by Thomas Maier
Among the Kennedys, the clannish nature of the Irish could be found in references to being “brothers,” not only among themselves—Jack, Bobby, Teddy as flesh-and-blood siblings—but to those who worked and acted on their behalf. The idea of brotherly fidelity, particularly in the face of adversity, seemed to strike a chord in President Kennedy. In many ways, he had entered politics as a way of redeeming his brother, realizing the goal that dead Joe Jr. aspired to at his father’s behest. If Jack fell, just as in ancient Irish folklore or the songs depicted about the Boys of Wexford in a long-ago battle, another brother would expect to take his place. His administration was a particularly male-dominated social dynamic, not unlike the customs in rural Ireland or those practiced by the Boston machine pols. Much of the Kennedy legacy was promulgated by “the men who came to spend their lives with them, who came to envy them their brotherhood, who came to want the love they had for each other, a love they expressed shyly, as men seem to, as Irish men particularly seem to, in banter and bravado, their fierce tenderness camouflaged in semigenial competition,” author Anne Taylor Fleming observed. To aides and associates, Jack fondly recalled “St. Crispin’s Day” from Shakespeare with lines spoken by a prince before going into battle:“ We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he today that sheds his blood with me, / Shall be my brother.” On one campaign swing, Francis X. Morrissey recalled, his boss suddenly turned green with nostalgia for their early days on the hustings. “Frankie, remember you with me on St. Crispin’s Day,” he implored.
Rather than imitating the British of old or the Brahmins of his youth, Kennedy forged his own style in public. He didn’t revert to the Irish Catholic rituals or rhetoric that some critics expected immediately upon his arrival in the White House. “John Kennedy was the more secure, the freer, of the two—freer of his father, freer of his family, of his faith, of the entire Irish-American predicament,” Schlesinger stated in his biography of Robert Kennedy. Yet there was far more to Kennedy’s actions than some liberation from the “Irish-American predicament,” as Schlesinger put it. Though he steered clear of the Catholic hierarchy’s interests in the first years of his administration,Kennedy never intended to detach himself from his religion or ethnic roots. He was clearly more of a “traditional Catholic” during his presidency than a “nominal Catholic,” as so many later portrayed him. In 1962—the only full year of his presidency—the New York Times recorded that Kennedy attended Sunday Mass thirty-three times, not counting several private Masses at Camp David and elsewhere that undoubtedly accounted for an attendance record to rival any faithful communicant. At St. Stephen’s Church in Washington, as well as parishes in Palm Beach, Hyannis Port and Los Angeles during that year, photographers and reporters noted Kennedy’s attendance at Mass. As one typical Times account summarized:“Kennedy attends mass, swims, cruises on [the presidential yacht] Honey Fitz with [long-time Kennedy friends] Ormsby- Gores, Fays, Reeds,Auchinclosses.” Before leaving Mexico, he went to Mass at Basilica de Guadalupe—not exactly the kind of religious service designed to win him votes back home among some bigoted Americans. Of course, no one is sure whether Kennedy spent the usual hour-long Mass in prayer or penance, atoning for the sins of the world or his own actions— or simply looking out the glass-stained windows as the priest droned on. But as such evidence suggests, the basic signposts of Kennedy’s Catholicism were often ignored by contemporary journalists and subsequent historians, just as the impact of his family’s cultural history went unmeasured.
