The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  To be sure, the Catholic Church’s inconsistent stance on the separation of church and state also created havoc for Kennedy. “Caught as he sometimes was between the criticism of Catholics and the criticism of Protestants, he must frequently have felt as if he were being offered to the gods of history,” sympathized Commonweal. During the primaries,Kennedy was quizzed about an unsigned editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, insisting that the church hierarchy has the “right and duty to intervene” in politics when necessary. Though the piece was intended to fend off the Marxists in Italy, reporters questioned its universal application in America. In a widely publicized statement, Father Gustave Weigel—one of the theological experts originally suggested to the Kennedys—provided strong moral support for Kennedy’s stand when he unequivocally endorsed the church-state separation principle.

  Such pronouncements became vital when, late in the fall campaign, the bishops of Puerto Rico wrote a lengthy pastoral letter forbidding Catholics to vote for the island’s popular local governor. The overt directive by the Puerto Rico church, violating the traditional sense of church and state in the United States, startled the Kennedys; indeed, campaign advisers feared the directive could be a death knell to Jack’s chances.“The day the bishops’ statements came out, everybody thought this was the end of the line, and I must say I felt that way somewhat, too,” John Cogley recalled. Tactically, the Kennedy camp decided to hold its breath and say nothing.

  American church leaders, led by Cardinal Cushing, quickly distanced themselves from the Puerto Rican fiasco. “It is totally out of step with the American tradition for the ecclesiastical authority here to dictate the political voting of citizens,” Cushing stated. He endorsed church and state separation without ruling out the influence of moral and religious considerations in the thinking of each Catholic.“We must repeat that, whatever may be the custom elsewhere, the American tradition, of which Catholics form so loyal a part, is satisfied simply to call to public attention moral questions with their implications and leave to the conscience of the people the specific political decision which comes in the act of voting.”

  Once again, like some political guardian angel, Cardinal Cushing came to Jack Kennedy’s rescue. The Puerto Rican storm cloud quickly blew past.

  Overall, the political impact of the “religious issue” galvanized support for Kennedy among Catholics, many of whom might have voted otherwise for the more conservative Republican candidate. In the last presidential election, Eisenhower garnered more than 60 percent of the Catholic vote. Nixon’s pollsters warned him that he hovered in the mid–20s among Catholics. Despite his earlier pledge, Nixon’s campaign reversed its hands-off position concerning religion. “The Kennedy camp is attempting to exploit the religion issue to solidify what they regard as a ‘Catholic vote,’” complained Nixon’s press spokesman, Herbert Klein. Nixon’s counterpunch was too late. In a preelection analysis, political correspondents from the New York Times rated “religion” as the number one issue of the campaign— ahead of the Cold War, national defense and the economy, and noted that “Kennedy gains more than he is losing” because of the dispute.

  On the night before the election, John Kennedy appeared on the ABC television network in a paid thirty-minute telecast in which he sat at a table and fielded questions posed by his three sisters, Jean, Eunice and Pat (Jackie Kennedy, only three weeks away from giving birth, didn’t attend). A day earlier, Nixon had held his own telecast, the questions being primarily about foreign policy. But Kennedy’s inquiries were most notably about religion. “When I take that oath—if I take it—to God to defend the Constitution, that’s the highest oath,” he explained during the broadcast.“I don’t think any fellow Americans have cause for the slightest concern. You may want to elect a Republican, but not for that reason—religion should not be your concern.” Looking into the eye of the camera,Kennedy assured voters that his own family was as “devoted as any fellow Americans to defending the Constitution and separation of church and state.” He noted that two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court had been Catholics, and that world leaders such as Konrad Adenauer in West Germany and France’s Charles de Gaulle didn’t let religion mix with their politics.

