J.F. Kennedy, al que suponemos en los cielos (After a very long passage through purgatory), owes more than his victory in the presidential elections of 1960 the then mayor of Chicago, the old Richard Daley, that famous first televised debate against his rival Nixon 50 years ago. Kennedy won the election by just over 100,000 votes , with Illinois and Texas swing states in his victory. Illinois took him with the help of Daley, patronage networks pharaoh of Cook County, the county where sits the city of Chicago. Texas won in large part thanks to Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's vice-presidential candidate, which raised more sympathy in the south than Massachusetts heartthrob himself. James L.
Baughman , a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, reminds us that the myth of the debate should be more destabilizing to the epic that is attributed to the famous book by Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 , than reality. The debate was important, but not as decisive as people think. Kennedy served to win in recognition among the electorate. Polls after the first game it was declared the winner cathode, but voters remained divided, faithful to their nominee, to the end. Perhaps the biggest mistake of Nixon (other than accept the debate itself) was to keep his promise to campaign in all 50 states. If the day before the election would happened in Texas and not in Alaska, the course of history might have changed. Also remember that a knee infection kept him hospitalized for twelve days, just before the first of three televised debates. Moreover, Nixon drew level with Kennedy in the second debate, and even won, according to surveys, the third.
There is an old sociological principle which states that 'what seems real, even if it is, has real consequences. " The Kennedy-Nixon debates are a good example. Despite its limited impact on voters' minds, the legend of his influence debates deprived of the Americans for 16 years until the duel Ford-Carter in 1976. If the presidential debates have been recorded as usual in the USA is the nation's democratic pedigree, but because they think they can serve to unbalance hotly contested election (as is often almost every U.S. presidential).
Tomorrow, Sunday, marking the 50 anniversary of the legendary first debate, the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago (which for five years asks for donations to finance its new headquarters in full Loop) will hold a roundtable in the participation, among others, Newton Minow (negotiator of the debate, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and author of the famous speech in which defined television as a "Vast wasteland " vast wasteland-a-) and Sander Vanocur, one of the four journalists who were asking questions at the inaugural debate. Past
ephemeris, the mythomaniacs like to know that Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum , near Boston, offers a recreation of the legendary televised debate in September, with which illustrates this post.
Recommended reading:
Baughman, James L. September 20, 2010. "Did the 1960 Presidential Debates Really Matter? "History News Network .
Greenberg, David. October 16, 2000. "Was Nixon Robbed ? The legend of the stolen 1960 presidential election . " Slate.
# # #
0 comments:
Post a Comment