Jewish voters may have provided the narrow margin of victory in the 1960 election for President John F. Kennedy, pollster Oliver A. Quayle, today told an institute convened here by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Mr. Quayle is vice-president of Louis Harris & Associates, the firm that conducted the private polls for President Kennedy during the 1960 campaign, Mr. Quayle said that Jews were cool to Mr. Kennedy at the start of the 1960 campaign but later fell solidly behind him “because he was a Catholic and deserved support of a minority group, even though another minority.”
It was stressed that both Catholic and Protestant support of Mr. Kennedy dropped in the last weeks of the campaign and “he may have been saved by the increase in the Jewish vote.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