  From beginning to end, Kennedy was forced to address his religion in a battery of tests that the Constitution once promised no American would have to endure. Survey analysis belied the hopeful claim of many Democrats, including Kennedy himself, that America had changed dramatically since Smith’s era and that religion wouldn’t be a serious obstacle in 1960. In fact,America was still a very bigoted country, not only for a Catholic but virtually for any minority member who dared reach for society’s highest positions. The assurances Kennedy gave on this final telecast of the campaign were the same as those he had offered in his announcement speech in the Senate Caucus Room, in his televised debate in West Virginia and in his inquisition before the Houston ministers. What he had repeatedly answered and put to rest throughout the campaign remained a nagging question until its very last day.

  ON NOVEMBER 8, 1960, Election Day, a strong Catholic turnout in such key states as Illinois and Pennsylvania provided Kennedy’s tiny margin of victory in one of the closest presidential contests in American history. As the Bailey Report had predicted four years earlier, a Catholic on the ticket had its greatest impact in key electoral states. The 1960 electoral college vote was far wider for Kennedy, 303 to 219, than the razor-thin popular vote percentage (49.72 percent to Nixon’s 49.55).The religion issue played a deciding role, nearly causing Kennedy’s defeat. Nixon won five Southern states, usually in the Democratic camp, where anti-Catholic sentiment festered among fundamentalist groups and conservative Protestant denominations. By one estimate, as many as 4.5 million Protestants who voted for Stevenson in 1956 switched to Nixon in 1960.“American Protestants were remarkably preoccupied by the fact that Kennedy was a Catholic,” concluded the University of Michigan Survey Research Center. A careful analysis by the Fair Campaign Practices Committee found that John F. Kennedy had faced more hateful material than Al Smith in his infamous 1928 race.

  Many journalists and contemporary historians didn’t recognize the true significance of Kennedy’s achievement until years later. In his otherwise masterly account, The Making of the President 1960, author Theodore H. White, like many other political commentators, downplayed the significance of Kennedy’s religion on the race—an error that White had the grace to acknowledge and correct in a later memoir:

  For all the many words and pages I wrote about [the 1960 election], it was a passage that clarified itself only as time went by. The election of 1960 was devoid of cause only if one failed to recognize that the man himself, John F. Kennedy, embodied the cause; and the cause was not borne by his tongue, his grace, his proposals. The cause lay in his birth: he was a Catholic, and ethnic from outside the mainstream of American leadership. To elect John F. Kennedy president was to make clear that this was a different kind of country from what history taught of it, that it was rapidly becoming, and would become in the next twenty years, so much more different in its racial and ethnic patterns as to make life in some of America’s greatest cities completely unrecognizable.

  Kennedy’s election victory represented far more than a momentary triumph. For more than a century, the Irish in America had suffered from religious intolerance, and now one of their kind had broken the most significant barrier to power in this land of immigrants. He had faced an extraordinary crucible of insult, derision and pure hatred of the kind that had crushed Al Smith’s soul. Yet, in 1960, the press suggested, as if giving a compliment, that Jack was somehow cleansed and purified, freed of the ethnic baggage of such Irish-American politicians as Smith and his own grandfather, Honey Fitz. On its front page, the New York Times quoted political observers who, trading off the old stereotypes, saw Kennedy as a president “not in the ordinary mold of Irish-American politicians.” For most of his life, Kennedy, like his father Joe, had avoided being identified as either
too Irish or too Catholic. In making history, however, he was forever identified with his religion, still in patronizing tones.

  The sweetness of his victory was tempered by over-the-top hate and prejudice during the campaign. It forced John Kennedy to confront these undeniable aspects of his Irish Catholic identity and subtly transformed his outlook. Somehow, the politician who avoided controversies now seemed more sensitive to the devastating consequences of bigotry and was determined to act upon it. Both father and son were affected deeply by the outcome of this race. As Joe later explained to his Vatican friend Galeazzi: “I was asked for reasons why I did not expect the race to be so close and I answered (1) I was wrong in expecting that we would get a bigger Catholic vote than we did and (2) bigotry played a much larger part in the campaign than we thought it would.” By confronting prejudice, John Kennedy and his brother Robert had developed a far different perspective from the average white Protestant politician. Whether they had the courage to act upon these beliefs in the White House remained to be seen.

