This is not exactly the way people usually recall John F. Kennedy. Wearing spectacular headgear, Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator, was speaking in October 1959 in Crowley, La., alongside a then-obscure city councilman named Edwin Edwards, who later became the state’s longest-serving governor.

Fifty-five years later, Edwards is now running, at 86, for a seat in the United States Congress. Lest anyone try to exploit this image as some kind of posthumous J.F.K. endorsement, it must be quickly noted that it was taken decades before Mr. Edwards was sentenced in 2001 to 10 years in federal prison for extortion.

Kennedy had come to Crowley about three months before declaring his candidacy for president. The city was celebrating its International Rice Festival — still an annual tradition — which explains his “rice hat.” His willingness to wear the headgear reveals his eagerness for friends in Louisiana. Recoiling from a famous photograph of President Calvin Coolidge in a Sioux headdress, which he considered comical, Kennedy almost always refused to wear unusual hats in public — including on the last morning of his life, when hosts at a Fort Worth breakfast pressed him, without success, to don a Stetson.

J.F.K.'s quest for Louisiana’s support at the 1960 Democratic convention was ultimately thwarted. The state’s delegates in Los Angeles gave 51.5 votes to a fellow Southerner, Lyndon Johnson, leaving Kennedy only 3.5.