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Jack flew to Hyannis Port after the convention. Johnson joined his running mate on the Cape, where the two men sat together discussing strategy. The vice presidential candidate was an oversize, looming character who dominated almost everyone within range of his booming Texas voice. If he had spoken with the sharp cadences of a New Yorker or with a Chicagoan’s flat tones, he would probably have been the presidential candidate instead of Jack. He attempted, as best he could, to shove his outsize form into the livery of a vice presidential candidate, but he was not yet comfortable wearing such a diminutive outfit.

“Now what we gotta do, Jack,” Lyndon said, speaking rightfully as a brilliant political tactician, “is I work the South where I’m strong. You’re big up here in the East, and we’ll both do the Midwest, and you take the West too, go with our strengths.”

“No, Lyndon,” Jack replied, speaking with a quick urgency, as if he had to squeeze as many sentences as he could into each moment. “You’re a monster up here, Lyndon. You have to come to Boston and show them what a nice fellow you are. And I’ve got to go South where they think I’m the pope’s creature and show them that I’m my own man. That’s what we’re doing.”

Jack had not even made his first campaign speech before the religion issue began entering the campaign like a foul tributary that, if not stopped, would flow into the political mainstream. For the candidate, it was an unpleasant reality that he knew he had to face. Bobby, however, took the anonymous pamphlets that had begun showing up across America and the whispered tales of papal conspiracy as a triple attack: on the church he revered, the free society he loved, and the brother he worshiped.

These critics considered Protestantism the natural faith of the American people, and they feared what would become of America under a Catholic president. Dr. Ramsey Pollard, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who declared proudly, “I am not a bigot,” asked that the papist church “lift its bloody hand from the throats of those that want to worship in the church of their choice.” Those preaching such words the loudest were not cultural riffraff trotting down barefoot from some backwoods hollow, but many of the most powerful clergy in America. “In every Catholic-dominated country today, non-Catholics are not permitted full privileges of citizenship,” declared a tract put out by the Baptist Sunday School Committee. “Illiteracy is high. Morals are low.”

On August 18 in Montreux, Switzerland, at an evangelical conference, the Reverend Billy Graham, perhaps the most revered evangelist in American history, hosted a private gathering of twenty-five prominent ministers, including the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The ministers spent much of the afternoon planning how they could ensure Jack’s defeat.

Peale believed that “American freedom grew directly out of the Protestant emphasis upon every man as a child of God.” To give over the presidency to this Catholic interloper would mean the slow end of freedom and the beginning of what the Catholic weekly America called “Post Protestant Pluralism.”

Shortly before this August meeting Peale wrote Nixon offering to help his campaign in any way that he could. “Recently I spent an hour with Billy Graham,” he noted, “who feels as I do, that we must do all within our power to help you.”

At the Swiss meeting one of the participants recalled Graham offering up details about the “moral character of one of the presidential candidates.” It was surely not Nixon whom Graham derided. Graham and Peale knew Nixon as a friend. To them, he was a deeply moral man who believed in the sacred trilogy of Protestantism, Republicanism, and conservatism, and they saw it as their Christian duty to work for his election.

It was not the “bloody hand” of Rome that sought to place its mark on this election, then, but the nimble fingers of evangelical Protestantism. When Nixon became president, Peale and Graham would presumably greet him at the steps of their