United States Presidential Election, 1960 (Papa Mac)

The United States presidential election of 1960 was the 44th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 1960. Republican nominee John Hoover, head of President MacArthur's Internal Investigative Service, defeated Democratic nominee Pat McCarran.

After MacArthur's 1959 death, and in light of Germany's losing ground in Europe, both the Republican and Democratic parties searched for anticommunist standard bearers in the nominally competitive election. Senator Pat McCarran, the Democratic nominee, and his running mate, attorney Robert Kennedy, were as rabidly anticommunist as the Republican nominees, and historians would later refer to this election as a "show election."

There were some scattered protests on the far left of American politics against Hoover's nomination and eventual win, as there were some that considered the Internal Investigate Service to be tantamount to an American gestapo. Recently leaked documents support this claim.