. McCarthy sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1968 election, challenging incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson on an anti-Vietnam War platform. McCarthy unsuccessfully ran for U.S. president four more times.
Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward is an American retired actress. She made her career breakthrough in the 1950s and earned esteem and respect playing complex women with a characteristic nuance and depth of character. Her accolades include an Academy Award, three Primetime Emmy Awards, a British Academy Film Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She is the oldest living winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress.
The 1992 Democratic National Convention nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas for president and Senator Al Gore from Tennessee for vice president; Clinton announced Gore as his running-mate on July 9, 1992. The convention was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, New York from July 13 to July 16, 1992. The Clinton-Gore ticket then faced and defeated their Republican opponents, President George H. W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle as well as the independent ticket of Ross Perot and James Stockdale in the 1992 presidential election.
William Lee Tracy was an American stage, film, and television actor. He is known foremost for his portrayals between the late 1920s and 1940s of fast-talking, wisecracking news reporters, press agents, lawyers, and salesmen. From 1949 to 1954, he was also featured in the weekly radio and television versions of the series Martin Kane: Private Eye, as well as starring as the newspaper columnist Lee Cochran in the 1958–1959 British-American crime drama New York Confidential. Later, in 1964, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe for his supporting role in the film The Best Man.
The 2000 United States Senate election in Washington was held on November 7, 2000. Incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Slade Gorton was seeking reelection to a third consecutive term, and a fourth overall, but he was unseated for a second time by a very narrow margin by former Congresswoman Maria Cantwell. The race was the most expensive contest in the state's history at the time.
Visit to a Small Planet is a 1960 American black-and-white science fiction comedy film directed by Norman Taurog and starring Jerry Lewis, Joan Blackman, Earl Holliman, and Fred Clark. Distributed by Paramount Pictures, it was produced by Hal B. Wallis.
Suddenly, Last Summer is a 1959 Southern Gothic psychological drama mystery film based on the 1958 play of the same name by Tennessee Williams. The film was shot in England and Spain. It was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and produced by Sam Spiegel from a screenplay by Gore Vidal and Williams with cinematography by Jack Hildyard and production design by Oliver Messel. The musical score was composed by Buxton Orr, using themes by Malcolm Arnold.
The Oscar is a 1966 American drama film directed by Russell Rouse and starring Stephen Boyd, Elke Sommer, Milton Berle, Eleanor Parker, Joseph Cotten, Jill St. John, Tony Bennett, Edie Adams and Ernest Borgnine.
The Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign began on March 16, 1968, when Kennedy, a United States Senator from New York, mounted an unlikely challenge to incumbent Democratic United States President Lyndon B. Johnson. Following an upset in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek re-election to a second full term. Kennedy still faced two rival candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination: the leading challenger United States Senator Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey had entered the race after Johnson's withdrawal, but Kennedy and McCarthy remained the main challengers to the policies of the Johnson administration. During the spring of 1968, Kennedy led a leading campaign in presidential primary elections throughout the United States. Kennedy's campaign was especially active in Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, California, and Washington, D.C. After declaring victory in the California primary on June 4, 1968, Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died on June 6, 1968 at Good Samaritan Hospital. Had Kennedy been elected president, he would have been the first brother of a former U.S. president to win the presidency himself.
From March to July 1968, Democratic Party voters elected delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention for the purpose of selecting the party's nominee for president in the upcoming election. Delegates, and the nominee they were to support at the convention, were selected through a series of primary elections, caucuses, and state party conventions. This was the last time that state primary elections formed a minority of the selection process, as the McGovern–Fraser Commission, which issued its recommendations in time for the 1972 Democratic Party presidential primaries, would dramatically reform the nomination process to expand the use of popular primaries rather than caucuses.
The Best Man is a 1960 play by American playwright Gore Vidal. The play premiered on Broadway in 1960 and was nominated for six Tony Awards, including Best Play. Vidal adapted it into a film with the same title in 1964.
The 1968 presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey began when Hubert Humphrey, the 38th and incumbent Vice President of the United States, decided to seek the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States on April 27, 1968, after incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew his bid for reelection to a second full term on March 31, 1968, and endorsed him as his successor. Johnson withdrew after an unexpectedly strong challenge from anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, in the early Democratic primaries. McCarthy, along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, became Humphrey's main opponents for the nomination. Their "new politics" contrasted with Humphrey's "old politics" as the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War intensified.
