Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [79]
and 1940.43
Edith was “as bigoted as her husband,” according to Kitty Kelley, who relied heavily on the recollections of Lester Weinrott, Edith’s producer and director, to reach this conclusion. “Loyal was the worst bigot in the world,”
Weinrott told Kelley. “He was a racist who called all blacks niggers, and an Nancy at Smith: 1939–1944
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anti-Semite who called all Jews kikes. He hated every Catholic he ever met.
His mother . . . was president of the Eastern Star [a Masonic order], and she spat on the floor every time a Catholic entered the room. Loyal was the same way. We had a federal judge in Chicago named Mike Igoe, who married a nice Catholic girl from Galesburg, and Loyal never referred to Mrs.
Igoe as anything but ‘that Catholic bitch.’ Not to her face, of course, just behind her back.”44
“I never heard any racial or anti-Semitic utterance from my grandparents, nor Dr. Loyal or Edith,” Richard Davis insisted. “My father’s best friend and colleague all of his life was Dr. Louis J. Pollock, who was Jewish. A Jewish surgeon, Jacob Bookbinder, operated on my grandfather, Albert, for cancer of the bowel. My father trusted him to take care of his own father. Edith would go out to black churches on the South Side of Chicago on Sunday afternoons and participate in their activities. Lester Weinrott knew all of this. He and his wife, Betty, were at the house all the time. Les Weinrott was a very, very dear friend of Edith and Loyal. And I was extraordinarily fond of him. I don’t understand why he said what he said to Kitty Kelley.”45
Mike Wallace, the CBS newsman, whose long friendship with the Davises began in the early 1940s when he worked at the same Chicago radio station as Edith, told me, “I’m Jewish, and I never had that feeling from anybody in that family. I never heard a whisper about anti-Semitism.”
Asked why Lester Weinrott, whom he also knew, would have made such statements, Wallace answered, “He was probably bitter, because he was left behind, so to speak. He disappeared after doing radio soap operas.”46
“Dr. Davis was certainly not anti-Semitic,” said Dr. Nicholas Wetzel, who started as a clerk with Loyal Davis in 1945 and was a partner in his practice until 1977. “He brought any number of Jews on the staff at Passavant.”47 Both Wetzel and Richard Davis cited Loyal’s intervention in 1946
or 1947 on behalf of Dr. Harold Laufman, a talented surgeon whose appointment was actively opposed by many doctors at the hospital because he was Jewish. “My father absolutely blew everybody away who objected to it,” Davis recalled, “because Dr. Laufman was an outstanding surgeon.”48
Although this incident took place after the end of World War II, when the revelation of the concentration camps put a muzzle on American anti-Semitism, quotas on Jewish students persisted at some colleges and universities into the 1960s.
Wetzel also said that he saw no evidence of anti-Catholicism in Loyal, 1 3 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House pointing out that he himself was a Catholic. He added that, while Edith was a regular attendant at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, her husband seldom accompanied her. “I don’t think he was atheistic, but he was certainly irreligious,” said Wetzel, “and that dated back to his grade school days, when he had perfect attendance at Sunday school and the prize was given to the son of the local department store owner. I think that totally soured him on the church.”49
“I never joined a church,” Loyal wrote. “I have tried to practice the golden rule. I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor to his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or a hell as places. If we are remembered and discussed with pleasure and happiness after death, this is our heavenly reward and mortality for having led a good life. I have never thought these beliefs necessary to the recognition of the great influence Christ’s teachings have had and which I have tried to follow. . . . I have always been affected by flagrant