by Thomas Maier
As the May 10 primary neared,West Virginia, with its high percentage of Protestants and few Catholics,would be the pivotal testing ground for John F. Kennedy and his chances to gain the Democratic nomination for president. In Wisconsin the month before, Kennedy had won the primary election against Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey by a wide margin, but in a way that drew more doubts about his viability as a national candidate. While in Wisconsin, Jack had studiously avoided any hint of ethnic politics. Campaigning through Eau Claire on St. Patrick’s Day, a street-corner drunk came up to the candidate and, good-naturedly, invited him to have a drink from his bottle. Kennedy politely declined.“That might play well in certain parts of Boston,” he turned and laughed to press aide Pierre Salinger, “but The New York Times wouldn’t like it.” In winning Wisconsin, however, Kennedy’s results were skewed along religious lines. Numerous Catholics voted as a virtual bloc for him, but political experts noted that he lost to Humphrey in three so-called Protestant districts. After the Wisconsin primary, commentator Walter Lippmann worried that national politics in the future would divide along Protestant-Catholic lines.
Celebrating victory at their Milwaukee hotel campaign headquarters, Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Shriver, inquired why he seemed so glum.
“What does it all mean, Johnny?” she asked.
Jack knew exactly.“It means that we’ve got to go to West Virginia in the morning and do it all over again,” he replied.
IN HEAVILY PROTESTANT West Virginia, analysts predicted that Kennedy wouldn’t fare well and might indeed show an inability to attract voters worried about his religion. Almost each day, the newspapers carried accounts of religious objections concerning Kennedy’s candidacy. Soon after the senator announced his candidacy in January, nearly half of all Presbyterian ministers who responded to a church magazine poll said they wouldn’t vote for a Roman Catholic who ran for president under any circumstances. “I’m sorry,” wrote one of the respondents, “But this is the way it is.”
In the same poll, many Presbyterian ministers agreed that “since the end justifies the means for Roman Catholics, a member of that church could not be believed even if he gave assurances that he would maintain a separation between church and state.” The following month, Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the nine-million-member Southern Baptist Convention—the second largest Protestant group in the United States— vowed not to “stand by and keep my mouth shut when a man under the control of the Roman Catholic Church runs for the Presidency of the United States.” In Kansas City, the American Council of Christian Churches passed a resolution disapproving of a Roman Catholic for president. The National Association of Evangelicals—representing thirty-five Protestant denominations in the conservative tradition—expressed “doubt” that a Roman Catholic president “could or would resist fully the pressures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.” In a national magazine, two leading Protestant churchmen—the Reverend Dr. Eugene Carson Blake of the Presbyterian Church and Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam of the Methodist Church—both said they’d feel “uneasy” with a Catholic in the White House. Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church in America who officiated at the 1956 Democratic Convention, advised congregates to follow their own consciences, but added there was no question as to “the stand of the Catholic church favoring state-church relations.” In Indiana, a group of picketers—identifying themselves as “Christian Patriots of America, Indianapolis”—challenged the candidate to debate his fitness, as a Roman Catholic, to be president. Most times, Kennedy ignored the hecklers, protestors, the people who stood with homemade signs insulting his religion, by trying to stay on course with his overall message.
Before the Wisconsin primary, Joe Kennedy predicted this state would be pivotal to his son’s chances. “If we do not do very well there, I would say that we should get out of the fight,” he told Galeazzi. “If we cannot make a showing and if the religious thing becomes very acute, then I am for stepping out and letting the boys fight it out amongst themselves.”To another family friend that same month, however, Joe showed his family’s steely determination to overcome the old cultural barriers. “I really have no patience with the Catholics who want to duck a fight,” he explained. “When you said to me that you hated to see these bigoted ideas arise, I asked you what we were supposed to do, just duck this question for the rest of our lives. If Jack’s heart is broken because he may be beaten on the religious question, then so be it.”
