President Kennedy's Visit to Wyoming, September 1963
By Phil Roberts
Wyoming only rarely plays a role in selecting Presidential nominees. The state never has held a presidential preference primary and the county caucuses that elect delegates to the state convention are held most years in March--too late to have an impact and too few votes to make a difference on the national scene. Only one time, in 1960, did the Wyoming delegate votes matter in the national selection. The votes by Wyoming delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that year were sufficient to hand the nomination to John F. Kennedy.
Three years later, President Kennedy visited the University of Wyoming. On that late September day in 1963, Kennedy's airplane landed at Brees Field and the President rode to the UW campus in an open convertible, much like the one he was tragically riding in during a visit to Dallas two months later. More than 10,000 people assembled in the War Memorial Fieldhouse to hear Kennedy’s speech. It was the largest crowd ever to hear a speaker in Wyoming.
The President was introduced by U. S. Senator Gale McGee, who had been elected to the Senate in 1958 after more than a decade as a popular history professor at the University of Wyoming.
Although it was his first trip to the state as President, Kennedy was no stranger to Wyoming. He visited the state during the summer of 1958, when he was a U. S. Senator from Massachusetts. At the time, he was testing the waters for a presidential run. He attended a Democratic Party fundraiser in Cheyenne.
During his War Memorial Fieldhouse speech, the President acknowledged the political debt he owed to Wyoming. Kennedy was one of a half dozen serious contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. His most formidable opponent in that contest was Lyndon B. Johnson, U. S. Senator from Texas and Senate majority leader.
The nomination outcome was still in doubt when Democrats assembled in Los Angeles during the summer of 1960 for their national convention. As Theodore White wrote in The Making of the President, 1960, the nomination came down as a contest between Kennedy and Johnson. In times before delegate votes were assigned to territories, Wyoming was the last state on the roll call of states. The Wyoming delegation had 15 votes; 10 ½ were pledged to Kennedy, but careful counters knew he needed the remaining 4 ½ to gain the nomination. As the roll call moved through the states, the Johnson forces knew that if they could keep the Wyoming delegation’s total at 10 ½ , they could force Kennedy into a second ballot. Many delegates were pledged to Kennedy only on the first ballot and Johnson strategists thought they could make substantial gains if Kennedy were forced into a second ballot The Kennedy partisans in the Wyoming delegation knew how serious it was for their candidate to sweep the entire delegation.
Tracy McCraken, Cheyenne newspaperman and UW trustee, was state Democratic chairman and leader of the Wyoming delegation. Ted Kennedy, the nominee’s youngest brother (and, currently, U. S. Senator from Massachusetts), was standing in the Wyoming delegation. The convention chairman called out, “Wyoming….15 votes.” Without polling the delegation, McCraken shouted into the microphone, “Wyoming casts all 15 of its votes for the next President of the United States….” Johnson partisans tried to grab the mic, but it was too late. The balloons were falling, the bands were playing, and the Democrats had their 1960 nominee.
On that September afternoon in 1963, the thousands of Wyoming listeners heard a speech by one of the youngest men ever to serve as U. S. President. Just two months and one day later, on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.