The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  “Our next president must tell the American people not what they want to hear but what they need to hear,” Nixon told the Republicans. Nixon, like Kennedy, realized that the political idiom of his day was full of half-truths, and half-truths were often worse than lies, for one could never parse the truth from the lie. “Why, for example, it may be just as essential to the national interest to build a dam in India as in California,” Nixon asserted, a message that many Americans did not want to hear. A politician who spoke such truths too loudly might not win election, but one who spoke them not at all did not deserve America’s highest office.

  “Mr. Khrushchev says our grandchildren will live under communism. Let us say his grandchildren will live in freedom.” That was one of Jack’s themes, and he could have spoken that line and most of Nixon’s speech that day. The two politicians had nearly as many affinities as differences. Underestimated by many of their enemies, patronized by some of their friends, they both had the knowledge and the experience to lead America into a new era. It was the character of each man that had not been tested.

  The wildly popular Eisenhower had overseen what most Americans considered a blessedly comfortable era of growing affluence and peace. That was the record that Nixon had the happy duty of defending. Jack had the more difficult task of not overtly criticizing the revered, grandfatherly Eisenhower while talking of a new troubled world full of what Time called “anxiety and discomfort.” For the most part, this was not only a posture shrewdly calculated to elect him president by playing on the natural anxieties of Americans in the age of the cold war; it was Jack’s own deeply felt judgment of what his nation faced in the decade ahead.

  “I think that in the 1960s you’re going to have a terribly difficult time, whoever is president,” Jack told James McGregor Burns privately in 1959. “I think Eisenhower is probably going to get home relatively free…. So I would say in a sense it’s almost like Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. I would say that in 1961 or ‘62 all these matters—changes in weapon structure, changes in NATO, and all the rest—are going to come to a head. And I would say that the job the president is going to have from ‘61 on is going to be the most difficult of any, certainly since Roosevelt, and I think Roosevelt had the most difficult, except for Lincoln.”

  In international affairs Kennedy might wave the rhetorical anti-Communist banner as high as any of his opponents, but he knew that he would not suddenly transform the world. He knew too that if freedom meant what he thought it did, then time was America’s greatest ally. “I don’t think there is any magic approach,” he told Burns. “There’s no secret source…. The magic power really is the desire of everyone to be independent and every nation to be independent. That’s the basic force which is really, I think, the strong force on our side. That’s the magic power … that’s what’s going to screw the Russians ultimately.”

  Jack was the elegant troubadour of this new era, celebrating the unprecedented challenge that he believed his nation faced, yet knowing that these would be years of immense uncertainty and danger. The restless spirit of America would not be contained much longer, and the new president would either ride the whirlwind or the whirlwind would ride him.

  Jack believed that the next president would have to act with unprecedented vigor, projecting onto the nation some of his own energy and will. During the tough months of the campaign, he could not stumble even once. As Feldman realized, Jack could dispel the rumors only by running a campaign that was an endurance contest merciless in its intensity and brutal in its scheduling. Beyond that, his minions would have to continue doing a brilliant job of disguising his health problems and preventing his enemies from learning the truth.

  Jack’s campaign had already been in the unpleasant position of having to find an acknowledged authority to say something that was untrue about Jack’s Addison’s disease. In early June 1960, Dr. Janet Travell and Dr. Eugene Cohen sat down to write a health certificate for Kennedy. Dr. Cohen

  was a prominent endocrinologist who had taken over Jack’s cure after the death of Dr. Shorr in January 1956. It was Dr. Cohen’s analysis of Jack’s adrenal condition that mattered. Dr. Travell recalled that Dr. Cohen said that he “didn’t like publicity” and “didn’t want to get mixed up in this,” and “we fought over every word…. We spent 3 or 4 hours on it.” The fighting was over the truth. Dr. Travell was a woman of immense political ambition who sought to advance herself through her relationship with Jack. Dr. Cohen was concerned only with the care of his patient.

  In the end, after all the negotiating, Dr. Travell and Dr. Cohen signed a joint letter stating: “With respect to the old problem of adrenal insufficiency, as late as December 1958, [when] you had a general check-up with a specific test of adrenal function, the result showed that your adrenal glands do function.” That was a legalistic way of getting around the hard truth that Jack had a serious condition, but the statement was hardly strong enough to make the suspicious turn toward other subjects.

  Later that month, the two doctors traveled to Boston to see Dr. Cohen’s colleague and another of Jack’s doctors, the equally highly regarded endocrinologist Dr. Elmer C. Bartels at the Lahey Clinic. Dr. Travell described the trip as “an important tactical move.” She wrote Dr. Bartels afterward to express her concern “about the security of the nurses’ notes at the Lahey Clinic” and noting that he planned to write his own letter about Jack’s health. Dr. Bartels may have written such a letter, but if he did, it was not considered strong enough to release, and no copy of such a document has surfaced.

