by Thomas Maier
In these stories, plentiful in the months before Jack’s announcement, a carefully nurtured mythology began to develop around the Kennedys. These accounts never failed to mention the $1 million trust funds that Joe, the wise and wealthy father, had set up for each son and daughter so they wouldn’t have the concerns of mere mortals and could devote themselves entirely to the cause of doing good.“Thus, they can repay, in some degree, the debt the family owes the nation for the blessings they’ve received since their hungry ancestors arrived in Boston as refugees from the great potato famine that ravaged Ireland in 1847,” extolled the Saturday Evening Post. This account ends with a short bromide from the proud patriarch, Joseph Kennedy. “The measure of a man’s success in life is not the money he’s made,” he insisted. “It’s the kind of family he has raised. In that, I’ve been mighty lucky.”
In a sense, the Kennedy’s message was old-fashioned. It harked back to the kind of family life that might have existed before the masses of immigrants, before the flight of whites from city neighborhoods to the distant suburbs, before the reduction in family size through birth control, before women in the workforce and other modern socioeconomic factors, and before the fragmenting of families, the generations living apart from each other, often hundreds of miles away. The Kennedys, with all their toothy smiles and sprawling progeny, exuded a different, often fascinating ethos— faintly Catholic in tone but not too much so. Their sheer numbers underscored the obvious fertility of these Kennedy men and their women, as if potency in one area of life surely could extend itself to another. These laudatory press accounts might mention the family’s ethnic and religious heritage, but clearly the all-American image they projected implicitly told readers that the assimilation process had worked for these Irish Catholics, that the Kennedys were just like any other happy-go-lucky WASPy family seen on 1950s television. Norman Rockwell could not have painted a more idealized portrait than the one greased and paid for with Kennedy publicity money. These stories seemed to say the Kennedys were “just like us”— or at least the vision of what we’d like ourselves to be. Yet without fail, these tributes to the Kennedy clan also mentioned their Irish Catholic heritage— “poor Irish immigrant stock,” as a 1958 New York Times Magazine profile put it—and invariably the underlying religious conflict behind their political quest. In a nation where myth holds that every little boy grows up thinking he could become president, Jack Kennedy’s ambition drew attention to one of the most accepted dirty little secrets of American politics. As Look concluded about Jack Kennedy: “He faces two obstacles: his youth, and a legend that no Catholic can be elected President.”
THE TACIT BAN on Catholics running for the nation’s highest office was more than a legend. Among Jack’s political advisers, including several family members, the prevailing sentiment was to ignore the issue, not bring it up at all. Better to leave the demons of bigotry undisturbed than provoked. But the candidate himself disagreed, borne of his own recent experiences. While traveling aboard a ship from Europe months earlier, Kennedy engaged in a long conversation with Dr. Henry Knox Sherrill, at the time the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who quizzed him extensively about his position on public aid to parochial schools. Sherrill’s questions were sincere and, as he recalled it, his talk with Kennedy was “very pleasant.” But Kennedy recognized that many fair and perfectly reasonable Protestants like Sherrill still held fundamental misunderstandings about Catholicism and the ability of Kennedy to separate his own views from those of the church hierarchy. He couldn’t ignore this problem or wish it away. As 1959 began, he decided the best strategy would be to lance the boil early—make abundantly clear his arms’-length position on church and state—and then let the body politic adapt in time for the November 1960 election. As the perfect vehicle for this candor, the Kennedy strategists decided on Look magazine, a publication perhaps more enthralled with the Kennedys than any other. Jack expressed his views to writer Fletcher Knebel, whom the campaign considered friendly. Prior to Jack’s 1956 bid, Knebel had written a piece called “Can a Catholic Become Vice President?” He spent many hours with Kennedy and became aware of his sensitivity about religious issues. “There was a chaplain of the Senate at the time, I forget his name, a Protestant who had made some passing comment to somebody about Kennedy’s Catholicism. It just burned him up,” Knebel recalled. “I had never heard such rough language as he said, ‘That cock-sucker,’ stuff like that, with this poor chaplain. I said, if he gets elected, that chaplain better go to the House.” In print, Knebel stayed away from the profane. He wrote an elaborately detailed piece that, essentially, allowed Kennedy to state his modest position. “In a capsule,” Knebel summarized, “his theme is that religion is personal, politics are public, and the twain need never meet and conflict.”
