by Thomas Maier
Rather than Cardinal Spellman of New York, Jack asked Boston’s Cushing to officiate at his wedding at St. Mary’s Church—a wise political choice for Massachusetts’ leading Irish Catholic politician but also a decision more in touch with his own brand of Catholicism. Jack didn’t exude any great religious fervor, certainly not the increasingly conservative, confrontational kind practiced by the New York prelate. In Cushing, he saw a gentler soul, one who appreciated Kennedy’s love of life, his wit and his fundamental optimism. In words and deeds, Cushing became Kennedy’s family priest and political adviser. During the heat of Jack’s 1952 Senate battle, when Cushing baptized Bobby Kennedy’s first child in a well-publicized special ceremony,“that cut the heart right out from us,” a Lodge man complained. Years later, when Robert Kennedy was asked about the “good deal of publicity” gained from Cushing’s christening his first son a week before the 1952 election, Bobby conceded,“We were aware of that.” Now, little more than a year later, Cushing presided over another important day for the man about whom he spoke with such great hope and anticipation, as if Jack were the Great White Hope of Irish Catholicism. In Cushing’s view,Kennedy represented the very best his tribe had to offer. As he once told a crowd at a Communion breakfast attended by the senator, “If it pleases God, we shall follow [Kennedy] to the most exalted heights that are within the power of the people of the United States to give him.”
After the couple exchanged vows, Cushing read a special blessing from the Pope. Then he extended his own wish for the couple’s future “with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and pains, its joys and sorrows [which] are hidden from your eyes. You know that these elements are mingled in every life and are to be expected in your own.”
Amidst the prayers and pomp of the wedding ceremony, Luigi Vena sang the “Ave Maria,” a beautiful rendition that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy would remember throughout her marriage to Jack.
AS PART OF the Kennedy clan, Jackie felt the almost suffocating embrace of her husband’s expansive family. She couldn’t keep pace with the rah-rah enthusiasms of the other Kennedy women, including Bobby’s wife, Ethel. As sort of a tutorial for her new daughters-in-law, Rose imparted her own experiences in being a Kennedy wife.“I warned them [Jackie and Ethel] in the beginning, there would be rumors,” she later explained.“There would be letters, anonymous letters. There’d be all sort of stories. That was part of the political spectrum. I tried to explain to them as soon as they were thinking of getting married.” Of course, she didn’t mention any practical solutions should these rumors and anonymous letters suggesting infidelity prove to be true. Instead, Rose counseled a different tack; she took her vision of things to a higher plane, even if she seemed naïve or simply foolish. Her devotion to God, church and family had buoyed her own spirits in the most difficult times. Repeatedly, she urged Jackie to do the same, suggesting her daughter-in-law attend a Catholic spiritual retreat. One year, she dropped a note to Jackie about a Lenten retreat. “Please do a little work on it, dear Jackie,” she urged, as though she were the mother superior of her daughter-in- law’s soul. In another letter, Rose offered more of an explanation for her push toward religion. “I believe sincerely it will open up new vistas of inspiring ideas to you,” Rose suggested,“and you will have a better understanding of life. Not that I would change you, dearest Jackie. It is just that I have spent a long, happy life with a few baffling as well as tragic moments, and I have found that these spiritual signposts along the way have helped me tremendously.”
On a more earthly plane, Joe Kennedy provided his own lessons about family and fate. In one heartfelt letter written on vacation from the South of France, Joe indulged Jackie as he might one of his own daughters, telling her that he’d pay for whatever horse she’d like to buy.“Honestly, I can’t see the point of saving a couple of thousands of dollars and not having a winner,” he declared.“If you’re going to have a horse get yourself one that will give you the satisfaction of winning whatever you go after. You know all of us Kennedys don’t like second prize. So get the horse you like and send me the bill.”
Joe had paid heavily to ensure Jack’s success so far. As if part of a long, daunting pilgrimage, he kept putting together the political advisors and priests and press pundits and segments of the American public who increasingly believed his son would become the first Catholic elected to the presidency. Now, he delighted in another step taken—his son’s selection of a wife whose beauty, charm and intellect seemed the perfect match for his outsized ambitions. He advised Jackie not to let the political battles bother her, that destiny would somehow take care of his son. Jack was someone special, he assured her, someone who’d survive the slings and arrows aimed his way. “Remember I’ve always said he’s a child of fate,” he explained to her about Jack,“and if he fell in a puddle of mud in a white suit he’d come up ready for a Newport ball.”
