by Ted Sorensen
Campaigning also meant talking with the press, at first formally in press conferences and then informally on plane and train. Reporters covering Nixon soon memorized the banal sentimentalities he repeated in each speech and found them difficult to report. Their difficulty in reporting Kennedy’s speeches was his tendency to be what they nicknamed a “text deviate,” his rapid-fire interjection of more statistics and statements than they could note. But his unusual accessibility to reporters, his frank and friendly talks with them, his growing confidence, and the excitement generated by his crowds after the first television debate, all contributed to their growing respect for Kennedy and their glowing dispatches back home. There was, moreover, an atmosphere of conviviality in the Kennedy press entourage, encouraged by Salinger’s efficient arrangements for their baggage, transportation, accommodations, instant speech transcripts and inflated crowd estimates from friendly local officials, and heightened by the attitude of enthusiasm and gaiety which spread from the candidate to his staff to the press. (The long weeks of travel together also encouraged the flowering of a certain amount of romance between secretaries, reporters and photographers, thereby adding to the atmosphere of camaraderie.)
For one long October day in Hyannis Port, and briefly in New York, on the plane and elsewhere, campaigning also meant strategy sessions with all the top team from Washington. But these sessions were largely confined to confirming the wisdom of what the candidate was already doing: identifying Nixon with Republicanism, not with Eisenhower.
Finally, campaigning meant seemingly endless travel, on and off planes, trains, buses, cars.
Although forty-five of the fifty states were visited, and no state could be taken for granted, those states with slender electoral totals or slim Democratic chances were visited only once in order to concentrate on more critical areas. Roughly three-quarters of the candidate’s time was spent in the twenty-four most doubtful states and nearly three-fifths of his time in the seven largest. These seven, plus most of New England and the South, were the basis of his campaign strategy. The schedule was adjusted from time to time in accordance with the results of polls and political reports. Time did not permit him to carry out his original plan to open in Hawaii. Nevada, like Hawaii, had too few electoral votes to be squeezed in; and Nebraska was included only for a late-summer briefing at Strategic Air Command Headquarters. Arkansas was included only to the degree that the town of Texarkana is in Arkansas as well as Texas, and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were thought better left to local loyalists and Lyndon Johnson.
In fact, the entire South depended considerably on Johnson, and Kennedy was delighted with the reports on his running mate’s progress in that area. Campaigning as the grandson of a Confederate soldier and as a more hard-hitting partisan than previously, the Majority Leader whistle-stopped through Dixie decrying the religious issue, deriding Nixon’s experience, detailing Republican shortcomings, warning of the dangers of divided government, praising Kennedy, mixing in a few homely Texas stories, reminiscing about his kinship with each state and refusing to back down on civil rights. Unlike his opposite number, Ambassador Lodge, Johnson at no time made any statement which caused Kennedy embarrassment or regret. He was aided, as had been the Kennedy girls on an earlier swing, by the remarkable campaign talents of his wife Lady Bird.
Equally as important as Johnson’s platform “pitch” was the persuasive pressure he brought to bear on Southern Senators, governors and local leaders who had theretofore refused to work for a politically unpopular ticket. Many had merely announced their support, denounced the platform and done nothing further. Others had remained wholly mute. But Johnson impressed them with the practical political fact that, win or lose, he and Kennedy would have considerable influence over the passage of legislation and the pipeline to public funds—“and we’re going to win.” In Virginia Harry Byrd would not come to listen. In South Carolina Strom Thurmond was as opposed as always. But elsewhere Johnson’s powerful listeners got the point and climbed aboard not only the campaign train but the campaign team.
While Lyndon Johnson stemmed the tide of Southern white revolt, John Kennedy’s very human call to Negro leader Martin Luther King’s pregnant wife on the occasion of his arrest by a Georgia traffic officer—combined with Bob Kennedy’s indignant protest to the judge who jailed him—may have impressed both Negroes and whites because of the political risk. More on that and other underlying factors later.
THE PERSISTENT RELIGIOUS ISSUE
The roughest issue in the South, as elsewhere, was religion. The issue was quickly brought to a head on September 7 with the founding of a new organization of very prominent Protestant clergymen, the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom. At the close of their daylong meeting behind closed doors, a public statement laid down a barrage of challenges to Senator Kennedy which made clear that, whatever his answers would be, his religion made him unacceptable for the Presidency. Kennedy, they said, had not repudiated all the teachings of his church and could not be free of its hierarchy’s “determined efforts…to breach the wall of separation of church and state.” Like Khrushchev, said the Rev. Harold Ockenga of Boston, Kennedy is “a captive of a system.”4
Presiding over the Conference and serving as its spokesman to the press was a prominent Republican clergyman, author and lecturer, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale of New York. (Peale was also a friend of Nixon’s, and when asked why the group had raised no questions on Nixon’s religion, Peale replied, “I didn’t know that he ever let it bother him.”) No Catholics, Jews or liberal Protestants had been invited, he said, and no details would be given out on who organized the Conference, who financed it or who drafted its declaration. During the Conference Peale had been overheard saying, “Our American culture is at stake. I don’t say it won’t survive [Kennedy’s election], but it won’t be what it was.” (Upon hearing this Kennedy remarked, “I would like to think he was complimenting me, but I’m not sure he was.”)
