John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  Kennedy, indeed, is rather mystifed by arguments based on elaborate interpretations of Church law. When he told a committee witness in 1947 that “there is an old saying in Boston that ‘we get our religion from Rome and our politics at home,’” he was saying politely what Al Smith had said indignantly on first reading the challenge in the Atlantic: “I’ve been a devout Catholic all my life and I never heard of these bulls and encyclicals and books.” Kennedy has no wish to be burdened by tomes of papal utterances on the hard climb toward the White House.

  “It would be foolish to deny,” Kennedy wrote to one Protestant critic in 1957, “that groups of Catholics bring pressure to bear at every level of government as do other religious groups. But I would deny your implied premise that a Catholic official is any more prone to the acceptance of a given position, if it is not in the public interest, than is a person who subscribes to the tenets of another creed or to no creed at all.… I quite sincerely do not believe that tensions between Catholics and Protestants are as serious as you believe and I certainly could not subscribe from my own experience to the thesis that the ‘administration of a Catholic president would be marked by a savage running fight between Catholic and Protestant’.”

  “I can honestly say,” Kennedy wrote to another worried Protestant, “that never in my public life have I been approached by a representative of the Catholic Church or for that matter any other church to perform an official act which was not consistent with the public interest as I saw it.”

  Kennedy’s basic position, then, is that the overwhelming majority of Catholics in public office as well as members of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy do not act according to an old stereotype. He acknowledges that there have been Catholic officeholders and prelates who have violated the proper autonomy of the political order. He feels, however, that in general the Catholic hierarchy and most Catholic officeholders adhere to both the letter and the spirit of the statement made in 1948 by Archbishop McNicholas, at that time chairman of the Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States: “We deny absolutely and without qualification that the Catholic Bishops of the United States are seeking a union of Church and State by any endeavors whatsoever, either proximately or remotely. If tomorrow Catholics constituted a majority in our country, they would not seek a union of Church and State. They would, then as now, uphold the Constitution and all its Amendments, recognizing the moral obligation imposed upon all Catholics to observe and defend the Constitution and its Amendments.”

  The issue, it is said in the Senator’s camp, involves the particular Catholic who is running for office. It also involves the nature of the office itself, and on this score Kennedy’s supporters contend that there is a further measure of reassurance for non-Catholics. The presidency, according to their argument, despite its huge scope and influence, touches directly on few matters of essentially religious concern, while the Constitution leaves the sensitive social issues—education, divorce, birth control, gambling, medicine, censorship, liquor—almost wholly in the hands of the states and their governors, state legislators, boards of education, and the like. Even Smith’s worst detractors in 1928 could not point to biased actions of his in four terms as New York Governor. Catholic influence, like other special influences, finds its main expression in localities where Catholic majorities gain control of policy, for example, through referendums. In wider areas—so runs this argument—factions have less play. They quote James Madison on the subject: “Extend the sphere” from state to confederation, he urged in Federalist paper number 10, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.… A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils, against any danger from that source.”

  Kennedy himself prefers to pose the whole issue in terms of what he would do as President. On this score, he had moved by 1960 to a position more acceptable to non-Catholics than was the case several years earlier. For example, in April 1954, he had written a Cambridge voter that, Roosevelt and Truman having favored representation at the Vatican, he would vote in favor of an ambassador if an appointment were submitted to the Senate. Five years later, the Senator flatly opposed such an appointment. On “moral” issues such as birth control, his position is sometimes contrary to what is, correctly or incorrectly, understood to be the “Catholic position.” When asked recently about his position on birth control, he said: “There is considerable difference among Catholics with respect to the application of general principles to specific fact situations. It is for this reason that one finds Catholics who subscribe to the same basic moral principles taking different positions on various issues of public policy. Public issues certainly are not divested of moral implication when they emerge in the political arena, but the responsibility of the officeholder is to make decisions on these questions on the basis of the general welfare as he sees it, even if such a decision is not in accord with the prevailing Catholic opinion.…”

  Kennedy’s views on church and state stem from his belief in diversity, in heterogeneity, in pluralism. “I have always been impressed in my study of American history,” he says, “by the fact that this country has been singularly blessed in its ability to take the best of all religions and cultures—not merely tolerating differences but building a new and richer life upon them. I firmly believe that our religious and cultural pluralism has been over the years one of our principal sources of strength.…” To Kennedy, pluralism means neither a society of sharply segmented and isolated parts nor a dull, homogenized mass, but a mixed society in which every group, without surrendering its identity and uniqueness, makes its distinctive contribution to the whole.

  He wrote to a Colorado woman in the spring of 1959: “As a public official, sworn to uphold the Constitution, I have no obligation to any private institution, religious or otherwise. My obligation is to the good of all.

