Author | Theodore H. White |
---|---|
Subject | 1960 United States presidential election John F. Kennedy |
Genre | Biography |
Publisher | Atheneum Publishers |
Publication date | 1961 |
Pages | 400 |
The Making of the President 1960, written by journalist Theodore H. White and published by Atheneum Publishers in 1961, [1] is a book that recounts and analyzes the 1960 election in which John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States. The book won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction [2] and was the first in a series of books by White about American presidential elections. (The others are The Making of the President 1964 (1965), The Making of the President 1968 (1969), and The Making of the President 1972 (1973).)
The book traces the 1960 campaign from the primaries (in which Kennedy faced Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington) to the conclusion of the general election contest against Richard Nixon. Much of the narrative is written in an almost novelistic style, describing politicians' looks, voices and personalities; but it also contains thought-provoking discussions of various trends in American life and politics.
The Making of the President 1960 was a huge success, staying on the best-seller list for more than 40 weeks. Critics and journalists hailed it as a new way of looking at its subject. It had a huge impact on political reporting and even on American politics itself. As White noted, it was an up-close look at a leader under the pressure of circumstances. [3] Its literary-journalistic approach brought a dramatic point of view on the world of politics and its strategies, victories and defeats. One chapter was devoted to detailing the reasons behind Americans' ways of voting and ways of life. [4]
White's book, and its successor volumes, inspired a trend toward the production of campaign books and toward a more personality-driven approach to political reporting. White in later years would bemoan the changes he had helped create. [5]
David L. Wolper produced a film version of The Making of the President 1960, which was finished shortly before President Kennedy's November 1963 assassination. It was released without revision.
The Pulitzer Prizes are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
The 1960 United States presidential election was the 44th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. The Democratic ticket of Senator John F. Kennedy and his running mate, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, narrowly defeated the Republican ticket of incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon and his running mate, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. This was the first election in which 50 states participated, marking the first participation of Alaska and Hawaii, and the last in which the District of Columbia did not. This made it the only presidential election in which the threshold for victory was 269 electoral votes. It was also the first election in which an incumbent president—in this case, Dwight D. Eisenhower—was ineligible to run for a third term because of the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment.
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Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was an American lawyer, writer, and presidential adviser. He was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, as well as one of his closest advisers. President Kennedy once called him his "intellectual blood bank". He collaborated with Kennedy on the book Profiles in Courage, "assembling and preparing" much of research on which the book was based. Kennedy won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Sorensen helped draft Kennedy's inaugural address and Lyndon Johnson's Let Us Continue speech following Kennedy's assassination, and was the primary author of Kennedy's 1962 "We choose to go to the Moon" speech.
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