The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  Eventually, in October 1951, Truman did live up to his promise. He selected General Mark Wayne Clark, who had led a bloody capture of Rome during World War II, to become the first U.S. ambassador to the Vatican since 1868.The announcement caused an uproar among hundreds of Protestant clergymen. Their calls and letters of protest doomed Truman’s decision, which needed the confirmation of Congress to take effect. The reaction illustrated the strong undercurrent of anti-Catholicism still imbedded throughout the United States. At a Washington rally attended by hundreds, the Reverend Carl McIntyre, president of the International Council of Christian Churches, not only attacked the proposed appointment but the Catholic Church as well.“Communism is the enemy we are all against— but we have another enemy, too, older, shrewder,” McIntyre proclaimed.“It is Roman Catholicism and its bid for world power. In the United States, it is called ‘Spellmanism.’”

  After several weeks of religious rancor, Clark withdrew his name from consideration, though the issue continued to burn. Leaders of several Protestant denominations vigorously attacked the very idea of an ambassador to the Vatican, and with nearly as much antipathy as the Know- Nothings of yesteryear. Truman retreated from the issue, and so did Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952, who warned such an appointment “would be highly incompatible with the theory of separation of Church and State.”

  Watching his long-time hopes and hard work for a U.S. embassy at the Vatican fade away, Joe Kennedy could only express his true frustrations to Galeazzi. For years, they’d worked together with Cardinal Spellman for what Kennedy believed was the good of the church in America. But the three were no longer united on this issue. For all his bluster and candor with President Truman, however, Kennedy failed to comprehend, quite naïvely, Spellman’s change. After all, the cardinal had united Joe’s children in marriage and baptized his grandchildren; he had also accepted thousands of dollars for his favorite charities. Kennedy felt he could count on Spellman, the same way he had been able to manipulate and count on the support of Cushing in Boston.

  As the premier Catholic figure in America, however, Spellman didn’t want to share power or prestige, certainly not with another American figure with close links to the Vatican. A U.S. representative to the Holy See could go over the cardinal’s head directly to the Pope, rather than deal with Spellman in New York. Though he chatted amiably about the issue with Kennedy and shared correspondences, Spellman discreetly did everything he could to undermine the effort. He ignored the Vatican’s directive to push for the measure with American Catholics and only halfheartedly lobbied other politicians about the matter. The subterfuge was pure Spellman. “Though nearly twenty years earlier Spellman had worked diligently for such an appointment, he no longer wanted an American official at the Vatican,” biographer John Cooney later observed. “If an effective ambassador were named to replace Myron Taylor, he would undercut some of the Cardinal’s influence, both in Rome and Washington.”

  In Rome,Vatican officials detected Spellman’s sleight of hand. One of the Pope’s top aides later sent a letter to the New York archdiocese blaming him for the whole mess and the new tide of anti-Catholicism evidenced in the United States. As late as June 1955, however, Kennedy was writing letters to the cardinal marked “personal and confidential,” evidently unaware of Spellman’s role in sabotaging the Vatican’s plans. Enthusiastically, Kennedy recalled his meetings in Rome with the Pope and their good friend Count Galeazzi, and wondered how they all might make the pontiff ’s dream come true for an American representative in Vatican City. “The Holy Father, as I have found out in my last four visits with Him [sic], is still incensed that nothing is being done in America,”Kennedy wrote.“He repeated again that personally Mr. Taylor was a nice man but the operation, including the closing, was an insult ‘not to me but to the Holy See.’” In a transparent allusion to his own political aims, Kennedy claimed the Pope “was vitally interested in why no Catholics seem to be appointed to important posts in the United States. I told Him I thought it was because the Catholics did not swing any political weight and I doubted if anybody, outside of yourself, could call the President or any high official on the telephone and get any service whatever, and I doubted whether you felt you could accomplish much along this line even with all your friends in the government. This perplexed him no end and then he asked me what I thought could be done.” Kennedy proposed a plan to merge the interests of church and state by using the National Catholic Welfare Council or some other Catholic agency “to alert every diocese in the United States and they, in turn, to alert the people when there is a problem that affects the Church.” Using his old prejudiced baseline of comparison, Kennedy again said he “pointed out the success of the Jews in working on these problems 365 days of the year.”

