John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were both elected to Congress in '46, a year in which the New Deal was seriously defeated as the Republicans took back control congressional control over slogan Have you had enough? Of course, Nixon had campaigned against incumbent Jerry Voorhis on an anti-New Deal platform, but it is often forgotten that when JFK first ran for the House in 1946, he differentiated himself from his Democratic primary opposition by describing himself as a fighting conservative. Privately, Kennedy's antipathy toward FDR's traditional New Deal was even more extensive. When Kennedy and Nixon were sworn in on the same day, both were already outspoken on the subject of the emerging Cold War. While running for office in 1946, Kennedy proudly told a radio audience how he had attacked a left-wing group of Young Democrats for their naivety about the Soviet Union, and how he had also attacked the emerging radical faction led by Henry Wallace. So when Kennedy entered the House, he was anything but progressive in his views on domestic or foreign policy. It didn't take long for these two to become friends. Both were Navy men who had served in the South Pacific, and both saw themselves as occupying the vital center of their party. Just as JFK attacked the New Deal and the radical wing of the Democratic Party, Richard Nixon also distanced himself from the right wing of the Republican Party. Nixon's support for Harry Truman's creation of NATO and aid programs for Greece and Turkey meant rejecting the isolationist bent of the old guard of the conservative wing embodied by Republican Senator Robert Taft. Indeed, when it came time for Nixon to endorse a candidate in 1948, his support went to the more centrist Thomas E. Dewey, not the conservative Taft. Kennedy decided to enter politics primarily because of his father's influence. Joe Kennedy, Jr. had been killed on the European stage of World War II and so the family's political ambitions rested on John's shoulders. Nixon, however, became involved in politics by chance. While celebrating the end of the war in New York, he received a telegram from an old family friend telling him that they needed someone to run against Democrat Jerry Voorhis..