The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [255]
Joe set out to use every personal relationship that he could to advance Jack’s cause. Jack and his minions complained mightily about anti-Catholic prejudice, but the Kennedys had already learned to have it both ways, publicly condemning those who stood against Jack because of his faith, while privately wooing those Catholics ready to vote for Jack largely because he shared their faith.
Those Protestant ministers who talked menacingly of a popish plot to elect Jack would have given their Sunday offering to learn the extent to which Archbishop Cushing, soon to be a cardinal, was working with Joe to promote Jack’s candidacy. “I have told Jack of our talk about getting out the vote and Jack agrees that that and that alone is the only problem,” Joe wrote Cushing in May 1958.
If Jack was going to win the largest victory in Massachusetts history, propelling him toward the White House, he needed Catholic voters to get out there in unprecedented numbers. Later in the campaign, Cushing wrote Joe telling him that he had authorized a statement to be read at every mass in the archdiocese of Boston on September 21, 1958, making it practically a religious mandate to vote: “Among our civic obligations, the highest priority should be given to the duty to vote…. Those who have not registered are reminded that they must register now to be eligible to vote in the November elections…. No good citizen will neglect this important duty.”
It was a dangerous business for the princes of the Church to promote Jack’s candidacy while seeming not to promote it, and it required a political subtlety worthy of a Medici. Some Church leaders lacked all such sensitivity. In May 1958, the bishop of Covington, Kentucky, wrote Cushing: “I do hope that sometime in the not too distant future Mr. Joseph Kennedy will see his way clear to do something for us. One hesitates to admit this or to include it in a letter, but a project of this kind aided by him, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, would be a great political aid to him in a Democratic state like Kentucky.” For speaking so bluntly, the bishop deserved to wear a dunce cap, not a cardinal’s peaked red hat. No matter the merits of his case, the foolish bishop would not be given a farthing. Cushing replied that he doubted “if you can get any help from the Kennedy Foundation” because the foundation would now be directed toward research. Then he sent both letters on to Joe.
In the decade that Joe had overseen the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, he had seen how useful philanthropy could be to his family, and especially to Jack. After his son’s election to the Senate, Joe had asked Lawrence O’Brien, then the president of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ Health and Benefit Fund, to do an analysis of the foundation’s role. O’Brien concluded that during Jack’s senatorial campaign “a program was carried out in a manner which created good will for the Kennedys as a family. This was bound to inure to the benefit of any member of the family who became a public figure without any attempt at actual exploitation … their political enemies are at a disadvantage in bringing the existence of … the Foundation into political discussion.” The Kennedys did not have to talk about the foundation to reap its benefits, while their opponents could not even admit its existence without harming themselves.
The Kennedy Foundation was an exquisite machine for the creation of goodwill and a perfect device to help Jack in his race for