The foreward to this slender volume states its premise:
"Every Presidential campaign has its facile and fashionable cliches. The favorite cliche of 1960 is that the two candidates, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, are essentially the same sort of men, stamped from the same mold, committed to the same values, dedicated to the same objectives [...] this essay is an attempt to explore these cliches."

You'd be hard pressed to come up with two modern-day presidents that play such different roles in the American consciousness than Kennedy and Nixon, so it's an historical object lesson to realize there was a time when they were perceived to be virtually identical and interchangeable. That anyone would feel the need to write an essay forcefully arguing that Kennedy and Nixon have personalities that are poles apart is literally inconceivable today.

From our vantage point in time, some of Schlesinger's observations have uncanny prescience. Regarding Nixon, he writes: "He seems not to understand that he is the only major American politician in our history who came to prominence by techniques which, if generally adopted, would destroy the whole fabric of mutual confidence on which democracy rests." (Watergate anyone?) But his description of Kennedy is full of surprises: " Kennedy himself is a bookish man" (Football on the beach?) "Kennedy's political manner is studiously unemotional, impersonal [...] "he presents himself as he is, giving his critics who cry 'cold' and 'machinelike' the target they desire" (cold? machinelike? -- the man who romped in the Oval Office with his little children and fought passionately for civil rights?)

This essay is a time tunnel into a world that is by turns entirely familiar and utterly foreign. It's a fascinating and fresh view from a period when events that are now seared into the American psyche hadn't yet taken place. Kennedy or Nixon allows you to shuffle off fifty years of memory and step into 1960 as though it is a new day. ( )

630. Kennedy or Nixon: Does it make any difference? by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (read 12 Oct 1960) I read this even though I knew the answer to the question. I knew it made a lot of difference and voted enthusiastically for Kennedy. ( )