  Without revealing much, Spellman listened politely to Joe Kennedy’s reports and took his telephone calls. He recognized that Kennedy maintained a remarkable connection to the Vatican, and that his son’s presidential ambitions could possibly affect the church in America. When Jack Kennedy nearly won the 1956 vice-presidential nod, Spellman forwarded pleasantries (“Jack is a great credit to us all”) and even indulged Joe in his father’s moment of pride. “I believe if you have what Jack has, you should try for the big job, then if you’re licked, at least you’ve had a shot at it,” Joe boasted to the cardinal.“Trying for the second best never appealed to me.”

  Surely when the time was right, Joe Kennedy believed, Cardinal Spellman would support him on another quest—the effort to get Jack Kennedy elected as the first Catholic to the American presidency. Only then would Kennedy and his family realize how little they could trust Cardinal Spellman.

  Chaper Twenty-Two

  A Friend in Rome

  THE FAVORS, big and small, between Enrico Galeazzi and Joe Kennedy extended to their children. When Jack breezed through Europe with his friend Lem Billings in 1937, Galeazzi managed to arrange a private audience for the twenty-year-old American with the Pope, who immediately asked about Kennedy’s parents. At dinner that night, Galeazzi “gave me quite a talk about the virtues of fascism and it really seemed to have its points,” Jack recorded in his diary. When young Kennedy returned in 1947 as a congressman, his father cabled him:“Spellman arranging with Galeazzi in Rome your appointment.” Joe Kennedy returned the favors by helping Galeazzi’s daughter and her husband, Dr. Roman Antonelli, immigrate to the United States. In particular,Kennedy felt indebted to Galeazzi for gaining the Pope’s special blessings following Kathleen’s fatal plane crash (to “help her in her eternal life,” as Galeazzi put it). “Rose and I and all the children are again, as so many times in the past, greatly indebted to you for your most unusual kindness and generosity,” Kennedy replied. “It has been my privilege to have met a great many men and women in my life, but none have left me with the gratitude I feel towards you for your consistent kindnesses to us all. It is one of the bright spots in a very unkind, cynical world—and I don’t exaggerate.”

  Kennedy probably didn’t know much more about Galeazzi’s personal life, nor the full extent of the intrigue within the Vatican walls. For example, though Kennedy had been introduced to Mother Pascalina, the beautiful nun who served as the Pope’s assistant and ran his household, he was most likely unaware of the extent of her influence over Pius XII and her close relationship with Galeazzi. Behind the scenes, Mother Pascalina, Galeazzi, and Cardinal Spellman—friends from their days together in the 1930s when Spellman served in Rome—wielded tremendous clout over the church’s decisions and, in Galeazzi’s case, over its finances. Throughout the 1950s, Joe Kennedy was one of their most constant allies in the United States. He shared their ardent anti-communism, their increasingly conservative outlook and their devotion to the consolidated power of Pope Pius XII in Rome.

  Prominent Catholics in America who wanted a favor from the church found they could seek out Kennedy to make it happen. When Ed Sullivan, the famous television host and newspaper columnist, went to Rome, he asked K
ennedy to arrange a papal audience. “I dislike bothering you with these things,” he relayed to Galeazzi, after explaining Sullivan’s prominence in America, “but there are some important people who are helpful when we want to get something done here.” Sullivan helped secure the support of Protestant clergymen for Jack Kennedy in 1960 and created a committee designed, in Joe’s words, to “offset some of the bigoted spokesmen.” When the New York Times political columnist James Reston wanted to forward some confidential information to the Pope concerning the Russians and India, he used Kennedy as a courier. Within the church, Kennedy became a sponsor and advocate for other prominent clergy (especially those not particularly in Spellman’s favored circle), acting as a godfather for their aspirations. Before the president of Notre Dame University, the Reverend John J. Cavanaugh, left for Rome, Kennedy dashed off a letter calling Cavanaugh “my closest friend in the entire priesthood in the United States” and urging Galeazzi to contact him during the trip.

