Kennedy barely squeezed by in 1960. He jokingly said his father didn't mind buying him the election but he wasn't going to pay for a landslide. Some argue that JFK actually received less popular votes than Nixon because he was credited with the popular votes going to presidential electors pledged to other Democratic candidates in some Southern states.
It's true that Joe Kennedy (JFK's father) put the fix in for his son during the 1960 Presidential election, and JFK did officially "beat" Nixon by a razor-thin margin. So JFK was not joking when made the quip about his father buying him the election, "but not wanting to pay for a landslide". Old Joe Kennedy had a shit-load of money by the standards of times, when he did in 1969 he was one of America's richest men. But even he couldn't afford to buy an electoral landslide in a US Presidential election in 1960.
Still, the ultimately successful rigging of the 1960 Presidential election by Joe Kenndedy and his criminal associates, for his son JFK, is an interesting story...
In 1960, JFK's father, Joe Kennedy, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America. He made a large portion of his money illegally, by bootlegging rum during the prohhibition between 1920 and 1933. He survived the crash of the Stock Market in 1929, finanally unscathed, and during the 1930s he continued to increase his wealth through shrewd investments and by cornering - this time legally - the rum market after the end of prohibition, and by producing movies in Hollywood.
Due to his fabulous wealth, Joe Kennedy's business activities inevitably found him rubbing shoulders with America's Ruling Class elites. He made social connections with many other other influential, powerful and famous Americans from the world of: politics; finance; big business; unions, entertainment and organized crime.
In 1945 Joe Kennedy bought "Merchandise Mart" a massive building in Chicago that held 13 warehouses. This allowed him to contriol the sale of goods related to the building trades around much of the country. Joe Kennedy's control of "Merchandise Mart" led to him interaction with the major unions, and through them organized crime figures what at the time controlled union membership and the union's massive pension funds.
In 1959, JFK's Presidential nomination campaign was not goining very well. So Joe Kennedy met with Frank Sinatra and asked him if would take a message to the Chigago mob boss, Sam Giancono, ans try to persuade him to suppory his son (JFK) in the 1960 election. The upshot is that Giancomo agreed to help get JFK elected if JFK and his brother Robert Kennedy (RFK) would end their determination to break orgaganized crime syndicates and jail their leaders. Giancomo also want Fidel Castro gone (assassinated) and Castro's nationalised casinos returned to their previous owners, one of whom was himself.
Giancana used the mob's muscle got out the JFK vote among the rank and file of mob-controlled unions and syphoned campaign funds from the crooked "Teamsters" union fund, among others into JFK's Presidential campaign. Union members began to volunteer in massive numbers for JFK's campagign.
Giancomo worked with Chicago's crooked Mayor, Richard Daley, who contributed to rigging the 1960 election for JFK using his corrupt Democrat political machine to stuff the ballot box in critical districts like Cook County, absentee ballot -harvesting from nursing homes, the registration and voting of all the names on the tombsones of certain cemetries in Chicago, and other types of corrupt practices such as intimidation by members of the mob at polling centres and so on.
Narrow victories in Illinois and Texas were enough to put Jack Kennedy into the White House through the electoral college system.
As President Kennedy and his brother RFK, did not honour their promise to go easy on the mob, and more leaders of organized crime syndicated were jailed than in the years before 1960. There was, however, a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro in 1961. Eliminating Castro was an important objective of the CIA's "Bay of Pigs" invasion.Unfortunately, The "Bay of Pigs" operation was, as you know, totally bothched - a notorious American military cock-up and Castro "lived to see another day."
Dachshund
