An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (39 page)

PART THREE

Can a Catholic Become President?

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

— John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960

CHAPTER 7

Nomination

No, sir, th’ dimmycratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itsilf. Whin ye see two men with white neckties go into a sthreet car an’ set in opposite corners while wan mutthers “Traiter” an’ th’ other hisses “Miscreent” ye can bet they’re two dimmycratic leaders thryin’ to reunite th’ gran’ ol’ party.

— Finley Peter Dunne,
Mr. Dooley’s Opinions,
1901

JACK KENNEDY’S REELECTION VICTORY
in Massachusetts and his growing national visibility since the 1956 Democratic convention put him on everyone’s list of possible candidates for the presidency in 1960. He was an appealing alternative to Eisenhower. Ike was much admired, even loved, by millions of Americans, but alongside Kennedy, the sixty-nine-year-old president, who was in declining health and had become the oldest man ever to serve in the office, seemed stodgy. Kennedy’s vigor (“vigah,” Jack pronounced it, in the New England way) was seen as a potential asset in dealing with Soviet challenges, a sluggish economy, racial divisions, and what the literary critic Dwight Macdonald described as the “terrible shapelessness of American life.”

In 1957, more than 2,500 speaking invitations from all over the country testified to Kennedy’s appeal. Seizing upon the opportunity to reach influential audiences, he agreed to give 144 talks, nearly one every other day, in 47 states. By early 1958, he was receiving a hundred requests a week to speak. Some Massachusetts newspapers, eager to boost a native son, already pegged him as the Democratic nominee. Numerous party leaders agreed. A majority of the party’s forty-eight state chairmen described him as the likely choice, and 409 of the 1,220 delegates to the 1956 Democratic convention declared their preference for Kennedy in 1960. Although Democratic governors did not foresee a first-ballot victory, they thought that Jack would certainly lead in the early balloting.

Kennedy backers took additional satisfaction from polls in 1959 depicting him in the most flattering terms. Even Republicans conceded that he was “very smart . . . nice-looking . . . likeable . . . [and] knowledgeable about politics.” Although some in the GOP set him down as a “smart-alec . . . millionaire . . . headline hunter,” others wished that he were a member of their party. Democrats had only nice things to say about Jack, describing him with words and phrases like “truthful,” “not afraid to express himself,” “family man,” “nice-looking,” “vigorous,” “personable,” “intelligent,” and “level-headed.” Some independents thought he was “too outspoken,” but the great majority described him in extremely favorable terms. Sixty-four percent of all potential voters with an opinion about Kennedy believed that he had “the background and experience to be President.”

Despite this widespread esteem, knowledgeable political observers, including many in the Kennedy camp, saw formidable obstacles to Kennedy’s nomination and election. His positive image, however useful, allowed critics to describe him as more the product of a public relations campaign funded by his family’s fortune than the result of political accomplishments. William Shannon, a well-known columnist for the
New York Post,
wrote: “Month after month, from the glossy pages of
Life
to the multicolored cover of
Redbook,
Jack and Jackie smile out at millions of readers; he with his tousled hair and winning smile, she with her dark eyes and beautiful face. We hear of her pregnancy, of his wartime heroism, of their fondness for sailing. But what has all this to do with statesmanship?”
New York Times
columnist James Reston complained that “[Kennedy’s] clothes and hair-do are a masterpiece of contrived casualness.” Reston worried that there had been too much emphasis “on how to win the presidency rather than on how to run it.”
Chicago Daily News
reporter Peter Lisagor and other journalists met with Jack in 1958: They “looked at him walking out of the room, thin, slender, almost boyish really,” and one of them said, “‘Can you imagine that young fellow thinking he could be President of the United States any time soon?’ I must say the thought occurred to me, too,” Lisagor recalled.

