by David Nasaw
Why, Catholic critics asked, did Kennedy think it necessary or proper to speak about his faith? Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Mormons weren’t required to answer questions about their religion and their allegiance to the Constitution. Why should Catholics?
CATHOLIC CENSURE OF KENNEDY RISES, the New York Times reported on March 1. America, a Jesuit journal, accused Senator Kennedy of pandering to bigots by discounting the influence of his religion on his beliefs and decisions and compartmentalizing his faith as a private matter. Ave Maria, the weekly published by the Holy Cross Fathers at Notre Dame, declared that despite what Kennedy claimed in the interview, a man’s religious faith was never solely a private matter and always had a bearing on his actions in the public sphere. “No man may rightfully act against his conscience. To relegate your conscience to your ‘private life’ is not only unrealistic, but dangerous as well . . . because it leads to secularism in public life.” Diocesan newspapers across the country assailed him for affirming the extremist Protestant position that the separation between church and state was “absolute.”28
Jack was upset, but his father was outraged at Catholic criticism of a Catholic candidate and waited expectantly for his friends in the church hierarchy to defend Jack’s statements. In the end, only Cardinal Cushing issued any such defense. Kennedy was now livid. He had poured millions of dollars into diocesan projects in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Yet there was no word, public or private, in support of Jack’s position as a Catholic candidate from Cardinal Spellman, or Archbishops O’Boyle, McIntyre, and Stritch, or Father Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame. “I am more than ordinarily bitter about the whole subject,” he wrote Galeazzi on March 30, 1959. “I doubt very much if my relations with the Church and the hierarchy, with the exception of Cardinal Cushing, will ever be the same. I do not care now whether Jack is elected President or not and I have told him so. I certainly will never ask the hierarchy for anything ever again—not that I have ever asked them for much. And I have always been anxious to do everything I could, but that also has ceased. I just believe that they do not deserve to improve their position one single bit.”29
Galeazzi tried his best to calm his friend but could not. “I value your suggestions and advice,” Kennedy wrote Galeazzi on April 17, “but I am really more than annoyed or upset—I am downright disgusted! And I do not imagine that anything is ever going to change that. I deplore the pettiness of the Catholic Press and I deplore the weakness of some of the hierarchy for not speaking out, at least in some measure, in Jack’s defense. I have had time to think it over and quiet down—if I were ever going to quiet down—but I know now that I never will.”
All his life, Kennedy had bemoaned the lack of political sophistication among Catholics, comparing it unfavorably with that of the Jews, who had achieved political influence beyond their numbers because they knew how to organize themselves into a powerful lobbying group. Kennedy had imagined—and hoped—that the Catholic community would come together, as the Jews surely would have, in support of Jack’s candidacy because he was a Catholic, because he was the best candidate for the office, and because electing a Catholic as president might help alleviate prejudices that still existed. No matter what his son’s qualifications, the bigoted and biased were going to vote against him because he was a Catholic. To offset those lost votes, Jack needed Catholics to vote for him in even larger numbers than they usually did for Democratic candidates. Kennedy feared that without the support of the church hierarchy, his son would not get those additional votes.