Chapter Nineteen
Articles of Faith
COMMUNISM STRUCK FEAR in the hearts of Americans in the 1950s. The growing titans of the Soviet Union and “Red” China—spreading global communism like some dread disease throughout large swaths of Europe and Asia—transfixed America as few other obsessions in the nation’s history.
In this Cold War, the United States competed in a nuclear arms build-up of mammoth proportions. Politicians worried aloud about a missile gap with the Russians. At home, the fervent and often excessive hunt for Communists within America’s borders created all sorts of watchdog government panels, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee. In seeking to sniff out Reds in their midst, the committee abused civil liberties and ruined many citizens. Whatever sanguine thoughts that some liberal Americans harbored from the 1930s of social justice through Marxism were largely crushed by the brutal totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Mao.
For Catholics, the fear of communism ran even deeper. The atheistic principles of the Communist bloc nations, denying the practice of religion with a philosophy that venerated socialism, almost as a deity, convinced church leaders both in the United States and in Rome that it faced a struggle for survival. The priests closest to the Kennedys were often in the forefront of this battle. “The Communist strategy of ‘divide and conquer’ is nowhere more apparent than in the field of religion,” warned Monsignor Maurice S. Sheehy, an old friend of Joe Kennedy Jr.’s from their navy days, after visiting the Soviet bloc nations of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans in 1956. “Since religion, of whatsoever form, is the only power that the Communist leadership fears, it must be destroyed.”
On television and in his book, Communism and the Conscience of the West, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the charismatic national director of the church’s Propagation of the Faith office, urged Catholics to resist communism passionately. In Boston, Archbishop Richard Cushing called communism one of the “greatest evils” ever to threaten Western civilization. With biblical imagery, Cushing declared that communism “is revealed as a false religion— the religion prophesied by the precursors of Stalin, namely, the religion of the Man-God in place of the religion of the God-man. The Christian symbol of this kind of religion, which is no religion at all, is Antichrist.”Taking its cue from church leaders, the Massachusetts State Legislature created a Committee to Curb Communism to root out any “Communist Party and communist-front organizations” in the Bay State.
The Kennedys, like many Irish Catholics in America, believed communism posed an unacceptable menace. In this era, even cool heads such as Jack Kennedy learned to embrace the hot rhetoric of the Cold War, casting the struggle in terms of good and evil. Long after many liberal Democrats like himself had disavowed the anti-Communist excesses, Kennedy could still conjure up an epic vision of confrontation for America’s soul.“I believe religion itself is at the root of the struggle, and we forget that the essence of this struggle is not material, but spiritual and ethical,” Kennedy said in a little-publicized talk at the Columban Fathers’ Seminary in Milton, Massachusetts,
in 1958.
Kennedy’s anti-Communist ardor reached back at least a decade when, as an aspiring congressman, he spent time in 1946 being prepped on the Soviet threat by a Catholic priest, Edward Duffy, who reflected the church’s teaching on this grave matter. Duffy had been influenced by the writings of another priest, John F. Cronin, an anti-communism expert who served as a back channel informant to the FBI and later became a close friend and associate of another young Republican congressman, Richard Nixon. (Father Cronin became known nationally after he took a key position with the National Catholic Welfare Conference and became the church’s chief protagonist against the threat of communism in America.) In 1948, Jack passed along to his father a proposal by the national Catholic War Veterans to produce films designed to fight communism and promote “a clear understanding of Christian social thought” based on two papal encyclicals.