  India Edwards’s dramatic attack on Jack’s health was just what he had feared might happen. Immediately Dr. Travell wrote another letter to Bobby in Los Angeles in her own name, stating baldly: “Senator Kennedy does not have Addison’s disease.” Dr. Travell knew little about Addison’s disease, though she presumably knew enough to realize that her statement was at best a half-truth. Even the doctor realized that she had gone too far in her disingenuous attempt to protect Jack. After the nomination was secure, she qualified her statement in another letter signed also by Dr. Cohen (“You do not have classical Addison’s disease”) and asked Bobby to destroy her previous letter. When Dr. Travell and Dr. Cohen’s offices were broken into by someone apparently searching for Jack’s medical records, she sequestered the documents and went around to the hospitals where he had been a patient, gathering up all his medical reports. “I tracked down almost everything that was available,” Dr. Travell recalled. “I think that was very important.”

  Jack flew to Hyannis Port after the convention. Johnson joined his running mate on the Cape, where the two men sat together discussing strategy. The vice presidential candidate was an oversize, looming character who dominated almost everyone within range of his booming Texas voice. If he had spoken with the sharp cadences of a New Yorker or with a Chicagoan’s flat tones, he would probably have been the presidential candidate instead of Jack. He attempted, as best he could, to shove his outsize form into the livery of a vice presidential candidate, but he was not yet comfortable wearing such a diminutive outfit.

  “Now what we gotta do, Jack,” Lyndon said, speaking rightfully as a brilliant political tactician, “is I work the South where I’m strong. You’re big up here in the East, and we’ll both do the Midwest, and you take the West too, go with our strengths.”

  “No, Lyndon,” Jack replied, speaking with a quick urgency, as if he had to squeeze as many sentences as he could into each moment. “You’re a monster up here, Lyndon. You have to come to Boston and show them what a nice fellow you are. And I’ve got to go South where they think I’m the pope’s creature and show them that I’m my own man. That’s what we’re doing.”

  Jack had not even made his first campaign speech before the religion issue began entering the campaign like a foul tributary that, if not stopped, would flow into the political mainstream. For the candidate, it was an unpleasant reality that he knew he had to face. Bobby, however, took the anonymous pamphlets that had begun
showing up across America and the whispered tales of papal conspiracy as a triple attack: on the church he revered, the free society he loved, and the brother he worshiped.

  These critics considered Protestantism the natural faith of the American people, and they feared what would become of America under a Catholic president. Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who declared proudly, “I am not a bigot,” asked that the papist church “lift its bloody hand from the throats of those that want to worship in the church of their choice.” Those preaching such words the loudest were not cultural riffraff trotting down barefoot from some backwoods hollow, but many of the most powerful clergy in America. “In every Catholic-dominated country today, non-Catholics are not permitted full privileges of citizenship,” declared a tract put out by the Baptist Sunday School Committee. “Illiteracy is high. Morals are low.”

  On August 18 in Montreux, Switzerland, at an evangelical conference, the Reverend Billy Graham, perhaps the most revered evangelist in American history, hosted a private gathering of twenty-five prominent ministers, including the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The ministers spent much of the afternoon planning how they could ensure Jack’s defeat.

  Peale believed that “American freedom grew directly out of the Protestant emphasis upon every man as a child of God.” To give over the presidency to this Catholic interloper would mean the slow end of freedom and the beginning of what the Catholic weekly America called “Post Protestant Pluralism.”

  Shortly before this August meeting Peale wrote Nixon offering to help his campaign in any way that he could. “Recently I spent an hour with Billy Graham,” he noted, “who feels as I do, that we must do all within our power to help you.”

  At the Swiss meeting one of the participants recalled Graham offering up details about the “moral character of one of the presidential candidates.” It was surely not Nixon whom Graham derided. Graham and Peale knew Nixon as a friend. To them, he was a deeply moral man who believed in the sacred trilogy of Protestantism, Republicanism, and conservatism, and they saw it as their Christian duty to work for his election.

  It was not the “bloody hand” of Rome that sought to place its mark on this election, then, but the nimble fingers of evangelical Protestantism. When Nixon became president, Peale and Graham would presumably greet him at the steps of their churches, signaling a return to what Peale called “the old, strong, narrow Protestantism that made America strong.”

  Bobby did not know about the secret meeting in Switzerland, but wherever he went in those first days of the campaign he was bombarded again and again with religious questions, some of them sincere doubts, others snide attacks masquerading as queries. Bobby not only wanted to talk about the issue, he had to talk about it. He had to stand up before his brother’s critics and fend off these attacks, daring them to throw the strongest charges full in his face. In Cincinnati early in September, he decided not to wait for the inevitable questions but to charge out in front of his attackers.

  “People have often said that Bob Kennedy is, you know, without emotion,” reflected William A. Geoghegan, a local attorney. “Well, this time Bob Kennedy did cry and he broke down as he was giving that talk. I was sitting right beside him and got up and had to take over. It was a very emotional experience I think for everybody there present…. I can recall the words that he spoke … following which he could not go on with his talk. He said, ‘I can’t imagine that any country for which my brother Joe died could care about my brother Jack’s religion when it came … ‘Then he stopped.”