  In his lengthy correspondences with Galeazzi, Joe Kennedy revealed numerous private insights about himself, his growing family and the ever-changing status of Catholics in postwar America. Kennedy confided some of his own doubts about still feeling like an immigrant’s grandson in America. “I think that the Irish in me has not been completely assimilated,” he acknowledged, “but all my ducks are swans.” Increasingly, Joe Kennedy’s neatly typed letters also reflected his escalating hopes for Jack’s political career and the implicit belief that the church would be a powerful force in their success. During the 1952 Senate campaign, Joe Kennedy mentioned the possibility of victory for his son, adding that presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson could still win “if the Irish Catholics would swing back the last week” before Election Day instead of deserting for the Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson would make a fine president,he explained to Galeazzi, but some Catholics objected to the Democratic nominee because he was divorced and was surrounded by too many leftists. When Jack nearly died from his back surgery in 1954, Cardinal Spellman alerted Galeazzi and suggested the Pope send a get-well message to the young senator with his blessing. “I can’t tell you how happy I was to have John receive the cable from the Holy Father,” Joe Kennedy wrote to his friend.“John is feeling better. He had two very close calls with death but now seems to be recovering.”

  Each letter spun its own tale about the Kennedys, a carefully crafted version of partial fact and fiction, just as Joe wanted the Pope to hear it. In the summer of 1956, Joe mentioned to his old friend that “Jack’s wife had a miscarriage after seven months.” Then he speculated that “very likely the strain and excitement of the [1956 Democratic] convention caused it and it’s a terrible blow to both of them.” After Democrats suffered a landslide defeat in the 1956 election, Joe told Galeazzi of his relief that Jack wasn’t selected as the vice-presidential nominee with Stevenson. “It would have absolutely set back the possibility of a Catholic in the White House for another fifty years because the defeat would have been blamed on the Catholic [sic],” he insisted, his eye always on the prize. In the late 1950s, as Bobby became more directly involved on the Senate Rackets Committee and its fight against organized crime, Joe echoed his son’s zeal. “We are doing nothing about the fact that the racketeers and the gangsters are the most powerful influence in American Labor,” the senior Kennedy claimed, without the slightest bit of irony or self-consciousness about his own Prohibition days.“Under the leadership, for the most part, of gangsters and racketeers, the United States has many many problems.”

  Joe Kennedy’s letters were composed with his usual cold and calculating eye. The subtleties of intent, the feeling of manipulation, were evident throughout. And yet there was an equally undeniable candor with Galeazzi in many parts—a shared worldview, a history of personal and professional experiences together, a unity in their commitment to the church. Joe Kennedy’s belief in the pontiff remained unshakable, both as an indicator of his own religious conviction rooted in his Irish Catholic heritage and in his own assessment of communism’s threat and what plagued the world. Like many Irish Americans of his generation, the essence of his Catholicism was built on a respect for the church’s traditions and structure, a conviction based on visible magisterial powers on earth as much as in the heavenly visions of a hereafter. For the Pope’s eightieth birthday, Kennedy sent a cable to Galeazzi extolling the Holy See’s influence on the world. “There are those who ask why God permits communism to destroy so many of his creatures and there are those who answer, of which I am one, that the Catholic Church has increased its influence throughout the entire anti-communistic world because of the confidence that all have in the Holy Father,” Kennedy wrote. “He may not have the battalions or the guided missiles but this man has a force greater than all.”

