The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  With his keen historical sense, Kennedy recognized that his campaign had become a quest for the rights and dignity denied his predecessors, for an end to the restrictions that kept minorities from achieving America’s greatest honors. “The nomination of the second Roman Catholic ever to run for President of the United States brought appeals from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergymen yesterday for a campaign without reference to religion,” the United Press International reported on the day of Kennedy’s acceptance speech. But that same week, the cover of Time magazine featured a profile of Kennedy and his “clan” replete with patronizing references to his faith and ethnicity.“The Kennedy clan is as handsome and spirited as a meadow full of Irish thoroughbreds, as tough as a blackthorn shillelagh, as ruthless as Cuchulain, the mythical hero who cast up the hills of Ireland with his sword,” the magazine reported. The article highlighted father Joe Kennedy, “whose shrewd Irish instincts were first and foremost focused on making a name and a fortune.” When FDR appointed him ambassador to Britain, he became “the first Irish-American to hold the job—the clan moved into the embassy residence on Prince’s Gate.” Readers learned how neighbors in Hyannis Port once looked down their noses at the Kennedys as “moneyed Boston Irish,” and how grandfather Honey Fitz represented “the old, colorful and rascally breed of Boston Irish politics.” It even suggested that Jack was keeping his father out of sight during the 1960 campaign “because of the Catholic issue.”

  The Time profile was only one of many such examples. Much had changed in America since 1928, but the old ghosts continued to appear: how would Jack Kennedy break through this historic barrier and not become just another painful failure, Al Smith all over again?

  Chapter Twenty- Five

  The Fall, 1960

  FROM THE START, Richard Nixon insisted that he wouldn’t make religion an issue in the 1960 campaign. The Republican vice president had grown up as a Quaker, a Protestant domination that had historically endured its own persecution, and he vowed that “under no circumstance” would he raise the subject. In an inter-office memo to his staff, he forbade everyone connected with his campaign from discussing religion, even informally or casually. By the general election campaign, however, it was clear that Nixon’s promise, regardless of his intent, would be impossible to keep.

  At a White House press conference in late August, President Eisenhower, who studiously avoided the controversy surrounding Kennedy’s religion, was prodded for a response about the growing number of anti-Catholic statements around the nation. Publicly, Eisenhower agreed with Nixon that religion should not be an issue, but he was asked about the increasing role of Protestant clergymen in this debate.

  “A man whom you have publicly esteemed, Evangelist Billy Graham, now says it is a legitimate issue and could be a decisive one in this election. Do you have any comment?” queried Edward P. Morgan, an ABC television correspondent. Three months earlier, Graham was present when the annual Southern Baptist Convention unanimously passed a resolution expressing doubts about electing Kennedy or any Roman Catholic to the presidency. Graham also gave a thinly veiled endorsement of Nixon at that conclave.

  Eisenhower’s discomfort with this mix of politics and religion was apparent in his pained expression and his rambling response. He restated his hands-off position, alluding to the Constitution and its promise of religious liberty. “But I—on the other hand—I am not so naïve that I think that in some areas it will not be,” the president added. “It is just almost certain, because as long as you have got strong emotional convictions and reactions in this areas, there is going to be some of it—you can’t help it. But I certainly never encouraged it.”

  Within a week, John Kennedy’s Catholicism became the central issue of the presidential campaign.“We think at this point there is a substantial danger that the campaign of 1960 will be dirtier on the religious issue than it was in 1928,” warned Bruce L. Felknor of the Fair Campaign Practices Committee, citing the widespread circulation of “rabidly anti-Catholic material.” In the Senate, Estes Kefauver said religious hate literature aimed at Kennedy’s defeat was being sent by the Ku Klux Klan and other such groups. Similarly, Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) blamed a “hideous apparatus of hate” for injecting religious bigotry into the presidential campaign and charged that “the same scurrilous, filthy type of literature being passed around against Negroes is now being passed out against Catholics.”Wilkins reminded that “most of the Protestant churches that pictured the Negro as virtually a chimpanzee now picture the Roman Catholic Church as an evil octopus.”Though little evidence existed of an active role by the Republican Party, nearly all those expressing anti-Catholic statements were Nixon supporters. For example, the Reverend Dr. W. O.Vaught, an Arkansas minister and vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, delivered the invocation at one of the sessions of the Republican National Convention that nominated Nixon for president in July. Two months later,Reverend Vaught was announcing “religious freedom rallies” in Little Rock to combat Kennedy. “We cannot turn our Government over to a Catholic president who could be influenced by the Pope and by the power of the Catholic hierarchy,” he declared.

