2008: The best US election yet?

By Nick Bryant
BBC News

A liberal from Illinois who made politics sound like poetry.

No poster boy: Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974

A two-term North-eastern senator from a celebrated political family with access to a vast campaign war chest and the best political hired guns.

A liberal Republican from New York, who made the craven mistake of avoiding the early primaries.

And a decorated veteran from the Sunbelt, happy to embrace some of the policies of the past eight years but deeply troubled by others.

The year was not 2008 but 1960, and for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain read Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, Jack Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, and Richard Nixon, the sitting vice-president.

Making history

Tempting though it is to lasso the 2008 campaign with the tagline "the best election of the modern era" they serve as a reminder there are other worthy contenders.

Certainly, the Kennedy/Nixon race in 1960 demands serious consideration, not least for its clutch of history-making "firsts".

I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience President Ronald Reagan to opponent Walter Mondale in 1984

It was the first time a Catholic had won the presidency; the first time, too, that the country had elected a leader born in the 20th Century.

The 1960 campaign witnessed the first televised debates between the presidential nominees - a hugely popular and vote-shifting innovation that was not repeated until 1976 - partly because one inexpertly applied coating of make-up could alter the whole complexion of the race, as Nixon learnt to his peril.

Also noteworthy was the calibre of the field, for the Democratic and Republican tickets included three men who would go on to occupy the Oval Office: Kennedy, Nixon and Lyndon B Johnson.

The odd man out was Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, Nixon's vice-presidential running mate, who nevertheless left his mark on the sixties by helping to shape US policy in Vietnam.

Unexpected plotlines

Then there was the hair-breadth margin of victory: just one tenth of one percentage point, the narrowest winning margin in the 20th Century.

Indeed, Kennedy retired to bed on election night not knowing whether he had won or lost.

The Kennedys brought glamour to the presidential campaign

The year 1960 also had a few unexpected plotlines. Readers might be surprised to learn that the liberal darling in the race for the Democratic nomination was not JFK, but Adlai Stevenson.

So raucous was the floor demonstration which greeted the arrival of the twice-defeated candidate at the Los Angeles convention that the floor lights had to be dimmed in an attempt to restore order.

By contrast, Kennedy was viewed with suspicion because of his friendship with 'red-baiter' Joe McCarthy, the anti-Semitism of his father and his lacklustre civil rights record.

Still, the first election of the 1960s might not even have been the decade's best.

That honour surely goes to the 1968 campaign, when Richard Nixon sealed an astonishing political comeback by beating Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.

Promise of Camelot

That year's drama started to unfold in the New Hampshire primary, when the anti-war candidate, Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, came close to defeating sitting President Lyndon B Johnson.

Then Robert Kennedy decided to launch his own, insurgent campaign, promising a political restoration and a return to the romance of Camelot.

1968 was surely the most rancorous and hate-filled election of modern times. It had an epic dimension lacking in other races. It was life and death

Four years earlier, Johnson had secured the biggest land-slide victory US history.

But confronted with the unexpectedly strong challenge from McCarthy and Kennedy, he announced to a stunned nation that he had no stomach for another electoral fight.

''I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president," he revealed in a tension-filled televised address.

1968 was a year punctuated, as well, by political violence.

In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Less than two months later, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles at the very moment of his victory in the California primary.

Then came the tumultuous Democratic convention in Chicago, where the party decided to nominate Hubert Humphrey while the police and protesters waged street battles outside.

Richard Nixon won that year by promising to restore law and order.

The slogan was echoed by George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and an avowed segregationist, who mounted one of the most successful third-party candidacies in US political history.

Winning five southern states and gaining 10 million votes, he was last third-party candidate to win any electoral college votes.

Fight to the death

1968 was surely the most rancorous and hate-filled election of modern times.

It had an epic dimension lacking in other races. It was life and death, in the most literal sense of all.

Other campaigns have had their moments.

1964 featured one of the most nonconformist presidential candidates - the Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, a pilot who buzzed his own delegates in the skies above the GOP convention in San Francisco, and is considered a hero by fellow Arizonan John McCain.

1972 had the tumult of the Democratic convention in Miami Beach, as the party imploded.

1976 seemed a little dull after all the drama of Watergate, but did witness the extraordinary rise of Jimmy Carter, usually cast as a folksy peanut farmer but who was better known in the South as the politically savvy former governor of Georgia.

1980 was noteworthy not just for the victory of Ronald Reagan, but also for the demise of Ted Kennedy, who tried to wrestle the presidential nomination from President Carter.

1984 had arguably the best one-liner in a presidential debate, when the 73-year-old President Ronald Reagan turned to his opponent, Walter Mondale, and said: "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality. He is presently writing a book on the 1960 election.