  These words were similar to those that Jack had spoken so many times in West Virginia. Jack had not cried the first time he said them, or the last time, but that was Jack, and this was Bobby. Again and again in the next few days, Bobby confronted the issue. In Toledo he told a crowd of twenty thousand: “The religious problem is hurting us badly now.” The next day at the University of Illinois airport in Champaign, he boldly answered a Methodist

  minister who asked whether Jack would owe fidelity to a Roman master. “I say you are questioning his loyalty if you question whether he would take orders from a third party. I say he’s proved his loyalty in the United States Navy and in Congress.”

  Jack was not one to try to outshout detractors but preferred to move away to where his rational, ironic voice could be heard. He had proved in West Virginia that he could play the religious fiddle as well as any of those preachers, but to him that was not politics as it was supposed to be. He agreed reluctantly to face up to the issue in one crucial, definitive speech. He had told Johnson in Hyannis Port that he had to go down to Texas to campaign, and Jack was a political preacher who listened to his own sermons. For the occasion, he chose not only the Longhorn State, but the most difficult, hostile audience imaginable: the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Sorensen wrote a speech that he knew could mean the presidency.

  Waiting for Jack in the ballroom of Houston’s Rice Hotel on September 12 were three hundred preachers and lay leaders and an equal number of guests. They would not have been Texans if they had been less than hospitable, and they greeted Jack civilly, but most of them had righteous suspicions of Catholics. They came that morning not to learn but to observe, not to change their ideas but to seek further confirmation of their beliefs.

  At his best, Sorensen did not simply write speeches but channeled himself into Jack’s psyche and intellect. Nine times in the short speech Jack spoke the words “I believe,” witnessing to his own political faith in a manner familiar to every evangelical Protestant in the room. Jack was not an emotional speaker; what gave his words special resonance was his heavy emphasis on each syllable, as if he wanted the sheer truth of his words to prevail.

  I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—… and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

  Jack went on to say that he would do what his conscience told him to do, not his church, but “when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.” Only a few months before, the Vatican newspaper, L’ Osservatore Romano, had stated that the pope and his cardinals had “the right and duty to intervene” in politics and that “the Catholic may never disregard the teaching and direction of the church.” Jack stood before the Houston preachers that morning in as much opposition to these certitudes, as he was to the certitudes of the Protestant clergy.

  Jack knew one simple fact. There were twice as many Protestants as there were Catholics, and if most Americans voted for a man of their own faith, he had no chance of winning this election. Although Jack may not have won any votes that morning, he partially dammed off that foul tributary of religious prejudice. It was dammed off too by Americans who may not have heard his voice that day but showed that they did not want their political system polluted by attacks on a man’s faith.

  Jack’s speech that morning was magnified a hundredfold. Bill Wilson, a television producer hired to oversee the debates and other live events, had insisted that the lengthy speech be kinescoped. He cut the speech down to a half hour to be shown again and again on television stations across America. This crucial element of the campaign was essentially a political infomercial unlike anything Nixon’s campaign was doing.

  Most Americans were not about to vote against Jack simply because he worshiped at a different church. The Reverend Peale learned that in early September, when he chaired the Washington meeting of a new group, Citizens for Religious Freedom, whose intent was the opposite of its name. The most pernicious of prejudices are not shouted in the street but spoken in sonorous
tones, garnished with reason and plausibility. The ad hoc group issued a statement with a disingenuous disclaimer that the “religious issue” was “not the fault of the candidate.” It was his church that was the problem, and as much as Jack might swear obeisance to the First Amendment, he could never be free of the Roman church’s “determined efforts … to breach the wall of separation of church and state.” Peale said that he doubted that, as president, Jack would be able to stand up to what was “both a church and also a temporal state.”

  Peale and his followers had every expectation that the mainstream American clergy and prominent newspaper editors would greet these comments positively. That would have been a strong signal for the ministers to make a public issue of Jack’s faith, possibly ensuring his defeat. Instead, the ministers’ statement roused the dormant leaders of liberal Protestantism. But it was not just Democratic-leaning clergy who were outraged. The Methodist Outlook, the Presbyterian Outlook, and the Christian Century all condemned Peale as well. Many newspaper publishers were appalled, and almost 10 percent of the newspapers carrying “Confident Living” canceled Peale’s popular column. Even the editor of the Saturday Evening Post criticized him.

  Peale backed off and retreated to the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, where he preached to a white, well-fed, increasingly suburban congregation who were a fair representation of what the minister thought America to be. After the election Peale said that “Protestant America got its death blow on November 8.”

  Jack had more than his faith to worry about. He was so apprehensive about his father’s potential negative impact on the campaign that when the British journalist Henry Brandon asked to interview Joe, the candidate told him: “Henry, if you do, you’ll never speak to me again.” Jack’s worries were well founded. Later in the campaign a secret report on Jewish voters noted their apathy toward Jack based in part on “anxiety about Joseph P. Kennedy and his alleged America First leanings.”