  “In sum, it is my firm belief that there should be separation of church and state as we understand it in the United States—that is, that both church and state should be free to operate, without interference from each other, in their respective areas of jurisdiction. We live in a liberal, democratic society which embraces wide varieties of belief and disbelief. There is no doubt in my mind that the pluralism which has developed under our Constitution, providing as it does a framework within which diverse opinions can exist side by side and by their interaction enrich the whole, is the most ideal system yet devised by man. I cannot conceive of a set of circumstances which would lead me to a different conclusion.”

  This belief in pluralism is common to a great number of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders who are emphasizing today the valuable contributions that diverse creeds can make to American thought. Those believing in such pluralism argue that one way to impair pluralism is to continue to deny the presidency to otherwise qualified Catholics. According to the pluralistic argument, the main historical source of Catholic exclusiveness and intolerance in America has been the sense of being discriminated against and excluded from some of the rewards of American life, while as discrimination has declined and economic and social opportunities have widened, Catholic insularity and solidarity have declined. Commenting on Paul Blanshard’s view that “Boston is aggressively Catholic largely because it is aggressively Irish, and it is aggressively Irish because its people have not quite overcome their sense of being strangers in a hostile land,” the Protestant scholar Dr. John C. Bennett, of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, has remarked, “If this is the case, is it not natural to wonder if some of the aggressiveness will be lost as the Irish cease to have this sense of being strangers, when John Kennedy rather than James Curley becomes a symbol of the Irish leader in politics?”

  The implications for 1960 are important, according to this argument. The image of the White House as “For Pro
testants only” is, they feel, one of the few remaining, but perhaps most conspicuous, and certainly most symbolic, barriers maintaining Catholic apartness. Shatter that image and a pillar of Catholic resentment and resulting intolerance would be torn down. And in that event, perhaps the day would come sooner when the White House would be accessible, in modern times, to a Jew or a freethinker or an agnostic as well.

  “No Catholics Need Apply”?

  So much for the merits or demerits of the case. What about the politics of a Catholic candidacy for President?

  Politics permits few laboratory experiments. Only once had Americans tried running a Catholic for President. The outcome of that one experiment seemed so emphatic that it had left a pall over the prospects of other Catholics and members of other religious minorities. But does the Al Smith case prove anything? Kennedy supporters insist strongly that it does not. Their reasoning runs as follows:

  Smith was many things besides a Catholic. He was a slum boy, a city boy, a salty, wisecracking New Yorker whose face, personality, and even clothes were stamped with the Bowery imprint. And Al was proud of his background. Even in 1928, when as a presidential candidate he had good reason to broaden his appeal, he refused to compromise with those who wished him to camouflage his urban, immigrant, Catholic background. It was a gallant gesture, Kennedy’s supporters admit, but a self-defeating one. The people were simply not in a mood to take to a man who seemed so alien. In a way, Smith was too honest—or, from another point of view, too impractical. “It was as if he feared,” says Oscar Handlin, “that in concealing the accents of the Bowery he would be turning his back upon the people among whom he had grown up, be untrue to himself and to them.” He would campaign as Al Smith and as nothing more.

  The year 1928, moreover, was an unfair test for a Catholic candidate, Kennedy supporters contend, for it would have been a hard time for any Democrat to win the presidency. Calvin Coolidge was presiding over a “safe and sane” administration that offered few openings for attack. The Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, was considered a somewhat liberal Republican. Most of the country was enjoying boom conditions. The Democratic party was still deeply split over Prohibition, religion, and other issues. In such circumstances, Smith did not come off so badly. He won 15 million votes, almost twice the Democratic total of four years before (when, to be sure, the Progressives captured some Democratic support). For a candidate who was supposed to have little appeal to the farm vote, he did remarkably well in some rural areas outside the South.

  To Kennedy people, then, the lesson of Al Smith for presidential politics in the 1960’s is that Al Smith is no lesson. The last thing anyone could call Kennedy is provincial. With his wealth, Harvard education, intellectual attainments, Brahmin accent, and cosmopolitan background and outlook, he stands culturally at the opposite pole from Smith. He has made precisely the transition that Smith refused to make—from the lower middle class of Beals Street to a place among the social elite.

  The times, too, have altered, it is argued, by almost any test. America by 1960 had changed a good deal from the America of the 1920’s. By 1958, Catholics had been elected governor or United States senator in states where Catholic voters were a minority, including California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and even Minnesota. Twelve Democratic members of the Senate were Catholics. The success of these candidates doubtless reflected not only increased religious tolerance, but the increased Catholic population and the migration of Catholics across state boundaries so that the Catholic vote has become less localized.

  Still these developments were suggestive rather than definitive. The ultimate test of a Catholic’s chances for the presidency could be only the test itself—the capacity of a specific Catholic in a specific year to win the grand prize. As 1960 approached, some of those opposed to Kennedy held that polls and voting analyses proved that a Catholic could not win. They pointed to a Gallup poll that asked: “If your party nominated a generally well qualified man for President this year, and he happened to be a Catholic, would you vote for him?” The question, asked of almost 2,000 voters considered to be a cross section of the national electorate a few weeks before the presidential nominating conventions of 1956, produced the following results:

  Yes

  72%

  No

  22%

  Don’t know

  5%

  Reject

  1%

  No candidate could win the presidency if he would automatically lose a quarter of his own party’s vote as a result of his religion.

