JFK: Unpublished, Never-Seen Photos
JFK: Unpublished, Never-Seen Photos - Photo Gallery - LIFE
Jackie and JFK ride through a mid-October blizzard of ticker tape in Manhattan’s famed “Canyon of Heroes,” three weeks before election day. Kennedy won New York with 53 percent of the vote to Nixon’s 47; the margin of victory in many, many states across the country, however, was far smaller than that. - Photo: Paul Schutzer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Toward a New Frontier
On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon in one of the closest national elections of the 20th century. At 43, Kennedy was (and remains) the youngest person elected to the office, and it was largely this quality in the man and his family — an engaging, youthful dynamism — that so captured the imagination of millions across the country. As Kennedy and his team ran a heady, propulsive campaign unlike any America had seen, LIFE’s best photographers were there, chronicling the grind of public appearances and the quieter moments JFK spent with advisers, with Jackie, and — rarest of all — alone, with his own thoughts. Here, on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s victory, life.com presents never-seen, unpublished photographs of an enigmatic, intensely ambitious man making history, and ushering in the poignantly brief American era known ever after as “Camelot.”