Kennedy

by Ted Sorensen

  In the Senate, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield was also being unfairly and unfavorably compared with his predecessor, the Vice President. The kind and careful Mansfield, faced with the very different task of enacting the program of his own party’s President, was endowed with very different personal assets. A gentle, usually soft-spoken Montanan, he was even more low-key and low-pressure than Kennedy. At times the President, who had been fully consulted on the makeup of the Senate leadership team, was frustrated by what he felt were Mansfield’s excessive pessimism, caution and delays. But in view of his consistent string of successes in the Senate, he was deeply appreciative of Mansfield’s loyalty and labors, held him in close personal affection, and felt that no Senate leader in those years could have done better in the long run.

  Working closely with the House and Senate leaders was the most organized White House legislative liaison effort in history under Larry O’Brien. His aides, unlike the rest of the White House staff, were selected with a careful eye to geography: Wilson of North Carolina, Manatos of Wyoming, Donahue of Massachusetts, Daley of California and DeSautels of Maryland. Although charged with employing high-pressure tactics and threats, the O’Brien team pumped far more arms than they twisted and brandished far fewer sticks than carrots: advance notification of Federal contracts, special privileges for White House tours, detailed data on a bill’s effect, material for speeches and releases, birthday notes from the President, campaign help from the National Committee, autographed pictures from the President, and whatever flexibility was possible on patronage, public works and other budget items.

  O’Brien, genial, tactful and tireless, added names and dates to the President’s lists of dinner guests, baseball companions, speaking engagements, appointment calendar and phone calls. Aware that the President’s interest in domestic legislation and the time he had available for any legislation were both limited, he increased the value of personal Presidential appointments for Congressmen by keeping their number low, but he never denied access to anyone insisting on seeing the President. A thoroughgoing political professional, he spent his evenings as well as his days with Congressmen, lobbying them, listening to them, laughing with them, always offering. more blandishments than bargains. He mobilized pressure from Democratic state and party leaders back home, from labor and other lobbyists, and from each of the departments and agencies. He maintained a card file on every Senator and Representative, complete with personal and political data and information on their districts. As crucial votes approached, he and his aides stationed themselves outside the doors of the appropriate chamber or set up temporary headquarters in the Speaker’s or Majority Leader’s office. On votes where there was no roll call, an O’Brien aide sometimes sat in the gallery watching how each member voted, although Larry himself felt it improper for him ever to appear there.

  EDUCATION AND RELIGION

  O’Brien’s original hope was to be named National Chairman—especially when he learned that the President, presumably on the assumption that the religious issue was now dormant if not dead, was paying no attention to those who insisted that the tradition of a Catholic chairman should be broken with a Catholic in the White House. But within a few months of inauguration, Kennedy, O’Brien and the rest of us were once again embroiled in the religious issue—only this time, remarked the President wryly, “with new teams.”

  Kennedy had in fact never agreed with those who wrote that the 1960 election had banished religion for all time as an issue. An un-American tradition had been broken. Clearly a Catholic could be elected. The campaign had illuminated many a dark corner of intolerance and ignorance. But the real test, he remarked soon after his victory, was not his election but his administration. The hard-core religious opposition which nearly defeated him would remain and flourish, to be cited by future conventions against the practicality of nominating a Catholic, if he lowered the bars between church and state, yielded to the pressures of the hierarchy or otherwise confirmed the religious opposition’s suspicions. But if his conduct of the office was in keeping with his campaign pledge and constitutional oath, then, while unreasoning bigotry would always remain and legitimate church-state questions would always be raised, the unwritten law against a Catholic President would be not only temporarily broken but permanently repealed.

  The issue was presented swiftly and forcefully on the one domestic subject that mattered most to John Kennedy: education. Throughout his campaign and throughout his Presidency, he devoted more time and talks to this single topic than to any other domestic issue. Without notes he would cite all the discouraging statistics: only six out of every ten students in the fifth grade would finish high school; only nine out of sixteen high school graduates would go on to college; one million young Americans were already out of school and out of work; dropouts had a far higher rate of unemployment and far lower rate of income; 71 percent of the people, according to Gallup, expected their children to go to college but only 51 percent had saved for it. As he climbed back onto his plane after a speech in Ohio, he said to me, “That’s the fifth governor I’ve talked to who doesn’t see how he can squeeze any more from property taxes to build enough schools.”

  Both as a Senator and President he addressed countless college audiences, imploring them

  to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education…. I would not adopt from the Belgian Constitution of 1893 the provision giving three votes instead of one to college graduates—at least not until more Democrats go to college…. But I do strongly urge the application of your talents to the great problems of our time.

  Each year he was in the White House he sent to the Congress a message on education more forceful than the previous year’s. He linked education to our military, scientific and economic strength. “Our progress as a nation,” he said, “can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.”