  Across the Atlantic, no one needed time to understand its historic significance. Along the stone quay in New Ross, Ireland, the place the itinerant farmer and cooper named Patrick Kennedy had once called home, five thousand people lit bonfires and danced and sang through the night to celebrate this great-grandson’s swearing in as president. “Fourteen years ago this summer I visited New Ross and saw the home from which over 110 years ago my grandfather had journeyed on his long voyage from Ireland to America,” the new president messaged. “Three generations have passed since then but across this long time and across the seas I send to all of you my best wishes. New Ross and Washington DC are tied together today.”

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his family were now the exemplars for the Irish Catholic experience in America and, in doing so, they’d change their country forever.

  Part IV

  The Rites of Power

  “There was perhaps something very Irish about it all—the loyalty to family, the irony and self-mockery, the mingling of romantic defiance with a deep sadness; something very Irish American too, for the Irish legacy in its Kennedy form had to accommodate itself to the puritan ethic, the belief in discipline, work and achievement. Being an Irish American, as Henry James might have said, was a complex fate.”

  —ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR.

  “...There’s an element of poetry in it, and then the element of tragedy enters into it— that the hero is slain and becomes a kind of Christ figure. All of this is important. So it’s part sociological, part psychological, and part mythical. Put it all together and you can see the tremendous influence J.F.K. has had on American Catholicism.”

  —JOHN COGLEY

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  A Catholic in the White House

  JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY JUNIOR, swaddled in a white-laced christening robe, came to the world’s attention on the cover of Life—the first but certainly not the last time he’d adorn the cover of a popular magazine. A series of photographs, spread over several pages inside this issue, showed the youngest Kennedy being baptized into the Catholic faith. The Life article turned this private Kennedy family affair into a very public catechism lesson. Like some National Geographic sojourn into some strange and distant land, it also provided an explanation into the mysterious rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, a religion that for most Americans was alien and decidedly unfamiliar.

  “Expel from him all blindness of heart . . . ”

  In the chapel of Washington’s Georgetown University Hospital, the Reverend Martin J. Casey, pastor of Holy Trinity Church, where the Kennedys worshipped, recited a prayer. Casey opened the child’s robes— once worn by the baby’s father—and anointed his chest with sacred oil. Then the gray-haired priest in sacramental garb began “the ancient exorcism against demons,” as Life described it, speaking in a Latin tongue that the magazine conveniently translated for its readers in Middle America.

  “Receive the salt of wisdom,May it win for you mercy and the everlasting life.”

  The infant Kennedy arrived on November 25, 1960, just two weeks after one of the most acrimonious elections in U. S. history.“Isn’t he sweet, Jack,” murmured the baby’s mother. “Look at those pretty eyes.” His father, the new president-elect, beamed for the camera, while Jackie, dressed in a black wool broadcloth suit and black tulle toque, peered down almost Madonna-like at their first-born son.

  “Enter into the temple of God . . . ”

  The 1960 presidential election unleashed its own demons, ugly spirits of intolerance that many hoped America had outgrown. Kennedy avoided being photographed with priests and nuns, careful not to stoke the fires of anti-Catholicism scattered across the land. Yet critics still wondered whether America’s first Catholic president would be able to keep his own religion at bay. In this sense, Kennedy’s decision to allow a reporter and a photographer to record his son’s baptism—one of his first events since his election as the thirty-fifth president of the United States—seemed curious indeed, almost provocative.

  “I exorcise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”

  The godparents stepped forward to the baptism font, and the priest made the sign of the cross over the baby’s forehead. The rest of the Kennedys watched in respectful silence. Ceremonies such as baptisms and confirmations and weddings were sacraments that brought the family together and bound them as one. For the Kennedys, the powerful hold of family and religion reached back to their Irish ancestors.

  “Will you be baptized, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior?”

  In unison, the godparents and family answered on the infant’s behalf— “I will.”