  Bobby Kennedy admitted that his brother faced an uphill struggle in six traditionally Democratic Southern states, including Florida and Texas, because of his Catholicism.“I think that’s the major problem at the present time, at least from what I’ve heard,” he told reporters.“Right now, religion is the biggest issue in the South, and in the country.” Despite his initial preference to avoid the topic, Bobby had come around to his brother’s view that the best political course was to deal directly with the religious issue and assert their unequivocal belief in a separation of church and state. To help overcome prejudice, the Kennedys enlisted a lay Protestant leader, James W.Wine of the National Council of Churches, to interpret the senator’s position on religious questions and allay fears. Nevertheless, the issue of religion continued to intensify.

  ON LABOR DAY, former President Harry Truman accused the Republicans of fostering religious bigotry against Kennedy, and he held Nixon personally accountable. “While he stands at the front door proclaiming charity and tolerance, his supporters are herding the forces of racial, religious and anti-union bigotry in by way of the back door,”Truman said in an Indiana speech.“And no one will ever make me believe he is not smart enough to know what is going on.” (Earlier in the primary campaign, Truman had opposed Kennedy, indicating to reporters that his reasons had more to do with the candidate’s father than his religion: “I’m not against the Pope,” said Truman, “I’m against the Pop.”) Later on,Truman backed away from his personal accusation of Nixon, but he still blamed the GOP for fanning the flames of intolerance.“In my home town, the Republicans are sending out all the dirty pamphlets they can find on the religious issue,” said the man from Independence, Missouri. He described the hate literature as “long sheets resembling the dirty sheets which they used against Al Smith in the Twenties.”

  Truman’s comments prompted Eisenhower to respond publicly to the religious issue for the second time in less than a month, once again creating front-page headlines. “I not only don’t believe in voicing prejudice—I want to assure you that I feel none, and I am sure that Mr. Nixon feels the same,” Eisenhower said at a White House press conference. Eisenhower also came to the defense of his party. “I know of no one, certainly no Republican has come to me and said: ‘I believe we should use religion as an issue,’ or intimate that he intends to use it either locally or nationally.” Eisenhower’s frustration was evident when he alluded to the general defensiveness Republicans felt about charges linking them to anti-Catholic hate mongers.“The very need, apparently, for protesting innocence in this regard now, in itself, seems to exacerbate rather than to quiet it,” the president said, expressing hope that a candidate’s religion could be “laid on the shelf and forgotten until after the election.”

  On the same day, howe
ver, the most explosive episode of religious bias in the campaign took place. Eisenhower’s comments were undermined with a statement unveiled by the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, headed by the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a prominent Protestant minister, author of the best-selling book The Power ofPositive Thinking and, most significantly, a close supporter of Nixon. The group charged that a Roman Catholic president would be under “extreme pressure from the hierarchy of his church” to align the foreign policy of the United States with that of the Vatican. The statement by the group of 150 ministers and laymen—including Billy Graham’s father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, an editor of Christianity Today—disputed Kennedy’s promise of independence from his church. He loudly proclaimed that freedom from “Romish influences”would be a major issue in the “momentous decision” of the 1960 election, and he urged the Protestant faithful to “question claims of freedom from domination” by a Roman Catholic candidate. Bell also outlined grievances against Catholics in general: “In various areas where they predominate, Catholics have seized control of the public schools, staffed them with nun teachers wearing their church garb, and introduced the catechism and practices of their church.” At a news conference, Peale denied bigotry by his group which, he said, engaged in “an intelligent approach to the religious issue on a high philosophical level.” The statement charged that Kennedy, as a Catholic, was bound by his church’s belief that “Protestant faiths are heretical and counterfeit and that they have no theoretical right to exist.”

