Until Kennedy won in 1960, the sense of most knowledgeable people was that only a white, male, Protestant could realistically aspire to serve as the head of the American government. The second account, the part of Richard Nixon’s memoir entitled Six Crises (Garden City: Doubleday, 1962) that dealt with the election, was even more biased in favor of Nixon. When the polls closed nationwide, there was a swing towards Labour across most of the country, but in Smethwick there’d been a dramatic swing in the opposite direction, towards the Conservatives. When asked after the election how he had managed to defeat Nixon, Kennedy replied crisply “television.”. The impact of televised debates also showed immediately on the campaign trail. For Kennedy’s Catholic supporters in particular, the real “Massachusetts miracle” was not that state’s economic comeback in the 1980s but rather Kennedy’s victory in 1960, which altered assumptions about who could realistically hope to hold high public office in the United States and paved the way for the next person who was not a white, male, Protestant to win:  Barack Obama in 2008. Kennedy’s victory, like Obama’s, also serves as a source of encouragement to many of those in the over 70 percent of the American population that is not white, male and Protestant. Richard M. Nixon. Smithsonian Institution. Eisenhower had urged Nixon not to debate Kennedy, predicting correctly that such extensive television exposure would ultimately help the lesser known-Democrat. In order for its presidential candidate to win then, he had to do so clearly or not at all. Even many of Kennedy’s liberal supporters firmly believed that, such as United Auto Workers union chief Walter Reuther, who had argued passionately during the 1960 primaries that no Catholic could be elected because anti-Catholic prejudice among Baptist and Methodist Democrats was too strong. A second reason for the excitement then and interest later was the simple fact of Kennedy’s Catholicism, which broke an unofficial but still very significant “rule” of the American political system as it was in those days. Peter Griffiths took the seat. Also, an article some years back in "The Journal of American Studies" analyzed the Cook County results, concluding that the fraud was on behalf of the State's Attorney candidate and that, while there was ome slopover for JFK, it was not enough to make the difference. Jesse Rhodes is a former Smithsonian magazine staffer. But one brief moment of television stood out as unusually dramatic: the results coming in from the West Midlands constituency of Smethwick. (For those of you who can't be here in person, you can take a virtual tour.) Broadcasting has re-made electioneering in the United Kingdom, as elsewhere in the world, with an over-emphasis on the presentational qualities of political argument. The importance of exploring new visual methods with which to illustrate the story of the night grew with every successive election after the first television coverage in 1950. It is clear that Kennedy’s initiative substantially improved his electability, but it is often the case in elections that error rather than enterprise is the determining factor.