Kennedy’s comments in the March 1959 issue of Look magazine saluted the flag rather than bowed to religion.“Whatever one’s religion in his private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state,” he explained.“I believe as a senator that the separation of church and state is fundamental to our American concept and heritage and should remain so.”
In its deferential tone, John Kennedy’s approach bore some resemblance to the 1927 Atlantic Monthly article in which Al Smith stated his views on the same perilous subject. Once again, a Catholic aspiring to the presidency was asked to explain himself. Indeed, the Look headline declared:“A Catholic candidate would have to give his views on religion.” But Kennedy, with his keen sense of history, remained aware of the pitfalls. Recently, he’d written a review in theWashington Post of a new biography of Al Smith authored by Oscar Handlin. In it, Kennedy somehow never mentioned Smith’s Catholicism and its relationship to the disastrous 1928 election results.
As a candidate, though,Kennedy demonstrated that he had learned from Smith’s mistakes in trying to explain his religious beliefs to other Americans without arousing their suspicions. In a masterstroke informed by history, Kennedy chose a different tack. “Smith in 1928 had defended his church, quoting clerics and encyclicals,” Sorensen later explained. “Kennedy defended himself, and quoted his own record and views. He spoke only of legislative, not theological, issues, and he spoke only for himself.”
In the Look piece, Kennedy sounded more like a Founding Father than a papist. His comments drew a sharp distinction between conscience and the Constitution. His affiliation with Roman Catholicism would have no direct bearing on his actions in the White House. He went as far in disassociating himself from the church and its demands for adherence by members as he could reasonably go. What little was left of the Irish Catholic congressman from Boston, the local pol praised in the archdiocese’s newsletter, was now gone. He had reinvented himself and tailored his positions for the big time.“Kennedy notes that he has opposed a number of positions taken by Catholic organizations and members of the hierarchy,” Look explained. In Congress, he favored aid to Communist satellite states, including Yugoslavia, a move opposed by the U.S. bishops. Kennedy didn’t object, as the American hierarchy did, to the selection of a former Harvard president and critic of the Catholic school system, James B. Conant, as U.S. ambassador to West Germany. More significantly, Kennedy flatly ruled out federal funds to support private or parochial schools. “The First Amendment to the Constitution is an infinitely wise one,” he said, giving an almost deistic description to the document. This stance was different from his earlier one. As a Congressman, he supported textbooks and buses for parochial school students, not to mention the private thank-you note he received as senator from Cardinal Spellman for helping to arrange public funds for Catholic schools in the Philippines and to rebuild Vatican property.
If the issue of church and state was going to be the major crisis of the 1960 campaign, it was remarkable that virtually no one examined the Kennedys’ lengthy record in melding the two entities. With Joe Kenn
edy wisely keeping himself out of sight, and therefore out of the glare of public examination, no one looked at his close association with key church figures, both at home and abroad. For nearly a quarter of a century, Joe Kennedy had pushed and cajoled two American presidents to appoint a U.S. official at the Vatican, lobbying for the church with his son’s help. Yet now, that same son, the prospective presidential candidate, took a completely different stand. “I am flatly opposed to the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican,” Kennedy declared. “Whatever advantages it might have in Rome—and I’m not convinced of these—they would be more than offset by the divisive effect at home.”
Overall, Knebel predicted that Kennedy would face bigotry among “some Protestants as well as some who speak as liberals.” He even quoted author Peter Viereck’s axiom that “Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,” and underscored the Constitution’s ban on a “religious test” for public office. Remarkably, Look magazine’s closing statement echoed the same mixed message of hope and resentment that Joe Kennedy had given his son on Thanksgiving 1956, when they decided privately he would run: “The Democrats may erase this [religion] test next year, banishing the unspoken warning to presidential candidates:‘Protestants only need apply.’”
