Newest Podcast Episode is "One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana"

When John F. Kennedy stepped off his plane in Billings on a warm Father's Day in 1958, it was hard to tell how many people in the crowd had come to see him and how many were just there for the dedication of the new airport building. He was a wealthy Catholic from a powerful New England family, running in a state that voted Republican and had already denied him its votes for Vice President two years before. Montana was a state he could never win. Its people were another matter.

So he set out to win them one at a time. He held the ceremonial headdress the Crow gave him but wouldn't put it on, remembering a photograph of Calvin Coolidge in one and not caring for the association. He sat down with a Butte couple whose child had a disability, then noticed the wife was pregnant and quietly told her to keep her coat on for the photograph. In Helena, the night before the delegate vote that would make him his party's nominee, he washed his socks in a hotel sink and asked where he could hang them, ate off-the-menu cream soup from the House of Wong, and rode to the airport in a theater owner's Pontiac while four large dogs licked the back of his neck.

By 1963 he could fill a Great Falls stadium built for 6,500 with 20,000 people, the largest public gathering in Montana history to that point. Fifty-eight days later he was dead. What Montana did with his memory is the rest of the story.

This episode is a sneak peek of our Fall issue, out around September 15th. One Handshake at a Time: JFK's Courtship of Montana is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Pocket Casts.