The Day JFK Came to Del Ray

The 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has produced countless tributes and news pieces in the last week.

On Friday, an official commemoration ceremony will be held at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

• See: Obama, Clinton Pay Respects at Kennedy Gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery

There are no official tributes scheduled in Alexandria, but it’s worth noting that Kennedy did stop in the city during his 1960 campaign for the White House.

On Aug. 24, 1960, Kennedy, then senator from Massachusetts, kicked off a tour of the South with a rally at the George Washington High School football stadium in Del Ray.

Joined on stage by running mate Lyndon Johnson and Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Kennedy spoke of Virginia’s history, the challenges facing the nation in the form of communism and, with the event being a campaign rally, his opponent Richard Nixon.

Here's an excerpt of Kennedy's remarks:

“… 170 years ago Thomas Jefferson and James Madison left the State of Virginia and went to New York on a botanical expedition up the Hudson River. After they had caught fish and butterflies, they rode down the river and stopped in New York City, and there they met Aaron Burr, and the Knights of St. Tammany, and founded the modern Democratic Party, a party which has united the country and the city, the East and the West in the only and oldest national party in the history of the world.

“I come here tonight not on a botanical expedition, not to catch fish and butterflies, but I come to the home of this party with Lyndon Johnson and ask for your help. You started it, you began the Democratic Party, and I cannot believe in the most dangerous time in our country's history, that Virginia is going to say, ‘We will not join up again.’

“We ask your help and we are here tonight to begin this campaign. Virginia is an old state and it values the past. But if there is any lesson that history has ever taught us, it is that those who hold the past are the ones who move ahead. This country was founded by men who valued the past and were revolutionaries to preserve it. I cannot believe that there is anyone in the State of Virginia who believes that this country should stand still, who believes that everything that had to be done was done in the past, who does not believe that there is any necessity for us to break new ground in the future. If they are, they should vote Republican, because that is what they are going to get—standstill.”

An estimated 15,000 people attended the event, which Almond called “the most enthusiastic rally of my political experience in Virginia,” according to a 2010 Out of the Attic article in the Alexandria Times.

You can read Kennedy’s entire speech from the rally at The American Presidency Project. The Out of the Attic article from the Alexandria Times has a photo of Kennedy and Johnson approaching the rally in a car.