As a politician in an overwhelmingly Catholic district, Congressman Kennedy maintained a strict anti-Communist posture, loathe as a “fighting conservative” to bend to the fuzzyheaded liberals in his own party. Kennedy blamed President Truman for allowing Communists in China to overwhelm the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and saw that his 1952 Senate candidacy focused criticism on Lodge’s support for Truman’s policy. Some liberals viewed the young congressman as almost reactionary in his espousal of a hard-line anti-Communist diatribe. In embracing the 1950 Communist Control Act, Kennedy declared,“We are faced with an enemy whose goal is to conquer the world by subversion and infiltration or, if necessary, by open war.” But for Catholic voters, Kennedy’s rhetoric adopted an almost religious tone in its support of the church’s deep antipathy toward communism. In a 1950 graduation day speech at the University of Notre Dame, Kennedy underlined the sharp philosophical distinction between Catholicism and its view of government only as a protector of human freedoms and natural law as opposed to communism with its all-encompassing belief in the powers of the state. “You have been taught that each individual has an internal soul, composed of an intellect which can know truth and a will which is free,” he told graduates. “Believing this, Catholics can never adhere to any political theory which holds that the state is a separate, distinct organization to which allegiance must be paid rather than a representative institution which derives its powers from the consent of the governed.” Fulton Sheen could not have said it better.
Jack’s family members felt even stronger about communism. All his adult life, Joe Kennedy inveighed against the threat of Marx upon the soul and the pocketbook. He applauded fellow anti-Communist fighters such as the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who, when talking to Archbishop Cushing (who himself provided information to the FBI), praised Kennedy as the most outstanding Catholic layman in the United States. Joe Kennedy’s vehement anti-communism undoubtedly affected his earlier accommodation of fascist states such as Germany and Italy, which had presented a Hobson’s choice as the lesser of two evils.“True, I was pessimistic as to the meaningfulness of any kind of a victory that might result eventually from that war, even after Hitler’s attack on Russia,” he later conceded,“for I foresaw then that the result of war would be the destruction of many of our democratic institutions and the rise of Communism.” Historians often point to Kennedy’s anti-Semitism as a possible cause for his policy of appeasement toward the Axis powers, but part of it likely stemmed from the anti-Communist stance of the Vatican, which saw its churches disassembled in Eastern Europe and deeply feared its further spread.“Of the polarities of totalitarianism, as a Catholic and a capitalist he objected more strenuously to communism, which he feared would grow unchecked in Europe in the wake of the defeat of fascism,” wrote his granddaughter Amanda Smith more than a half century later. As a self-described “prophet” warning of these dangers, Joe Kennedy said the postwar world of communism on the march turned out precisely as he had warned.
Bobby Kennedy enlisted wholeheartedly in his father’s cause. After a 1948 visit to Hungary, Bobby wrote an article for a Boston newspaper describing the Communist persecution of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, who was arrested for being a Western spy, including an alleged collaboration with New York’s Cardinal Spellman. The embattled prelate—“uninfluenced and uncorrupted by temporal power,” as young Kennedy described him—had been jailed by the Nazis in 1944, and now was suffering as a Catholic in a Communist bloc nation. Bobby’s own Catholicism and his sense of moral outrage rang out in this piece. “As a ranking official of an organization which is [a] direct antithesis of Communism, he [Mindszenty] naturally has been a symbol about which the opponents of this ‘type of democracy’ have rallied—but he has been far more than that,” wrote young Kennedy. “He was Faith, Hope and Charity personified.” During his stay in Hungary, the government suspected Kennedy of spying for Cardinal Spellman.“The only premises upon which they based this fantastic suspicion seemed to be that my father and Cardinal Spellman were close personal friends,” he wrote.
In the mid–1950s, during a trip through Central Asia with a family friend, Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, Bobby reprised his critique of communism’s impact on religion. “Today, religion and the family unit, which mean so much to the Moslem, have been destroyed,” he observed in the New York Times Magazine. “The parents have been replaced by the state-operated nurseries and Youth Pioneer camps.” To young Kennedy, this system struck at the heart of his own family’s most cherished beliefs, and his moral objection was palpable. In the Soviet bloc, he saw the intense struggle between the Communists and the church. In Leningrad, he found the Communist government operating “a museum which is devoted completely to ridiculing God and people’s religious beliefs,” he told U.S. News and World Report disgustedly.“For instance, as you enter they have God sitting on top of the cross,wearing a top hat, smoking a cigar and portrayed as a capitalist while a working man is bent over carrying the Cross and Him.”
