Perhaps it was only fair that Kennedy, who had denied the monolithic nature of the Catholic Church, should find most Catholic political leaders behaving like American politicians rather than like Roman Catholics. Perhaps it was symbolic, too, for Kennedy had deliberately moved to a position within the Democratic party that brought him ties with all major groups but identified him wholly with none of them. Despite his Catholicism, he had won considerable support from the South, largely as a result of his moderate political views. But his backing there was by no means solid. And not only were leading Catholic politicians supporting other candidates, but among the Roman Catholic clergy itself, there were some who feared that Kennedy’s stated acceptance of the separation of church and state might have roots in political expediency, and that if elected President he would lean far—too far—toward keeping himself free of the suspicion of being pro-Catholic. Clearly, if commitment had its dangers, so did non-commitment.
The solution to some professional politicians and some amateur ones also seemed to be to nominate Kennedy for the Vice-Presidency, thereby having their cake and eating it, too, since even militant Protestants were assumed not to mind a Catholic Vice-President, while Catholics who had defected to the Republican standard might be won back by the award of second prize.
Some of Kennedy’s followers held that his moderate Catholicism, which had none of the crusading spirit of some in the American hierarchy, would temper and soften the religious arguments that 1960 was bound to bring. There were signs, however, that some of the old bitterness had not died. When Governor John Patterson, of Alabama, a Methodist, endorsed Kennedy for President, the Baptist organization in his own county chastized him, stating that they did not want a President “whose first allegiance is to the Vatican State, a foreign power.” Governor Patterson would discover “to his horror,” declared the Methodist Christian Advocate, official journal for the state’s Methodists, that “the people of Alabama do not intend to jeopardize their democratic liberties by opening the doors of the White House to the political machinations of a determined power-hungry Romanist hierarchy.”
In Massachusetts, the same concerns were evident, though touched with more subtlety and humor. After New England Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord publicized a number of test questions for Catholic candidates for President, the Pilot, a weekly newspaper of the Catholic archdiocese of Boston, retaliated in an editorial with a series of questions for Methodist candidates, “Sauce for the Goose.” In light of the “traditional racial segregation long practiced and still mightily supported in Methodist churches,” asked the Pilot, “can you be relied upon to carry through the Supreme Court decisions recently made on this topic? Can you serve with Negroes in your cabinet …?” “Moral,” added the Pilot: “Anyone can play this game if he doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty!”
“Dirty” or not, the game was evidently going to be in the minds of many voters in 1960 if a Catholic should be nominated. Certainly it was on the minds of many moderates; for example, Bishop Lord said in the fall of 1959 that it would be a “sin” to vote against a presidential candidate merely because he was a Catholic. And certainly the problem was on the minds of the Kennedy strategists, who were trying to be philosophical about it. “All of this religious discussion now means it will not be a mysterious unknown at convention time,” one of them has said, “but a boring subject thoroughly surveyed and resurveyed—with some votes to be picked up and some to be lost, just as other candidates have handicaps which may lose them votes.” One of Kennedy’s closest supporters notes that Pat Brown was elected governor of California as a Democrat and not as a Catholic, and Ribicoff, governor of Connecticut as a Democrat and not as a Jew. Kennedy feels much the same way: “I am not sure I would vote for the ‘Catholic’ candidate for President—I hope I am not running as the ‘Catholic’ candidate.”
14A PROFILE IN LEADERSHIP
For months before the coming of a critical election year, the acknowledged front runner was one who met none of the accepted tests of presidential timber. He was not a governor of a large state or a cabinet officer or a general. He was not a Protestant. He was not a longtime party leader. He did not personify any great national issue. He was not the champion of any one group or philosophy. He was not in his fifties or sixties, the supposed age for coming into the fullness of one’s political powers. He was a senator hardly past his first term, Catholic, independent Democrat, barely into his forties.
“Unless the opinion polls are totally misleading, millions of Americans are eager to elect this still young, still incompletely tested man to the Presidency,” Joseph Alsop has said. “But why?” How was it that Americans, facing what would be perhaps the most difficult decade in this century, were willing to turn to a man who seemed to stand for so little? a historian asked. And columnist Marquis Childs wrote, “At 42, with his unruly shock of hair, Kennedy still looks like a Harvard graduate student out to get his Ph.D. in political science.” Yet Kennedy was a formidable contender for the most important position in the free world. Why?
Kennedy’s political career provides some answers. In his early legislative life he had won the support of a wide array of political leaders and groups by establishing an image of moderation. Secondly, he had been, in effect, campaigning for fellow Democrats and for President over a period of four years in every state in the Union (including Alaska and Hawaii), and in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, which also send delegates to presidential conventions. He had probably appeared before more Democrats than any other Democratic candidate except Stevenson. Third, his candidacy always carried an extra quality of excitement and newsworthiness because of the controversy over a Catholic for President. On the otherwise rather flat and dreary political terrain, he was the one Democrat, aside from Stevenson, whose political image had been projected into the minds of millions of nonpolitical Americans. This was not simply to the credit of Kennedy; it was mainly a combination of his youthful, arresting appearance and the capacity of television and picture magazines to project that image into thirty million or more living rooms across the country.
