Published May 2010 — Download PDF of the original newspaper column
Byrd's-Eye View By U.S Senator Robert C. Byrd THE 1960 WEST VIRGINIA PRIMARY AND THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT May 10 was the fiftieth anniversary of the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in West Virginia. This was, perhaps, one of the most important presidential primaries in recent history. It was the election that made Senator John F. Kennedy the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. "It was in West Virginia," wrote Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger, "that Kennedy really sewed up the Democratic nomination for President." Speaking in Wheeling in 1962, President Kennedy declared, "West Virginia ... is the State which sent me out into the world, and you are the people who made me the Democratic candidate for President of the United States." And the 1960 Democratic primary was the political contest that paved the way for America's first Catholic president. With West Virginia being an overwhelmingly Protestant state in 1960, religion was seen as the "burning issue" of the contest. Therefore, if Kennedy, who was Catholic, defeated his only opponent, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who was a Protestant, it would show that religion would no longer be a defeating handicap in a presidential contest. For weeks, both national and international media swarmed our state as people, not only around the United States, but also around the world, closely followed the West Virginia primary to see if a Catholic had a chance of becoming president. According to the media, the prospects did not look good for Kennedy. Newsweek noted that the "deck looks to be hopelessly stacked against Jack Kennedy in West Virginia.... This state is 95 percent Protestant." The Wall Street Journal predicted that Kennedy "would lose—perhaps heavily. The vote against him could go as high as 60% of the total." The Baltimore Sun predicted that Humphrey would take "two out of three [voters], solely because he is a Protestant and Kennedy is a Catholic." On May 10, 1960, the people of West Virginia stunned the nation! Kennedy won a sweeping victory in the Mountain State. His victory was a 61-39 percent margin and he carried 50 of 55 counties. It was an historical moment. The Congressional Quarterly reported: "The results were viewed by political observers as proof that Kennedy's Roman Catholicism would not bar him from winning the nomination or general election." Journalist Theodore White, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Making of the President, 1960, called the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary "a turning point in American history." The best assessment came from Kennedy himself, who, the day after winning the primary, proclaimed: the religious issue was "buried here in the soil of West Virginia." May 12, 2010