JOHN KENNEDY’S tactical move with Look magazine—“in the hope that the issue would lose some of its mystery and heat by 1960,” as Sorensen put it—failed miserably. It didn’t have any discernable effect on those who harbored doubts about a Catholic in the White House. More so, the move infuriated many Catholics, Kennedy’s wellspring of anticipated support for the election. Several in the church’s hierarchy and Catholic press took offense. Some attacked Kennedy’s posture in the article because, they contended, he seemed to avoid or disavow his Catholicism. From a historical perspective, few realized the political necessity of Kennedy’s arms-length detachment from the church in showing his independence to the American voters. For some, the prospect of another Catholic as a serious presidential candidate caused remarkable anxiety, as if they were still not sure of their place.“Catholic Americans in 1960 lived almost in a nation apart,” political observer Michael Barone wrote decades later. “The descendants of Irish, German, Italian and Polish immigrants were still concentrated in industrial cities. They . . . ate fish on Friday and attended Mass every Sunday, shunned birth control and boasted of large families and sent their children to schools run by celibate priests and nuns. In this Catholic America, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was an aristocrat.” So why was one of their own so distant, so cool in his rhetoric toward them? In the weeks that followed, their anger and hurt was palpable.
“Young Senator Kennedy had better watch his language,” warned the Indiana Catholic and Record, which said his Look comments “have set Catholics fighting among themselves.” Many thought Kennedy was striving too hard to dismiss his own cultural heritage. “We regret that Senator Kennedy, in his sweeping statement opposing Federal aid, did not think it appropriate to add his tribute to the enormous sacrifices that millions of his fellow Catholic citizens are making for their schools,” lamented an editorial in America, the magazine published by the Jesuits, who operate numerous Catholic schools and colleges around the nation. “On the part of one who himself never went to a Catholic school, such a gesture would have been as gracious as it was obviously called for.”
Kennedy’s insistence that his actions would be ruled by the Constitution rather than his own conscience was ridiculed and called disingenuous. “Something does indeed take precedence over the obligation to uphold the Constitution—namely conscience. And this applies whatever the religion of the officeholder,” lectured Ave Maria, another Catholic periodical.“To relegate your conscience to your ‘private life’ is not only unrealistic, but dangerous as well.” Some pushed the analogies much further. “The Kennedy statement expresses fundamentally the same doctrine as the one used by Nazi torturers and assassins in the Nuremberg trials,” howled the St. Joseph Register in Kansas City. “They argued that they could not be convicted of any crimes because they had acted in obedience to duly constituted superiors and the ‘law of the land.’” Ironically, some criticized Kennedy for taking part in exactly what he sought to avoid—a religious test for the presidency.“One of the things that bothers me in relation to Mr. Kennedy is that he appears to have gone overboard, in an effort to placate the bigots,” said Gerald E. Sherry of the Catholic Review in Baltimore, Maryland. “Unfortunately, despite lessening in tensions in many areas, a Catholic President is something quite a number of bigots still can’t stomach.” Some argued that Kennedy needed more moral courage in standing up to his detractors.“The Catholic does not have to put his religion aside if he runs for or holds public office,” scolded the St. Louis Review. “He does not have to assure anyone that he will not let it interfere with his duty to his government because it never will.”
When asked about the interview,Kennedy refused either to retract or to clarify his comments. The public uproar caused his father’s temper to explode in private.“The only result of it can be to knock a Catholic out of the chance of getting the big job. . . . They don’t deserve to have a President,” Joe Kennedy wrote to Galeazzi. “I myself am thoroughly disgusted and if I were Jack, I would tell them all to go jump in the lake and call it quits.”
The fallout from the Look magazine article, as Sorensen recalled, made Kennedy appear to be “a poor Catholic, a poor politician, a poor moralist and a poor wordsmith.” In response to the bundles of critical mail, Kennedy’s office sent out a standard letter restating his belief that a Catholic could serve as president and “fulfill his oath of office with complete fidelity and without reservation.” Certainly, any hopes of putting the “religious issue” behind them were premature, if not impossible. Given the strong response from the Catholics, some editorialists in the mainstream media wondered aloud whether Kennedy could overcome the religious pull of his church, whether he could live up to his promise. His initial foray had plumbed only a small part of the deep morass of prejudice in America. “It would be a national tragedy if the question of a Catholic nomination for the Presidency produced a new wave of religious bigotry,” worried Commonweal. “Unfortunately, reaction to the Kennedy statement provides ample proof that such an eventuality is entirely possible.”