What was this image? It was not just a physical picture of white teeth against a tanned face under a mop of hair. It was, at least superficially, a sense of the man’s personality. When asked by pollsters in the summer of 1959 to describe, in their own words, what kind of person they thought Kennedy was, voters answered in such terms as “energetic … intelligent … good-looking … strong character … good family … aggressive … dynamic … outspoken.” Though some Republicans considered him something of a “smart aleck” and a headline-hunter, most had a favorable image of him; their main grievance seemed to be that he was in the wrong party. Independent voters mentioned his honesty, impartiality, good background. The image of Kennedy expressed in these polls emerged as almost entirely favorable. In one poll, toward the end of 1957, voters were asked to evaluate Kennedy on a ten-point scale—from plus five for the most favorable rating to minus five for the lowest. Ten times as many people rated him on the plus side as on the low; most of those who rated him high rated him very high, but most of those who rated him low rated him just a bit low.
There were those who disliked Kennedy, too. One senses, however, that the dislike turned on the same impression of surface charm that accounts for the vote of those who did like him. For some, his youth and eager and attractive appearance did not match their image of the country’s President. To many of his critics he seemed opportunistic, pragmatic, forever shifting with the political breezes. He has, indeed, been described as a “Democratic Nixon,” an ambitious, hard-working politician, acting in terms of the immediate situation rather than on general and deeply rooted principles, and hence operating in a moral vacuum. “Where is the heart in the man—what makes it tick?” asked a close observer on Capitol Hill.
The more one studies the popular image of Kennedy, indeed, the more one is struck by its superficial, one-dimensional quality. The mass media, in their quick, kaleidoscopic way, have proje
cted the characteristics that go only skin deep. The feeling about Kennedy, if it could be summed up in one phrase, is that he is “a nice guy who would like to be President”; indeed, this phrase often crops up in everyday political talk. It was with this same kind of phrase thirty years ago that Walter Lippmann dismissed, in words that historians will not let him forget, another presidential aspirant as an “amiable man with many philanthropic impulses but … not the dangerous enemy of anything,” as a “pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” This was Franklin D. Roosevelt. It does not follow, of course, that all hasty political judgments are equally doomed to be proven wrong. Still, it does remind us of our human fallibility and of the dangers of prophecy.
What Sort of Man?
Many people think of Kennedy as a sunny, gregarious type who likes nothing more than stumping the country, or as a glamorous matinee idol who would be a Hollywood star if he were not a Washington politician, or as a casual, happy-go-lucky kind of person. Actually, he is a serious, driven man, about as casual as a cash register, who enjoys the organizational, technical part of politics but not the stumping, which he considers simply grinding hard work, and whose resemblance to a matinee idol is purely on the surface. Nobody knows all this better than his wife. Talk of Kennedy as a glamour boy annoys her. “It’s nonsense,” she says. “Jack has almost no time any more for sailboats and silly things. He has this curious, inquiring mind that is always at work.” She has said more than once that if she were drawing him, she would make a picture of a tiny body and an enormous head. Kennedy evidently shares this view of himself. When his wife once asked him what he considered his best and his worst qualities, his answer to the former was “curiosity.” (She says she has forgotten his answer to the second part of the question.)
Kennedy, in short, has many qualities of the intellectual. It is not a press agent’s pitch, but a solid fact, that he loves to read, to ruminate, to analyze. He is happiest not in social gatherings but sitting in bed, bespectacled, going through a recent biography, just as he prefers to spend his time with a small group of intelligent people (especially if it includes members of his family) rather than with crowds. Political life he calls a “treadmill.” He never gives the impression of throwing himself into a campaign and loving the noise and confusion as Roosevelt and Truman did, or as Kefauver and Humphrey do now. Campaigning to him is hard but necessary work.
He has the intellectual’s type of absent-mindedness. His friends never tire of telling how he leaves clothes behind in hotels, cannot find things, wear socks that don’t match, breaks off a conversation with a staff aide, perhaps in the middle of his own sentence, to reflect for long moments on a different subject—or how, in an earlier day, he was once found after a wedding reception making off with the groom’s extra shirt and cuff links. He forgets the little things around him because he is preoccupied with what seem to him bigger ones. And he has an excellent memory when he wants to use it, recalling details of something he read months back, and sometimes disconcerting his assistants by asking about a matter that he had mentioned long before and supposedly forgotten.
But if Kennedy is an intellectual, it is of a very special type. His mind is more analytical than creative, more curious and penetrating than wide-ranging or philosophically speculative, more skeptical than confident, more catalytic than original or imaginative. He shuns doctrinaire solutions and dogmatic talk. He is uneasy with slogans—and sometimes with statements of principle. He would prefer to present a dozen assorted reasons for a position than a single, overarching one that to most intellectuals might seem compelling. He is surprisingly literal-minded; once when asked at a student convocation what he would do about Little Rock if he were President, he went through a step-by-step description of precisely what legal procedures were open to the Chief Executive. He considers the Eisenhower administration’s favorite phrases tired substitutes for hard thought and action. If there is anything he dislikes more than the liberal stereotypes, it is the conservative ones.