He was now convinced that the leaders of the American church did not want a Catholic president or, at least, they did not want Jack Kennedy to be president. The Look article had, he wrote Galeazzi, provided “an excuse for a lot of stupid bishops and editors to say out loud what they have been saying privately for the last year and a half,” that it would be better if Jack Kennedy did not run for the presidency in 1960.30
Kennedy was not the only one who had come to this conclusion. “Some of the hierarchy of the church,” Cardinal Cushing would concede in a 1966 oral history interview, “were not in favor of John F. Kennedy being elected President. They feared that the time had not arrived when a president who was a Catholic could be elected.” The senator, according to John Cogley, “felt that some members of the hierarchy” were against his candidacy “mainly because they were Republicans or because they didn’t like what they thought was the liberal tenor of his thinking. Also, there was, among not only bishops but among priests, as we could tell by the mail that came in, a kind of a resentment sometimes that here he was, a Harvard man, the boy who didn’t go to Catholic schools, being the nation’s number one representative of Catholicism—I think there was a little of that there, too—and also a fear that his style was altogether too secularized for their tastes.” The American church had, until now, spoken unchallenged, with one voice: that of its priests, bishops, and cardinals. The idea that if Kennedy was elected, the most prominent, the most influential, Catholic in the nation would be a layman, not a churchman, was for them a situation to be avoided at all costs. There were political considerations as well. It was widely and accurately believed that a Catholic president would be less likely to openly support federal funding for parochial schools or the establishment of full diplomatic relations with the Vatican.31
Opposing or remaining neutral to Jack’s candidacy, as the church leaders now appeared to be doing, was, Kennedy believed, a betrayal not only of him, his son, and his family, but of the millions of American Catholics who stood to benefit from the election of one of their own to the presidency of the United States. For perhaps the first time in his life, certainly for the first time since the death of Joe Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy was forced to reconsider, to reevaluate, the ties that bound him to his church. “My relationship with the Church will never be the same,” he confessed to Galeazzi in an April 17 letter, “and certainly, never the same with the hierarchy. But that will not make any difference to them, I am sure, and I can assure you that it will not make any difference to me. For the last few years which I have left, I will indulge myself at least in continuing to believe that friends are friends when you need them. Please do not be upset yourself about my attitude. I would not want anything to annoy you.”32
Thirty-eight
ELECTING A PRESIDENT
The first organizational summit meeting for the 1960 campaign was held in Palm Beach on April 1, 1959. Four of the nine men present, Kennedy, Jack, Bobby, and Steve Smith, were family members. They were joined by Ted Sorensen, Larry O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell, pollster Lou Harris, whom Joe Kennedy had put on retainer, and Bob Wallace, who had worked for Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois. “When the matter of financial requirements was raised, Ambassador Kennedy,” Ted Sorensen recalled, “said, ‘We’ve come this far, we’re not going to let money stand in our way, whatever it takes, even if it requires every dime I have.’ RFK piped up: ‘Wait a minute now—there are others in the family.’”1
By October 28, 1959, when a second summit was convened, this one at the Robert Kennedy residence in Hyannis Port, the group of nine had been expanded by a dozen more, none of them chosen by Joseph P. Kennedy or beholden to him in any way. Jack ran the first part of the meeting, then after lunch, which was held at his parents’ house next door, the group reconvened and Bobby took over. Joe Kennedy did more listening than talking. He was not in charge now, nor did he want to be. He could not match anyone in the room for sheer hands-on, data-driven knowledge of the political situation in each of the states Jack would have to campaign in for primary votes.
—
The week before, Jack had been one of two speakers—Governor Nelson Rockefeller the other one—at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. While Rose and members of the family sat at one of the tables in the ballroom, Kennedy, too nervous to sit with them, “stayed in the back of the hall where
he could sense the reactions from the speeches.” Jack didn’t get to speak until eleven o’clock, at the end of a very long evening in a hot, stuffy, crowded room. According to the New York Times the next morning, he easily “took the honors in audience reception.” He opened by telling the story of a past candidate for president who had failed miserably, carrying “fewer states than any other of his party, losing even his own state. ‘You all know his name and his religion.’” He paused with the timing of a seasoned comedian: “‘Alfred M. Landon, Protestant. . . . The memory of that election still burns deeply in our minds,’ Senator Kennedy continued, amid laughter. ‘But I am not prepared to tell Governor Rockefeller that a Protestant should not be nominated in 1960.’”2