As they did throughout the 1960 campaign, the Kennedys called in every chit they possessed in the world of American Catholicism, no matter how remote to politics. In a letter to Mother O’Byrne of Manhattanville, Rose asked for the list of alumnae whom she might contact in Wisconsin in anticipation of the primary there. Rose underlined that “the results will be carefully evaluated and they will have a strong psychological effect on the voters.” O’Byrne wrote back to say she’d send the book of alumnae names, but the tone of her letter suggested that she was uncomfortable with the request. Some Catholics didn’t want a repeat of the 1928 campaign, afraid of being disappointed again. While campaigning in Eau Claire,Wisconsin, Kennedy met a kindly, older woman who held his hand in hers for a moment and said,“Not now young man, it’s too soon, too soon.” Kennedy just smiled.“No Mother, this is it,” he replied. “The time is now. ”
Even Kennedy’s seventy-year-old mother, who proved a popular campaigner in Wisconsin with a series of teas and receptions, faced anti- Catholic criticism. After one luncheon in Eau Claire, Rose Kennedy chatted amiably with three Protestant clergymen who explained their reasons for opposing her son. “It is based on the fear of the predominantly Protestant population of America that the Roman Church will use, through pressure and coercion, the office of the Presidency to achieve ends which are not in keeping with Protestant beliefs,” said one of the ministers, the Reverend Forrest W.York of Eau Claire’s First Congregationalist Church. Although Rose was among the family’s best campaigners, she didn’t repeat her familiar round of teas and receptions for the West Virginia primary, mainly because of concern about anti-Catholic bias. Her honorific as a “papal countess,” conferred by Pope Pius XII, was a great source of family pride, mentioned at various church ceremonies and special events when she traveled in predominantly Catholic countries in Europe. But with religion dominating the debate in West Virginia, the Kennedy campaign decided Rose shouldn’t appear at all. Instead, she spent the campaign at the family’s Florida vacation home. Bobby Kennedy, the campaign manager, tried to break the news gently to her.
“Mother, after you worked so hard in Wisconsin, go on back to Palm Beach and get some rest for a few days,” he advised. But Rose understood the real reasons for her absence. “In West Virginia, with ‘Popery’ suddenly the big issue, the media there surely would bring it up in interviews and feature articles if I came into the state to campaign,” she later wrote. “I would have been, to say the least, ‘counterproductive.’” Rose, the daughter of Honey Fitz, didn’t need any more reminders of the lingering ghosts from Al Smith’s 1928 campaign.
BOBBY KENNEDY, more so than his brother, appeared aghast at the degree of religious prejudice they faced. Early in the West Virginia campaign, Bobby, and two top Kennedy aides, Larry O’Brien and Kenny O’Donnell, began a meeting of local campaign workers by asking what problems they might face.
A man stood up from the crowd.“There’s only one problem,” he shouted. “He’s a Catholic. That’s our goddamned problem!”
The room erupted in a litany of complaints about Kennedy’s religion, which wasn’t well known by most West Virginians until the newspaper and TV coverage of the previous Wisconsin primary. One after another, these campaign workers complained of suffering abuse from friends and neighbors for supporting Kennedy. By the end of the meeting, Bobby Kennedy appeared stunned. “He seemed to be in a state of shock,” remembered O’Donnell.“His face was as pale as ashes.”
Right after the meeting, Bobby Kennedy rushed to a telephone booth to
call his brother in Washington and tell him the bad news.
“It can’t be that bad,” Jack said after listening for a few minutes. He reminded Bobby that the pre-campaign poll in West Virginia had showed substantial support.
Bobby, his voice sour with dismay, was unmoved. “The people who voted for you in that poll have just found out that you’re a Catholic.”
At another point, an exhausted Bobby Kennedy, at a campaign appearance on behalf of his brother, defended his family on the charge that their religion made their allegiance to the United States suspect. During this talk, Bobby recalled his family’s commitment to serving their country, and mentioned the death of his oldest brother, Joe Jr., shot down in battle during World War II. At the mention of his fallen brother, Bobby stopped and sat down, too overcome by emotion to continue. When news of this appearance reached Jack, he shook his head.“Bobby must be getting tired,” he said.
