Even with all the support of young people and the endorsements of many civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, these coalitions weren’t enough to get him elected -- until a substantial number of dead people showed up to vote in Chicago during the general election. The Chicago dead-people’s vote was just enough to put him over the top, and this young man was able to pull past his opponent by a slim margin to win the electoral votes of Illinois. By the end of the evening, this young man had won his election to be President by only three electoral votes.

True to his campaign rhetoric, he went to meet with the greatest enemy of his country 'without preconditions.' He sat down with Khruschev, the Communist leader of the Soviet Union, to reason out our ideological differences. This young man put his faith in international negotiations, and in his intellect, to talk out our misunderstandings and pave the way to a new and lasting peace.

As has been true throughout history, his idealistic move was seen as naïve and weak by the very folks he was reaching out to. The Soviets came out of that meeting with a new resolve -- not the vision of world peace that had been expressed to them, kum-baya, but a chance to get American missiles out of Turkey, missiles that had been pointed at the USSR by President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s years in the military had brought him to a different policy of dealing with the Soviets, one of negotiating from a position of military strength. Khruschev wanted those US missiles out of Turkey, and he saw in this new President an opportunity to make it happen.

How Khruschev made it happen is known in this country today as the “Cuban Missile Crisis.” Our bright young President and his intellectually-gifted advisors are credited with narrowly averting a military confrontation with the Soviet Union, possibly even WW3, through skillful brinksmanship and steely resolve. Arguably, things could have gone out of control, but it’s hard to say that our President was the hero of the day -- since he was the one that caused the so-called crisis in the first place, by meeting with his enemy without precondition and seeking to negotiate peace on any terms. And he brilliantly resolved the crisis when he gave Khruschev what he wanted, the removal of the US missiles from Turkey, in exchange for the removal of missiles from Cuba -- missiles that were never in Cuba before the ill-conceived ‘no-preconditions’ meeting. It looks more like a tale of the Soviets manipulating our young President as an inexperienced young idealist to further their own ends than a saga of skillful international negotiations brilliant resolved by a masterful intellect.

There are several lessons we can draw from this history class today, so take notes as there may be a quiz on this later. First, that there is a time-honored tradition of  Chicago dead-people’s voting bloc putting Democrat candidates over the top. That banner has been taken up by ACORN and expanded to include many more segments of the population than just dead people -- we now have homeless drunks and drug addicts, many of whom are only mostly dead, not all dead. We have a young man as the Democrat candidate and heir-apparent to the dead-people’s voting bloc.