While his father was delighted at the applause that greeted his son’s lighthearted approach to a decidedly serious subject, he remained furious at the leaders of the Catholic Church, including Cardinal Spellman, one of the dinner’s hosts, for not doing more for his son. “Arthur Krock of the New York Times,” Kennedy wrote Galeazzi on New Year’s Day 1960, “called me up to tell me that he was about to write an article saying that not only did he believe the hierarchy were not helping Jack; but he thought that they were going out of their way to hurt him. I told this to Cardinal Spellman and he just asked if Krock had any proof and I said that he did. And the Cardinal just kept quiet. . . . In addition to that,” Kennedy continued, “practically every statement out of Rome hurts. This is not just my opinion—it is the opinion of the topside newspaper men in the country. However, we are all reconciled to the fact that the most we can hope is that they do not do us too much harm, not that they will do us any good.”3
Here was vintage Kennedy, wisely deploying his strengths to push Spellman by threatening him with a Krock column in the New York Times. Whether Krock had any intention of writing such a column we do not know. What we do know was that he continued, in his columns, to repeat that Senator Kennedy was a man of courage and character, that Catholic voters made up a large percentage of the Democratic faithful, and that at no time in American history had either party denied the nomination to a candidate because of his religion.4
The only way to put to rest Democratic Party leaders’ fears that Protestants would not vote for a Catholic was for Jack to prove the opposite by doing well in the primaries. The first major primary was in Wisconsin, where Catholics were in a sizable minority at about 30 percent. “That is going to be a real tough fight—but we should win,” Kennedy wrote Galeazzi. “Then he goes from there to West Virginia where the Catholics total around three or four percent. They may use the religious issue there and it may be very, very tough.”5
Kennedy had originally, he wrote Sir James Calder in mid-January, expected to travel the country with his son. He decided not to because he had concluded, reluctantly, that his presence on the campaign trail might do his son more harm than good, especially in Wisconsin, a liberal state and the home of Joe McCarthy. He would spend the primary season in Palm Beach. Turning down an invitation to a fund-raising dinner at which Jack was scheduled to speak, he explained that while he was “sure that all of my friends are going to be there . . . I have tried to make it a rule never to be anywhere my boys or girls speak. It is just an old-fashioned notion, but I have stuck to it pretty much now for eight years.”6
His plan, for the moment, was to make a few trips north to talk to old friends and acquaintances, but for the most part to work the phones from Palm Beach. He had accumulated a lifetime of contacts and intended, it appeared, to approach every one of them. “This is a list of names that Duffy Lewis, a former Bostonian and now, Secretary of the Braves [the baseball team that had left Boston for Milwaukee after the 1952 season], had made up for me,” he wrote Bobby on February 8, 1960. “The dots indicate people with a great many friends, but they all should be contacted.”7
Preoccupied with the religious question, as he had been since the campaign began, he took it upon himself—with Steve Smith’s assistance—to get “some of our friends in different states to get up a Protestant clergymen’s committee to see if we can use such committees to offset some of the bigoted spokesmen.” Frank Morrissey would do the same for Massachusetts, John Bailey in Connecticut, “and I will try to do it in New York. I really think that it is worth looking into.”8
He focused his primary attention on Catholic politicians such as Governor David Lawrence of Pennsylvania who were not supporting Jack because they did not believe he could win the nomination. Archbishop Cushing arranged the first meeting with Lawrence in the spring of 1959 at the Penn Harris Hotel in Harrisburg. “The papers never discovered it,” Lawrence later recalled. “I went down there and had lunch with him instead of at the mansion because the mansion would have been covered by newspapermen if they’d ever found it. Of course he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t for his boy, Jack. . . . I said to him, ‘Mr. Kennedy, I’d love to be for your boy. I’d love to see him president of the United States, but I don’t think he can win. I don’t think any Catholic can win.’” Kennedy responded by telling the story of the young New York bank president who had been “shooting his mouth off about, ‘Who’s this young Kennedy think he is? What right’s he got to be president of the United States?’” When Kennedy, who did a lot of business at the bank, was asked by the vice president if he wanted to meet the new president, he said he would. They met at Kennedy’s office. “I had nine million dollars in that bank and I felt like I’d pull out of that bank that day.” Kennedy and Lawrence parted friends, with Lawrence reminded of how much money Kennedy had, how committed he was to his son’s victory, and how dangerous it was to cross him.9
