November 4, 1960
Chicago, Illinois
After a buildup fit for a circus, thousands of screaming fans packed into Chicago Stadium for the main event. The Democratic Party was putting on a daylong political spectacle.
Chicago was critically important to Jack Kennedy’s election chances, and the city was ruled by a man whose support could well push this tight election Kennedy’s way.
Mayor Richard Daley had pulled out all the stops. He’d arranged an impressive torchlight parade honoring Kennedy and Democratic candidates for statewide offices. On a cool, rainy night, a million people lined the two-and-a-half-mile parade route from Grant Park to the stadium to hear marching bands and cheer the region’s beauty queens waving from decorated floats. Representatives of the city’s fifty wards, Cook County townships, and labor unions marched in the procession.
Kennedy needed the vote of every person he could get along the parade route—and then some—if he was going to win Illinois’s 27 Electoral College votes.
If the parade wasn’t stirring enough, NBC was broadcasting Kennedy’s speech nationally—paid for by Daley and the Cook County Democratic Party.
Daley, himself an Irish Catholic, was proud of Kennedy. That Kennedy was able to not only capture the Democratic presidential nomination but also have a legitimate shot at winning the office was a pivotal moment in American history. It wasn’t too long ago that anti-Catholic bigotry would have held back leaders like Kennedy and Daley.
Daley was one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, but Kennedy’s candidacy meant the Irish had finally arrived. Anything was possible. On the last weekend before the election, Daley made sure JFK knew that Chicago had his back.
Kennedy’s motorcade snaked down South Michigan Avenue and along Madison Street to the stadium. JFK scanned the vast crowd cheering and waving their “Kennedy for President” placards.
The size of crowds at JFK events had grown exponentially in the past weeks. For many, like twenty-year-old college student Paul Green, politicians were stodgy old men—wizened like Truman or bald like Eisenhower.
Kennedy headed up a new generation of leaders. He was young and cool. He easily articulated his vision for America’s future—with programs like the Peace Corps—that made young people want to get involved in government. That’s why Paul had waited for eight hours to get into the arena to see Kennedy speak.
Big crowds didn’t necessarily translate into big Election Day turnouts, but tonight was something special. Twenty-six thousand supporters filled Chicago Stadium to capacity. Banners with images of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Mayor Daley fluttered from the rafters, and the marching bands played lively, foot-stomping tunes.
At around 8:30 p.m., Daley escorted Kennedy from the motorcade into the building. When the mayor stepped to the podium, the roar inside the building grew louder and louder. The throng chanted, “We want Jack! We want Jack!” Spotlights shone bright beams of light over the crowd and into the arena rafters.
Young Paul Green sat in the first row of the balcony with a perfect view of the podium. Daley beamed with pride, especially when he introduced JFK as the next president of the United States.
When Kennedy strode to the rostrum, he basked in the cheers and applause for more than a minute before beginning his speech. He summed up the domestic proposals he had championed throughout the campaign.
He slapped again and again at Richard Nixon for his effort to ride “someone else’s coattails” into the White House—a reference to President Eisenhower’s last-minute campaigning for Nixon.
Kennedy said Nixon—not Eisenhower—was on the ballot. The election was about who was going to be their next commander in chief. And that, Kennedy said, was more important than ever. The world was in a dangerous place with nuclear weapons and the advance of communism. “I want to make it very clear that contrary to what you may have come to think this week, we are not electing a committee for president of the United States. I have seen pictures in the paper of the rescue squad. Nelson Rockefeller, Thomas E. Dewey, Cabot Lodge and I understand they are adding Alf Landon [GOP presidential nominee in 1936] to their strategy board this weekend on how to win their campaign,” Kennedy quipped.
“I want to make it very clear that they are not all running for the presidency. Mr. Nixon is running…. You have all seen elephants in the circus, and you have seen how they grab the tail of the elephant in front of them, and they pull themselves around that way. Mr. Nixon grabbed that tail in 1952 and 1956, but now he is running, not President Eisenhower, but Mr. Nixon,” he said.
