The last surviving member of President John F. Kennedy’s West Wing staff has died, severing a living link to the Camelot era of American history.
That link was Charles “Chuck” Daly, who had been Kennedy’s Congressional liaison. He passed away peacefully, aged 98, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, Jan. 21, more than six decades after the president he had served. He was surrounded by his wife and four sons when he died.
Being one of JFK’s West Wing aides was only one episode in his extraordinary life. As well as being one of the final living links to JFK’s presidency, he was one of a diminishing number of surviving Korean War veterans; he had earned first the Silver Star, and then the Purple Heart, in combat in 1951.
Daly was born in Ireland and arrived in the U.S. as a child. He enlisted in the Navy in 1945, at 17, and was sent by the service to Yale through a combination of a Navy program and the G.I. Bill. Feeling that his service had been minimal, he was commissioned in the Marine Corps and deployed to Korea. He was shot in the arm by a sniper, he was shipped home, where his wife Mary had given birth to their first son, Michael. Michael Daly is the Daily Beast’s Special Correspondent.
Daly studied at Columbia School of Journalism, then worked in the Senate for another brilliant young combat hero: John F. Kennedy, whom he followed to the West Wing in 1961. After Kennedy’s assassination, Daly stood on the steps of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., as JFK Jr. saluted the casket of his dead president.
Daly continued in the West Wing serving Johnson’s presidency because he wanted to help pass the Civil Rights Act.
He went on to work for Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. He was standing beside RFK when the assassin Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed the candidate. Daly’s wife was upstairs at the hotel and he returned to her, covered in blood, telling her, “People are animals.”
In subsequent decades, he worked to bring peace to his native island of Ireland’s troubled North; to reduce gun violence in Chicago; and to fight AIDS in South Africa. His work in Chicago meant he was on the same board as yet another brilliant young senator bound for higher office: Barack Obama.
It was hardly his only encounter with future presidents: Michael Daly memorably wrote in 2016 about his father’s encounter with a younger Donald J. Trump. Daly was with his friend, Patrick McGahn, another decorated Korean War combat veteran who had become Trump’s right-hand man in Atlantic City, but who addressed the property empire heir as “draft-dodging bastard.”
Daly became a director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in 1988, a year after the death from cancer of his first wife, Mary. He later married Christine Sullivan Daly, who survives him. He is survived by his sons Michael and Douglas from his first marriage, his sons Charles and Kevin from his second marriage, by five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
He will be buried near the president he served, at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, after a funeral in Chatham, MA, on Sat. Jan. 31.