The “Peale group,” as it was thereafter called, stirred a wave of anger and dismay from coast to coast. Many who had previously assumed that intolerance was confined to “backwoods Bible-thumpers” were shocked by the transparent unfairness of three aspects of the meeting:
Men well known to be Republicans had pretended their opposition to Kennedy was for religious reasons.
Protestant clergymen opposed to the Catholic Church’s intervention in politics showed no compunction about openly intervening themselves.
The political position of the Catholic Church had not only been inaccurately described but also inaccurately ascribed to Senator Kennedy, whose own views and legislative votes the group largely discounted.
There was nothing new about any of these three phenomena. Similar attacks had been made in all parts of the country, in intellectual as well as scurrilous tones, and by prominent preachers as well as hate groups. But the “Peale group” was the best publicized. One result was the withdrawal by several newspapers of Peale’s spiritual advice column and the withdrawal by Dr. Peale from the “Peale group.” He had no disagreement with what was said and done but wanted everyone to know that he had nothing to do with it. “I do not now or never have had any relationship with the group, except attendance upon this one meeting,” he wrote in a form letter which regretted his “distorted publicity” but not his participation in the meeting. “The press has continued to emphasize me personally, without reference to any of the [other] 150 persons present, which I must say seems unfair…perhaps I will be a wiser person in the future—at least, let us hope so.” No more was heard during the campaign from the author of Confident Living.
The Peale publicity helped set the stage for Kennedy’s major response to his attackers. He agreed, with considerable reluctance, to accept an invitation to appear before the Houston, Texas, Ministerial Association to discuss the religious issue on the evening of Monday, September 12. Nixon had declined a similar invitation from the same group.
We worked on the speech
throughout a weekend “rest” in Los Angeles and overnight in El Paso. My chief source of material was Kennedy’s own previous statements on religion to the ASNE, to the convention, to press conferences and to Look Magazine. One of the additional facts desired by the Senator, inasmuch as he was speaking at the Alamo in San Antonio on the way to Houston, was how many Catholics had died at that shrine of Texas independence. I telephoned Mike Feldman in Washington at 4 A.M. Texas time. A few hours later he had a list of possible Irish-American names but added that no religious affiliations were known. Thus was born a line in the speech: “…side by side with Bowie and Crockett died McCafferty and Bailey and Carey, but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test at the Alamo.”
The Senator’s desire was to state his position so clearly and comprehensively that no reasonable man could doubt his adherence to the Constitution. All year his critics had pointed to the Catholic attacks on his Look interview as proof that his church would resist his position. In the hopes of avoiding any loose wording this time that would unnecessarily stir up the Catholic press, I read the speech over the telephone to the Rev. John Courtney Murray, S.J., a leading and liberal exponent of the Catholic position on church and state. On the plane to Houston, the speech, along with all possible questions that might follow from the floor, was also reviewed with both James Wine and his temporary aide, John Cogley, a Catholic scholar formerly with Commonweal magazine. The Senator, resting his strained vocal chords, wrote out his questions and comments on a scratch pad, laughing at his lack of theological training and showing no apprehension over the trial he was about to face.
That night, in the ballroom of Houston’s Rice Hotel, I sat in the audience with Cogley as we waited for the program to begin. Inasmuch as the meeting was to be televised throughout the state of Texas, all were silently in their places waiting for the hour to strike. The Senator, in black suit and black tie (but wearing brown shoes, his black shoes having been accidentally left on the plane to the chagrin of Dave Powers), flanked by the two ministers who presided, sat somewhat nervously behind the lectern. Glaring at him from the other side were the Protestant ministers of Houston. “They’re tired of being called bigots for opposing a Catholic,” Pierre Salinger had earlier reported to the Senator as he dressed. Also on hand was a large number of national press pundits who had flown in for the great confrontation. A sense of tension and hostility hung in the air. The few minutes of waiting seemed endless. John Cogley whispered to me, “This is one time we need those types that pray for Notre Dame before each football game!”
At last the Senator was introduced, and the atmosphere eased almost at once. It was the best speech of his campaign and one of the most important in his life. Only his Inaugural Address could be said to surpass it in power and eloquence. Both Protestants and Catholics acclaimed his succinct summation of belief: “not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in.”