Polls assessing Kennedy’s candidacy in a national campaign echoed Lisagor’s doubts. They foresaw a close contest with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, whose eight years under Eisenhower gave him a commanding lead for the Republican nomination. Moreover, a vigorous campaign for Nixon by Ike, whose approval ratings in the next-to-last year of his presidency ranged between 57 percent and 66 percent, seemed to promise a third consecutive Republican term. But no sitting vice president had gained the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836, and several straw polls matching Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy against Nixon and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, or Kennedy directly against Nixon, gave the Democrats a slight edge. Nothing in the surveys, however, suggested that Kennedy and the Democrats could take anything for granted.

The criticism and doubts bothered Jack, but he blunted them with humor. At the 1958 Gridiron dinner, an annual Washington ritual in which the press and politicians engaged in humorous exchanges, Jack poked fun at his father’s free spending in support of his political ambitions. He had “just received the following wire from my generous daddy,” JFK said. “‘Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’” To answer predictions that a Catholic president would have divided loyalties, Jack promised to make Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, an outspoken opponent of electing a Catholic, his personal envoy to the Vatican. To counter Oxnam’s complaint that a Catholic in the White House would be in constant touch with the pope, Jack declared his intention to have Oxnam “open negotiations for that Trans-Atlantic Tunnel immediately.” The Republicans did not escape his barbs: A 1958 recession had moved President Eisenhower to declare that, in Jack’s version, “we’re now at the end of the beginning of the upturn of the downturn.” He added, “Every bright spot the White House finds in the economy is like the policeman bending over the body in the alley who says cheerfully, ‘Two of his wounds are fatal—but the other one’s not so bad.’”

Jack’s wit scored points with journalists but had limited impact on Democratic voters and party officials, who would have the initial say about his candidacy. In 1959, Democrats were evenly divided between Kennedy and Stevenson. Each of them was the choice of between 25 percent and 30 percent of party members. Less encouraging, congressional Democrats put Kennedy fourth behind Lyndon Johnson, Stevenson, and Missouri senator Stuart Symington for the nomination. They thought that the forty-two-year-old Kennedy was too young to be president and preferred to see him run as vice president.

But Jack had no patience with being second. “We’ve always been competitive in our family,” he explained. “My father has been competitive all his life, that’s how he got where he is.” When Newton Minow, a Stevenson law partner, told Kennedy in 1957 that he could probably have the vice presidential nomination in 1960, Jack said: “‘I’m not interested in running for vice president. I’m interested in running for president.’ ‘You’re out of your mind,’” Minow replied. “‘You’re only thirty-nine years old, you haven’t got a chance to run for President.’ ‘No, Newt,’” Jack answered, “‘if I’m ever going to make it I’m going to make it in 1960.’” Sensible political calculations were shaping his decision. “If I don’t make it this time, and a Democrat makes it,” he told a reporter, “then it may [be] for eight years and there will be fresher faces coming along and I’ll get shoved in the background.” Besides, the vice presidency was “a dead job.” Nor did he think he could work with Stevenson, who “is a fussbudget about a lot of things and we might not get along.” Settling for second place was tantamount to defeat.

The greatest impediments to Jack’s nomination seemed to be liberal antagonism and doubts that a Catholic could or should win a general election. The two were not mutually exclusive. “Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,” one conservative declared. The Church frightened progressive Democrats, who regarded it as an authoritarian institution intolerant of ideas at odds with its teachings. Suspicion of divided Catholic loyalties between church and state was as old as the American Republic itself, and since the 1830s, when a mass migration of Catholics to America had begun, Protestants had warned against the Catholic threat to individual freedoms. In May 1959, 24 percent of voters said that they would not cast their ballots for a Catholic, even if he seemed to be well qualified for the presidency.