Kennedy said the real issue in Tuesday’s election was about “world freedom or world slavery, world peace or world war,” and it could not be met by goodwill tours or kitchen debates with Nikita Khrushchev.
The United States had to stop the communist advance that had made inroads all over the world—including Cuba—under the Eisenhower-Nixon administration.
Kennedy said the vice president was apparently having trouble dealing with the pressures of the campaign. And if he couldn’t withstand that, how could he deal with the pressure of the presidency?
He ended by reminding everyone that the campaign ended Tuesday and they had to make up their minds based on their own convictions.
“You make your judgment not merely about the two candidates, but you must make your judgment about yourselves, what you believe, what you stand for, what you see as your obligations to this country, what you see as your responsibilities as a citizen of this country,” Kennedy said.
“I believe it is possible to build in this country an ornament of freedom, and I hope on November 8 that all of us are working together because that is what this country requires—all of us working together can begin a great effort to ensure that peace and ensure the United States will serve as the defender of peace,” he said.
Kennedy stepped away from the platform and left behind the thundering applause. The bright lights were intoxicating, but the work in Chicago had just begun.
While the rest of the Democratic team triumphed in Chicago, Lyndon Johnson was having a rough time in the Lone Star State. Johnson had been relegated there by the Kennedy team, kept well south of the Mason-Dixon Line. At some appearances, Johnson had been heckled and booed by both Republicans and Democrats.
The Dixiecrats thought Johnson a traitor to the South. He’d formed a ticket with Kennedy, a northern liberal who they believed would work to overturn Jim Crow.
Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, were scheduled to speak at a luncheon at the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. They were met in the lobby by a crowd of fired-up Nixon supporters who blocked their way through the lobby, shouting, “We want Nixon! We want Nixon!”
A police officer attempted to disperse the crowd, but a defiant Johnson stopped him.
“I’m Senator Johnson. I don’t want to go through here like this was another Cuba or Berlin,” he declared.
It took the Johnsons fifteen minutes to elbow their way through the lobby to the banquet hall.
There was pushing and shoving, and the protesters mussed Lady Bird’s newly coiffed hair. Mrs. Johnson got into a sharp exchange with the wife of Edwin Bell, a Republican congressional candidate. Bell’s wife was dressed in a red, white, and blue outfit that resembled those being worn by “the Nixon-Lodge Girls,” supporters of the GOP campaign.
“Lyndon will win the election,” Lady Bird snapped.
“Nixon will win,” she shouted back.
“I’ll bet you that Lyndon will win,” Lady Bird said.
“I’m not a betting woman, but Nixon will win,” Mrs. Bell drawled.
Once inside the banquet hall, Johnson shrugged off the demonstrators, telling two thousand supporters that he’d told the police officer to stand aside.
“When the time comes when I can’t walk with my lady into the corridors of a hotel in Dallas without a police escort, I want to know it,” he said.
Richard Nixon was on a campaign blitz all along the West Coast and Rocky Mountain states. He would push himself as hard as he could until Election Day. Nixon started in Casper, Wyoming, then moved on to Spokane, Washington, 630 miles away.
His plane had flown through a storm that had just dropped seven inches of snow on Wyoming. It forced the pilot to circle the Casper airport before visibility returned and the plane could land. The rough touchdown terrified several of the reporters aboard.
The plane finally skidded to a stop on the snow-covered runway.
Nixon went straight from the airport to a high school auditorium jam-packed with more than two thousand people. But a few thousand more either watched the talk on televisions in the high school gym or stood in hallways trying to catch a peek of Nixon walking by.
His voice was hoarse from speeches. Nixon told the cattle country crowd that Kennedy’s farm policies would mean police state–type controls and require fifty thousand additional federal inspectors to enforce them.