  POLITICALLY, THE GROUP’S statement drew attention because of Peale’s allegiance to Nixon. Peale served as pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, which Nixon occasionally attended. At the group’s press conference, Peale said he had not discussed the statement with Nixon who, he admitted,“probably would have disapproved of it had he known.” The statements by Peale and his group were roundly criticized (the Philadelphia Inquirer even dropped his weekly column because of the furor). Eventually, Peale felt compelled to renounce his part in the movement he had helped create. “I was not duped,” he told the New York Herald Tribune, “I was just stupid.”

  But the Kennedys seized on Peale’s comments as evidence of the Republicans’ part in a religious smear campaign. “Their close relationship with Mr. Nixon and the Republican party in the election leads me to question the sincerity of their statement and their judgment in issuing it,” campaign manager Robert Kennedy said of the ministers. On its own, the Democratic National Committee compiled a memorandum of “questions frequently asked by fair-minded persons” about such issues as parochial schools and birth control, along with answers taken from Kennedy’s past statements, and sent it to party workers and private citizens inquiring about the senator’s position. When asked during a Los Angeles appearance about the Peale group’s statement, Kennedy bristled at the attacks on his religion. “I do not accept the view that my church would place pressures on me,” he declared. During an earlier stop in Modesto, California, the candidate encountered a heckler who demanded to know whether he considered Protestants to be heretics.“No, and I hope you don’t believe all Catholics are,”Kennedy replied briskly. The crowd of several hundred onlookers burst into applause, a response that emboldened him to continue.“May I say that it seems that the great struggle today is between those who believe in no God and those who believe in God. I really don’t see why we should engage in close debate over what you may believe and what I may believe. That is my privilege and your privilege.”

  Nixon kept his distance from the Peale group’s statement. During a television appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Nixon kept firmly to his position of not discussing religion, and he called upon Kennedy to agree to a “cut-off date” from talking about it in the campaign. Nixon said he had no doubt Kennedy would place the Constitution above his faith and added that it would be “tragic” if his opponent lost simply because he was a Catholic.“I don’t believe there is a religious issue as far as Senator Kennedy is concerned,” Nixon said. “I have no doubt whatever about Senator Kennedy’s loyalty to his country.” Nixon’s high-mindedness in this situation is remarkable, particularly given his penchant for dirty tricks and political infighting. Kennedy said that he, too, wished for an end to the religious debate, but his campaign had already accepted an invitation to address these concerns formally at a meeting of conservative Protestant ministers in Houston.

  JACK KENNEDY was uncharactertistically nervous. He rubbed his fists, sipped water several times and pushed his thumbs back and forth as he waited through the perfunctory introductions and opening prayers of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Inside the Rice Hotel ballroom on a sultry afternoon in September 1960, Kennedy turned anxiously to his press aide, Pierre Salinger.

  “What’s the mood of the ministers?” the candidate asked.

  Salinger gave him the news bluntly. “They’re tired of being called bigots,” he growled.

  Kennedy could only muster a wan smile. For days, he had been preparing a five-page speech on “the religious issue.” In most campaign speeches, he’d vary from the prepared script with some impromptu humor or relaxed comments. In this one, though, he resolved to stay strictly to his text, but promised to entertain questions from the floor when he had finished his speech.

  The stakes were extraordinarily high. Kennedy knew he could lose it all: not only his bid for president in 1960 but also any realistic chance for a Catholic to aspire to the nation’s most powerful office anytime in the near future. “We can win or lose the election right there in Houston on Monday,” Sorensen confided to a friend before the speech.