  Kennedy’s strategists deny this. Of those who would not vote for their own party’s nominee if Catholic, they point out, a large number live in the South, where a Democratic candidate—especially one otherwise popular in the South, like Kennedy—enjoys such a large margin of support that he could afford to drop some voters. Most of the others are Republicans, who would not vote Democratic anyway. A number of persons who have said they would not vote for a Catholic candidate for President, have also announced that they would vote for Kennedy even though they knew his religion. Though the Gallup poll reported in May 1959 that only 47 per cent of the persons they had polled nationally (30 per cent in the South) were aware that Kennedy is a Catholic, Kennedy’s strategists were betting that the knowledge would not deter the numbers who were already pro-Kennedy. The real question, Kennedy backers say, is one that the pollsters have not asked—how many persons who ordinarily vote Republican, or at least voted for Eisenhower, will support a Catholic candidate because he is a Catholic?

  According to this view, in short, there is a Catholic vote, however much some may deplore it, along with the Protestant vote. But the crucial aspect of the Catholic vote—and this is not brought out in the polls—is its location. And this is where the Electoral College—the system Kennedy fought so hard to maintain intact—becomes so important. Some Kennedy backers reason as follows:

  The Catholic vote is far more important than its number—about one out of every four voters who actually turn out to vote—because it is concentrated in the key Northern states. A dozen states are decisive because they have many electoral votes and tend to switch back and forth. They are New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Maryland. The Kennedy camp estimates, based on studies of voting turnout, that the proportion of the two-party vote in these states made up of Catholic voters is 57 per cent in Massachusetts, 55 per cent in Connecticut, 47 per cent in New Jersey, 40 per cent in New York, and so on down a descending scale to the lowest, 25 per cent in Ohio. These dozen states have a total of 253 votes, with 269 needed to win. The Democrats won the presidency in 1940, 1944, and 1948 because most of the states went for Roosevelt and Truman. They lost in 1952 and 1956 because they all went for Eisenhower.

  The key to the 1960 election, according to the Kennedy strategy, was the city vote. In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and a host of other cities, the Catholic voters can usually determine the size of the Democratic margin in those cities; the size of the Democratic margin in those cities usually determines whether these states go Democratic; and whether these states go Democratic usually determines whether the Democrats win the presidency. This analysis lay back of a major premise of some Kennedy supporters—that the Senator’s great problem was not the election but the nomination. The problem was less that of winning a majority of the electoral votes in November than winning a majority of the delegate votes in July.

  It has long been a maxim of American politics that presidential candidates are chosen by a handful of powerful party bosses meeting in a smoke-filled room. This maxim was never wholly true, and in 1960, with a variety of willing candidates on tap, the prospects of a boss-controlled convention seemed dimmer than usual. Most state delegations, after a bow perhaps to favorite sons on the first ballot, seemed likely to split on the next ballots as factions moved toward their real candidates. Still, some state leaders would have considerable influence over their st
ate delegations. Ironically for Kennedy—but reassuring to Protestants fearful of a “Catholic bloc” at the convention—most of the strongest state leaders outside New England were Catholics cool to his cause, at least as the campaign year opened.

  In California, Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, a Catholic, was planning to head a delegation pledged to himself as favorite son, thus dampening Kennedy’s hopes of entering the California presidential primary; no candidate wants to take the double risk of losing such a primary or, in the event of victory, of alienating the state’s party leader. In Pennsylvania, Governor David Lawrence, a Catholic, flatly came out for Stevenson, In Ohio, Governor Michael V. DiSalle, a Catholic, was maneuvering for a favorite son endorsement. Two leaders in New York, Mayor Robert Wagner and Tammany boss Carmine De Sapio, both Catholics, were noncommittal to Kennedy. Sentiment for Kennedy seemed stronger among the few Protestant county leaders in New York State than among the Catholic.

  Why were these Catholics cool politically to the leading Catholic candidate? In part, they may have feared that if nominated Kennedy might lose the election and that the effect of his losing would be to reverse for years the present tendency toward more acceptance by all religious groups of Catholic candidates for office. Their main reason may well have been political in a more personal sense. Party leaders like Lawrence and De Sapio were well aware of Kennedy’s party independence in Massachusetts and in Congress. Would he be equally independent as national standard bearer and President, working with political amateurs and his own personal organization? Some Catholic politicians were simply playing dog-in-the-manger; they themselves would lose any chance they might have for a place on the ticket in 1960 or 1964. Or—a far simpler explanation—they may merely have preferred some other candidate.