On a crisp autumn morning, students and faculty gathered on the steps of the DiMenna-Nyslieus library with an eye turned towards Election Day.’ A young senator running for the Presidency used this stump stop as a stage to speak of change and the dawn of a new generation for young Americans.
JFK and a Revolutionary War battle battle
Despite its parallels to the present, the year was 1960, and the speaker was Massachusetts’ senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who delivered a campaign speech to a rally of College Democrats and youthful voters, many of whom emphatically waved ‘Fairfield supports Kennedy-Johnson’ posters.
Kennedy’s campaign stop is one of many memorable political moments in the history of Fairfield University, a place that has witnessed a full range of American history, dating back to the Revolutionary War, when the Battle of Round Hill took place in 1779 on modern-day Bellarmine Hall.
Fast-forward two centuries, and Fairfield’s place in the American story is now defined by its political links, including numerous Presidential visits and congressional debates.
In 1956, Fairfield held the first mock Presidential Election in the school’s history. Student polls showed that undergraduates heavily favored Republican incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower over Democratic challenger Adlai Stevenson.
Renewing the tradition
Despite a respite after Kennedy’s campaign appearance in 1960, the school again played host to several speakers in the neo-conservative movement of the early 1980s.
Former President Gerald Ford came to campus in the early 1980s to receive an honorary degree and spoke to students and faculty, a speech best known for Ford’s infamous salutation following the address.
‘As a young presidential scholar, I thought (Ford’s portrayal in the media) was grossly unfair,’ said Fairfield politics professor John Orman. ‘I was astonished when Ford graciously thanked ‘Fairdale’ University. I thought, ‘That’s my guy, Gerald Ford.”
In 1984, incumbent President Ronald Reagan made a visit to Fairfield during his campaign trail. Marine One, the United State’s Marine Corps’ helicopter used for presidential travel, landed on a field adjacent to Southwell Hall, an office house located bordering the Dolan School of Business and PepsiCo Theatre.
Then University President Aloysius P. Kelly and several other University officials greeted Reagan, marking one of the more memorable scenes in the school’s political history.
At the time, Professor Orman was running for a seat in the House of Representatives in Connecticut’s fourth district, and was given explicit instructions by Kelly to refrain from any political activity on campus.
‘I was astonished when I looked outside my office window to see a presidential helicopter land,’ Orman said. ‘Afterwards I said to Father Kelley, ‘ You know that event looked political to me.’ He smiled and said ‘No, John. That was just one president welcoming another.’
In 1988, just four days before Election Day, Alumni Hall served as a forum for then Vice President George H.W. Bush to discuss the nation’s economy, his scrutiny of the Massachusetts’s governor Michael Dukakis’ fiscal policies, and his ‘no new taxes’ platform.
‘After a long wait, Bush appeared on the platform in Alumni Hall and was vigorously greeted,’ wrote then news editor Anne Marie Puckhaber in ‘The Mirror’. ‘On viewing the large crowd, Bush said that it is obvious that ‘Bushmania and Stagmania go well together.”
Presidential connections
The forty-first president’s ties to Fairfield extend much further than his Alumni Hall visit.’ J. Michael Farren ’77, a West Hartford, Conn. native and Fairfield grad, served as the deputy-director of the Bush campaign’s transition team, and later as the deputy campaign manager for the Bush-Quayle reelection committee.
Presently, Farren serves as George W. Bush’s Deputy White House Counsel in the Office of Counsel to the President.
Another alumnus, Tom J. Josefiak served as General Counsel for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in 2004. Josefiak had previously served as the Chief Counsel for the Republic National Committee (RNC) and the Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) during the 1988 presidential campaign.
The younger Bush also generated on-campus political news with a campaign speech he did not make in 2000.
As then governor of Texas, Bush received intense media scrutiny following a visit to Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist, Protestant college in South Carolina that has been openly critical of the Catholic Church in the past.
Bush cancelled the speech at Fairfield to deter any further extension of the story.
As for this year’s election, neither candidate has made an appearance on campus ‘- although Senator John McCain held a rally at Sacred Heart University last semester on Feb. 3. Still, if the past is any indication, there will always be subtle ties to the Oval Office on North Benson Road.
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