Both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were elected to Congress in 46, a year in which the New Deal suffered a major blow as Republicans regained control of Congress with the slogan Have you had enough? Nixon, of course, had campaigned against now-President 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 opposition in the primaries by describing himself as as a fighting conservative. Privately, Kennedy's antipathy to FDR's traditional New Deal was even broader. When Kennedy and Nixon were sworn in on the same day, both were already outspoken on the topic of the emerging Cold War. While running for office in 1946, Kennedy proudly told a radio audience how he had lashed out at a left-wing group of Young Democrats for being naive about the Soviet Union, and how he had also attacked the faction emerging radical led by Henry Wallace. Therefore, when Kennedy entered the House, he was far from progressive in his views on both domestic and foreign policy. It didn't take long for these two to strike up a friendship. Both were Navy men who had served in the South Pacific and both saw themselves as occupying the vital center of their parties. Just as JFK railed against the New Deal and the radical wing of the Democratic Party, so too Richard Nixon distanced himself from the right wing of the Republican Party. Nixon's support for Harry Truman's creation of NATO and aid packages for Greece and Turkey meant rejecting the isolationist tendency of the old guard of the conservative wing that had been embodied in 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, and not the conservative Taft. Kennedy decided to enter politics mainly because of his father's influence. Joe Kennedy, Jr. had been killed in the European arena of World War II and so the family's political ambitions were placed on John's shoulders. Nixon, however, got into politics by accident. While celebrating the end of the war in New York, he received a telegram from an old family friend telling him they needed someone to stand up to Democrat Jerry Voorhis..