  Kennedy had prepared his Houston speech with a battery of tests. Sorensen read its contents over the telephone to Father John Courtney Murray to avoid “any loose wording this time that would unnecessarily stir up the Catholic press.” James Wine, the candidate’s liaison with the Protestant community, and Commonweal’s John Cogley, who took a leave from the magazine to assist the senator, also reviewed each word, each phrase. Some lines were lifted almost verbatim from Cogley’s Commonweal columns on the issue. Sitting next to Sorensen in Houston, the air thick with tension, Cogley quipped: “This is one time that we need those types that pray for Notre Dame before each football game!” Kennedy’s appearance that day in Houston—in the heart of the nation’s Bible Belt—reflected his intent to confront prejudices directly in a polite and respectful manner. If these wary Texans could only see him talking politics sensibly on television, see that he didn’t have horns or wear a Roman collar, perhaps they could be convinced to pull the Democratic lever in the ballot box. Kennedy did everything he could to set aside their fears. He came to this meeting of Protestant ministers “looking something like a parson himself,” as Time magazine observed, dressed as he was in a somber black suit with a black tie. After the initial remarks, he strode purposefully to the microphone and took command.

  “I believe in an America,” Kennedy began with his clipped New England accent, “where the separation of church and state is absolute— where no Catholic prelate would tell the president, should he be a Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”

  AS BIG AND BROAD as the state itself,Texas overflowed with passion about John Kennedy’s candidacy in 1960. Early in the primary season, its favorite son, Lyndon Johnson, had lost to Kennedy; but once he was chosen as a running mate, Johnson spoke out forcefully about the “hate campaign” surrounding Kennedy’s religion. He predicted that most Southerners would judge Kennedy on his political qualifications, not his religion.“I believe that most people think that if a man is good enough to fight for his country and die for his country, he ought to be allowed to serve his country without a test of his race, religion or regional status,” Johnson proclaimed.

  Nonetheless,Texas was home to much of the anti-Catholic allegations against Kennedy, particularly Dallas. A group called Texans for Nixon was headed by Carr B. Collins, a member of the First Bapt
ist Church in Dallas, where congregates were instructed not to vote for Kennedy. Collins had his own anti-papist pedigree. As investigative columnist Jack Anderson reported, “Collins sparked the drive in Texas against Catholic candidate Al Smith in 1928 and is now organizing the campaign against Catholic candidate Jack Kennedy.” On a Sunday morning sermon the day before Independence Day, Dallas radio listeners could hear Collins’s pastor, the Reverend Dr. W.A. Criswell, preach against the threat of a Catholic in the White House. “Roman Catholicism is not only a religion, it is a political tyranny,” the reverend declared. The New York Times identified Criswell as pastor of “the nation’s largest all-white Baptist congregation” with twelve thousand members. Criswell’s radio sermons were so clearly political in overtone that the Democrats demanded and received equal time from the radio station for a response by the Reverend F. Braxton Bryant, a Methodist minister and Kennedy backer. “Leaders of the Nixon forces, not Nixon himself, are using the religion issue against Mr. Kennedy,” said Bryant. “Even Billy Graham—he’s for Nixon—is being political every time he says, ‘Religion is a major issue, but I’ll wait till I enter the voting booth to express my convictions.’”

  Throughout Texas, preachers and churchgoing people received leaflets in the mail with such titles as “Can We Afford to Elect a Catholic President?” The letter was sent by a group called Christians United for a Free America, located outside of Dallas and devoted to opposing Kennedy on religious grounds. In the words of its founder, the Reverend Tom Landers, an independent Baptist, the massive mail campaign aimed to convince all Protestants and right-thinking Americans to reject the Massachusetts Democrat because “he owes allegiance to a sovereign power over and above that of the United States.”The sheer expense of this large-scale anti-Catholic propaganda campaign by the local churches led many political observers to wonder where these churches were finding the money. Eventually, some wealthy Texan businessmen, among them oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, were identified as the behind-the-scene sponsors for this tax-free bigotry.“It is not only that the majority of Protestant churches are openly opposing him [Kennedy], but equally important that influential economic interests are supporting the anti-Catholic preachers,” wrote columnist James Reston.“The flood of this kind of material is now running into the millions, and clearly this kind of money is not normally available to individual churches or their central organizations.”