Kennedy (20 page)

More than one pollster was used. Kennedy questions were sometimes included in surveys taken by various firms for many state and local candidates. But the chief Kennedy pollster during 1959-1960—following my meeting with him in New York on December 19, 1958, an exchange
of memoranda and a $100,000 guarantee—was Louis Harris, an ambitious but idealistic veteran of the opinion survey business.

All polls have their limitations. They can be most helpful in determining a rough comparison of relative strength between two well-known candidates as of the day of the survey. They can indicate how well and how favorably a candidate and his opponent are known among various voter groups. But they cannot be as precise as they pretend, provide protection against wide fluctuations or predict the final choice of the undecided. The weight of their answers often varies with the wording of their questions. They did not show us the true depth and volatility of religious bias. They told us very little about issues—except to report such profound conclusions as the fact that many voters were in favor of greater Federal spending in their own state, lower taxes and a balanced budget, and were opposed to Communism, war and foreign aid. The Senator also felt that a pollster’s desire to please a client and influence strategy sometimes unintentionally colored his analyses.

Senator Kennedy never lost his interest in polls, but his skepticism grew. He blamed his loss of one Wisconsin primary district—a crucial toss—on a last-minute Harris Poll. It showed that district as already certain for Kennedy and urged more effort in an upstate district which was supposedly close but actually hopeless. The religious divisions emphasized by those Wisconsin primary results then focused attention on the religious issue in West Virginia, causing Kennedy to tumble almost overnight in Harris’ poll from the 70-30 lead over Humphrey which had induced him to enter the state to a 40-60 minority position which seemed certain to wreck his candidacy. More will be said about the West Virginia primary later, but Kennedy aides O’Brien and O’Donnell grew suspicious of the whole process when they began to suspect that the county-by-county figures forecast by the poll were influenced by their own reports on local political leaders.

Republican front-runner Nixon was also a believer in polls. He also selectively released or “leaked” particular results to his political advantage. Inasmuch as his private polls included considerable findings on Kennedy, as ours did on him, the two principals arranged for a swap of several of their own private surveys, which their administrative assistants surreptitiously exchanged. (Although this occurred long before they were formally opponents, I compared it with Eisenhower’s “open skies” proposal to exchange military information with the Soviets.) When the two candidates met in Florida after the 1960 election, both agreed that their pollsters—Louis Harris for Kennedy and Claude Robinson for Nixon—had been overly optimistic about the final result but on the whole highly accurate and valuable, as had the published polls of Dr. George Gallup. The same could not be said of the other pollsters and experts.

In any event, both private and public polls from 1957 to 1959 were
increasingly reassuring to Kennedy and increasingly discouraging to his opponents. There were disadvantages in being the “front-runner.” The Senator’s critics became more open and vocal and his every word was politically interpreted. The Republican administration, in one forty-eight-hour period, turned suddenly against three Kennedy proposals it had earlier appeared to favor: aid to India, economic relations with Poland and labor reform. Veteran politicians warned that he was starting too soon, was pressing too hard and would burn himself out. One suggested no more speeches outside of Massachusetts. More than one columnist said Kennedy would not be ready for the Presidency in 1960 in terms of age and maturity and would do better to “slow down.” Public relations experts warned of overexposure in the press.

At times the Senator did severely limit his out-of-state speaking engagements to concentrate on Senate duties and on his Massachusetts re-election. He also tried to ration his nationwide television appearances and to shift the publicity away from his family and personality to more emphasis on his convictions and accomplishments. But he was skeptical of the “don’t start too early” adage. He preferred cooperating with interested newsmen to seeking in vain a postponement of their interest.

Moreover, his pace had several advantages. It answered all doubts about his health. It helped voters disregard his appearance of immaturity. It emphasized qualities other than his religion. And it produced a self-generating momentum which other contenders would be hard put to stop or catch. A candidate with his handicaps, Kennedy knew, had to be a front-runner and win early or not at all. And “At least,” he said to me in 1958, “they’ve stopped talking about me only in terms of the Vice Presidency.” To another friend who remarked that summer that it looked as though the Vice Presidency could be his for the asking, he replied with a grin, “Let’s not talk so much about vice. I’m against vice in any form.”

The Vice Presidential talk was promoted by those Democrats—including all other potential nominees—who hoped thereby to gain the Catholics while not losing the anti-Catholics. Even so wise a man as Walter Lippmann, terming religion “the problem which Senator Kennedy has posed,” proposed second place on the ticket as the solution. “It is ever so,” a leading Jesuit intellectual was reported to have remarked. “A Catholic is fine as a member of the board but not as chairman.”

Senator Kennedy was less philosophical. “I find that suggestion highly distasteful,” he said. “It assumes that Catholics are pawns on the political chessboard, moved hither and yon.” It also assumed that the top spot had been permanently closed to all Catholics by the overwhelming
defeat of Catholic Al Smith in 1928. Kennedy set out to challenge that assumption—and to challenge it early in the hope that the issue would lose some of its mystery and heat by 1960. Smith in 1928 had defended his church, quoting clerics and encyclicals. Kennedy defended himself, and quoted his own record and views. He spoke only of legislative, not theological, issues, and he spoke only for himself. “I think,” he told me regarding this general strategy, that “we should just stick to the general principle of a determination to meet our constitutional obligations.”

