by Thomas Maier
Whatever its origins, the book indisputably helped John F. Kennedy’s political fortunes and lifted him from the realm of cultural stereotype. During the 1950s, several critics, notably Paul Blanshard, wrote about the lack of intellectual life among American Catholics and blamed the church and the insular nature of immigrant life for its underdevelopment. The rants of Senator McCarthy only reinforced this die-hard stereotype of Irish Catholics, particularly among liberals and intellectuals, a significant segment of the Democratic Party and the press. In writing his book, Kennedy twisted the old archetypes on their head to create his own new standard. Here was an Irish Catholic who didn’t look like Al Smith or a bleary-eyed big-city hack; instead, he was a Harvard-educated young man who got himself elected to the Senate and managed to win a Pultizer to boot. His respectful tribute to the Senate’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestant politicians— several of whom probably would have prohibited the Kennedy clan from entering this nation had they been given the chance—pushed Kennedy back toward the middle of the political spectrum, away from the extremes of McCarthy. He was no longer touted as “a fighting conserva-tive”— the phrase that Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune used to describe him—but as a thoughtful, moderate senator who wanted to be president someday. “Today the challenge of political courage looms larger than ever before,” Kennedy assured his readers. “Our public life is becoming so increasingly centered upon that seemingly unending war to which we have given the curious epithet ‘cold’ that we tend to encourage rigid ideological unity and orthodox patterns of thought.”
As if repenting for his silence during the censure vote, in his book Kennedy embraced old American virtues based on individual liberties and devotion to the democratic institutions. “The ultimate source of political courage in a nation, Kennedy was saying in his book, lay in the extent that independence, unorthodoxy, and dissent were tolerated among the people as a whole,” observed historian James MacGregor Burns, one of several experts credited in the preface. “This conclusion was of particular importance, for he was arguing that the toleration of unorthodoxy is a matter not merely of democratic rectitude, but a matter of democratic survival.” Kennedy’s heroes paid homage to the traditional separation between church and government, though they remained always answerable to a higher power. Kennedy suggested that this same spirit of openness should apply not only to orthodoxy in politics but also to choosing a politician with an unorthodox religion.
BY EARLY 1956, John Kennedy’s name was being circulated among the Democratic conventioneers as a potential running mate for Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the odds-on favorite as the party’s presidential nominee. Four years earlier, Stevenson lost badly to Eisenhower and his chances didn’t seem any brighter this time against the Republican incumbent. Joe Kennedy considered Stevenson a sure loser; he advised his son to be patient and not take a possible vice-presidential bid, even if the opportunity were offered. The senior Kennedy, still mindful of Al Smith’s 1928 loss, worried that Jack’s Catholicism might be blamed unfairly as a reason for the ticket’s failure. Such a scenario would be worse than just a single defeat; for at least another generation it could dissuade any Catholic from seeking the presidency. Stevenson himself wasn’t sure that running with a Catholic would help his chances for the White House. Several of his allies wondered whether under all Kennedy’s polish lay the beastly heart of a Red-baiter willing to abuse civil liberties at any cost. Other advisers exuded the faint whiff of anti-Catholicism found in intellectual circles. Plenty of anti-Catholic and anti-Kennedy mail found its way to Stevenson, and several national figures, including national chairman Frank McKinney (a Catholic himself), advised Stevenson against asking Kennedy because it would mean certain defeat. In one of the private letters he received, Agnes Meyer, a Stevenson friend married to the publisher of the Washington Post, warned that such a selection would unleash a more sophisticated and more powerfully organized opposition than the 1928 election saw because the Protestant clergy was more formidable than in Smith’s day. She clipped a newspaper article quoting a prominent Protestant clergyman in New York who vowed not to vote for a Roman Catholic on any national ticket “because of the authority the Roman Catholic Church holds over its members.”
As the summertime convention neared, Jack took his father’s prognosis under advisement. “While I think the prospects are rather limited,” he admitted to his father before the convention, “it does seem of some use to have all of this churning up.”At the same time, though, Jack made sure that his brother Bobby would be working on his behalf on the convention floor. The senator called his friend Tip O’Neill, who had taken over Jack’s old congressional seat, and asked for credentials for his brother. Told it was too late, Kennedy persisted.“My brother Bob is the smartest politician I have ever met in my life,” Jack implored.“You know you never can tell, lightning may strike at this convention out there, I could wind up as vice-president.”
Boston’s Irish Catholic politicians with a sense of history, such as O’Neill and future Speaker of the House John McCormack, were well aware that Kennedy had traveled farther and faster than any of their kind before. Despite his sophisticated and often witty manner, he knew how to be an organization in-fighter, a party chieftain, just like his two grandfathers. Earlier in the year,Kennedy had won a struggle to wrest control of the state Democratic Party from those allied with Curley and McCormack.“He and his millions don’t know what decency means,” complained state party chairman William Burke, after being ousted by Kennedy’s hand-picked candidate. On the national scene, however, Boston’s pols were inclined to root for Kennedy, even if they did resent the family’s power and money. O’Neill knew what he must do. He agreed to turn over his own seat at the convention to Bobby.
