The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [278]
Most presidents invoked the name of God to justify the most secular of policies. To assuage the fears and prejudices of Protestants and Jews, Jack took an unprecedented position on the role of religion in public life. He told Look magazine in March 1959, that “whatever one’s religion in private life may be, for the officer holder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution in all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state.”
In their zeal to protect the presidency from the machinations of Rome, the ministers had essentially induced Jack to promise to drive God out of the White House. This grievously offended the Catholic press, while the most prejudiced of his critics considered it a further example of the duplicities of Rome. Among the many letters of protest Jack received was one from a group of thirty-eight students at a Midwestern parochial school who lamented “the crash of an idol.”
No one was more concerned with this issue than Joe and Cardinal Cushing. The Boston priest worked assiduously to promote Jack’s candidacy in a manner that his Protestant counterparts would have felt proved their every fear about the heavy hand of the Church. “Wherever I go they think I am Jack’s campaign manager,” Cushing wrote Joe in May 1960. The previous March, when Jack’s campaign was just beginning, Joe had written Cushing: “This letter really adds up to saying that if Jack stays in the fight, it will be you who has kept him in. If he wins, it will be you who has made it possible.”
Two months later, Joe wrote the religious leader again, essentially giving him carte blanche as to how Jack would handle the religious issue. “I hope that we won’t have the Catholic question raised again, but it might be a good idea to have some phrases worked out and handed to Jack to be added to the list of matters that he carries in his head. But we will be guided entirely by your thoughts on this.”
Cushing replied two days later that “the religious issue should be taboo. Those who raise it never change their opinions no matter what answer we give them. This whole thing is very subtle. It will come to the forefront again and again but it may be a political devise [sic] to get us off the beam.”
His father and his favorite priest had spoken from the depths of their experience that Jack had better steer as far from the religion issue as he could. But now, in the last weeks of the campaign in the heart of fundamentalist Protestant America, Jack decided to face the religion issue straight on. In doing so, he went not only against his father and Cushing but his West Virginian staff, who supposedly knew these people best, against his own pollster’s studied judgment, and against the advice of most of his sophisticated Washington aides.
A great politician knows that if he stands back far enough from a problem, it may take on a manageable form and become an opportunity. He knows too that the defining of an issue is often the winning of an issue. There were many crucial decisions in Jack’s quest for the White House, but few to compare to this moment. The issue would rise up again and again, but almost always in the form in which Jack had defined it as he campaigned in the hills and hollows of West Virginia. To do what he was doing took the courage that he considered the king of all virtues. But political courage rarely stands alone, and his was welded to an awesomely shrewd sense of human beings and their emotions.
“I refuse to believe that I was denied the right to be president on the day I was baptized,” he told his audiences. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy…. Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or a Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber plane to fly his last mission.”
How were his listeners to respond when the matter was couched as an act