As primary day neared in West Virginia, the religious issue took center stage. The state’s largest newspaper, the Charleston Gazette, published an advertisement that, in the guise of a private “poll,” was a direct attack on Kennedy’s religion. The newspaper ad asked the question:
Who is the bigot? A candidate for the Presidency believes it is a mortal sin for him to worship with a faith other than his own. A voter votes against him on account of this belief. Who is the bigot?
The ad was paid for by a Joseph I.Arnold of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who let reporters know he’d published a similar ad aimed at “non- Catholics” in nineteen religious publications in the South. Informal surveys of West Virginia voters “made it clear that anti-Catholicism would be their primary reason for voting against Senator Kennedy and for Senator Humphrey in the primary,” the New York Times said in a story about the “bigot” ad. “The issue has made Senator Humphrey the favorite.” A study by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith found a “distressing amount of bigoted expression about a Catholic in the White House” and reported that “anti-Catholic extremists today are circulating petitions on a large scale, demanding of both Republican and Democratic National Conventions that they nominate no Catholics for President or Vice-President.”
Humphrey, as a Congregationalist, was the beneficiary of the anti- Catholic vote against Kennedy, though no evidence existed of prejudice on his part. Nevertheless, the Humphrey campaign did little to disavow the religious bias efforts against Kennedy, and even suggested these reports of bigotry were exaggerated. During one television interview, Humphrey implied that Kennedy was “crying” about anti-Catholicism among West Virginia voters. In turn, the Kennedy camp issued a blistering statement, calling Humphrey guilty of conducting a “gutter campaign” to win the nomination.“Why is he letting himself be used as a tool by the strangest collection of political bedfellows that has ever joined to gang up on one candidate?” Kennedy asked in the statement.
TO OVERCOME THE uneasiness of some Protestants, the Kennedys enlisted another Protestant with a beloved Democratic name in West Virginia, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., to work on their behalf. Earlier in the year, Joe Kennedy had arranged for young Roosevelt to pay a visit to the family’s Palm Beach compound, where he agreed to campaign in West Virginia for Jack. In this coal-mining region, the name of Roosevelt was revered because of New Deal legislation that gave miners the right to unionize and earn decent living wages. To these voters, young Frank Jr. had the same looks and charm as his sainted father. A former war hero himself, Roosevelt stressed Kennedy’s military record, regaling crowds with the heroism Jack displayed in saving crew members from his destroyed PT-109 ship in the South Pacific. Around the state, the campaign emphasized the Kennedy-Roosevelt connection, even though Joe Kennedy’s alliance with FDR had ended in alienation and Eleanor Roosevelt, a preeminent liberal Democrat in the postwar years, initially preferred Stevenson in 1960. She thought JFK a coward for not standing up to the witch hunt of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Given this history, getting young FDR Jr. on the Kennedy bandwagon was a major coup. At numerous rallies, Roosevelt held up two fingers tightly pressed together. “My daddy and Jack Kennedy’s daddy were just like that!” he exclaimed. To drive home the point, Joe Kennedy arranged for endorsement letters signed by Roosevelt to be shipped to Hyde Park, New York, where they were postmarked and mailed to West Virginia voters. Roosevelt’s impact in West Virginia proved significant, author Richard Reeves observed, “as if the son of God had come to give the Protestants permission to vote for this Catholic.”
Over the objections of both his father and brother Bobby, Jack Kennedy decided on his own to confront the Catholic question directly in West Virginia. During the primaries, most of his advisors preferred to wait, hoping the religion issue would fade. But as Sorensen recalled, Kennedy decided “to combat it out in the open then and there instead of permitting it to fester until fall or prevent his candidacy from surviving until fall.” In his speeches, he pointed out that religion wasn’t a factor when he joined the navy to fight in the war, and that “nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or a Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.” Adroitly, Jack made religious bias appear anti- American rather than an act of nativism. In a paid statewide television program with FDR Jr., Kennedy reiterated the same theme.