As the buzz about Kennedy increased, Look magazine published an article that questioned whether any Democrat could win with a Catholic on the ticket. In a survey of thirty-one Democratic officials in thirteen Southern states, more than half said a Catholic would hurt the party’s chances in their states. Only three said it would help.“You know, you guys have got this Catholic thing all wrong,” Kennedy told Look magazine reporter Fletcher Knebel after the article appeared. “I think a Catholic would run better for vice president, maybe not president.” Jack directed his chief strategist Ted Sorensen to prepare a memorandum about why Kennedy’s religion would help the Democrats that year. The memo argued that Catholics, regardless of age, residence or social class, would vote in “high proportion . . . for a well-known Catholic candidate or a ticket with a special Catholic appeal.” It relied heavily on statistical analysis gleaned from top pollsters and published academic studies. The Kennedys mailed the report to top party leaders around the country under the signature of Connecticut’s Democratic boss John Bailey (and thus dubbed “the Bailey report”) to avoid having their fingerprints directly on the document’s creation.
The so-called Bailey Report wasn’t the first time Sorensen’s work had benefited Kennedy. If the Irish pols surrounding him in his congressional races reflected one side of Jack Kennedy’s background, the hiring of Ted Sorensen for his tenure in the Senate reflected another part of Kennedy’s personality and ambitions. In effect, Sorensen became Kennedy’s Brahmin alter ego, the sober-minded tactician not swayed by ethnic pride or prejudices but committed as a liberal to helping a like-minded politician try to win favor in a Protestant nation. Before being hired in early 1953, Sorensen was warned by a well-placed Washington lawyer that he wouldn’t get the job because of his religion. “Jack Kennedy wouldn’t hire anyone Joe Kennedy wouldn’t tell him to hire,” the lawyer told him, “and with the exception of Jim Landis, Joe Kennedy hasn’t hired a non-Catholic in fifty years!”Wary of Kennedy’s father, Sorensen also thought Bobby Kennedy was “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat shallow in his convictions . . . more like his father than his brother.”
A native Nebraskan, Sorensen understood the prairie lands, where Catholics were a rarity and looked at askance. As he
later wrote, “Having been raised in a Unitarian and civil liberties atmosphere that looked with some suspicion on Catholic political pressure, I could help the Senator understand the more reasonable fears he encountered.” Before accepting the Senate staff job, Sorensen inquired about Kennedy’s religion.“We had another interview and this time I asked the questions—about his father, Joe McCarthy and the Catholic Church,” he recalled. Kennedy quickly put to rest his young aide’s concerns.“There is an old saying in Boston—‘We get our religion from Rome and our politics at home,’” Kennedy replied.
In surveying the 1956 political landscape, Sorensen built his argument for Kennedy with a strong dose of numbers and revisionist history. Rather than a defensive treatise, arguing for religious liberty and tolerance, Sorensen instead crafted a memo that underlined why Catholics—many of them first- and second-generation children of Irish, Italian, German, Polish and other immigrants—were a pivotal part of the Democratic Party’s strength. Without the margin of victory provided by Catholic voters in the 1940 presidential campaign, the report noted, states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Illinois and even New York—Franklin Roosevelt’s home state—would have been lost to the Republicans, changing the entire outcome of the election. After World War II, as Catholics moved to the suburbs and integrated into the mainstream of American life, some defected to the Republicans, the report pointed out. By 1952, many groups such as Irish Catholics—who normally voted 65 percent Democratic—voted by a 53 percent margin for the GOP’s Dwight Eisenhower. In this report, Sorensen contended that putting a Catholic on the 1956 ticket would regain this traditional bloc of Democratic voters.
The Bailey Report also addressed “the Al Smith myth”—the historical contention that Smith’s Catholicism posed an insurmountable hurdle for his presidential candidacy. Instead, the report argued that in the 1928 election, the prohibition of alcohol was three times more important as an issue than religion, and Hoover, a “dry” candidate, reflected public sentiment more than a “wet” like Smith. More significantly, the report insisted that America was now different, had grown past the bigotry of yesteryear.“The nation has changed since 1928,” Sorensen concluded. “There are more Catholics—their political role, as seen above, is more crucial—their leadership in the Democratic Party and in the statewide offices from California to Maine is both frequent and accepted—and the nation is considerably more tolerant on religious matters.”