When chroniclers did look beyond the immediate, they found patterns to Kennedy’s behavior that went beyond the pop psychology of labeling him a sexual compulsive or of giving him some Freudian diagnosis. Historian William V. Shannon, who covered Kennedy as a journalist, contended that this American president possessed a particularly Catholic approach to government. Kennedy’s view of human nature and politics, he said, reflected the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. From his own Irish Catholic perspective, Kennedy didn’t talk in moral absolutes, as some intellectuals with their own ideological orthodoxies were wont to do. John Cogley, the 1960 adviser who returned to Commonweal and later became a religion writer for the New York Times, said JFK’s most “Catholic” contribution to American life was his attitude toward the use of power which, he said, was distinctly Thomistic, “learned not in the classroom but absorbed from his Irish forebears.” Unlike the Puritans of his native Massachusetts, he didn’t see its exercise as intrinsically evil. Kennedy’s utilitarian approach to power was, Cogley believed, “a kind of cultural overflow of Catholicism which was very deeply reflected in Kennedy.” In particular, Kennedy’s culturally influenced social concerns were reflected in his campaign against hunger and poverty (he was shocked by conditions he found in West Virginia during the 1960 primary), as well as his administration’s embrace of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America exposing this national problem. “Kennedy was a liberal, an Irish Catholic liberal,” explained Shannon.“He could easily have been a conservative, but again history and circumstances made it more likely and more fitting that he go to the White House as the protagonist of those most in need of a champion: the old in need of medical care, the slum child in need of a better home, and, beyond America’s shores, all those who hunger and wait.”
In style, if not substance, Kennedy became a new kind of Irish Catholic politician. He was wary of the stereotypes of old—particularly those inner-city machine hacks such as Curley in Boston and Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago, who were analyzed with disdain by the liberal reformers. But he was still uncertain about the emerging conventions of the new. As president, his Harvard side was clearly in view, while the “Irish” side remained opaque, often imperceptible to the public at large. To be reelected in 1964, Kennedy knew he’d have to keep his political equilibrium, to build his own majority as a minority president, to master the art of coalition politics. Perhaps with this in mind, Kennedy once asked his long-time aide Kenny O’Donnell for his opinion of who were the best politicians in America. O’Donnell mentioned Daley and Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, the orphaned son of Irish Catholic immigrants.
The president considered the names for a moment and nodded. “The Irish do seem to have an art for government,” Kennedy agreed. Then with a conspiratorial grin, he said to O’Donnell: “Perhaps we are both prejudiced.”
Chaper Twenty-Seven
Holy Wars
STEPPING OFF A PLANE at Tokyo’s airport in early 1962, Robert Kennedy appeared determined to take Japan by storm. During his five-day goodwill tour, the attorney general and his wife, Ethel, would travel throughout the island nation, absorbing the culture of Japan and exuding a distinctly American brand of their own. Like some foreign evangelist, Robert carried a gospel extolling the virtues of democracy and a warning about the evils of communism. With his boyish charm and toothy smile, he announced in awkward Japanese:“My brother, who is the President, wishes me to convey to you all his very best regards.”
At one stop, hundreds of Tokyo schoolchildren pushed forward with raised arms and yelled,“Kennedy-san, shake hands!”After meeting with local politicians and business leaders, the Kennedys were serenaded with a Japanese folk song called “The Coal Miner’s Song.” It prompted Bobby to reciprocate with a folk song of his own—“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
At Tokyo’s Waseda University, a large crowd of students greeted them. When Bobby tried to give a speech, however, members of Zengakuren, the Communist-leaning Japanese student organization, confronted him and mercilessly booed. They attempted to drown him out with their noise. Finally, Bobby pointed to his loudest critic.
“You sir, have you something to tell us?” he asked, his finger jabbing into the air, his Irish tough face set firmly. Kennedy invited his critic up to the platform. He held the microphone while the Japanese student lashed into America and the abuses of capitalism.
Bobby tried to respond, but he was heckled again by the screaming students, especially by the one that he had invited to the pla
tform. Adding to the mayhem, half the stage lights in the auditorium were knocked out by a power failure, along with the public address system. Kennedy was handed a police megaphone so that he could address the crowd, but that didn’t work, either. The boos and catcalls worsened. Whatever hope Kennedy had of converting the crowd, of convincing them of his message, was lost. His appearance at the school turned into a small disaster.
Recalling the incident two years later for an oral history, Bobby offered a simple reason for his failure with these Japanese students. “If they’re Communists,” he explained,“you can’t get through to them.”