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference…an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from…any…ecclesiastical source…where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind…and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
He reminded his listeners that other faiths—including the Baptist—had been harassed in earlier days. “Today,” he said, in a passage he had inserted in the final draft, “I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you.”
The religious views of the American President, he said, must be “his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.” Citing his record on church-state issues, he asked to be judged on that basis and not on the
pamphlets and publications…that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic Church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries….
I am not the Catholic candidate for President, I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
In the most controversial paragraph of the speech, Kennedy said he would resign his office rather than violate the national interest in order to avoid violating his conscience. That passage, which the Senator had long deliberated and which he rightly predicted would be criticized, was based on my talk months earlier with Bishop Wright. Although Kennedy did “not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible,” this single sentence was designed to still those Protestant critics who were certain he would succumb to pressure and those Catholics critics who were certain he would stifle his faith. “I hope,” he added, that “any conscientious public servant would do the same.”
After the speech came a barrage of questions, none of them wholly friendly. More than one question related to the story circulated by a well-known preacher, publicist and onetime Republican candidate for Mayor of Philadelphia, the Rev. Daniel Poling. Congressman Kennedy had been invited by Dr. Poling to a fund-raising dinner in honor of a chapel, located in a Baptist church, which paid tribute to the heroic four chaplains (including Dr. Poling’s son) who went down with the S.S. Dorchester in the Second World War. As stated in the Reverend’s Autobiography, released in late 1959, Kennedy was to be the “spokesman for his Roman Catholic faith” at the dinner. A prominent Protestant and Jewish leader were also scheduled to speak. When the Congressman belatedly learned that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia did not support the project or dinner, he told Rev. Poling with some embarrassment that he could not accept the invitation after all because he had no credentials “to attend in the capacity in which I had been asked.” He could and would have attended, he said repeatedly in 1960, in the role of Congressman, ex-serviceman or private citizen. Nevertheless, the incident was cited by Poling, and subsequently by thousands of others, as proof of Kennedy’s subservience to the hierarchy.
“I had been in politics probably two months and was relatively inexperienced,” said the Senator. “I should have inquired before…. [But] is this the best that…can be charged after fourteen years?” He had concluded a series of letters to Dr. Poling in July, 1960, by emphasizing that he would have no “reluctance in accepting an invitation to any public occasion in my capacity as a Massachusetts legislator or public official, without regard to any requests not to keep that engagement emanating from any source, ecclesiastical, political or otherwise.” But the original story was still circulated in anti-Catholic literature, and Dr. Poling ignored Kennedy’s reply when he was in touch with the Houston ministers.
The Senator fielded all questions with ease and without evasion. Asked if he would intercede with Cardinal Cushing to obtain the Pope’s approval of his position, he said no ecclesiastical official should interfere in public policy and no public official in ecclesiastical policy. Asked if he had the approval of the Vatican for his statement, he said he did not need such approval. Asked what his response would be if his church attempted to influence his public duties, he said he would “reply to them that this was an improper action on their part…one to which I could not subscribe, that I was opposed to it…[as] an interference with the American political system.”
He made clear that he had not read and was not bound by all the documents and doctrines quoted to him—that he believed not all but the “overwhelming majority of American Catholics” shared his views—that he could attend in his capacity as President any Protestant funeral or other service—and that he did not look upon those who sincerely asked his views as bigots. He conclud
ed with the hope that the discussion would assist them “to make a careful judgment,” although “I am sure I have made no converts to my church.”
The Houston speech did make some converts to his candidacy. It impressed all who watched it then and later. “As we say in my part of Texas,” said Sam Rayburn, “he ate ’em blood raw.”
The Houston confrontation did not end the religious controversy or silence the Senator’s critics, but it was widely and enthusiastically applauded, not only in the Rice Hotel Ballroom but all across Texas and the nation. It made unnecessary any further full-scale answer from the candidate, and Kennedy, while continuing to answer questions, never raised the subject again. It offered in one document all the answers to all the questions any reasonable man could ask. It helped divide the citizens legitimately concerned about Kennedy’s views from the fanatics who had condemned him from birth.
But the issue did not die. Many who approved of the Houston speech demanded a statement by the Pope as well. Others said Kennedy was lying. Some said Kennedy was fine, but his election would pave the way for future Catholic Presidents who might not share his views. Some said they would still vote against Kennedy as a protest against his church. Others invented quotations of what he had said or cited Catholic criticisms of his earlier statements. “It’s frustrating,” said the Senator. “I’ve made my views clear month after month and year after year. I’ve answered every question. My public record is spread out over fourteen years…but it seems difficult to ever give some people the assurance they need that I’m as interested in religious liberty as they are.”