John F. Kennedy’s dirty road to the White House

(Read at Expat's telegraph. Jack Kennedy won the presidency with the help of large amounts of cash – and a liberal number of lies, writes Andrew Marr.)

Get the picture right, and your history will take care of itself. Jack Kennedy always got the picture right. Even now, it is hardly possible to glimpse the gleaming white smile, the sunlit hair and the perfect First Family without a lump in the throat.

JFK became the icon of democratic optimism, the man who inspired half the world. Cut down in his prime, he never grew old enough to betray, disillusion or bore his legion of admirers. Who is President Josiah Bartlett of The West Wing but the liberal fantasy of a mature Kennedy – pin-sharp, hard as nails and bright with idealism?

So it comes as a shock to study Kennedy, the campaigner, properly, as I have been doing for a television documentary. The story of how a rich, preppy, party boy from Massachusetts managed to raise a roar for underdog America loud enough to carry him to the White House is gripping. But uplifting it certainly isn't. Yes, it's a tale of soaring and risk-taking rhetoric, partly fashioned by the late lamented Ted Sorensen, and of a candidate with remarkable energy. It is also, however, a tale of big money, smears, bribes, wire-pulling and bottomless cynicism. If you are asking what has gone so wrong with modern politics, Kennedy's 1960 election campaign is a good place to start.

And in that campaign, West Virginia, the impoverished and sidelined state where Kennedy polished off his main Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey, is even better. West Virginia is still the wooded, hilly, coal-mining-ravaged place of small towns, military volunteers and neighbourliness it was when the rivals clashed there. On the one side came Kennedy with his private jet, a present from daddy, and huge amounts of money for campaign commercials. He came with promises about more money for the state, but above all he was selling an image – the naval war hero, the glamorous wife, the kids, the homespun family with their little sailing boats. Earlier politicians had a "back-story" – log cabins, Welsh cottages, you name it – but Kennedy was the first to sell his lifestyle.

Kennedy's father Joe, the former (and unfriendly) ambassador to Britain, had made his fortune in steel, movies, whisky, stocks and property. With an obsession about building his family into a great political dynasty, he had squared many of the key newspaper owners for his son, who in turn was a master at flattering their reporters. He was ruthless and understood the rising power of the advertising companies – the world of Mad Men taking shape at the time. As JFK later said, his father wanted to know the size of the eventual majority because "there was no way he was paying for a landslide".

The Kennedy machine, an awesomely well-organised instrument, had some obvious problems. Joe Kennedy was rumoured to have been a bootlegger, had been brought back to the US in 1940 having announced that "in Britain, democracy is finished", and was a close ally of Senator McCarthy. Above all, he was a Roman Catholic at a time of fierce anti-Catholic prejudice, including in the overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia. Yet the Kennedys knew that if they could beat Humphrey and win there, they could win anywhere.

Against them, Hubert Humphrey had a classic, old-fashioned campaign. He had been too ill to fight in the war. His finances were meagre. His wife was homely and old-fashioned. He had no private plane, but a bus – with a broken heater. He was one of the most intelligent, compassionate and literate politicians in modern American history, who had stood up to Communists, organised crime and racialism when these were very dangerous fights to pick, and who understood middle America far better than Kennedy. But he was about to be crushed.

The Kennedy team dealt with their Catholic problem by smearing Humphrey as a draft dodger. They saturated the state with advertising, money and helpers. By the end, a stunned Humphrey, who had compared his fight to that of a corner store against a supermarket chain, was reduced to using the few hundred dollars he and his wife had saved for their daughter's wedding to pay for a final ad campaign. Having smeared Humphrey and trashed his reputation, the Kennedys washed their hands and denied it all.

Well, you may say, that's politics. Kennedy went on, after all, to see off the grandees of the Democratic Party – Adlai Stevenson and a rising Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson (who became his running mate) at the convention in Los Angeles. Then he narrowly beat Richard Nixon after those famous televised debates when Nixon's heavier growth of beard, badly chosen suit and tendency to sweat persuaded viewers that Kennedy was the better man.

When I met some of those involved, including Kennedy's TV adviser in 1960, I came away freshly awestruck by his presentational audacity. For instance, in that first debate, Kennedy politely excused himself for a "comfort break" a minute before the two men were live on air. He did not come back. As the studio manager was counting down the final seconds to going live, everyone – Nixon included – was aghast. Just as the count ended, there was Kennedy, smiling at the podium. "Psyching" an opponent doesn't get smarter than that.

And, yet… Kennedy beat Nixon not simply with his ads, his sound bites, his jingles, the carefully posed photographs and the downright lies he told about his own health; he beat Nixon by not standing for anything beyond rousing banalities. On the "missile gap" with Russia, Kennedy hyped the danger. Nixon, as vice president, knew the facts but for reasons of national security could not reveal them. (And Kennedy probably knew that, too.) On the other great issue, civil rights, the Kennedy team sent one message to black audiences and another to middle America.

Did it matter? I came away thinking the mix of big money, smearing, a feel-good blur where policy should have been, and the selling of the candidate like soap flakes, added up to a fairly shameful record. Even then, he barely won. The younger Nixon, who was liberal on race and more economically mainstream than he became, could well have made a good earlier president. In office, Kennedy made some terrible overseas blunders – though kept his nerve over the Cuban missile crisis – and was slow on domestic policy, particularly civil rights. Had he lived longer, I think he would have had a lower presidential reputation.

The 1960 campaign is not the story I had expected. It's a far more interesting one. It has been obliterated by those images of the handsome, young father and husband; then the young king cut down in his prime. But today we live in a world that has become profoundly cynical about politics. I think we owe it to ourselves to look past those images and ask: aren't there better ways of doing democracy than Kennedy's?

Andrew Marr's 'JFK: The Making of Modern Politics', is on [...] on BBC iPlayer