KENNEDY KNEW he couldn’t rely on Cardinal Spellman, still the most visible Catholic prelate in America, to speak up for him. He would need the help of other theologians to craft a more finely tuned statement about his beliefs on church and state, one that wouldn’t land him in trouble.
As the presidential campaign neared, the most consistent and trustworthy ally for Kennedy’s cause proved to be Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston. In Cushing’s estimation, Jack was special, different from James Michael Curley and all the rest—the embodiment of every Irish Catholic immigrant’s dream in America. “This is wonderful,” he pronounced when Jack won the Pulitzer Prize, “I don’t know when a Catholic was ever awarded such an honor. Thanks be to God.” As he later concluded, “Jack is the only outstanding man that the local Democrats gave in my lifetime to the national picture.”
Relative to his times, Cushing was progressive among American Catholic cardinals. Unlike his predecessor O’Connell, Cushing encouraged ecumenical dialogue by Catholics with those of other religions; he was particularly attentive to the Jewish community, as if atoning for the well-documented past sins inflicted by his own Boston flock. He applauded Protestant ministers who spoke out against “the renewed anti-Catholicism . . . sweeping America,” and condemned statements that fostered stereotypes, including the belief that a Catholic couldn’t be voted into the White House. “I believe that people of all faiths think the same, that religion has nothing to do with a man’s holding public office, the highest or the lowest,” the cardinal declared at the opening of the Joseph P. Kennedy School in Hyde Park in 1957. Cushing dismissed the idea that American Catholics should vote according to Vatican decree. “The only things Catholics agree on is
the dogma mentioned in the Apostle’s Creed,” he quipped. Some have repeated Cushing’s claim that the Kennedys didn’t mix religion with politics. “The candidate explicitly asked the prelate not to involve the church in the campaign in any way,” insisted one biographer. But outside the scrutiny of a wary and often bigoted nation, Cushing intervened at various points in the Kennedy campaign as a clear-cut partisan.
Symbolically, Cushing became convinced that the election of Kennedy would break the stranglehold of power in America that heavily weighed against minorities. Irish Catholics would be only the first of many to follow.“ My idea was to do everything I could to help him,” Cushing recalled. “I would have done the same for a Jewish . . . or a Negro candidate as long as I could break through what . . . was a sort of iron curtain.” Publicly, Cushing’s support of Kennedy’s strict stance on the separation of church and state added ecclesiastical legitimacy to his views and quelled some of the complaints within the ranks of American Catholics. Behind the scenes, however, Cushing played a much more direct role in the Kennedy camp, helping to line up support among the clergy and elected officials who were Catholics.
In late 1959, Cushing promised to lobby on Jack’s behalf with Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh (his former top aide in Boston) so that “he will start a little aggressive talk among the folks in his area that will reach the ear of the Governor of Pennsylvania.” Through his private consultations with the candidate’s father, Cushing decided that Pennsylvania’s Governor David Lawrence, also a Catholic, could be of tremendous help. But Lawrence worried that Kennedy’s candidacy would only hurt the Democratic Party’s chances of regaining the White House after eight years of Eisenhower’s Republican rule. Like other state and local officeholders of the same religion, Lawrence remembered the painful legacy of Al Smith’s defeat. With anti-Catholicism on the rise, he felt the timing was poor, that hopes would be raised among Catholics, only to be dashed by religious bigotry at the ballot box. But Cushing wouldn’t be deterred. When he flew out to Pittsburgh for the installation of Wright as the new bishop in March 1959, the cardinal asked the mayor of Pittsburgh to arrange a private meeting with Lawrence. Along for the ride was Francis X. Morrissey, the Kennedys’ long-time political aide. The cardinal and Morrissey urged Lawrence to end his reluctance; after some arm-twisting, Lawrence changed his mind and swung his ample political resources for Kennedy.