Description: Provides a corrective to the famous--but flawed--classic, The Making of the President. Looks closely at the nuts and bolts of the election, and at a candidate whose hard-won victory depended upon hoards of money, an effective organization, television image-making, and LBJ's campaigning in the South.
Brief description: W. J. Rorabaugh is professor of history at the University of Washington and author of four previous books, most recently Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties.
Review Quotes:
"Rorabaugh makes clear just how much White's breathless, novelistic account shaped subsequent writing on the lives of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The result is a fresh, insightful book that explains this crucial contest and also sheds light on how Americans transform these quadrennial battles into episodes in the national political mythology."--Lewis L. Gould, author of The Modern American Presidency
"Blunt, gritty, and written without illusions, this concise and pungent account depicts a cynical, rough-and-tumble political world at a time when money, alliances of convenience, elaborate organization, and new modes of communication were changing the character of presidential campaigning and governance."--Alonzo L. Hamby, author of For the Survival of Democracy
"Captures the interplay of money, power, and politics in the 1960 election and brings a fresh eye and new material to an election that has taken on mythic proportions in the American imagination."--Donald T. Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History