Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [34]
“I know that,” Akers replied, matter-of-factly. “But you will be. And thirty sounds better.”
After the Sun-Times endorsement, a number of the original candidates in the Republican primary dropped out. By late March it came down to a four-man race between the two who were by then the front-runners with strong newspaper support—Burks and me—and two other candidates. Burks was the favored candidate, having garnered the endorsement of a number of the big Republican Party township organizations. He used what he saw as his strengths in the race against what he saw as my weaknesses, homing in particularly on the charge that I wasn’t a hard-right conservative. In one of his campaign ads he repeatedly labeled himself as a conservative and noted that he was “the only candidate qualified by experience, maturity, and political philosophy to represent the citizens of the 13th Congressional District.”3 Burks, however, also had to deal with unproven allegations involving financial management issues at an insurance company that he had chaired.
By the day of the primary election it was looking like I might actually win. We were mobilizing an army of volunteers, finally raising some campaign funds, and had important endorsements.* It was a surprising showing for a group of young people who started the campaign in a kitchen scraping together four hundred dollars. Because I’d managed two losing campaigns for Dave Dennison, failing by the thinnest of margins, however, we weren’t going to take anything for granted until all the votes came in. I won with 67 percent of the vote on April 10, 1962. “RECENT POLITICAL UNKNOWN IN SWEEPING WIN,” reported the Chicago Daily News.4 Joyce and I were still amazed at the thought that we had actually won. We knew we had little time for celebrating as we quickly turned our attention to the November general election.
Since the district was Republican leaning, I felt we had a good chance. Our campaign team was energized and enthusiastic, and I could feel traction as we went into the fall. But then historic events intruded. In late October, Adlai Stevenson, by then America’s ambassador to the United Nations, gave a dramatic presentation to the UN Security Council. Complete with fresh aerial photographs to prove the Kennedy administration’s case, he asserted that the Soviet Union had been secretly planning to install nuclear weapons on the island of Cuba, ninety miles from the United States. For many days, as American forces imposed a blockade against the Soviet ships en route to Cuba, the world stood closer to the brink of nuclear confrontation than at any time yet in the Cold War. Politics didn’t matter anymore. Americans stopped thinking about an election that was but a few weeks away and focused on the Cuban missile crisis.
When the confrontation ended and the Soviet ships turned around, President Kennedy received a sizable boost in popularity. I thought it might propel Democrats to victory in races around the country, even where they weren’t favored to win. I was also running against a man with a good name for a Democrat in 1962: John A. Kennedy. He was not related to the President, though it probably didn’t bother him all that much if some voters thought otherwise.
In the final days of my 1962 general election campaign I had no sense of what would happen. We kept working and worrying. On election night, when I prepared for a close vote, I was stunned again. We had won by a sizable margin. I was thirty years old and headed to the United States Congress. It was quite a night for our entire family. But most of all I remember the expression of amazement on the faces of my parents. Something had happened in the life of their son and in their lives that was beyond anything they had imagined.
I had been a newly elected member of the Republican freshman class for about fifteen minutes before I was asked to make waves. Shortly after my victory, Congressman Bob Griffin elephoned. I assumed my old boss was calling me to offer his congratulations. Instead, he told me he was in the early stages of an effort to