Kennedy also lobbied Charles Buckley of the Bronx, Eugene Keogh of Brooklyn, Daniel P. O’Connell of Albany, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, and John McCormack of Boston. “If Jack had known about some of the telephone calls his father made on his behalf to Tammany-type bosses during the 1960 campaign,” Kenny O’Donnell recalled, “Jack’s hair would have turned white.”10
—
On March 8, the voters went to the polls in the nation’s first primary, in New Hampshire, where Senator Kennedy, as expected, polled 85 percent of the Democratic votes. His father, who was in New York City for a luncheon with Cardinal Spellman, was delighted. “I think a lot of those who have been on the side line are amazed by yesterday’s performance and may now start to think that maybe he can be elected.” He was engaging in a bit of wishful thinking here. The make-or-break primary contest was going to be the one in Wisconsin on April 5, as Kennedy admitted in a letter to Galeazzi on March 31. “If we do not do very well there, I would say that we should get out of the fight. . . . If we do very well in Wisconsin, and I mean very well, I would think we would go on to win the nomination.”11
While the rest of the family campaigned with Jack in Wisconsin, Kennedy remained in touch by phone from Palm Beach. In earlier campaigns, Kennedy had relied on Frank Morrissey for information about Jack’s health. In 1960, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, he “worked out an arrangement with Dave Powers to report to him every evening between six-thirty and seven to tell him about Jack’s health, checking to see whether he took his vitamins, ate his prescribed New York–cut sirloin and drank his orange juice. ‘Dave, if you want him to win, keep him healthy,’ the Ambassador implored night after night.”12
It was a dirty campaign and promised to get dirtier. The Humphrey campaign made constant references to millionaires and “high level” fixers and operators to draw attention to Joseph P. Kennedy. “I am watching what they say and do to Jack ten thousand times more than what they say and do to me,” he confided to Lord Beaverbrook. “Everything is very unimportant now except his nomination and election.”13
The attacks, real and threatened, came from every direction. Through Peter Lawford, the family had been introduced to Frank Sinatra, who had become a vocal Jack Kennedy supporter. Sinatra visited the Palm Beach house in March during the Wisconsin campaign. When actor
Leo Carrillo, whom Kennedy had not seen in years, wrote to warn that Sinatra had hired a blacklisted Communist writer, Albert Maltz, for his next film and this would reflect badly on Jack, Kennedy drafted a blistering letter. “As to the Sinatra hiring of this writer, you know as well as I that there is nothing in the world that I can do about it. . . . To try and ring Jack in on this because Sinatra sang a campaign song for him is about as unfair as anything I can think of.”14
Kennedy never had to send the letter to Carrillo. On April 8, Sinatra dismissed Maltz. “It was considered possible,” claimed the New York Times, which reported the dismissal on page one, “that Mr. Sinatra may have changed his position . . . for political reasons.” Sinatra replied angrily that he had had no pressure from or discussions with Senator Kennedy about Maltz, and those who said he had were “hitting below the belt. ‘I make movies. I do not ask the advice of Senator Kennedy on whom I should hire. Senator Kennedy does not ask me how he should vote in the Senate.’” That much, of course, was true. What Sinatra didn’t say was whether Kennedy Sr. had called to ask him, for Jack’s sake, to get rid of Maltz.15
Kennedy was far more concerned with attacks on him—and his son—from the Left. One of the stories circulating through Wisconsin was that Kennedy was not just a conservative, but a friend and supporter of Nixon’s. While it was true that he had contributed $1,000 to Nixon’s 1950 campaign against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he regarded as much too far to the left, Kennedy had had no other contact with the presumptive Republican nominee. When Cyril Clemens, the editor of the Mark Twain Journal, raised the Nixon charges and asked why, if they were untrue, Kennedy had not said so directly, Kennedy wrote rather testily that if he “were to start to answer all the charges that have been made or are going to be made, I would not be able to do anything else. If people do not like Jack for what he is and what he stands for, then they should not vote for him. But if they do, they should support him—and never mind what the ‘old man’ says or does.”16