Main St. Hyannis and JFK’s Campaign for President

Imagine yourself in the year 1960. If you were to glance across the street, you would have seen nationally known retailers, like Woolworth's, along with locally owned and operated stores like Puritan of Cape Cod. The street was bustling with Boston stores like Filene's and Abercrombie & Fitch, alongside bakeries, restaurants, and jazz clubs. In that year, Hyannis had an active role in John F. Kennedy's campaign for U.S. President against Richard Nixon. Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline, learned she was pregnant early in her husband's campaign, and by summer doctors had advised her to keep travel to a minimum, so she remained mostly here, in Hyannis Port. To stay connected with voters, Jackie penned a weekly newspaper column called 'Campaign Wife,' in which she discussed issues and shared personal stories and advice. On election day, an astonishing 93.8% of Town of Barnstable voters went to the polls. On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. Kennedy defeated Nixon when votes were finally counted in the Electoral College, by a margin of 303 to 219. But in the popular vote, Kennedy won by just 112,827 votes out of 68 million votes cast, or a margin of just 0.2 percent. Just 17 days after her husband was elected president, Jacqueline, then 31, gave birth to a son, John F. Kennedy, Jr.