  No number of setbacks discouraged him. When an omnibus bill failed, he tried for each of its parts, and vice versa. When elementary and secondary school aid was blocked, he worked on higher education. Racial and religious4overtones, sniping from public school lobbyists and quarrels between the House, the Senate and individual members all combined to block passage of his higher education bill in 1962, even after both houses had passed it in different forms. But patience on the part of the President, perseverance by a new and talented Commissioner of Education, Francis Keppel, and a more constructive leadership in the National Education Association produced the Higher Education Act of 1963, authorizing several times more college aid in a five-year period than had been appropriated under the Land Grant College Act in a century, and providing classrooms for several hundred thousand students, twenty-five to thirty new community colleges a year, ten to twenty new graduate centers, several new technical institutes and better college libraries. A separate bill enacted the same year provided similar assistance to medical and dental schools.

  When Congress dropped scholarships out of these bills, the President broadened student loans and scholarships under existing laws. When general Federal aid was defeated, he invented or expanded new means of specialized aid: quadrupling vocational education, allocating Presidential funds to stop dropouts, authorizing literacy training under Manpower Development, providing funds to teach the deaf and the handicapped and the retarded and the exceptional child, increasing funds for school lunches and libraries, working with schools on delinquency—in all these ways not only attacking serious educational problems but freeing local funds for use on general construction and salaries. Other enactments aided community libraries, college dormitories and educational television. An estimated one-third of all principal Kennedy programs made some form of education a central element, and the Office of Education called it the most significant legislative period in its hundred-year history.

  Nevertheless his bill for general aid to elementary and secondary education failed, unable to survive a harsh combination of
controversies of which religion was only the most conspicuous. For nearly fifty years similar bills had been the victim of arguments over civil rights, states’ rights, academic freedom, balanced budgets and financial equalization. Its supporters in the Congress could not agree among themselves, and most of its organizational backers were inept, uncooperative and inconsistent. “He’s simply against all Catholics, regardless of whether his position endangers an education bill,” Abe Ribicoff told us in summing up the views of one long-time school lobbyist.

  On the other hand, said a Catholic cleric, some of his colleagues were simply against all Federal aid to education bills, regardless of whether they included constitutional aid to children attending parochial schools. Kennedy expressed no surprise at this. But he noted that a bill limited to public schools had nearly passed in 1960 with no major protest from the hierarchy, and he hoped that his church would be equally understanding of his campaign pledge to obtain such a bill.

  His hopes were soon dashed. Even before inauguration, Cardinal Spellman denounced the Kennedy task force report on education as “unthinkable” for not including parochial schools equally. “He never said a word about any of Eisenhower’s bills for public schools only,” muttered the President, “and he didn’t go that far in 1949 either.” But he refused to duck the issue or alter his view, and he presented early in the year a massive Federal aid to education bill limited, as he emphasized, to public schools “in accordance with the clear prohibition of the Constitution.” The National Catholic Welfare Conference, representing the full hierarchy in America, immediately called for the Kennedy bill’s defeat unless loans to nonpublic schools were added. Pastoral letters in many churches urged parishioners to write their Congressmen.

  The President, wondering once again why he had been singled out, pointedly referred in a press conference to the fact that there had been no similar agitation during the Republican administration. “The Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy are entitled to their views,” he added, but “they should not change their views merely because of the religion of the occupant of the White House.”

  His campaign commitment and the Constitution were both clear on this matter, in his opinion, and a comprehensive brief by the Departments of Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare reinforced his view. He saw nothing discriminatory about helping local taxpayers of all faiths finance schools that were open to all faiths—and which, in fact, roughly half of all Catholic children attended, as he had. His continued reliance on the Constitution in messages and press conferences seemed to make some Catholics angrier; but no matter how many different versions of the question the President received, his answer always reflected his determination (1) to promote public school education and (2) to preserve church-state separation. The problem was to find some means of removing Catholic objections to the former without violating the latter.

  Secretary Ribicoff and I met quietly and informally with a local Catholic cleric who in turn was in touch with officials of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. These discussions ultimately focused on possible amendments—to be proposed in the Congress, and not by the President—to the National Defense Education Act (NDEA).

  The NDEA, enacted in 1958, already included loans for private school education in categories essential to defense. It thus provided the most convenient and constitutional vehicle for demonstrating that it was “across-the-board” aid to Catholic schools, not “categorical aid” to Catholic schoolchildren, which the Constitution forbade. While the President remained formally committed only to his original program, advocated no other and did not want it amended to cover parochial schools, he had no constitutional or policy objection to the Congress, by separate bill, removing Catholic opposition to his bill by broadening the NDEA’s categories and increasing its loan funds. As a young Congressman he had made a similar effort more than a decade earlier to bridge the gap between public and parochial aid adherents by introducing an auxiliary services “aid to the child” amendment in committee in keeping with the Everson school bus case.

