Kennedy Comes to Billings:

Campaigning, Conservation, and Cold War Politics in Montana’s Largest City

Background: Montana and the Democrats Before Kennedy

When Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts came to Billings in September 1960, he arrived in terrain that was politically uncertain, geographically imposing, and economically distinct from the urban industrial centers that formed the core of the Democratic coalition. Montana’s economy rested on agriculture, ranching, mining, and the management of vast federal lands, and its voters had long responded to candidates who spoke directly to those interests. The state had sent capable Democratic senators to Washington — Mike Mansfield and, beginning in 1961, Lee Metcalf — but it had also developed a persistent streak of independence that made electoral outcomes difficult to predict.

Billings, situated in the Yellowstone River valley of south-central Montana, was the state’s largest city and a regional commercial hub. It served as a center for the energy industry, wholesale trade, and agricultural finance, and its political climate leaned more conservative than cities of comparable size in the Upper Midwest. Winning Yellowstone County was not a precondition for carrying Montana, but campaigning there sent a signal that a candidate took the entire state seriously rather than concentrating only on the mining towns and labor enclaves of the west.

Kennedy had been courting Montana’s Democratic organization throughout 1960. In June of that year, he appeared at the Montana State Democratic Convention in Helena, where he delivered a lengthy address that laid out his critique of the Eisenhower administration’s record on natural resources. Speaking at the Marlow Theatre, Kennedy opened with a self-deprecating reference to Daniel Webster’s dismissal of the West as worthless — “this region of savages and wild beasts,” Webster had reportedly called it — before pivoting to argue that Republican neglect of hydroelectric power development had specifically disadvantaged states like Montana, which lacked proximity to eastern markets and depended on cheap electricity to offset high transportation costs. The Helena speech established the rhetorical framework Kennedy would carry to Billings three months later: the West’s economic needs were inseparable from federal resource policy, and the Eisenhower administration had failed on both counts.

The September 1960 Campaign Stop at the Shrine Auditorium

On September 22, 1960, Kennedy appeared at the Shrine Auditorium in Billings. The speech he delivered there, preserved in the Pre-Presidential Papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum under collection number JFKSEN-0911-073, represented one of the most substantive policy addresses he made in the Mountain West during the general election. The occasion also placed him in the company of Montana’s congressional delegation, including Congressman Lee Metcalf, who was running simultaneously for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring James Murray.

The Billings speech focused on a nine-point program for natural resource development. Kennedy argued that the United States was consuming water at a rate eight times greater than in 1900 and projected that demand would increase further by 1975. He contended that growing water scarcity was already constraining industrial growth across the country, and he placed particular emphasis on the consequences for western states. Montana, he argued, faced a structural disadvantage in national commerce because of its distance from eastern markets. The only way the state could overcome that disadvantage, in Kennedy’s framing, was through aggressive federal investment in hydroelectric power and water storage. He called for coordinated planning that would link the power systems of the Columbia and Missouri Rivers and proposed that power user groups eventually develop thermal generating plants using the lignite fields of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas to supplement hydropower from the Missouri River dams.

Kennedy also used the Billings appearance to draw an explicit contrast with the Eisenhower administration’s record. He criticized what he characterized as a virtual halt in natural resource development at the federal level and argued that resource development was not merely a regional concern but a component of national strength — especially given competition with the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s recent visit to the United States and the broader dynamics of the Cold War served as a backdrop against which Kennedy framed the stakes of domestic policy. A nation that failed to develop its natural endowments, he suggested, would find itself at a disadvantage in the global contest for influence and economic leadership.

Local dignitaries who shared the stage included Lieutenant Governor Paul Cannon and Leo Graybill, who was making a congressional bid in the district. The event was organized in part through Kennedy’s statewide campaign infrastructure, which had been working to line up endorsements and coordinate with the state Democratic Party since the spring primaries.

The 1960 Election Outcome in Montana

Despite the effort Kennedy made in Montana, the state’s voters gave their electoral votes to Vice President Richard Nixon in November 1960. Nixon carried Montana by a margin of approximately 2.5 percent, making Kennedy the first Democrat to win a presidential election without carrying the state since Grover Cleveland in 1892. The result reflected several intersecting factors: Eisenhower’s lingering popularity, Nixon’s alignment with the prosperity narrative of the outgoing administration, and the cultural wariness in many rural Montana counties toward a Catholic candidate from Massachusetts.