Most liberals subscribed to the view of Kennedy as an ambitious but superficial playboy with little more to recommend him than his good looks and charm. On none of the issues most important to them—McCarthyism, civil rights, and labor unions—had Jack been an outspoken advocate. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said later of liberal antagonism to Jack, “Kennedy seemed too cool and ambitious, too bored by the conditional reflexes of stereotyped liberalism, too much a young man in a hurry. He did not respond in anticipated ways and phrases and wore no liberal heart on his sleeve.” Joe Kennedy’s reputation as a robber baron and prewar appeaser of Nazi Germany also troubled liberals. And, despite numerous examples of political divergence between father and son, they saw Jack as little more than a surrogate for Joe, whom they believed to have been planning to buy the White House for one of his children since at least 1940.

Kennedy’s threat to a third Stevenson campaign was an additional source of liberal antagonism. Liberals hoped that despite Stevenson’s two defeats by Eisenhower, he might be able to win against Nixon in 1960. Some journalists shared this belief. (James Reston privately lamented “the effects upon this country of the advertising profession, the continual deterioration of our citizens, the lulling of their consciences, the degradation of their morals, and Adlai seems to me to be the only one that can raise our sights. He is the only one who speaks with the voice of a philosopher, of a poet, of a true leader.”) Journalist Theodore White wrote that California, Illinois, New York, Oregon, and Wisconsin “youngsters Stevenson had summoned to politics with high morality in 1952 had now matured and were unwilling in their maturity to forsake him.”

To discourage a stop-Kennedy drive, Jack publicly denied that he was a candidate. In 1958, he said that his campaign for reelection to the Senate required all his attention and that he needed to “take care of that matter before doing anything else.” When a journalist pointed out that he was giving speeches in five western and midwestern states in just one month, Jack explained that he was “interested in the Democratic party nationally” and was “delighted to go where I am asked.” In 1959, a reporter asked when Jack was “going to drop this public pretense of non-candidacy.” The time to declare his future intentions would be in 1960, he replied.

Early in 1958, as Jack’s presidential candidacy was gaining momentum, Eleanor Roosevelt published a magazine article in which she repeated her complaint that he had “dodged the McCarthy issue in 1954.” In May 1958, she made a more direct attack on Jack’s candidacy, telling an AP reporter that the country was ready to elect a Catholic to the presidency if he could separate the church from the state, but that she was “not sure Kennedy could do this.” In December, she stepped up her opposition to Jack in a television appearance, expressing doubts about his readiness for the presidency and noting his failure to demonstrate the kind of independence and courage he had celebrated in his book.

Jack avoided any public fight with her, answering her opposition in a private letter. He challenged her to support an allegation made during her TV appearance that his “father has been spending oodles of money all over the country and probably has a paid representative in every state by now. . . . I am certain you are the victim of misinformation,” Jack wrote, and asked her to have her “informant back up the charge with evidence.” She replied that if her comment was untrue, she would “gladly so state,” but she cited his father’s declaration that “he would spend any money to make his son the first Catholic President of this country, and many people as I travel about tell me of money spent by him on your behalf.” In response, Jack expressed disappointment that she would “accept the view that simply because a rumor or allegation is repeated it becomes commonly accepted as a fact.” He asked her to “correct the record in a fair and gracious manner.” When she published a newspaper column quoting Jack’s letter, he pressed her for a fuller retraction. When she agreed to write another column if Kennedy insisted, Jack told her not to bother, saying, “We can let it stand for the present.” Jack’s suggestion that they “get together sometime in the future to discuss other matters” provoked a snide telegram: “MY DEAR BOY I ONLY SAY THESE THINGS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. I HAVE FOUND IN [A] LIFETIME OF ADVERSITY THAT WHEN BLOWS ARE RAINED ON ONE, IT IS ADVISABLE TO TURN THE OTHER PROFILE.”

MRS. ROOSEVELT’S REPRIMAND
stemmed partly from a conviction that Jack’s denials about his father were misleading. She had no direct evidence of Joe’s spending in his son’s behalf, but she believed that all the rumors were more than idle gossip. And of course she was right. Joe had financed all Jack’s campaigns, including the 1958 romp, when he spent an estimated $1.5 million to ensure the landslide that would help launch Jack’s presidential bid.