THE KENNEDYS SHARED a strong opposition to communism. Though guarded about his religion on the domestic front, President Kennedy’s Catholicism considerably influenced his view on international communism. Over the next few years, both the president and his brother Robert brought these values to bear during their deliberations on the nuclear threat posed by Soviet Russia, the escalating guerilla war in Vietnam and threats in Latin America. In one sense, their campaign against communism was only a slight variation on America’s prevailing foreign policy of containment following World War II. But in an unprecedented way for an American president, Kennedy’s behavior often involved the Roman Catholic Church, his actions justified and actively encouraged by its religious leaders, including his own priests. In its words and provocative deeds, the Kennedy administration conducted a vigorous worldwide campaign against Communist nations—what Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev complained were U.S. “holy wars.”
Goodwill tours around the globe for Robert Kennedy took on the tone of missionary zeal against communism. When he flew down to Brazil, Bobby informed local leaders dutifully that within their ranks there were a “number of Communists in important positions—in the labor unions, in the military, and in the government generally.” Bobby, who had authored a book called The Enemy Within a few years earlier about labor corruption, brought the same fierceness to rooting out international Communists. He became fascinated with the idea of indoctrination, proposing an international school “to teach insurgency and teach about communism.” Despite President Kennedy’s rhetoric about freedom and self-determination, his government generally preferred dictators to elected officials who showed Communist leanings. Stopping communism justified almost any action. Even the assassinations of international leaders—such as Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam and the CIA effort to poison Fidel Castro in Cuba—seemed secondary to this overriding concern. The domino theory—the belief perpetuated by U.S. analysts that one country’s fall to the Communists might lead to the collapse of other neighbors and eventually entire regions—became an article of faith, the building block of Kennedy’s foreign policy. As Robert Kennedy plainly stated: “It doesn’t matter what kind of system you have in another country as long as it’s anti-Communist.”
IN THE BATTLE against the godless Communists, the Roman Catholic Church became intertwined with the policies of the new American administration. For decades, the Kennedys had worked with priests, cardinals and a long line of church officials leading all the way to Rome in an effort to curb communism. None were more vigorous than Cardinal Spellman, the church’s most prominent cold warrior. During the 1950s,American authorities consulted regularly with Spellman, still military vicar of the U.S. Armed Forces, a title he had held since World War II. President Eisenhower felt compelled to assure Spellman that he wasn’t getting soft on communism when the United States made initiatives toward bilateral talks with the Soviets. After the 1960 election, however, John Kennedy wanted nothing to do with Spellman. In his own Cold War against communism, Kennedy turned instead to Cardinal Cushing when he needed a point man between the church and government, and Cushing proved as anti-Communist as any Catholic leader. More important,Kennedy knew he could trust Cushing as a close friend and confessor. In the international arena, outside the purview of his domestic critics, Kennedy could relax his wall between church and state without fear of complaint. When brother Ted went to Peru and throughout much of Latin America in 1961, for example, Cushing arranged for him to meet with several priests and religious leaders who helped rally support for America’s campaign against communism. In this fight against communism, the interests of the church and Kennedy’s government were often the same.
By far, Cushing’s most extraordinary intervention in U.S. foreign affairs came after the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Urged by the CIA and his military aides, President Kennedy went ahead with a plan—hatched in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration—that launched a sneak attack on Cuba by 1,400 exiles forced from their homeland by Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover. Despite strong evidence that Castro enjoyed wide popular support,Kennedy became convinced that the Cuban people—many of whom were Roman Catholic—were just waiting to be liberated from the Communists. (Unaware of the personal differences between the two men, Castro charged that Kennedy and Spell-man were working together to overthrow him.) When the Cuban exiles landed, they were overwhelmed by Castro’s vastly outnumbering armed forces. Kennedy canceled the expected U.S. air assault, fearing it would look like a direct attack by the United States. When the short-lived invasion was over, Castro had captured and jailed 1,113 exiles. They were released after twenty months in exchange for $53 million worth of medicine and other supplies.