The loss in Montana did not diminish Kennedy’s ultimate victory. He won the presidency by carrying populous swing states in the industrial East and Midwest, accumulating 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219. His national popular vote margin was a slim 118,550 votes out of nearly 69 million cast, making the 1960 election one of the closest in American history. Montana’s three electoral votes would not have changed the outcome had Kennedy carried them, but their absence from his column underscored how difficult it remained for Democrats to make inroads in the Mountain West, even with an aggressive campaign focused directly on western economic concerns.

The 1963 Return: A President, Not a Candidate

Kennedy returned to Billings as president on September 25, 1963, as part of an eleven-state, five-day tour officially billed as a conservation trip. The White House framed the journey as a nonpolitical tour to promote the rational use of natural resources. Republicans were skeptical of that characterization. John Cavan, chairman of the Yellowstone County Republican Central Committee, observed publicly that the president had not conducted extensive inspections of Bureau of Reclamation projects or participated in substantive conferences with Interior Department officials. He noted that all eleven states on the itinerary were either ones Kennedy had lost in 1960 or states with competitive Senate races — suggesting the tour served a political function alongside its stated conservation purpose, even as Cavan acknowledged he was glad to welcome the president to the city.

The logistics of the visit were elaborate. Because planners in Washington believed Billings lacked adequate capacity to house the large presidential entourage, it was decided that Kennedy would not stay the night, instead departing after the fairgrounds event for Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Mayor Willard Fraser, known as a forthright and frequently contentious figure in Billings civic life, was initially dissatisfied with these arrangements. He told a Billings Gazette reporter days before the event that he resented being excluded from planning decisions and was annoyed that the president would not remain in the city long enough to address the Montana Municipal League, which had assembled in Billings that week. Fraser ultimately took his place on the platform alongside Kennedy, Democratic Senators Mansfield and Metcalf, and Republican Governor Tim Babcock.

The presidential Boeing 707 landed at Billings Logan International Airport at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon on a warm late-summer day. The temperature was forecast to reach 83 degrees. Law enforcement and Secret Service personnel had canceled all days off in preparation. Jack Sampson, then a rookie officer with the Billings Police Department who later retired as assistant chief, was stationed at the airport and recalled that the facility was filled to capacity, the proceedings tightly controlled by federal security agents. Before departing, Kennedy shook hands with officers at their posts. Sampson later described him as friendly and approachable.

The crowd waiting along the streets and at the airport was reported by observers to exceed 100,000 people — a remarkable figure for a city of Billings’ size. A sixth-grade student at the time, Jay Kohn, was bused to the fairgrounds from Highlands School with his classmates and sat in the grandstands. Decades later, he recalled the excitement of seeing a president in person for the first time, and noted that the speech addressed the recently ratified Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as prominently as it addressed conservation. His father later gave him a PT-109 tie clasp distributed as a souvenir of the presidential visit, which Kohn kept as a memento of the occasion.

The Fairgrounds Speech: Conservation, the Treaty, and the Economy

At the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds, an estimated 17,000 people gathered for the president’s remarks, delivered starting at approximately 4:00 in the afternoon. Kennedy’s speech ranged across domestic and foreign policy themes with a coherence that reflected the administration’s effort to present conservation not as a parochial western concern but as an element of national policy with international dimensions.

The nuclear test ban had cleared the Senate just two days before Kennedy arrived in Billings. On September 23, 1963, the Senate approved the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of 80 to 19. Kennedy praised both Senate Majority Leader Mansfield, a Montanan, and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois for guiding the treaty to ratification. The treaty prohibited nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater while allowing underground tests to continue, provided no radioactive debris crossed national boundaries. Kennedy had been pursuing such an agreement since his 1960 campaign, and the Billings appearance offered him a natural opportunity to connect Montana’s bipartisan leadership directly to a foreign policy achievement that had resonance for every American who had followed the Cuban Missile Crisis of the preceding year.