He contended that JFK kept changing his mind on issues. “If he hasn’t made up his mind at this point, he won’t make up his mind as president, and I say we’re going to vote for somebody who has made up his mind, and that is what I have done.”
He was in and out in under forty-five minutes, then headed back to the airport and took off for another city. He only had to touch down in Alaska to keep his all-fifty-states promise, still rejecting his top aides’ advice. He would be there on Sunday.
Then he’d be in Detroit on Monday night to field questions from voters in a four-hour nationally broadcast telethon. After that, he’d head back to California to watch the election returns.
It was ironic that Nixon’s last major campaign stop on this stretch was a telethon where he’d answer questions from voters all over the nation. For three months, Theodore White noted—from July 25 until October 25—he made zero paid television campaign appearances. His television advisers wanted him to do more, but he ignored them.
Nixon wanted his television ads to feel more organic—not staged. He was so fearful of being accused of relying on slick Manhattan advertising firms on Madison Avenue that his television team moved their offices one block east to Vanderbilt Avenue.
Kennedy, though, had embraced television. A few nights earlier, JFK and his wife, Jackie, who had stepped away from the campaign trail as her pregnancy advanced, were asked questions by movie star Henry Fonda in a slick made-for-TV campaign program.
The three appeared from separate parts of the country—Fonda in New York, JFK in Los Angeles, and Jackie from their home in Washington, D.C.
While they waited for Kennedy to appear, Jackie shared family photos and snippets of home movies. Fonda asked softball questions about their lives.
After displaying a photo showing Jack reading a book, Jackie said she had been working with “Calling for Kennedy,” a group that identified issues with “the most significance to women.” Once such issues were identified, they’d put them on a form and she’d take those concerns to Jack, she said.
When JFK finally joined the interview, Jackie discussed the top issues the group had identified, then let her husband answer.
Jackie said almost every form listed “peace” as the top issue. She said one woman wrote that she’d like to see consistent, “not crisis-to-crisis planning.”
“What can you tell [her], Jack?” Jackie asked.
Good question, Kennedy said. America wants to avoid war, he said, reminding the audience that he’d served in World War II and that his older brother was killed during the conflict.
That’s why it’s so important for him to keep the peace. Kennedy said no one wants another conflict. “So, if I’m elected President, we’re going to work with all our energy, all of our effort, to maintain the peace. I think we’re going to have to do better than we’re now doing,” he said, before moving into his pitch about America losing its international prestige. He talked about aid for students and a program to help the elderly pay for health care.
When he signed off, he sweetly assured Jackie he’d see her soon. He still had seventeen states to visit before ending his campaign.
Unlike Nixon, Kennedy also had Hollywood for celebrity backup.
In late October, Frank Sinatra, some of the Rat Pack, and several movie stars performed at the Governor’s Ball, a Democratic Party function in Newark, New Jersey.
Police had to hold back a crowd estimated at somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand inside and outside the Newark Armory for the affair. Yes, in theory Adlai Stevenson was headlining the event. But the reality was this was in Sinatra’s backyard—and he was more popular than ever with his music, movies, and high-profile association with JFK’s campaign.
It was supposedly a formal event, and many attendees in gowns or tuxedos stood up on their chairs to get a better look at Hollywood actors Tony Curtis and his wife, Janet Leigh. But New Jersey native Sinatra stole the show singing seven big hits with a fourteen-piece orchestra.
The stars shone for Kennedy, all through his campaign. Lena Horne, Milton Berle, Gene Kelly, and Ella Fitzgerald were among the long list of other celebrities that made pitches for Kennedy or performed on his behalf.
Nixon had his share of Hollywood support. John Wayne and James Stewart were for Nixon, but they didn’t go out to raise money or put on flashy shows like Kennedy’s Hollywood friends did. No one knew if the celebrity support would translate into votes, but Kennedy wasn’t taking any chances.