Photo galleries showcase John Kennedy's visits to Utah

John F. Kennedy made five visits to Utah as a Massachusetts senator, presidential candidate and president of the United States. Amateur historian Ron Fox found 399 images of those visits in the archives of the Deseret News. The newspaper's photographers captured the faces of thousands of Utahns who clamored to see an American icon.

The newspaper is posting a photo gallery from a JFK visit on its Web site for the next several days. Saturday was the 45th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

March 6, 1959

Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy, 41, brought his glamorous wife, Jackie, with him on his second visit to Utah, according to 13 pictures in the Deseret News archives.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy, who was 29 years old at the time, is a subject of nine of the photographs, shown walking down the stairs from the airplane ahead of her husband and then standing beside him at the bottom of the stairs and again next to a car.

She is wearing fashionable gloves, a long wool coat and three rows of pearls around her neck.

Kennedy was already considered a potential candidate for the presidency back in 1959 on his first visit to Utah. He would announce his candidacy nine months later, in January 1960.