https:// www.politico.com/story/2018/07/13/democrats-nominate-jfk-july-13-1960-635353
58years ago , the democrats nominated JFK ( juli 13 1960)
Delegates to the Democratic National Convention, meeting in Los Angeles on this day in 1960, nominated Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts as their presidential candidate. The next day, at Kennedy’s behest, despite some shouted protests from the galleries, the delegates unanimously chose Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, the Senate majority leader, as his running mate.
In the week before the convention, both Johnson and Adlai Stevenson, the party’s nominee in 1952 and 1956, announced their candidacies. Kennedy’s nomination, while likely, appeared less than assured.
Texas Gov. John Connally, a Johnson supporter, said Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease. Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, denied it, while Kennedy’s physician, Janet Travell, falsely asserted that the senator’s adrenal glands functioned normally.
As the convention opened, Kennedy accepted Johnson’s challenge to hold a televised debate before a joint meeting of the Texas and Massachusetts delegations. Most reporters wrote that Kennedy won. In its wake, Johnson proved unable to significantly expand his delegate support beyond his Southern base.
Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady, seconded Stevenson’s nomination. “I did not agree with the people who said Stevenson could not be nominated because he had twice been defeated,” she wrote in her autobiography. “His defeat, I felt, was a result of running against the hero worship of President [Dwight] Eisenhower.”
The delegates nominated Kennedy on the first ballot. He had 806 votes to 409 for Johnson and 79.5 for Stevenson. Favorite sons and minor candidates split the remaining 142 votes.
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In his acceptance speech, Kennedy said: “I am fully aware of the fact that the Democratic Party, by nominating someone of my [Catholic] faith, has taken on what many regard as a new and hazardous risk.” He added: “And you have, at the same time, placed your confidence in me, and my ability to render a free, fair, judgment" and "to reject any kind of religious pressure or obligation that might directly or indirectly interfere with my conduct of the presidency in the national interest.”
In the July 23, 1960, issue of The New Yorker, Richard Rovere, the magazine’s Washington correspondent, wrote that "it can be said with a fair amount of certainty that the essence of [Kennedy’s] political attractiveness is his extraordinary political intelligence. He has a mind quite unlike that of any other Democrat of this century. … The easy way in which he disposes of the question of Church and State — as if he felt that any reasonable man could quite easily resolve any possible conflict of loyalties — suggests that the organization of society is the one thing that really engages his interest.”
In November, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket won 49.7 percent of the popular vote against the 49.6 percent garnered by Republican Vice President Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, his running mate. Spread across all 50 states, their plurality came to 110,000 votes.