November 7, 1960: NYC Subway Bomb Kills One, Nixon Would Send Eisenhower to Eastern Europe, Kennedy 'Stature' Said to Have Grown in Campaign, TV Hit

"A young woman was killed and eighteen persons were injured last night in a bomb explosion" on a subway train, the New York Times reported today. "The blast was the fifth here since Oct. 2 and the first to cause death. All the explosions have taken place on city property. The bomb detonated ... as the train ... stood in the station with its doors open.... The explosive had been placed under a single seat at the rear of the fifth car of the six-car train."

"Vice President Nixon said tonight that if elected President he would propose sending President Eisenhower on a mission to Eastern European countries. He said he would invite the Communist leaders of those nations to visit the United States," the Times also reported today.

"Senator John F. Kennedy appears to have a substantial lead over Vice President Nixon as their campaign for the Presidency enters its final day, according to a nation-wide check of informed political opinion," The Times reports today. "However, most of those in close touch with the political picture in the fifty states added a big 'if' to their analyses.

"Senator Kennedy could fall short of victory, they said, if unmeasurable influences on the voters or a last-minute shift to the Vice President gave the latter all the doubtful states. ... Senator Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, is ahead in nineteen states with a total of 244 electoral votes, twenty-five short of an electoral majority of 269 votes. Vice President Nixon, the Republican candidate, is leading in sixteen states with a total of 109 electoral votes."

C.L. Sulzeberger writes in his column today: "We cannot tell in advance whether the electoral winner will be a great President. It is always difficult to tell in advance. No one foresaw that Jefferson would be an empire-builder, that Polk would conduct a strong foreign policy or that Buchanan would lack competence.

"However, on the record of this overlong campaign, whose duration is more than the world can forever afford, the personality and stature of Kennedy have grown perceptibly while those of Nixon have shown little sign of change. Only Kennedy has in any sense seemed to emit a charismatic aura of popular leadership, the kind of aura emitted by Franklin Roosevelt and by Eisenhower when they campaigned for office."

The National Chairman of the Writers Guild of America said, "TV is not intended to be moral or cultural uplift," the Times reported today. "It is entirely devoted to a specific form of advertising, namely brainwashing. The sole object is to condition the reflexes of all potential customers as if they were Pavlov's dogs. ... The so-called entertainment portion has the single function of associating the product with the common good [for sale]. The formal commercial specifies the product's brand label."