During negotiations with Castro, the church became a behind-the-scenes force and Cardinal Cushing, who emerged as a key player, both helped the Kennedy administration and was aided by it. The cardinal served as an important adviser to the Cuban Families Committee, made up of friends and relatives of those who’d been taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs. He vowed to prevent three prisoners who were Catholic priests from dying in a Communist prison. He also arranged for a hundred Cuban refugee children to be transported to Massachusetts, where they were taught English by Spanish-speaking nuns in a Framingham convent. But the cardinal’s greatest gift to the Kennedy administration came on the day before Christmas, 1962, when he received an anxious call from the attorney general, who was putting together the final ransom package for the Cuban Communist leader.
“Castro wants an extra $2,900,000 and everybody wants to get the prisoners home to Miami by Christmas,” Bobby explained in his 5:00 A.M. call, and then told the cardinal he needed the money by three o’clock that afternoon.
Neither were involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but both tried desperately to extricate the president from its aftermath. JFK felt his blunder had cost brave men their lives. A man with the crusty exterior of a longshoreman but a soft heart, Cushing was genuinely moved by Kennedy’s sense of culpability for his actions. “I remembered a talk I had with Jack about the Bay of Pigs prisoners,” Cushing recalled. “It was the first time I ever saw tears in his eyes.”
Bobby trusted Cushing to keep his ransom plea private. The cardinal acted quickly and quietly to raise $1 million in needed money, which, according to Cushing, came from friends and church patrons in the Latin American community. (The rest of the money was put up by General Lucius Clay, who solicited funds from various U.S. corporations.) Though he didn’t like the idea of being blackmailed by a Communist leader, Cushing rationalized the money payment for these imprisoned fighters. “The payment saved the prisoners from languishing in prison and possible death,” he later explained.“I wouldn’t call it ransom, just an exchange.”
On his own, Cushing already raised some $200,000 for a tractors-for-prisoner deal, never consummated because Castro kept raising his overall ransom demand. A network of Latin American contributors were assembled by Cushing to underwrite the Missionary Society of St. James the Apostle, which carried on its own aggressive anti-Communist campaign. Founded in 1958, the society recruited priests from the United States and Ireland to serve among the poor in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. By sending $1 million each year to Latin American bishops for the construction of schools, churches and seminaries, Cushing intended for the society to “help missionaries be zealo
us apostles of Christ and ambassadors of good will for the United States.”The cardinal certainly felt no need to keep his religion out of his nation’s fight against communism:“It is appropriate and fitting . . . for a Catholic prelate of the United States to have a part in the liberation of the ‘Cuban Freedom Fighters’ who love their country and the ‘Faith of their Fathers,’” he wrote.
When the cardinal finally gathered the $1 million at Bobby’s request, Francis X. Morrissey handled the money, bringing it down to Washington to give to the attorney general. Morrissey claimed he didn’t know exactly where the money had come from, but he later contended that the cardinal’s last-minute financial assistance was justified given how much help the Kennedys had provided in the past to the Boston archdiocese. When rumors circulated that Joe Kennedy or the Kennedy Foundation or some other source was responsible for the ransom money, the cardinal denied it in the diocesan newspaper.“I alone am responsible for the collection of this extraordinary sum,” he insisted.
THE RANSOM MONEY and the release of the prisoners didn’t prevent Jack Kennedy from being roundly criticized for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Several commentators called him weak and indecisive; others dismissed him as too young and too inexperienced for the job. Within the American foreign policy establishment, the new president was still perceived as the ambitious son of an amoral social climber and bootlegger devoid of principle and integrity. Some who opposed the invasion even believed, as Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles wrote in his private diary, that the new chief executive lacked “a genuine sense of conviction about what is right and what is wrong . . . [and] a basic moral reference point.” But few analyzed how Kennedy’s religion and its antipathy toward communism—an important reference point throughout his political career— played a significant role in the Bay of Pigs, underlined by Cardinal Cushing’s very prominent role in the messy aftermath.