Aug 17, 2020 3 min read

This week (Aug. 17) in 1956, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who had lost the 1952 presidential election to Republican Dwight Eisenhower in a landslide (442 Electoral College votes to 89), was once again the Democratic Party’s choice to challenge Eisenhower in the upcoming presidential election, having secured more than enough delegates by the second day of the Democratic National Convention. Among those who hoped to be his choice for vice president was the first-term junior senator from Massachusetts, John Kennedy.

Kennedy was an up-and-comer, whose father, Joe Kennedy, was both wealthy and politically connected. The Kennedy camp even secured a time slot on the convention’s opening night to show a film about the Democratic Party that, not coincidentally, prominently featured John Kennedy. And when Stevenson asked Kennedy to give the speech nominating Stevenson, Kennedy and his advisers were convinced he was the favorite for the vice president slot.

And then Stevenson surprised the entire convention by announcing he would let the convention delegates choose his vice presidential candidate and would indicate no prior preference. Caught off guard, the Kennedy camp adapted, manufacturing buttons, signs, banners, and so on, saying “Kennedy for Vice President,” all the while working the backrooms in deal-making attempts to secure the nomination over several formidable opponents, including Sens. Estes Kefauver and Al Gore Sr. from Tennessee, and Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota. When the balloting began on the convention’s last day, the Kennedy camp’s work seemed to be paying off, and after the second ballot Kennedy surged to a formidable lead. As he headed to the convention hall that night, tellingly accompanied by a police escort, he was sure he would be nominated.

However, over the last few hours, Kennedy’s Catholicism gave the delegates pause. As would later bedevil him in his run for president (which he eventually overcame), many Americans thought Catholics were more loyal to Rome and the Pope than to their country, and Kefauver surged back into the lead, defeating Kennedy by a comfortable margin.

Kennedy was devastated, but it would be a political lifesaver. The Stevenson-Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket by an even worse landslide than in 1952 (457 EC votes to 73), but Kennedy took no blame for the loss, and the newfound national prominence he earned at the convention convinced him to run for president in 1960.

There is an old catchphrase, “You can’t win for losing,” meant to express one’s futility at how things keep going wrong. John Kennedy proved otherwise because in 1960 things kept going right for John Kennedy. For losing the vice presidential nomination in 1956, in 1960 he easily bested two-time loser Adlai Stevenson for the presidential nomination, and ultimately won the election.