The JFK Mystique
President John F. Kennedy visited Washington County on October 13, 1962, during a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania.
President John F. Kennedy visited Washington County on October 13, 1962, during a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania.
President John F. Kennedy visited Washington County on October 13, 1962, during a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania.
President John F. Kennedy visited Washington County on October 13, 1962, during a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania.
President John F. Kennedy visited Washington County on October 13, 1962, during a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania.
President John F. Kennedy visited Washington County on October 13, 1962, during a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania.
It’s the hair that Cary Jones remembers.
As a 9-year-old, he watched John F. Kennedy sweep up Beau Street seated on the trunk of a convertible, and what still stands out is the color of the 35th president’s hair.
“It wasn’t as red as I thought it would be,” said Jones, who is now 53 and an attorney in Washington. “It was more brown. We had a black and white TV, and to see a person like that in true, living color was really something.
“He was the first famous person I’d ever seen,” Jones recalled.
Fifty years after Kennedy’s death, the “thousand days” of his presidency still exert an unshakable fascination. The stream of books on Kennedy continues unabated, especially around landmark anniversaries of his assassination, and, in a 2003 Gallup poll, he came in second in the “greatest presidents” tally, bested only by Abraham Lincoln.
During one of the thousand days of Camelot, Kennedy broke away from Washington, D.C., and visited Washington, Pa.
On Oct. 13, 1962, Kennedy came to the city on a campaign swing a little less than a month before that year’s midterm election. It was at the tail-end of a two-day journey through the Pittsburgh area that included a rally at the University of Pittsburgh and visits to Aliquippa, McKeesport and Monessen.
While Kennedy was ostensibly stumping for fellow Democrats, he was undoubtedly thinking ahead to his own re-election prospects in 1964. In the nail-biting 1960 election, Kennedy carried Pennsylvania with 51 percent of the vote over Richard Nixon’s 48 percent. And, much like Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, Kennedy ended up carrying Pennsylvania on the strength of victories in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh regions. Kennedy carried Washington County by 15,000 votes and Greene County by 2,000 votes, and also took Allegheny, Beaver, Fayette and Westmoreland counties.
“We’re here for the Democratic Party,” Kennedy told the crowd, which clogged the street in front of the Washington County Courthouse and spilled onto Beau Street that Saturday afternoon.
The opportunity to engage in a little partisan hardball before friendly crowds might have been a welcome respite from the troubles bedeviling Kennedy in the Oval Office.
Just two weeks before, James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi after federal intervention; and the Cold War relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was about to turn positively glacial. The day after Kennedy’s visit to Washington, a reconnaissance flight over Cuba revealed Soviet missiles being installed, kicking off the two-week-long Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was the first time a sitting president visited Washington since Benjamin Harrison came for a funeral in 1892. It hasn’t happened again in the four decades since, though Bill Clinton made a stop at Washington’s Union Grill restaurant prior to Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary in 1992.
Preparations for Kennedy’s Washington appearance were completed close to the time Air Force One touched down at Greater Pittsburgh Airport. Workmen constructed a platform outside the Main Street entrance to the courthouse, and a sign that read “WELCOME MR. PRESIDENT” was hung between two courthouse pillars.
Parking was prohibited on portions of Beau and Main streets and on all of Cherry Avenue. The courthouse was shut down and additional phone lines were installed to accommodate the press traveling with the president.
The weather that day? “Perfect,” according to The New York Times.
Despite the golden glow that now surrounds the Kennedy legend, not everyone was enthusiastic about his presence in Washington. Some protesters held up signs at the rally, with one proclaiming “JOBS, NOT JIBES,” and another that said nothing more than “TALK, TALK, TALK, TALK, TALK.”
The Observer, which was seldom shy about its Republican leanings in those days, offered lukewarm editorial support the day before Kennedy’s arrival. “Many of those who hear him will be persons who are greatly opposed to his political theories and to his record in office,” the newspaper opined, “but it is to be expected that all of them will respect the office to which he was elected two years ago … Respect does not necessarily mean agreement.”
The Pittsburgh Press was even less kind: “We’d feel a lot safer if JFK would stick to his job and let his political friends do their own campaigning.”
Nevertheless, “there was quite a bit of buzz about it,” according to Jack Crouse, who covered Kennedy’s visit for the Observer and The Washington Reporter. “He was a popular figure, certainly, and a charismatic figure.
“I can picture the crowd in front of the courthouse,” he continued.
Before being called away to fight a house fire, retired Washington fire Chief Jack Manning saw Kennedy’s motorcade pull in behind the courthouse.
“He was a handsome man,” Manning recalls. “That’s unusual for a man to say, but he was a striking individual. He was tanned, like he’d just been to Florida.”
Malcolm Morgan, who would one day be a Washington County commissioner, was working for York Realty at the time, and watched the rally from his sixth-floor office in the Washington Trust Building, which faces the courthouse.
“I think every politician in Washington County was there,” Morgan remembers.
In fact, aside from local politicos, Kennedy was accompanied by Richardson Dilworth, the Philadelphia mayor who was running for governor, along with incumbent Sen. Joseph Clark. Clark was re-elected that November, while Dilworth was defeated by Gov. William Scranton.
After Kennedy’s 15-minute speech, he went across the street to the George Washington Hotel to relax, watch the Army-Navy football game on television and attend a private luncheon. Hotel employees were mostly confined to their offices while Kennedy was in the building, though Doris Stiltenpole, who was a clerk in the accounting office, was told to show Kennedy and his entourage to their third-floor suite.
“That was the only exposure we had to him,” said Stiltenpole, who added, “He wasn’t as tall as I thought he was going to be.”
Crouse remembers trying to elbow his way into the George Washington, but was stopped by security.
“There was not much of a chance to be close to him,” Crouse said. “There was a great deal of protection and a large crowd.”
Kennedy left Washington later that day and traveled on to Kentucky for more campaigning. All in all, Kennedy’s autumn campaign swing would probably have to be counted as a success – the ensuing election was “the best midterm showing for any incumbent president in the twentieth century,” Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek wrote in his book “An Unfinished Life,” with a gain of four Democratic Senate seats and the loss of only four seats in the House of Representatives.
“We’ll probably be in a position somewhat comparable to what we were in the last two years,” Kennedy said of the results.
It turned out to be the last federal election of Kennedy’s lifetime.