He was born on November 23, 1904 in n Hartford, Connecticut. His father, a physician, was a founder of Hartford Hospital and served for many years as a city alderman. His mother owned and managed considerable real estate holdings in Hartford and was active in Catholic charities and Democratic party politics.
Bailey attended Hartford Public High School before entering the Catholic University of America in 1922. A star athlete, he captained the college baseball team and played basketball and football with distinction. Although he was a good student and graduated with a B. A. in science in 1926, Bailey's athletic pursuits prevented him from obtaining high enough grades in chemistry and other premed courses to enter medical school. Instead, he went on to Harvard Law School, where he received his LL. B. in 1929. Bailey returned to Hartford later in that year, passed the Connecticut bar examination, and opened a small practice.
In 1929, Bailey backed a family friend's campaign for mayor and ran for Democratic precinct captain. Although he lost by thirty votes, Bailey so enjoyed this first election experience that he decided to pursue a political career. In order to learn the fundamentals of his new profession, he joined the entourage of Thomas J. Spellacy, the Democratic boss of Hartford. As Spellacy's aide-de-camp and chauffeur, Bailey gained appointment to the staff of Mayor William J. Rankin in 1931 and election to the Central Committee, the governing body of the Connecticut Democratic party, in 1932.
A year later he became a judge of the Hartford police court by means of a patronage deal made by Spellacy with Republicans in the state legislature. In 1935, Spellacy's influence waned and Bailey was forced to give up his judgeship for the lesser post of clerk of the police court. He returned to the police bench on the strength of his own legislative contacts in 1939. At the same time he functioned as a political factotum and minor public official in Hartford during the 1930's, Bailey involved himself deeply in the activities of the newly formed Young Democratic Club locally and nationally. A willing speechmaker and recruiter, he traveled widely in behalf of the Young Democrats and was elected the group's national treasurer in 1937 and 1939.
At the same time he functioned as a political factotum and minor public official in Hartford during the 1930's, Bailey involved himself deeply in the activities of the newly formed Young Democratic Club locally and nationally. A willing speechmaker and recruiter, he traveled widely in behalf of the Young Democrats and was elected the group's national treasurer in 1937 and 1939. His own modest success, and the prospect of a smashing Democratic victory with President Franklin Roosevelt at the top of the ticket, emboldened Bailey to seek election as probate judge of Hartford County in 1940.
However, a newspaper story alleging a $1, 000 discrepancy in the account of the clerk of the police court during Bailey's last term enabled Republicans to block his bid. They posed the question: "Who do you want handling your money after you are dead?" and defeated Bailey by fifteen thousand votes even as Democrats won the governorship and other major offices on Roosevelt's coattails. Though later cleared of wrongdoing, Bailey never again sought elective office. In 1941, Governor Robert Hurley appointed Bailey to a four-year term as statute revision commissioner. The job, which entailed checking and drafting bills that came up for consideration by the general assembly, enabled Bailey to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of the legislative process. He also gained an unexpected opportunity to demonstrate his ability as a party tactician when Republican governor Raymond Baldwin waited until after the 1945 legislative session to appoint replacements for the statute revision commissioner and three other Democratic officeholders whose terms had expired. Bailey refused to vacate his office until his successor was confirmed by the state senate, as required by law, and urged his colleagues to stay in their positions. To Baldwin's chagrin, Bailey and the other Democrats held their patronage-rich offices jointly with the new Republican appointees until the general assembly returned; their stand was upheld by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors.
Although he accepted appointment as executive assistant to Democratic state chairman John McGuire in 1946, Bailey's ambition was for the top post. Toward that end, he forged alliances with dissident ethnic ward leaders and orchestrated the overthrow of his mentor, Spellacy, in Hartford. Controlling the city convention, he saw to it that members of his coalition won legislative nominations and state convention seats, and that Spellacy and his supporters were shut out. Bailey also proved to be the driving force at the 1946 state conclave, promoting the successful nomination of Wesleyan professor and poet Wilbert Snow for governor. Snow, in turn, delivered the state chairmanship to his benefactor. Fortified by his family's wealth and income derived from the lucrative Hartford law firm he founded with political ally Alfred Wechsler in 1946, Bailey remained the unpaid, full-time head of the Connecticut Democratic party for the next twenty-nine years. Choosing high-quality gubernatorial candidates, fashioning ethnically and geographically balanced tickets, dispensing patronage deftly, and displaying brilliant generalship as the principal Democratic legislative leader, he was able to hold together the Roosevelt coalition and to guide his party toward majority status. Bailey's first major success as state chairman came in 1948, when he engineered the nomination of left-leaning millionaire New Dealer Chester Bowles for governor.
A political masterstroke, the Bowles candidacy pumped much-needed campaign money into Democratic coffers, deflated a third-party effort by Henry Wallace Progressives, and helped the Democrats eke out an election victory despite President Harry Truman's loss of Connecticut by fourteen thousand votes. Six years later, Bailey's handpicked candidate was moderate former Congressman Abraham Ribicoff, who upset Republican incumbent John Davis Lodge to become the first Jewish governor of the state. Ribicoff, who went on to win a landslide reelection in 1958, was appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1961, and captured a seat in the U. S. Senate in 1962. Irish-born John Dempsey, another Bailey protégé, kept the governorship in Democratic hands from 1961 to 1971.