  Both Joe and Rose considered their family very fortune to be in the Vatican’s good graces, as though they’d been selected by some higher force for a transcendent task or mission. At Christmas, surrounded in Hyannis Port by his large and handsome family,Kennedy reminded them how privileged they were to have the Pope so concerned, so aware, of their welfare. “We had eight of the grandchildren here for the holidays and all of my own children and in a talk when we got together one night, I told them what a wonderful gift it has been to have been so close to the Holy See during the past twenty years, a privilege, I am sure, not given to any other family in the world and it is all due to you,” he thanked Galeazzi.“You can imagine how grateful the Kennedy family feels toward you.”

  In turn, the Pope’s chief administrator reinforced Kennedy’s vision of his own family’s uniqueness, that providence had chosen the Kennedys, particularly his eldest son, for some fateful destiny. Whether Pope Pius XII actually shared this belief is not clear, though the pontiff ’s actions by awarding both Joe and Rose Kennedy special church honors and Galeazzi’s own letters suggest it was so. “I was happy to have from you interesting clippings about Jack,” Galeazzi wrote in 1958 after the Kennedys were featured in Time. “Please have someone in your office select a few clippings once in a while to allow me to follow the development of this great battle, which after all is the natural logical consequence of a long series of wonderful achievements and providential mysterious events that have happened to your family in a steady sequence.”Though signed with a florid and familiar “Enrico,” this letter on Vatican stationary could have been written for Joe Kennedy in the hand of God. With all the religious conviction he could muster, he felt sure these “providential mysterious events” would lead his son someday to the White House.

  THE KENNEDYS bolstered their claims to the church, their constant exchange of favors, with an uninterrupted flow of cash. In the private realm, Joe Kennedy could be quite generous with his own funds; his financing of the underground discoveries at the Basilica of Saints John and Paul, a pet project of Cardinal Spellman, was one such instance. To move that work along, he sent installments of $20,000 to keep the workers digging. With another favorite Spellman project in Vatican City—the Arch of Constantine—Kennedy was a virtual spendthrift. “I told His Eminence, Cardinal Spellman that I didn’t think very much could be done with the figure he talked to you about—$100,000,” Kennedy wrote to his friend in Rome. “I sincerely want to make this a really worthwhile job so don’t worry about any cost within a reasonable figure.”

  As a congressman, Jack Kennedy could be equally generous in satisfying the church’s needs, sometimes by using the American taxpayer’s money. For several years, the request for U.S. reparations to repair Vatican properties at Castel Gandolfo, damaged by Allied bombing during World War II, remained an unsettled sore point. In a 1946 assessment prepared by Galeazzi, the Vatican said that $850,000 worth of damage occurred at the Pontifical Villas, and another $788,000 from damages to another papal building. During the next several years, the Vatican and the United States wrangled over the correct amount of money for the damages, the Apostolic Delegate twice asking the State Department for the funds with still no resolution by 1954. In
1956, Senator John F.Kennedy helped push through legislation that eventually allocated nearly a $1 million in federal funds for damaged church properties at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence at the Vatican, but also provided $8 million for schools in the Philippines. “As you know, the authorization for the Vatican bill passed the Senate unanimously yesterday,” Jack wrote in a June 1956 note to his father.“I think the appropriation bill will be all right too.” Church officials expressed their indebtedness to Kennedy for arranging this federal compensation. “You have been wonderfully cooperative and wonderfully successful both in obtaining reimbursement to the Vatican for the damages caused during the war and also in obtaining funds to help pay for the damages to institutions in the Philippines,” Cardinal Spellman applauded Senator Kennedy the following month in a note signed “your sincere friend.”

  Throughout his early political career, Jack Kennedy acted as a stalwart supporter of the church, both for calculated political reasons and out of his own convictions. His public statements and behind-the-scene efforts reflected not only Rome’s view about international communism but the American church’s position on such domestic issues as education. As a Massachusetts congressman, Kennedy tried to maintain a careful line— some would say a nonexistent one—between matters of church and state.