Up until the United States Presidential Election of 1960, no previous election had ever been this close. The closest election in U.S. history at that time of course had global implications. A series of bad luck and simple joke on national TV by previous U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower being twisted around to sound as if Nixon h
Richard Nixon doing his signature victory signs.
had no clue on how to run a country. Many other factors could have influenced the 1960 Election in a slant toward Nixon. Richard Nixon could have been more public about equal rights instead of letting John F. Kennedy receive the support from the African American vote and the majority of Americans from the Northern states. During this time, Martin Luther King, Jr. was sentenced to four months of jail time until John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy intervened, freeing King. Nixon, while a Duke law student, argued on behalf of equal rights for African Americans but chose to do nothing because he wanted to avoid the "white backlash" against him. After the intervention by the two Kennedy brothers, Jackie Robinson switched to Kennedy. Robinson, like Nixon, was a fellow Californian and was a Connecticut Republican, speaking out against Communism. Jackie Robinson's decision to switch to Kennedy can be viewed as the first major shift in racial politics and politics of that time when the African American vote slightly favored the Democrats with 55 percent at the time, grew to become a 90 percent voting bloc. Imagine if Nixon had been the one that intervened when King was in jail? And what would happen if Eisenhower never said that joke on TV? Another factor that highly favored Kennedy was that he was loaded with money, enough money to travel to all of the 50 states. What would have happened if Kennedy made a simple decision that most politicians use, and focused more on the swing states of that time? Well, the result of the 1960's election could have told a much different story, a story where Nixon won.