Seeking a place in the national political lime-light, Bailey asked Governor Bowles to name him to the U. S. Senate seat left vacant by Bowles's appointment of Republican Raymond Baldwin to the Supreme Court of Errors in 1949. However, the governor passed over Bailey in favor of William Benton, whom Bowles believed to be more electable in 1950. Bailey managed to get some national notoriety in 1956 as a booster of the vice-presidential campaign of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy by circulating a sixteen-page memorandum prepared by Kennedy aide Theodore C. Sorensen that used statistics, quotations, and analyses to counter the widely held view that Kennedy's Catholicism was a liability to the Democratic ticket.
. In addition to launching the "Bailey Memorandum, " he acted as a floor captain for the Kennedy bid, which was only narrowly defeated by that of Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, at the Democratic national convention in Chicago. Following the defeat of Adlai Stevenson and Kefauver, Bailey enlisted in Kennedy's campaign for the presidency. An important cog in the successful 1960 operation, he did advance work in the critical primary states of Wisconsin and West Virginia, rounded up delegates in New England and upstate New York, and served as the intermediary between the young Kennedy campaign staff and the older generation of party power brokers that included Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago; Carmine De Sapio, Tammany Hall boss; and David Lawrence, governor of Pennsylvania. As a reward for his tireless effort, President Kennedy named Bailey Democratic national chairman in January 1961.
Although Bailey was given charge of all assistance provided to state and local candidates and the party's vital voter-registration effort, he had little real influence in the new administration. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy controlled the staffing of the Democratic National Committee, and other important patronage was handled by the White House. Presidential assistant Lawrence F. O'Brien generally informed officeseekers when they received positions, and the national chairman was given the thankless task of telling them when they did not. Still, Bailey's skilled management of the party machinery helped Democrats gain four U. S. Senate seats and hold House losses down to four seats in the off-year election of 1962. President Lyndon B. Johnson retained Bailey but reduced his role considerably. A White House aide, Clifton Carter, was assigned to oversee Democratic National Committee operations in 1964; following the president's landslide election in that year, the committee's budget was slashed and its voter registration operation closed down. Though little more than a figurehead, Bailey remained loyal to the president and kept his national post until August 1968. By 1968, American intervention in Vietnam had changed the political landscape drastically, and Bailey found his leadership in Connecticut challenged by a determined band of middle-class amateurs linked to the antiwar presidential candidacy of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota. Running against what they termed the "old politics" of the Democratic party regulars, the McCarthy volunteers, led by the Reverend Joseph Duffey and housewife Anne Wexler, garnered 44 percent of the vote in the spring primaries. There followed a long series of negotiations during which Bailey's foes threatened to oppose the renomination of Senator Ribicoff if they were not given a fair share of the forty-four seats in the Connecticut delegation to the Democratic national convention in Chicago. Although Bailey ultimately granted them only nine seats, the insurgents succeeded in embarrassing the national chairman by preventing him from invoking the unit rule and delivering all of his state's convention votes to his chosen candidate and the eventual Democratic nominee, Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey.
In 1970, Duffey's upset victory over the Connecticut Democratic convention's choice for the U. S. Senate in a primary contest and the nomination for governor of Congressman Emilio Daddario, who also was not in the Bailey camp, seemed to damage Bailey's reputation further. But the election defeats of both Duffey and Daddario allowed Bailey to hold on to power, and he returned to form as party kingmaker in 1974, convincing Attorney General Robert Killian to end his gubernatorial campaign and run for lieutenant governor on a ticket led by Congresswoman Ella T. Grasso. Grasso then became the first woman and first Italian-American governor of Connecticut, and the first woman elected as a state governor who did not succeed her husband. Bailey continued to advise Grasso on appointments and legislative strategy until his death in Hartford.
Bailey dominated Connecticut Democratic politics as a party chairman, from 1946 to his death in 1975. He typically had a decisive voice in selecting the party's candidates for top offices and in coordinating Democrats in the state legislature. He was even more powerful as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1961 until 1968, and was one of the main behind-the-scenes backers of John F. Kennedy. Connecticut Democrats honor Bailey each year with their Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner.
While he often spoke in the manner of the earlier generation of party bosses ("I go with the bird who can fly, not with the pigeon who can't get off the ground"), Bailey did not adopt its autocratic style. He preferred a politics of subtle persuasion and compromise, if necessary, and he was known as a man who kept his word.
Quotes from others about the person
Theodore White described John Bailey as a "tall, cigar-smoking, baldheaded man who affects an exterior hardness of manner, talks in a high, rusty, confidential tone of voice, and effectively conceals the fact that he is a Harvard Law School graduate. "
In August 1, 1933, he married Barbara Josephine Leary, a schoolteacher he had met while attending law school; they had four children.