“When any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of president, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state,” he avowed.“He puts one hand on the Bible and raises the other hand to God as he takes the oath. And if he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Constitution can impeach him—and should impeach him—but he is committing a sin against God.”
His high-risk strategy worked remarkably well. Kennedy pulled off a surprise victory in West Virginia, upsetting Humphrey by such a large majority that the Minnesotan withdrew from the remaining primaries. Once the challenger, Kennedy now became the frontrunner, his nomination inevitable unless something untoward stopped him.“If Senator Kennedy is to be turned down, those in control of the convention will be under heavy pressure to make a convincing demonstration that his religion was not officially responsible,” observed the New York Times, correctly recognizing the significance of the moment.
With the size of this victory, Kennedy declared the controversy surrounding his Catholic faith had been put to rest—an assertion far removed from reality. As he remarked, it was “buried eight feet deep in West Virginia; now if we can get the Catholics to stop talking about it.” Some commentators expressed hope that the country had turned a corner. In the most unlikely place, particularly given West Virginia’s history of anti-Catholicism, Kennedy’s victory suggested that the religious barrier to the presidency finally could be overcome.
IN LOS ANGELES, at the Democratic National Convention that July, John F. Kennedy became his party’s presidential nominee. At his father’s insistence, he rounded out the ticket by asking Lyndon Baines Johnson to be his vice-presidential running mate—believing the Texas senator would bring enough votes from traditional Democrats in the South to offset those lost on the religious issue. To Jack’s surprise and the dismay of Bobby, Johnson accepted. Despite his sons’ gloomy ambivalence, Joe Kennedy declared the Johnson selection a masterstroke. He believed Johnson’s presence on the ticket might help avoid some of the ugliness and difficulties ahead for Jack as a Catholic running for president. Already problems existed in the Democratic ranks.
At a luncheon for Adlai Stevenson shortly before the convention began, Eleanor Roosevelt tried to swamp Kennedy’s candidacy by casting doubts about his religion, contending that she “did not believe Senator Kennedy could win the election, nor could he win the Negro vote.”When reporters inquired further about her inflammatory statement, the former first lady reiterated her concerns about whether America was ready for a Catholic in the White House.“I felt that there would be less chance for a ticket headed by Senator Kennedy,” she explained. “I doubted h
e could carry the Negro vote, and also, while I am extremely gratified not to find any real prejudice from the religious point of view, I couldn’t be sure, from the trends I have seen, that this situation would continue through the November election.” To be sure, many Negro Baptist churchmen said they’d never vote for a Roman Catholic. If Kennedy’s candidacy carried some symbolism about their own fate—as members of another minority group in America—these ministers were blind to it. Their denouncements were every bit as loud and determined as those of other Protestant churches opposed to Kennedy. For her own reasons, Eleanor Roosevelt felt this sentiment was enough to deny Kennedy his chance. By that point, he already had enough delegate support to secure the nomination. But Mrs. Roosevelt insisted the best ticket in 1960 would be “Stevenson-Kennedy”—the young Catholic taking second place. Jack found such a notion distasteful. Eventually, he met with the former first lady to alleviate her concerns, even if she was motivated, as the Kennedy family suspected, by less than fair-minded principles. Yet if liberal Democrats with the name Roosevelt harbored such fears, how could he expect to win?
ARRIVING BACK in Hyannis Port after the convention, Kennedy was swarmed by at least fifteen thousand people, mostly from Boston, who heard him give a short speech of thanksgiving. Elated by his nomination,Kennedy reminded this crowd of many immigrant descendants how his own family had struggled for this moment. He mentioned his great-grandparents from Ireland, how they had sought the freedoms and opportunities America had to offer and what it meant to him. Some Catholics were so consumed with pride by Kennedy’s candidacy that their words spilled into hyperbole. The editor of America, the Jesuit magazine, predicted the United States was entering a “post-Protestant era” and claimed Kennedy’s candidacy was “filled with immense sociological and cultural meaning,” partly because JFK “makes no secret of the fact that he is a Catholic of Irish descent.”