The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [277]
“And the Star says we are guilty of ‘dirty politics,’” Jack scribbled on a piece of paper. Jack could have asked Roosevelt to back off, but he did not. A week and a half later, Roosevelt had suddenly discovered where Humphrey had been during the war: a “draft dodger” hiding at home. The candidate tried to point out that even though he had been a married man with three children, he had tried to enlist in the navy but was turned down because of a physical disability. The charges had inflicted a heavy wound, however, in proudly patriotic West Virginia.
At that point, right before the election, Jack issued a statement condemning the discussion of Humphrey’s war record. “There was a lot of criticism, and the Kennedys repudiated the statement and cut the ground out from under me,” FDR Jr. recalled. “That was the beginning of the break between Bobby and me.”
While the Kennedys stood back watching, Roosevelt had besmirched Humphrey’s reputation. Although the Minnesota senator would quickly wipe off the dark spots, Roosevelt’s role in West Virginia would stain him for the rest of his life. What angered Roosevelt most was that what he had said was not only unwise and unfair but untrue. “It was based on so-called reliable information which was made available to me,” he later reflected. “It was used in the heat of the closing days of a vital and decisive primary, and … when I found it was unwarranted I went to Mr. Humphrey and not only ate crow but asked for his forgiveness.”
Jack might have been traipsing across West Virginia wearing the laurels of a war hero, but he remained a Catholic. West Virginia was overwhelmingly Protestant, full of God-fearing, churchgoing folks who had probably never met a Catholic and surely had never voted for one. Most of them had heard tales of an Italian pope and his hold on the American faithful. They had heard whispered yarns of the strange language spoken and strange rituals enacted in the dark recesses of the Catholic churches whose portals they would never enter. Their ministers often told them that a Catholic president would have another master in the Vatican.
In 1960, this Pentecostal vision of Catholics was only an exaggerated version of the dominant Protestant culture’s view on Catholics. Prejudice against Catholics was widespread in America, from the ignorant mouthing of the Ku Klux Klan to the no less pernicious musings of many political liberals, but the hard center of Jack’s problems lay with Protestant ministers, who feared the gloved hand of Rome reaching into the White House and were ready to tell their congregations as much. Like millions of his co-religionists, Jack was only a nominal Catholic. He attended mass, but he acted as if the rituals of the Church were its essence. He was as much bewildered as irritated when he was constantly confronted with questions about his faith.
Part of the hierarchy of his own church was no more welcoming of Jack’s candidacy than the fire-and-brimstone preachers of the Bible Belt. Some of the bishops and cardinals were so conservative, like New York’s Cardinal Spellman, that they preferred the mock-Quaker Nixon to Kennedy. Others made the calculating and indeed accurate assessment that Kennedy would not be “their” president; he would have to distance himself so far from the Church that he would take positions on aid to parochial education and other matters that were harmful to the Church. In March 1960, Archbishop Egidio Vagnozzi, apostolic Vatican delegate in Washington, said off the record to a New York Times reporter that though most bishops in America favored Jack “‘simply because he is a Catholic