  But the public school advocates had been suspicious of his amendment then, and they were suspicious of widening NDEA in 1961. The Kennedy Federal Aid to Education Bill, having passed the Senate early in 1961, and having been reported out of committee in the House, ran afoul of his one-vote margin in the House Rules Committee. Democrat Jim Delaney sincerely believed, along with a majority of his constituents, that distinguishing between Catholic and other schoolchildren was unconstitutional and unfair. Having sensed the gathering Protestant storm over the NDEA amendments, he concluded—and no doubt rightly—that once he agreed to the public school bill, the NDEA bill would be mutilated or killed. As he waited until both bills reached the Rules Committee, religious feelings boiled up on both sides; and with no prospect of joining the two bills together or passing the NDEA bill first, Delaney joined Smith, Colmer and all five Republicans in voting the Kennedy bill down by 8-7. No amount of pleading or pressure by the President or Ribicoff could budge him. More adamant than many leaders of his church, he had no interest in bargains or trades on other subjects. “He didn’t want a thing,” said O’Brien. “I wish he had.” The more Delaney was attacked by editorials and Protestant spokesmen, the more he was applauded by his Catholic constituents and colleagues.

  The battle lines were now drawn in Congress and the country. A new organization, Citizens for Educational Freedom, threatened to defeat any Congressmen opposed to aiding parochial schools. Legislators received an avalanche of letters on both sides, some accidentally including instructions on how to write your Congressman on parochial school aid. One bloc of House members vowed to oppose any bill that included parochial aid, another bloc vowed to oppose any bill that excluded parochial aid, and the rest, with divided constituencies, devoutly hoped no bill would ever be reported that would force them to take a stand. John McCormack came out for across-the-board loans to parochial schools. Sam Rayburn said opposition would be less without inclusion in the bill of teachers’ salaries. The education lobbies denounced any deletion of teachers’ salaries. House leaders agreed that no bill on this subject could pass without first obtaining Rules Committee approval, and that—in the atmosphere then prevailing—no bill could win the support of both Delaney and the Southerners to provide that Rules Committee approval.

  Nevertheless the President fought on, urging those “members of Congress who support this [bill]…probably the most important piece of domestic legislation…[to] use those procedures which are available to them under the rules of the House to bring this to a vote.” There were only three doubtful routes of resurrecting on the House floor a bill the Rules Committee had killed: (1) discharge petitions signed by a majority of House members—which had produced legislation only twice in fifty years; (2) suspension of the rules to bring up a blocked bill—requiring a two-thirds vote, which this bill clearly lacked; and (3) bills called up by committee chairmen on “Calendar Wednesday”—these could be delayed and debated to death. Nevertheless this last route was pursued on a compromise bill sponsored by the House leadership.

  It was a sorry ending to a sad story. Solid Republican opposition, joined not only by conservative Democrats but by those unwilling to face voting the bill up or down on its merits, overwhelmingly defeated a motion even to bring the bill up for consideration. Federal aid to education was dead.

  Most Catholic members, including Delaney, voted to consider it. But only 6 out of 166 Republicans voted for it, compared to 44 the previous year, and nearly every Southern segregationist voted against it. The repeated headlines and editorials stating that it was the Catholics who had caused the bill’s defeat, said the President, were unfair. The bill’s House sponsor, he pointed out, was a Catholic. Of the three Catholics on the Rules Committee two had voted for it; of the ten Democrats seven had voted for it; but of the five Republicans not one had voted for it, when only one was needed to report it. In short, seven of the eight opponents—five Republicans and two Dixiecrats—had not supporte
d Kennedy’s election and were not influenced by Kennedy’s wishes. “That’s who really killed the bill,” he said, “just as they’ve killed it for fifty years, not the Catholics.”

  The death of his aid to education bill, however, was accompanied by one of the most far-reaching changes in American politics effected during the Kennedy years. To a much greater extent than had been true the previous November, the ban on Catholics in the White House was dead also. John Kennedy had demonstrated that a Catholic could with-stand the full pressures of the hierarchy on a bill of real significance to both sides, and he was toasted from Protestant pulpits throughout the land. One of his most violent opponents in the campaign a few months earlier, for example, Dr. W. A. Criswell of Dallas, called upon his flock “to stand behind President Kennedy and the Constitution.” Even the POAU reported it was “extremely well pleased with President Kennedy” whose “strong stand…will reassure and inspire all who believe in the separation of Church and State…. We hope that the American people will support President Kennedy against the Bishops of his church.”

  Many Catholic laymen, and a few Catholic publications such as Commonweal, supported the President’s position, and his friend Cardinal Cushing called upon Catholics to recognize the majority’s opposition to tax-supported parochial schools and “neither force such legislation through at the expense of national disunity or use their political influence in Congress to block other legislation of benefit to education because they do not get their own way.” But the President felt once again that most members of the hierarchy were opposed to both him and his program. At the 1961 Gridiron Dinner he referred to the old anti-Catholic legend that Al Smith, when his defeat in 1928 prevented the Pope from “taking over” America, had sent the Pontiff a one-word wire: “Unpack!” “Well,” Kennedy said, “after my stand on the school bill, I received a one-word wire from the Pope myself. It said ‘Pack!’”