On conservation specifically, Kennedy discussed ten ongoing reclamation projects and the importance of the acquisition of wetlands, forest protection, and wildlife preservation. He argued that developing wilderness areas would expand Montana’s tourism economy and benefit ranchers and farmers alongside recreationists. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a key architect of New Frontier conservation policy, was part of the traveling delegation. Kennedy also addressed the tax bill then moving through Congress, arguing that stimulating the national economy to produce the millions of new jobs required by the decade’s population growth was as important to Montana’s future as any single reclamation project.

The speech closed with a quotation from Henry David Thoreau: “Eastward I go only by force; Westward I go free. I must walk towards Oregon and not towards Europe.” Kennedy applied the passage to himself — “I walk towards Montana” — and expressed confidence that the generation then in public life would be judged favorably for taking the steps necessary to secure prosperity and peace for those who came after them.

Republican Governor Babcock, introducing Kennedy at one of the Montana stops, welcomed him to “a state with no major problems” — a remark that carried its own irony in a region where water rights, federal land policy, and economic development remained perpetually contested subjects.

Aftermath and Legacy

Kennedy departed the fairgrounds at 4:35 p.m. and flew to Jackson Hole. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, less than two months after his Billings visit. For Montanans who had been present at the fairgrounds or along the motorcade route, the assassination transformed what had been a civic occasion into a fixed point of personal memory. Gary Glynn of Missoula, who had been brought to the fairgrounds as a six-year-old child by his parents, recalled decades later that his clearest memory was of the largest traffic jam Billings had ever produced. Jay Kohn remembered that the assassination solidified his recollection of the fairgrounds speech into something permanent and charged with retrospective weight.

The Billings Gazette’s front page on the day of the visit carried the headline “17,000 Cheers — Kennedy Was Here,” a document now preserved in the collections of the Western Heritage Center in Billings. The headline’s past tense had an unintended resonance that would become apparent only weeks later.

Kennedy’s two appearances in Billings — the 1960 campaign stop and the 1963 presidential visit — illuminate complementary aspects of his relationship with the Mountain West. In 1960, he came as a candidate pressing a policy argument against the incumbent administration on ground where that argument had genuine economic stakes, and he lost the state nonetheless. In 1963, he came as a president whose administration had produced tangible legislative accomplishments in resource conservation and arms limitation, and he was received by a crowd that crossed party lines. The shift between those two moments — from contested campaign rhetoric to the authority of incumbency — did not resolve the fundamental tension between federal policy and western political culture, but it demonstrated that the relationship between Washington and the High Plains was more complex than simple partisanship allowed.

Works Cited

Kennedy, John F. “Speech of Senator John F. Kennedy, Shrine Auditorium, Billings, Montana, September 22, 1960.” The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/speech-senator-john-f-kennedy-shrine-auditorium-billings-mt. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Kennedy, John F. “Remarks at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds, Billings, Montana, September 25, 1963.” The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-yellowstone-county-fairgrounds-billings-montana. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Kennedy, John F. “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Montana State Democratic Convention, Helena, Montana, June 27, 1960.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/helena-mt-19600627. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Shrine Auditorium, Billings, Montana, 22 September 1960.” Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files, Speeches and the Press, Speech Files 1953-1960, Collection JFKSEN-0911-073. https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKSEN/0911/JFKSEN-0911-073. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Trip of the President, September 24-28, 1963.” White House Films, Collection JFKWHF-WHN07. https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkwhf-whn07. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/nuclear-test-ban-treaty. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

Shuvaeva, Anastasiia. “JFK at the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds.” Intermountain Histories, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/222. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“50 Years Ago This Week, John F. Kennedy Visited Billings; Less Than 2 Months Later He Was Dead.” Billings Gazette, 2013. https://billingsgazette.com/news/local/50-years-ago-this-week-john-f-kennedy-visited-billings-less-than-2-months-later/article_92cd4820-ff27-5c82-b821-b30601ef7e11.html. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

“JFK’s 1963 Visit to Montana Seared into Memories by Assassination.” Missoulian, 2013. https://missoulian.com/news/local/jfks-1963-visit-to-montana-seared-into-memories-by-assassination/article_cb201e08-4f2d-11e3-8bb7-0019bb2963f4.html. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

JFK Visits Billings, Montana. Pediment Publishing. https://www.pediment.com/blogs/news/1963-jfk-visits-billings. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​