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Bobby did not know about the secret meeting in Switzerland, but wherever he went in those first days of the campaign he was bombarded again and again with religious questions, some of them sincere doubts, others snide attacks masquerading as queries. Bobby not only wanted to talk about the issue, he had to talk about it. He had to stand up before his brother’s critics and fend off these attacks, daring them to throw the strongest charges full in his face. In Cincinnati early in September, he decided not to wait for the inevitable questions but to charge out in front of his attackers.

“People have often said that Bob Kennedy is, you know, without emotion,” reflected William A. Geoghegan, a local attorney. “Well, this time Bob Kennedy did cry and he broke down as he was giving that talk. I was sitting right beside him and got up and had to take over. It was a very emotional experience I think for everybody there present…. I can recall the words that he spoke … following which he could not go on with his talk. He said, ‘I can’t imagine that any country for which my brother Joe died could care about my brother Jack’s religion when it came … ‘Then he stopped.”

These words were similar to those that Jack had spoken so many times in West Virginia. Jack had not cried the first time he said them, or the last time, but that was Jack, and this was Bobby. Again and again in the next few days, Bobby confronted the issue. In Toledo he told a crowd of twenty thousand: “The religious problem is hurting us badly now.” The next day at the University of Illinois airport in Champaign, he boldly answered a Methodist

minister who asked whether Jack would owe fidelity to a Roman master. “I say you are questioning his loyalty if you question whether he would take orders from a third party. I say he’s proved his loyalty in the United States Navy and in Congress.”

Jack was not one to try to outshout detractors but preferred to move away to where his rational, ironic voice could be heard. He had proved in West Virginia that he could play the religious fiddle as well as any of those preachers, but to him that was not politics as it was supposed to be. He agreed reluctantly to face up to the issue in one crucial, definitive speech. He had told Johnson in Hyannis Port that he had to go down to Texas to campaign, and Jack was a political preacher who listened to his own sermons. For the occasion, he chose not only the Longhorn State, but the most difficult, hostile audience imaginable: the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Sorensen wrote a speech that he knew could mean the presidency.

Waiting for Jack in the ballroom of Houston’s Rice Hotel on September 12 were three hundred preachers and lay leaders and an equal number of guests. They would not have been Texans if they had been less than hospitable, and they greeted Jack civilly, but most of them had righteous suspicions of Catholics. They came that morning not to learn but to observe, not to change their ideas but to seek further confirmation of their beliefs.

At his best, Sorensen did not simply write speeches but channeled himself into Jack’s psyche and intellect. Nine times in the short speech Jack spoke the words “I believe,” witnessing to his own political faith in a manner familiar to every evangelical Protestant in the room. Jack was not an emotional speaker; what gave his words special resonance was his heavy emphasis on each syllable, as if he wanted the sheer truth of his words to prevail.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference—… and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.