One word describes Kennedy more exactly than any other—self-possession. He has never been seen—even by his mother—in raging anger or uncontrollable tears. He does not lose himself in laughter; the only humor he displays, aside from the contrived jokes of a political speech, is a light, needling, slightly ironic banter, such as one often meets in war or in other times of stress. He dislikes emotional scenes, at home or at work. His driving ambition to win out in politics seems to rise less from an emotional compulsion—though emotional drive manifests itself in his restless, hardworking, single-minded will—than from a calm evaluation of what he can do if he puts everything he has into it. He has apparently never lost himself in a passionate, unrestrained love affair; “I’m not the tragic lover type,” he said once when pressed about whether he had ever gone through youthful agonies of love.
Where does this quality of detachment, of restraint, of moderation, of self-protection come from? The easy answer is from his glands, or his psyche, just as Hubert Humphrey says with a laugh that it is in his glands to throw himself into what he is doing, whether a marathon talk with Khrushchev or a liberal cause. But in Kennedy’s case the roots of his dispassionate attitude toward personal and political matters can be traced in part to his background, as can the origin of his competitive will power; in his family the price of acceptance was effort and success. He grew up in a family that was moving from Boston to New York to Palm Beach and Hyannisport, that was rising from lower-middle-class environs to the financial and social pinnacle, that swung away from its lace-curtain Irish ties but did not forge new ones with any social or economic or ideological group. Kennedy, while friendly to all groups, has found a place for himself in none.
This fear of making too much of a commitment, of going off the intellectual deep end, is locked in Kennedy’s character. To him, to be emotionally or ideologically committed is to be captive. On the few occasions when he has acted immoderately, he later regrets it. It was characteristic of him, for example, that long after he told the House of Representives that the Legion leadership had not had a single new idea for years, he wondered if he had not overstated his case, for the Legion had had one or two new ideas, and if he overstated his case very much, Kennedy went on, “people would feel that I was not thoughtful or rational and I think that’s terribly important.”
What Sort of Democrat?
This refusal of Kennedy’s to make commitments has alienated many liberals and intellectuals who feel that even a reasonable man, and certainly a presidential candidate, must “stand for something.” It has alienated some professional Democrats, too. Where does he fit into the party spectrum? Kennedy is proud of his friendships in the Senate, stretching from Paul Douglas to Barry Goldwater, just as he used to boast of getting along personally with everybody in the House, from racist John Rankin to radical Vito Marcantonio. This is all right for a congressman, Democrats grant, but what kind of Democrat would he be as President?
“Win ye see two men with white neckties, set in opposite corners while wan mutthers ‘thraiter’ an’ the other hisses ‘miscreent,’ ye can bet they’re two dimmycratic leaders thryin’ to reunite th’… party,” said Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley. Kennedy is fond of this observation, which is as apt today as a half-century ago. But to some Democrats, the fights within the party are not just a joking matter—they are the way that the party finds out where a man stands. The question is not merely who is for him. The question is also who is against him. In Roosevelt’s time, Democrats stretched a banner around Madison Square Garden: “We love him for the enemies he’s made.” What enemies would Kennedy make? Would they be the right ones?
Certainly Kennedy has made unusual efforts to get along with all factions of the party. Always conscious of the convention situation, he knows that the solid opposition of any one of the major Democratic groups—Southerners, union leaders, civil-rights blocs, farm leaders—would probably be enough to stop him. But his wish
to get along with all party groups is a result of temperamental as well as political considerations. Kennedy doubtless believed that he was paying the ultimate tribute when he described Stevenson once as “beholden to no group or section, belonging neither to a left wing or a right wing.”
Democratic chieftains in Kennedy’s camp contend that too much is made of his appeal to all sections. That appeal, they say, is based on personal friendships, especially with Southern senators, and on a lag in understanding of Kennedy’s congressional record. He has not catered to the South or the conservatives in his recent votes, they contend. He has simply stayed a bit to the right of Humphrey without losing his franchise as a Northern Democrat. They quote one Southern state chairman as calling Kennedy only “the best of a sorry lot.”
Behind some of the liberal suspicion of Kennedy is not so much distaste for his views as worry over his temperament. They sense that emotionally and temperamentally Kennedy is moderate, and they are right. He has often mentioned his admiration for John Buchan’s Pilgrim’s Way, and no wonder, for Buchan admired men like Burke and Balfour who would not destroy what many generations had built “merely because some of the plasterwork was shaky.” In Buchan, too, Kennedy found the line by Lord Falkland that he likes so much to quote: “When it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.” He puts it a different way, but with the same meaning when he quotes Robert Frost: “Don’t take down a fence until you know why it was put up.”
The main suspicion of Kennedy among the Democratic pros stems less from doubts over his Democratic creed than from fears over his attitude toward them if elected President. They know of his critical attitude toward decrepit party organizations; of his independence of the party in Massachusetts, at least up to 1956; of his tendency to award patronage plums—the few he has had to give out—to leaders in his own organization rather than to “deserving Democrats”; and of his expressed hostility to some old party practices, such as awarding the best embassies to big contributors to the party. How much would this man upset the status quo in the party?
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