Was the President Republican or Democrat?

The point being made in the film was that during the Cold War there was a driving need shared by both the US & the USSR to at least equal one another in nuclear capacity (altho both really wanted to surpass the other by a large margin!) The Fail-Safe President made his offer to assure equality between the two super powers. NYC was chosen because the population was equal to that of Moscow. Remember the Fonda also knew that his wife was in NYC. (Please don't anyone say his bombing NYC was just to get rid of his wife!)Either way some city in the US was going to get bombed in retaliation. By offering to destroy NYC to equal the Moscow bombing was to keep WW3 from beginning.

Well, lets see, it is 1964, so apparently if the film was in normal timeline, President Johnson was in the Whitehouse. Harold Wilson (unless I'm mistaken) was in number 10.

"But, the biggest "jolt" I ever received from watching a movie concerning nuclear war was simply hearing that high pitched shrill as the Ambassador's phone melted. Utterly devestating when heard the first time. Total shock."
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artisicengineer, me too. I saw this when I was a child and that scene has stuck with me for over 40 years. The president and the ambassador calmly talking as our bomber approaches and the then phone shrieking was almost too much to bear. Growing up in a town with a national laboratory dedicated to the design and construction of a better bomb it was nothing to rub elbows with cowboys and nuclear physicists' kids in school. We thought nothing of it. What a strange and terrible time that was.

The shrill freaked me out, too, the first time I saw "Fail Safe," especially combined with Fonda's look of utter despair. That short scene was just huge.

Notice something, though? Just before it happens, the ambassador says, "I can hear explosions from the northeast. The sky is very bright..." In reality, he would've been vaporized before he heard the explosions.

In the novel(which I highly recommend)the President is John F. Kennedy and the story takes place in 1967(the book was published in 1962).

I doubt that it does really matter which political party the president was in. Since the real life president was a Democrat in 1964, the president in "Fail-Safe" was perhaps a Democrat too. The Wikipedia entry on the NOVEL "Fail-Safe" also mentions that the authors seem to have modeled the president after John F. Kennedy, who was president at the time the novel was written: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-Safe_%28novel%29. But as I said, it doesn't really matter in my opinion.

As for the president's political fate, I always imagined that he chose to resign shortly after the end of the movie's events. Personally, I think his decision to nuke New York was the right (or the least bad) thing to do. But justified or not, you can't deny the fact the he just ordered the death of several million Americans, including his own wife. And since the "Fail-Safe" president seemed to be a man of principles, I think he resigned from office at the earliest possible moment... but probably not after the immidiate crisis was resolved (co-ordinating help for New York, maybe convincing the Soviet government to pursue radical disarmament on both sides). Of course, if he was still in his first term and the next election was scheduled soon he might have just pledged not to run for re-election.

A related question is whether the Congress had pushed for an impeachment of the president. But I think in that case a Nixon-esque scenario could have occured: The president resigns and his vice-president pardons him.

Hopefully, the events of this movie would also have lead to the end of the Cold war, since both sides were shown the consequences of a nuclear attack and how easy it is to accidentally trigger an third world war. But then again, people are stupid, so who knows...