Dizzy Gillespie
- Dizzy Gillespie President
- During the 1964 United States presidential campaign, Gillespie put himself forward as an independent write-in candidate. He promised that if he were elected, the White House would be renamed the Blues House, and he would have a cabinet composed of Duke Ellington (Secretary of State), Miles Davis (Director of the CIA), Max Roach (Secretary of Defense), Charles Mingus (Secretary of Peace), Ray Charles (Librarian of Congress), Louis Armstrong (Secretary of Agriculture), Mary Lou Williams (Ambassador to the Vatican), Thelonious Monk (Travelling Ambassador) and Malcolm X (Attorney General). He said his running mate would be Phyllis Diller. Campaign buttons had been manufactured years before by Gillespie’s booking agency as a joke but proceeds went to Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr.; in later years they became a collector’s item. In 1971, he announced he would run again but withdrew before the election.
- Dizzy Gillespie