During their trip, Douglas recalled, young Kennedy “carried ostentatiously a copy of the Bible in left hand” like a missionary. Yet Bobby responded to the poverty and loss of freedom in a humane way, Douglas recalled, despite his “violent religious drive” against the apparatchiks. The suffering he witnessed in the Soviet empire was further proof for Kennedy of the evils of communism.
FOR THE KENNEDY family, the personal and ideological came together in their friendship with the man who embodied the era—Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The Republican from Wisconsin, a genial fellow in private but in public a demagogue with a straining voice and indiscriminate conscience, seized on the Red Scare in 1950 when he held up a sheaf of papers and claimed they contained the names of 150 Communists in the State Department. He rode the issue mercilessly. In pure humbug fashion, McCarthy seized on the fear of subversion in America not to preach a deeply held conviction but rather to create an issue that would get him reelected. He jumped on the idea suggested to him initially by the Reverend Ed Walsh, a Jesuit priest at Georgetown. McCarthy’s foghorn of alarm about the Communist threat struck a chord among many Catholics in America, who heard similar warnings from the pulpit. At first glance, this unique link between McCarthy and Catholics, particularly Irish- Americans, could be explained as some form of ethnic politics, the pride of an immigrant people about one of their own rising to an esteemed position of power. For a long time, this glow overshadowed the questionable motives and tactics behind McCarthy’s effort to rid the countryside of all hidden Communists. “The grandiloquent gesture, the blarney, the do-or-die bravado, the inability to forget slights and humiliations, as well as the drinking and affinity for lost causes: it is not possible to understand McCarthy’s career without this ethnic component,” observed biographer Arthur Herman, who pointed out that McCarthy didn’t lose his Irish brogue until he attended law school.
But McCarthy’s prominence illuminated another schism among American Catholics. For all the progressive individuals associated with the church who were working toward social justice and enacting Christ’s word in the world, just as
the Sacred Heart nuns would have it, there was another side. The hidebound institutional church, particularly the all-male hierarchy of mostly Irish descent, was far more conservative. They instinctively agreed with McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. The senator’s actions were applauded by the Catholic clergy closest to the Kennedy family. In New York, Cardinal Spellman publicly backed McCarthy’s crusade long after its Red-baiting excesses were exposed.“He is against Communism and he has done, and is doing, something about it,” Spellman declared. “He is making America aware of the danger of Communism.” A few Catholic prelates, notably Bishop Bernard J. Sheil of Chicago, condemned McCarthy’s tactics, but many Catholic clergy, including Archbishop Cushing, still viewed the Wisconsin senator as doing God’s work.“It all depends on what they think of Communism,” explained Cushing in late 1953.“Despite any extremes or mistakes that may have been made, I don’t believe anything has brought out the evils and methods of Communism more to the American people than the investigations.” When Ralph E. Flanders, the Republican senator of Vermont, suggested that McCarthy’s charges were upsetting his church as well as the nation, Cushing came to McCarthy’s defense. “He certainly is not dividing the church,” Cushing rebuked.“There is no Catholic attitude on the issue and Catholics can go the way they will.”
Regardless of Cushing’s disclaimer, the American leaders of the church sent a message portraying McCarthy as a defender of the faith as well as the nation’s security. In the early 1950s, McCarthy became the most prominent Catholic in American political life since the days of Al Smith. At the same time, though, McCarthy stirred deeply imbedded tensions throughout the country between Catholics and the Protestant majority, some of whom resented the inquisition-like tactics of this Irish Catholic ideologue. In his study of this period, Donald F. Crosby, a Jesuit priest, observed, “Many Protestants began to see in Joe McCarthy the lurid image of everything they had come to fear in American Catholicism: like many Catholics he showed a certain disinterest in civil liberties, he demanded conformity to his own set of opinions, he was intolerant of all opposition, he dogmatized mindlessly, and he made a shambles of the democratic process by abusing the witnesses who came before his congressional committee. In sum, Joe McCarthy had come to represent what the Roman Catholic church had always seemed to be.” Many wondered whether McCarthy hoped to become the “first Catholic President.” He discounted such a possibility. As he told the press, his religion made it virtually impossible.