  THIS MUCH-PUBLICIZED baptism proved one of the few overt and unabashed displays of Catholicism during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. After he entered the White House, there were many displays of religion— with the president only too happy to be seen greeting evangelist Billy Graham, for instance—so long as the religion was not his own. His most fixated critics worried that a Catholic Mass would be said inside the White House, a barrier Kennedy never crossed. Instead, on the morning of his inaugural, Kennedy went to Mass at the Holy Trinity Church to pray for his country and to pray for himself. Despite his all-American appearance and rhetoric, Kennedy knew from his own sense of history that he must walk a tightrope as the nation’s first chief executive from a minority group. His presidency would test the degree to which any chief executive could influence the broader majority culture without denying their own heritage. Just as in the campaign, there were no history books to explain what to do, how far he could go, before he was rejected by the majority. In the first sev eral months, Kennedy instinctually proceeded with caution. “I know that the primary concern in the mind of Jack Kennedy was what kind of image he would leave for history as the first Catholic President of the United States,” Cardinal Cushing later recalled about their talks together. Kennedy assumed this challenge as his singular burden, as perhaps the most significant test of his presidency, the one by which he would be most remembered. When a reporter congratulated him after the election for breaking the religious barrier,Kennedy quickly corrected.“No, I have not broken it,” he insisted.“I have only been given the opportunity to break it. If I am not a successful President, the barrier will be back higher than ever.”

  IN THE BRILLIANT SUN and starkly frigid temperatures of Inauguration Day 1961, Cushing gave a long and windy invocation (Cardinal Spellman wasn’t invited to an inauguration for the first time in years) that was briefly interrupted when the sound system began to smoke, nearly causing a panic until it stopped. A poem was read by one of America’s great poets, Robert Frost, whose age and inability to read in the blinding light prevented him from finishing his recitation. Perhaps Frost’s greatest insight that day could be found inscribed in the book of poems he gave Kennedy as a gift. “Be more Irish than Harvard,” Frost beseeched. Over time, the inscription became subject to wide interpretation by historians, who often viewed Ken
nedy from their own distinct vantages.

  Frost’s intent is fairly easy to trace. He liked and admired the Massachusetts senator. During the campaign, Jack incorporated verse from the poet into his speeches. In Frost’s lexicon, the Irish were the proverbial outsiders, the historically embattled minority, a stark contrast to the old WASP culture epitomized by Harvard. On the day Kennedy won the election, Frost declared it “a triumph of Protestantism—over itself.” As a native Protestant New Englander aware of the old Brahmin prejudices, Frost was thrilled by this victory, particularly when Kennedy chose a mutual friend, Stewart Udall, as his new interior secretary.“Great day for Boston, Democracy, the Puritans and the Irish,” said Frost’s telegram to the new president.“Your appointment of Stewart Udall of an old Vermont religion reconciles me once and for all to the party I was born into.”

  Not all Kennedy chroniclers interpreted Frost’s words in the same way. For example,David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest—which showed how Kennedy’s New Frontier, Ivy League–trained technocrats and academics could lead a nation into the morass of Vietnam—later cited Frost’s words as a call for aggression. Halberstam’s rather curious interpretation seemed to rely on its own cultural stereotype. Along with several other American historians, Halberstam perceived Kennedy as an ideal end product of the assimilation process, far more a Harvard man than an Irishman, so good that he could fool the unblinking eye of the television camera.“He was catapulted forward in his career by his capacity to handle the new medium, thus to be projected into millions of Protestant homes without looking like a Catholic,” Halberstam wrote in his acclaimed 1972 book, which specifically mentioned Frost’s inscription. The Times of London, noting the Brahmin history of Harvard as the high temple of Anglo-Americanism, later suggested that Frost’s words were a mild admonishment to JFK for being such an apparent Anglophile himself. The newspaper called it “a little sad” and “strange that the first President to emerge from a minority group should ignore the rich potential of the later immigrant groups.”