Ikeda was elected president of the LDP and became Prime Minister in July 1960, at an extremely difficult moment in Japanese domestic politics and U.S.-Japan relations. Ikeda's immediate predecessor as prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi, had disastrously mishandled his attempt to revise the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (known as Anpo in Japanese), leading to the massive 1960 Anpo protests, which were the largest protests in Japan's modern history. Although Kishi was ultimately successful in ramming the revised treaty through the Diet, the size and violence of the protests that followed forced him to cancel a planned visit by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and resign in disgrace. Ikeda also inherited from Kishi a violent dispute at the Miike Coal Mine in Kyushu, where striking coal miners repeatedly clashed with right-wing thugs sent by their corporate overlords to break the strike. Ikeda had been a compromise candidate to succeed Kishi, and had only secured the premiership by promising to call an immediate election, just a few months later in the fall of 1960. Given Ikeda's image as an unpopular politician out of touch with the common people and prone to verbal gaffes, few expected Ikeda to be anything more than a temporary placeholder prime minister.
