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Stocking Feet & Black Cigar. On election night the GHQ swarmed with Kennedys and staffers. All the brothers and sisters—Bobby, Ted, Jean, Eunice and Pat—and their husbands and wives scurried about with news bulletins (Old Joe Kennedy and his wife watched the returns on TV in the "Big House'' near by); Brother-in-Law Peter Lawford manned the five wire-association tickers in his stocking feet. Press Aide Pierre Salinger, Chief Adviser Ted Sorensen, Scheduling Coordinator Kenny O'Donnell, Top Organizer Larry O'Brien and Pollster Lou Harris (working feverishly with past election records and a slipstick) analyzed reports from far-flung observers—90 appointed assistants in key precincts all over the nation—who phoned in their findings direct. Bobby kept in touch with Democratic National Committee Chairman Henry ("Scoop") Jackson in Washington over a direct telephone line. He had another private line to Jack's house, but frequently Jack went over to the command post himself to look at the returns. When the news of the big Connecticut victory came over the wires. Jack uttered his favorite exclamation. "Fantastic!"', jumped for joy and (though he rarely smokes) lit a big black cigar, while his gleeful sister Eunice warbled When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.
As the night wore on, crowds gathered outside the Hyannis National Guard Armory, where carpenters had set up a makeshift platform from which Kennedy would make his nationwide victory speech. Pranksters hoisted a stuffed elephant on a telephone pole; newsmen milled about, waiting. Agents of the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to guard the winning candidate, notified the local police that they would move in when certain victory was assured.
At Bobby's house. Jack Kennedy checked in a few more times to read the reports. His mother came down from the big house to see him. By midnight, the jubilation of local Democratic staffers had subsided somewhat as they realized that the race was still undecided. At a TV set in the early hours of the morning, Kennedy watched Richard Nixon's address to campaign workers in Los Angeles (see below), decided to follow the Vice President's lead by going to bed without delivering any public speech.
The victory was the answer to the call whose theme Jack Kennedy had uttered with such pounding force in the two months of his campaign. It was a call predicated on the proposition that the heirs to the Eisenhower years lacked the courage and vision to lead the nation through the troubled '60s. It was a call that forced Richard Nixon into a defensive posture from which he never fully recovered—even with the last-minute intervention of President Eisenhower.