Six Crises (63 page)

As we started off on our last full week of campaigning, I returned to one of my recurrent themes—the fiscal irresponsibility of Kennedy's promises.

If he says he can keep his promises in the Democratic platform—which would add 15 billion a year to the budget—promising everything to everybody, with the people paying the bill—if he says he's
going to do this and balance the budget and not raise taxes, then he is showing such an ignorance of simple economics that he disqualifies himself to be President.

In Pennsylvania and upstate New York, I continued to carry the attack to Kennedy. I said we could not afford “to use the White House as a training school for a man who wants to learn how to be President, at the expense of the United States of America” and I hit out at the Kennedy formula designed to “produce prosperity with a printing press.”

During this week, we had not only stepped up the number of rally appearances, but at Tom Dewey's suggestion, we had added a nationwide telecast each evening at seven in which, for fifteen minutes, I discussed a major issue of the campaign in a “fireside chat” format.

Wednesday, November 2, was our big day in New York, with President Eisenhower, Cabot Lodge, and myself appearing together in huge rallies in the heart of the city and in the suburbs. The highlight was our meeting which overflowed the New York Coliseum in Columbus Circle, ending with the President and me sharing a half-hour of national television time.

It was a long day but a highly gratifying one because of the tremendous outpouring of people—nearly three million all told. I did not get back to the hotel until after ten but, tired as I was, I asked Don Hughes to gather our key staff members for a strategy conference. It was after eleven before we finally sat down in the drawing room of my Waldorf suite. The time had come to discuss a subject which I had deliberately refused to bring up in a staff meeting until now, despite considerable pressure to do so.

What, if anything, should I say on the religious issue during these last few days of the campaign?

I had insisted from the day of my nomination that religion would be an issue in the campaign only to the extent that the candidates themselves talked about it and thus made it one. Consequently, it had been my policy and the policy followed at my explicit direction by everyone directly or indirectly connected with my campaign not to initiate or even engage in any discussion of the religious issue. When the subject was raised by others, as it had been in the Peale incident, I had categorically disassociated myself from any individuals, however strongly they might be supporting me, who based their support on religious grounds.

I had taken this position because I did not believe religion had any legitimate bearing on Kennedy's qualifications for the presidency. I had even gone so far as to exercise a veto over a proposed endorsement that would certainly have given my candidacy a boost. Billy Graham, with whom I had enjoyed a long and close friendship, contacted my campaign staff early in the fall and said that he had been asked to write an article on the election for
Life
magazine. He had prepared an article in which he endorsed me unqualifiedly and enthusiastically, largely on grounds of my experience in world affairs and foreign policy. He had mentioned the religious issue in the article only in order to deny explicitly that it either was or ought to be an issue at all. But he did not want to give
Life
the go-ahead on publication unless I gave my approval. I was naturally pleased to have Graham's support. My staff felt that a Billy Graham public statement might be very helpful in the closing days of the campaign. But I ended up vetoing the proposal because of my fear that, even though he was basing his support on other than religious grounds, our opponents would seize on his endorsement as evidence of religious bigotry, his own forthright denial notwithstanding.

I understood that Kennedy was in a very different position. He was a Catholic and he had not only a right but a responsibility to answer affirmatively any attacks that were made on him because of his religion. But what concerned my staff at this point was not what Kennedy himself had been saying (ironically, he had made a quip about “racism in reverse” in commenting on Cabot Lodge's alleged promise to appoint a Negro Cabinet member)—it was what Johnson, Stevenson, Robert Kennedy, Walter Reuther, and other key leaders in the Kennedy campaign were saying and doing on the religious issue. In a speech before the Houston, Texas, Ministerial Association early in the campaign—on September 12, just one day after my own TV statement on “Meet the Press”—Kennedy had made an eloquent and very proper appeal that he not be denied the presidency on the sole basis of his religion. Touching on all facets of the question, he had pointed out that he had fought in the South Pacific, that his brother had died in Europe in World War II, and that no one had then suggested they might have a divided loyalty in serving their country.