In March, 1959, the publication in
Look Magazine
of his views on church and state—especially his denial of any conflict between his conscience and the Constitution—aroused a storm of protest in the Catholic press. Some editors disagreed with the wording of his statement. (“Whatever one’s religion in his private life may be, for the office-holder nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts.”) Others felt he was too defensive. Some felt he should not have submitted to a religious test, “a loyalty test for Catholics only,” “bowing to bigotry.” Others felt impelled to criticize him to prove that Catholics did not all think alike. His reasoning was compared by the Kansas City
Register
to that used by accused Nazi war criminals. “He appears to have gone overboard in an effort to placate the bigots,” said the
Catholic Review
in Baltimore. He was termed a poor Catholic, a poor politician, a poor moralist and a poor wordsmith.

Finally his closest friend in the hierarchy, Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston—a man in whom the seeds of liberalism had been richly nourished through association with and pride in the Senator—came publicly to his defense, stating that Kennedy’s “simple candor…has given way to other people’s interpretations.” In an effort to allay suspicions about Church doctrine, the Cardinal prepared for publication and submitted to the Senator for approval an article entitled “Should a Catholic Be President?” Concerned about its effect on those most in need of reassurance, the Senator confidentially submitted the article to some of the most outspoken Protestant critics of Catholic doctrine in the country, with whom he or I were in touch. All agreed that publication of the article would be unwise.

Senator Kennedy asked the Cardinal to defer the article, without mentioning that he had submitted it to men with whom the Cardinal had frequently clashed. But he refused to retract a word of his
Look
interview. “I gave this interview on my own initiative,” he had written in a form letter to that portion of his heavy mail which favored his stand, “because I felt that the questions which were raised were matters which reflect honest doubts among many citizens.” To his critics, another form letter pointed out that his comments had not pretended to be “an
exhaustive statement of Catholic thought…since I am trained neither in philosophy, theology nor church history,” nor an exhaustive statement of

Nor did he feel he was appeasing bigotry merely by agreeing to answer such questions. He knew that Catholics were under suspicion by Americans of goodwill as well as by bigots. To end those suspicions, and to end the tradition against a Catholic President, he knew he had to answer not only all reasonable questions but many unreasonable questions as well. He knew he could not afford to be defensive, angry, impatient or silent, no matter how many times he heard the same insulting, foolish or discriminatory questions.

Privately, he felt it unfair that none of the other Presidential contenders in either party was so questioned. While he realized that their churches, rightly or wrongly, had less often been accused of accepting foreign control or seeking public funds and influence, his own record of votes and statements was actually more in support of church-state separation than that of any other candidate. Those Protestants who arbitrarily refused, solely because of his religion, to listen to his answers and to accept his devotion to the First Amendment, he said, were in effect violating a second, but unfortunately generally overlooked, constitutional provision, the prohibition in Article VI against any religious test for office. He discovered a widely and deeply held belief that the United States, because it is predominantly Protestant in church membership, is traditionally and even semiofficially a Protestant nation—and that the President, as spokesman, symbol and leader of the nation, is expected to attend a Protestant church. Catholics and Jews had long served with distinction as members of the Cabinet and the Congress, in a growing number of governors’ mansions, and even on that arbiter of the Constitution, the Supreme Court. But the White House was “For Protestants Only,” and mere consideration of a Catholic for President revived old fears and passions in states which had elected Catholics to other offices without blinking. Throughout the fall of 1959 state Southern Baptist conventions passed almost identically worded resolutions opposing the election of a Catholic and deploring religion as a campaign issue.

Kennedy believed that both Article VI and Amendment I should be
scrupulously followed by all candidates and their interrogators. Thus he willingly submitted to questions on constitutional and legislative issues asked by
Look Magazine
and the Methodist Council of Bishops, but he resented a questionnaire from the POAU (Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State) addressed to “every Catholic candidate” and excusing non-Catholic candidates unless “they reveal any inclination” toward less church-state separation. When asked at a Los Angeles Press Club Dinner in 1959 whether a Protestant could be elected President in 1960, he replied in good humor, “If he is willing to be questioned on his views concerning the separation of church and state, I don’t see why we should discriminate against him.”

Of all the church-state issues of public policy on which leading Catholic ecclesiastics differed from most Protestants, the most important was education. Kennedy, who had attended public as well as non-parochial private schools, introduced in 1958 a Federal aid to education bill limited to the public schools, and later was alone among the Presidential hopefuls in the Senate in opposing Senator Morse’s amendment authorizing funds for nonpublic schools. The use of Federal funds to support parochial schools, he said, was “unconstitutional under the First Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court.”

He was “flatly opposed” to the appointment of a U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican: “Whatever advantages it might have in Rome—and I’m not convinced of those—they would be more than offset by the divisive effect at home.”

He also disagreed with various Catholic clerics, conventions and publications on aid to Yugoslavia and Poland; was never found among those Catholic legislators who called for keeping Khrushchev out of the country or for more censorship of literature; and dismissed as dangerous folly all talk of a “Holy War” against atheistic Communism. Confronted late in 1959 by the most sensitive of all Catholic issues—population control—he opposed making birth control programs a condition of our foreign aid, on the grounds that this would add still another controversial burden to an already unpopular program (“You will get neither birth control nor foreign aid”) and that it would be rightfully resented by the recipient nations as interference in the most delicate domestic matters. “Most people,” he noted, “consider…that it is other people’s families that provide the population explosion.”

But he was equally opposed to any attempt to refuse or reduce our aid to a nation using public funds for such a program: “If they make a judgment that they want to limit their population…that is a judgment they should make, and economic assistance which we give permits them to make that judgment.” He made clear that, if elected President
he would act on this matter in the light of the national interest, irrespective of religious considerations, “and not in accordance with the dictates of any ecclesiastical authority or group.”