Was JFK the lesser evil in 1960?

Leave aside that, per persistent rumor, the Democrats stole that election from Nixon.

At that point the conservative movement was not in control of the GOP and Nixon was not then or ever a part of it.

And the Democrats were far from the party of civil rights they would later be.

Given they had built American Apartheid in the South and elsewhere, to begin with, if anything they had less claim to be the party of racial justice than the Republicans.

It was Ike who, urged by Nixon, sent troops to Little Rock.

Stevenson, who lost the nomination to Kennedy, was by far the more liberal of the two Democrats.

Kennedy was a globo-cold warrior, big time, and he used lies about a “missile gap” and fear of the reds in his campaign against Nixon.

Kennedy ran, in fact, as the nuttiest cold warrior on the ballot.

Once in office, instead of cancelling he merely botched the Bay of Pigs operation, inherited from Ike, himself in large measure thus provoking a missile crisis that would take us close to nuclear war and “resolving” it only by promising immunity forever to communism in Cuba.

Of course, he committed America more deeply to stop communism in Vietnam.

If you were going to worry about dominoes, Cuba and Latin America were a much better place to worry than Southeast Asia.

That seems to have been Eisenhower’s view and despite their personal relations Nixon was more an Eisenhower Republican all his life than any other kind.

Was Kennedy really the lesser evil of his day or only the less competent man?

Apart from Chicago and West Virginia, he won because of the cosmetics of TV debates, after all.

Nixon had a heavier beard and sweated under the lights.