Kennedy: The Classic Biography (21 page)

At times the Senator did severely limit his out-of-state speaking engagements to concentrate on Senate duties and on his Massachusetts re-election. He also tried to ration his nationwide television appearances and to shift the publicity away from his family and personality to more emphasis on his convictions and accomplishments. But he was skeptical of the “don’t start too early” adage. He preferred cooperating with interested newsmen to seeking in vain a postponement of their interest.

Moreover, his pace had several advantages. It answered all doubts about his health. It helped voters disregard his appearance of immaturity. It emphasized qualities other than his religion. And it produced a self-generating momentum which other contenders would be hard put to stop or catch. A candidate with his handicaps, Kennedy knew, had to be a front-runner and win early or not at all. And “At least,” he said to me in 1958, “they’ve stopped talking about me only in terms of the Vice Presidency.” To another friend who remarked that summer that it looked as though the Vice Presidency could be his for the asking, he replied with a grin, “Let’s not talk so much about vice. I’m against vice in any form.”

THE RELIGIOUS ISSUE

The Vice Presidential talk was promoted by those Democrats—including all other potential nominees—who hoped thereby to gain the Catholics while not losing the anti-Catholics. Even so wise a man as Walter Lippmann, terming religion “the problem which Senator Kennedy has posed,” proposed second place on the ticket as the solution. “It is ever so,” a leading Jesuit intellectual was reported to have remarked. “A Catholic is fine as a member of the board but not as chairman.”

Senator Kennedy was less philosophical. “I find that suggestion highly distasteful,” he said. “It assumes that Catholics are pawns on the political chessboard, moved hither and yon.” It also assumed that the top spot had been permanently closed to all Catholics by the overwhelming defeat of Catholic Al Smith in 1928. Kennedy set out to challenge that assumption—and to challenge it early in the hope that the issue would lose some of its mystery and heat by 1960. Smith in 1928 had defended his church, quoting clerics and encyclicals. Kennedy defended himself, and quoted his own record and views. He spoke only of legislative, not theological, issues, and he spoke only for himself. “I think,” he told me regarding this general strategy, that “we should just stick to the general principle of a determination to meet our constitutional obligations.”

In March, 1959, the publication in
Look Magazine
of his views on church and state—especially his denial of any conflict between his conscience and the Constitution—aroused a storm of protest in the Catholic press. Some editors disagreed with the wording of his statement. (“Whatever one’s religion in his private life may be, for the office-holder nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts.”) Others felt he was too defensive. Some felt he should not have submitted to a religious test, “a loyalty test for Catholics only,” “bowing to bigotry.” Others felt impelled to criticize him to prove that Catholics did not all think alike. His reasoning was compared by the Kansas City
Register
to that used by accused Nazi war criminals. “He appears to have gone overboard in an effort to placate the bigots,” said the
Catholic Review
in Baltimore. He was termed a poor Catholic, a poor politician, a poor moralist and a poor wordsmith.

Finally his closest friend in the hierarchy, Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston—a man in whom the seeds of liberalism had been richly nourished through association with and pride in the Senator—came publicly to his defense, stating that Kennedy’s “simple candor…has given way to other people’s interpretations.” In an effort to allay suspicions about Church doctrine, the Cardinal prepared for publication and submitted to the Senator for approval an article entitled “Should a Catholic Be President?” Concerned about its effect on those most in need of reassurance, the Senator confidentially submitted the article to some of the most outspoken Protestant critics of Catholic doctrine in the country, with whom he or I were in touch. All agreed that publication of the article would be unwise.

Senator Kennedy asked the Cardinal to defer the article, without mentioning that he had submitted it to men with whom the Cardinal had frequently clashed. But he refused to retract a word of his
Look
interview. “I gave this interview on my own initiative,” he had written in a form letter to that portion of his heavy mail which favored his stand, “because I felt that the questions which were raised were matters which reflect honest doubts among many citizens.” To his critics, another form letter pointed out that his comments had not pretended to be “an exhaustive statement of Catholic thought…since I am trained neither in philosophy, theology nor church history,” nor an exhaustive statement of

my views on conscience, religion and public office….I was simply stating candidly my firmly held belief that a Catholic can serve as President of the United States and fulfill his oath of office with complete fidelity and with no reservations. I see no cause to amend that statement now.

Nor did he feel he was appeasing bigotry merely by agreeing to answer such questions. He knew that Catholics were under suspicion by Americans of goodwill as well as by bigots. To end those suspicions, and to end the tradition against a Catholic President, he knew he had to answer not only all reasonable questions but many unreasonable questions as well. He knew he could not afford to be defensive, angry, impatient or silent, no matter how many times he heard the same insulting, foolish or discriminatory questions.

Privately, he felt it unfair that none of the other Presidential contenders in either party was so questioned. While he realized that their churches, rightly or wrongly, had less often been accused of accepting foreign control or seeking public funds and influence, his own record of votes and statements was actually more in support of church-state separation than that of any other candidate. Those Protestants who arbitrarily refused, solely because of his religion, to listen to his answers and to accept his devotion to the First Amendment, he said, were in effect violating a second, but unfortunately generally overlooked, constitutional provision, the prohibition in Article VI against any religious test for office. He discovered a widely and deeply held belief that the United States, because it is predominantly Protestant in church membership, is traditionally and even semiofficially a Protestant nation—and that the President, as spokesman, symbol and leader of the nation, is expected to attend a Protestant church. Catholics and Jews had long served with distinction as members of the Cabinet and the Congress, in a growing number of governors’ mansions, and even on that arbiter of the Constitution, the Supreme Court. But the White House was “For Protestants Only,” and mere consideration of a Catholic for President revived old fears and passions in states which had elected Catholics to other offices without blinking. Throughout the fall of 1959 state Southern Baptist conventions passed almost identically worded resolutions opposing the election of a Catholic and deploring religion as a campaign issue.

