blunder of the previous presidential election by trumpeting Great Britain's support for the Democrats. That drove Irish-American voters into the Republican fold, and Cleveland lost the presidency to Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison. In the weeks leading up to the 1920 presidential election, rumors circulated that Warren G. Harding was of African-American descent. Harding's campaign feared that the rumor would affect his popularity amongst white southerners and so his campaign made it a point to prove Harding's whiteness. Less than a month before the 1940 presidential election, President Roosevelt's press secretary Stephen Early kneed a black police officer in the groin outside Madison Square Garden. Roosevelt had already been facing skepticism from black voters because of his failure to desegregate the military. Roosevelt responded days before the election by appointing the nation's first black general, Benjamin O. Davis Sr., and announcing the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen. The Suez Crisis and Hungarian Revolution have both been described as October surprises during the 1956 presidential election. On October 7, 1964, just under a month before the 1964 presidential election, one of President Johnson's top aides, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for disorderly conduct with another man at the Washington D.C. YMCA, a place described by the Toledo Blaze as "so notorious a gathering place of homosexuals that the District police had long since staked it out with peepholes for surveillance." However, a week later, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power by hardliners in the Soviet Union, the Labour Party won the United Kingdom election and China conducted its first nuclear weapons test. During the 1968 presidential election, Hubert Humphrey—who was rising sharply in the polls due to the collapse of the Wallace vote—began to distance himself publicly from the Johnson administration on the Vietnam War, calling for a bombing halt. The key turning point for Humphrey's campaign came when President Johnson officially announced a bombing halt, and even a possible peace deal, the weekend before the election. The "Halloween Peace" gave Humphrey's campaign a badly needed boost. In addition, Senator Eugene McCarthy finally endorsed Humphrey in late October after previously refusing to do so, and by election day the polls were reporting a dead heat. During the 1972 presidential election between Republican incumbent Richard Nixon and Democrat George McGovern, the United States was in the fourth year of negotiations to end the lengthy and domestically divisive Vietnam War. On October 26, 1972, twelve