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This Just In: Media

'Nixon Beats Winship': The head that almost was

By Dan Kennedy

It's true-confession time for retired Boston Globe editor Tom Winship. In the new edition of Media Studies Journal, Winship fesses up to the biggest blunder he ever made: declaring John F. Kennedy the winner of the 1960 presidential election shortly after the polls had closed, with a first-edition banner headline that blared KENNEDY WINS BIG.

Of course, Winship, then the Globe's managing editor, had to sweat it out for another day before Kennedy finally squeaked by Richard Nixon, 50.09 percent to 49.91 percent. "If Kennedy had not snaked out his eventual 17,000 vote victory," Winship writes, "that Boston Globe headline 'Kennedy Wins' would have gone down in newspaper history, along with the Chicago Tribune's immortal 'Dewey Beats Truman' banner. Two examples of overexuberant editing." (The actual margin -- 118,500 out of more than 68 million votes cast -- wasn't quite as close as Winship recalls, but it was close enough.)

Winship also takes himself to task for ordering Globe columnists not to weigh in on school desegregation for two weeks at the height of the busing crisis in 1974 ("I'm ashamed of myself"), and says he thinks the paper's editor should have control of the editorial page, even though he pushed for separation of the Globe's news and opinion operations when he was editor. That legacy remains: editor Matt Storin and editorial-page editor David Greenway are equals on the organization chart, and each reports to publisher Ben Taylor.

But Winship is clearly still traumatized by the Kennedy headline, calling it "my most blatantly irresponsible, stupid, and unfair performance. . . . The obvious lesson: Don't get too close to political candidates. It's addictive, and you always get hurt before you take the cure."