Despite its compelling arguments, the Bailey Report didn’t sway Stevenson enough to put Kennedy on the 1956 ticket. He did ask the young Massachusetts senator to give a nominating speech on his behalf, however, which Kennedy did effectively before a television audience. Without warning, Stevenson then threw the vice-presidential decision open to the delegates. Kennedy’s troops, led by his brother and a handful of state leaders, made a last-minute effort, but he fell short of the sufficient number of votes, the party instead nominating Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Before the full convention,Kennedy made a gracious concession speech that marked him as a future contender for the top spot on the ticket. He dutifully campaigned for Stevenson, but he didn’t forget the dismissive reaction he heard in the voice of one of Adlai Stevenson’s relatives—“Oh, those poor little Catholics.” In 1956, Kennedy’s political achievements and his success with a best-selling book brought him great acclaim. But the question of religion underlined how difficult it would be for him to seek the presidency.
AFTER THANKSGIVING dinner in 1956, the Kennedy patriarch held a long discussion at the family’s home in Hyannis Port about his son’s political future. Though he’d been against the idea of Jack’s running for vice president with Stevenson, Joe Kennedy now proposed that his son pursue the 1960 presidential nomination. Laboriously and cautiously, Jack went through each major hurdle, each of which his father assured him could be overcome, including religion. Years later, Rose recounted her husband’s pep talk, which took on the dramatic overtones of a quest.
“Just remember, this country is not a private preserve for Protestants,” Joe concluded. “There’s a whole new generation out there and it’s filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants from all over the world and those people are going to be mighty proud that one of their own is running for President. And that pride will be your spur, it will give your campaign an intensity we’ve never seen in public life. Mark my word, I know it’s true.” Old man Kennedy, though tart and cynical, still burned with a certain idealism when it applied to his son and his country. Perhaps the glass ceiling in American life could be broken, and Joe took heart when Jack was elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers in 1957.“Now I know his religion won’t keep him out of the White House,” he declared. “If an Irish Catholic can get elected as an Overseer at Harvard, he can get elected to anything.”
IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR children were the untapped potential for Kennedy. The symbolism of his candidacy represented far more than the potential acceptance and toleration of Roman Catholicism in the United States; it extended into the realm of opportunities and possibilities for all minority groups. Joe Kennedy surely didn’t see his son as the messianic leader of all minorities in America, and surely his politically prudent son didn’t, either. But Joe’s keen grasp of the facts and figures outlined in the Bailey Report made him aware that immigrants and minorities held the key to Jack’s potential victory.“Catholic voting strength is currently at its peak, in view of the maturing of the offspring of the Italians, Poles, Czechs and other former immigrant elements,” according to a voter survey quoted in the report. These “immigrant elements” would form the stone and mortar of Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
Immigration remained a constant in Kennedy’s politics. Like grandfather John F. Fitzgerald, he paid particular attention in Congress to matters concerning immigrants. For all of his considerable cautiousness in politics, Kennedy became a maverick on this issue. During his six years in the House, Kennedy consistently favored immigration reforms along with other liberal domestic issues that balanced his hawkish anti-Communist foreign policy. His concerns were sensible local politics in a congressional district with many recent émigrés from around the world. Massachusetts then contained a greater percentage of foreign-born residents than any other state in the union. In the Senate, Kennedy’s interest in immigration broadened even further, both in proposed legislation and his own public writings. He fought hard for reforms to the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 by seeking to end racist restrictions that favored “Caucasian” immigrants and restricted entry for those from Asia and Latin America. In strong moral tones, he criticized the national origins quota system that kept many immigrant families, apart for years, from coming together.
Kennedy’s objections to the nation’s immigration system, its fundamental unfairness, struck a deep chord within him. In late 1958, Kennedy published a small book, almost pamphlet-sized, called A Nation of Immigrants, in which he provided an enlightened history of America’s immigrants and carefully picked apart the problems of the current system. “I know of no cause which [Jack] Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies,” observed Robert Kennedy, who later said the book was “deliberately designed to provide those who were unfamiliar with this aspect of our history with an appreciation of the enormous contributions to American life made by immigrants.”
Far more than Jack Kennedy’s two earlier books, A Nation of Immigrants had very personal roots. Kennedy’s heritage allowed him to perceive changes in America that other Anglo-American thinkers might not pick up. His sense of history made him see a universal quality to America’s immigration.
Years later, Senator Edward Kennedy would agree that this small book, often ignored by biographers, had sprung from some of his brother’s most deeply held values. “It was very important to him,”Ted recalled. “He was very proud of his Irish heritage and while growing up came to realize how the Irish in Boston made great contributions to the life of the city. He came t
o see that immigrants from many other nations enhanced America and helped the nation to move forward into the future. He knew that there were misconceptions about immigration and immigrants. . . . So he wrote that book to show how much immigration helped America and how much it was needed and should be appreciated.”
IN LANGUAGE suitable for a Boy Scout manual, Jack Kennedy saluted America’s cherished beliefs in democracy, equal opportunity and the melting pot of disparate cultures brought by immigrants. Invoking Walt Whitman, he surveyed a land enlivened by a constant flow of new blood in all walks of life.“There is no part of our nation that has not been touched by our immigrant background,” he praised. “Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.”To draw strength for his argument, Kennedy quoted probably the most patrician character his father ever knew, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who told a convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”