Kennedy believed that both Article VI and Amendment I should be scrupulously followed by all candidates and their interrogators. Thus he willingly submitted to questions on constitutional and legislative issues asked by
Look Magazine
and the Methodist Council of Bishops, but he resented a questionnaire from the POAU (Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State) addressed to “every Catholic candidate” and excusing non-Catholic candidates unless “they reveal any inclination” toward less church-state separation. When asked at a Los Angeles Press Club Dinner in 1959 whether a Protestant could be elected President in 1960, he replied in good humor, “If he is willing to be questioned on his views concerning the separation of church and state, I don’t see why we should discriminate against him.”

Of all the church-state issues of public policy on which leading Catholic ecclesiastics differed from most Protestants, the most important was education. Kennedy, who had attended public as well as non-parochial private schools, introduced in 1958 a Federal aid to education bill limited to the public schools, and later was alone among the Presidential hopefuls in the Senate in opposing Senator Morse’s amendment authorizing funds for nonpublic schools. The use of Federal funds to support parochial schools, he said, was “unconstitutional under the First Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court.”

He was “flatly opposed” to the appointment of a U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican: “Whatever advantages it might have in Rome—and I’m not convinced of those—they would be more than offset by the divisive effect at home.”

He also disagreed with various Catholic clerics, conventions and publications on aid to Yugoslavia and Poland; was never found among those Catholic legislators who called for keeping Khrushchev out of the country or for more censorship of literature; and dismissed as dangerous folly all talk of a “Holy War” against atheistic Communism. Confronted late in 1959 by the most sensitive of all Catholic issues—population control—he opposed making birth control programs a condition of our foreign aid, on the grounds that this would add still another controversial burden to an already unpopular program (“You will get neither birth control nor foreign aid”) and that it would be rightfully resented by the recipient nations as interference in the most delicate domestic matters. “Most people,” he noted, “consider…that it is other people’s families that provide the population explosion.”

But he was equally opposed to any attempt to refuse or reduce our aid to a nation using public funds for such a program: “If they make a judgment that they want to limit their population…that is a judgment they should make, and economic assistance which we give permits them to make that judgment.” He made clear that, if elected President he would act on this matter in the light of the national interest, irrespective of religious considerations, “and not in accordance with the dictates of any ecclesiastical authority or group.”

This last controversy was raised by a formal statement on population pressures by the American Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington in late 1959. The term “population explosion,” they said (a term frequently used by Senator Kennedy in his speeches on the developing nations), “was a recently coined terror technique phrase.” Some press and political observers thought the issue had doomed Kennedy’s chances for the Presidency, and the Senator was sharply irritated that so sensitive and divisive an issue had been needlessly dragged into the headlines on the eve of his official campaign. The bishops’ declaration furthered his belief that the hierarchy did not want him to be a candidate—that they had either deliberately issued this statement at that critical time or were else thoughtlessly unaware of the damage it would do to his chances. (“Does he suppose,” said the author of the declaration to a Catholic cleric, “that every public statement on matters we must continue to defend or oppose is aimed at him?”)

Rumors but never concrete proof of opposition within the hierarchy had frequently reached the Senator’s ears. Whether they considered his political or his religious views too liberal, or feared a revival of religious controversy, or felt Protestants would be more likely to woo their support, was never clear. His only public reference to their position was to joke at the height of the controversy: “They’re working on a package deal—if the Electoral College can be changed into an interdenominational school, they’ll open up the College of Cardinals.”

His own attitude had always been one of respectful independence, far less impressed by the political power of the church than many of his Protestant critics. “Naturally most of the hierarchy are extreme conservatives,” he said to me one day while driving. “They are accustomed to everyone bowing down to them, to associating with the wealthiest men in the community. They like things as they are—they aren’t going to be reformers.” He was irritated by reports of local bishops’ allegedly opposing interfaith activities or public school bond issues, just as later he would be furious when, in the midst of his Wisconsin campaign, a leading Catholic clergyman in that state forbade his members to join the YMCA. Still later, as President, he would say to a Catholic Youth Convention: “In my experience monsignors and bishops are all Republicans while sisters are all Democrats.”

He never hesitated to joke in public about eminent churchmen as well as his church. Appearing at a dinner with a somewhat rotund monsignor, he called it an “inspiration…to be here with…one of those lean, ascetic clerics who show the effect of constant fast and prayer, and bring the message to us in the flesh.” And in the midst of the campaign he claimed at a New York dinner that he had “asked Cardinal Spellman what I should say when people ask me whether I believe the Pope is infallible, and the Cardinal replied,‘I don’t know, Senator—all I know is he keeps calling me Spillman.’”

BUILDING AN ORGANIZATION

While attacking the religious issue directly, he was also attacking it indirectly by demonstrating his appeal to all voters. We had no vast campaign organization in those early years, despite the rumors resulting from his progress. In advance of each trip, I worked on the speeches, schedules, transportation, accommodations, arrangements and publicity. Wires or letters would ask his supporters in each area to meet with him upon his arrival. On the plane, prior to each stop, I tried to brief him on whatever I had been able to learn about the state, its problems, leaders, candidates, factions and method of choosing delegates. In each city I arranged with a friendly state or county chairman or contact to collect all names and addresses for our growing political files. The Senator, neglecting neither the importance of an impressive speech nor the indispensability of personal contact—for he was one of the few politicians who excelled at both—talked in each state with key Democratic leaders, telephoned those not present, met with the press and visited with old friends. When there was an honorarium for his speech, he donated it to a local or national charity.