Michael Beschloss Quotes

You have had presidential candidates over the last 30 years who would have had a very hard time getting nominated under the old system. One example is John Kennedy.

To people who remember JFK’s assassination, JFK Jr. will probably always be that boy saluting his father’s coffin.

Then you get to the last half of the 20th century, Americans are getting very skeptical about their leaders and their institutions, and another place that is affected is parties and conventions.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can’t govern.

So the result was that as one approached a political convention for most of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century until the 1960’s, part of the drama was the fact that you didn’t know ultimately who was going to be the nominee at the end of that convention week.

So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington.