James Reston and the Changing of the Guard

A self-portrait of Times cartoonist Bruce Russell.

July 10, 1960: The 1960 Democratic National Convention marks an end to the era of political bosses, New York Times columnist James Reston says: "The lobby of the Biltmore Hotel is jammed at this moment with a mob of notorious political peacocks smoking cigars as big as ball bats, and pretending they are going to 'put Kennedy over' or stop him on Wednesday. "But most of these gentlemen are dead and don't know it. Kennedy did not come here yesterday to negotiate the nomination with them but merely to pick up the loving cup he won and negotiated by rushing all over the country weeks and even years ago." Author Theodore White will underscores this theme in "The Making of the President 1960," Page 154:  "In a matter of days another dominant note was struck by the mysterious process of common press observation. From the sounds and sights, from the hundreds of lost and milling faces in the Biltmore, the press distilled a swift truth that was a remarkably accurate historic assessment: that this was the convention where the young faced the old, this was -- in James Reston's felicitous phrase -- the assembly that witnessed the Changing of the Guard."