This very effective speech was recorded on video tape, and it was being played and replayed across the country—but, according to our reports, far more often in Northern cities, where it might be expected to appeal to Catholic voters, than in the South and Midwest, where
one would expect the heaviest anti-Catholic or simply non-Catholic population. Furthermore, my staff showed me a file of “scare” headlines and news stories from the nation's press. Some of them were:

DEMOCRATS HIT BACK ON RELIGION (New York
Times).
JACK'S BROTHER SAYS RELIGION TOP ISSUE (Columbia, S.C.,
State).
RELIGIOUS ISSUE STRESSED AT KENNEDY CONFERENCE (Nashville
Banner).
JOHNSON BLASTS ‘HATERS' ATTACKS ON CATHOLICS (Washington
Post).
BOB KENNEDY SCORES STRESS ON RELIGION (Cleveland
Plain Dealer).
CREED ISSUE MUST BE MET, BOB KENNEDY SAYS HERE (Cincinnati
Enquirer).
BOB KENNEDY SAYS CATHOLIC ISSUE WANES (New York
Herald Tribune).
MRS. FDR HITS RELIGIOUS BIAS IN TALK TO NEGROES (Baltimore
Sun).
UAW PAMPHLET LIKENS KENNEDY FOES TO BIGOTS (Washington
Star).

And it was not just headlines. Stevenson, for example, was quoted as “wondering out loud” why nobody was making an issue of Nixon's Quaker faith, since “many Quakers are pacifists.” Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina, speaking at Charlottesville, Virginia, warned: “We had to choose between a Catholic and a Quaker in 1928. We elected a Quaker and lived to regret it. And if you vote for a Quaker this time, you will live to regret it horribly.” Lyndon Johnson—as well as the members of Kennedy's family—almost always referred in their speeches to the fact that the Senator's brother had died in action in World War II without anyone questioning his loyalty. Senator Jackson, the Democratic National Chairman, accused Nixon of “conniving” with anti-Catholics.

Congressman Charles Diggs told his Detroit constituents that “Kennedy has felt the sting of hate; he is feeling it today as the propaganda masters of the Republican Party keep up a continuous, well-financed attack against his religion.” Congressman Adam Clayton Powell was saying that “the Klan is riding again and . . . all bigots will vote for Nixon and all right-thinking Christians and Jews will vote for Kennedy rather than be found in the ranks of the Klan-minded.”

AFL-CIO's COPE-the Committee on Political Education-distributed nation-wide an unadulterated hate-pamphlet which said the issue in the campaign was not Kennedy vs. Nixon but “liberty vs. bigotry.” The Kennedy-Johnson Labor Committee put out its own leaflet—equating a vote for Nixon with a vote for the Ku-Klux Klan.

So it went. At every possible juncture and on every possible occasion, Kennedy's key associates were pushing the religious issue, seeing
to it that it stayed squarely in the center of the campaign, and even accusing me of deliberate religious bigotry. They were, in short, contributing all they could to make religion an issue while piously insisting that to do so was evidence of bigotry. And they were using it where it would do them the most good. It was, for Kennedy, a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition.

The Catholics on my own staff had taken to kidding me that there were probably more Catholics on my payroll than there were in Jack Kennedy's office, right across the hall from us. My aide, Don Hughes, my personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, my receptionist, Betty McVey, three of my top secretaries, Rita and Jane Dannenhauer and Mary Fenton, and my research assistant, Agnes Waldron—all were Catholics. During my fourteen years in Washington, I had gained the friendship, and I believe the respect, of top members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States. I had spoken and written publicly on many occasions in commendation of the effective work Catholics have done and are doing, everywhere in the world, to combat the spread of Communism.

It was the Catholics on my own staff and among top officials of the Administration who were now most outraged at the tactics used by some of Kennedy's supporters, and most insistent that I answer their attacks in at least one major television speech before the campaign was over. Secretary of Labor Jim Mitchell, Chairman Bill Miller of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, and Peter Flanigan, executive director of the Volunteers for Nixon-Lodge, all urged me to make such a speech denouncing what they called “reverse bigotry.” As they well pointed out, I was getting it from both ends: Republican Catholics were being urged to vote for Kennedy because he was of their religion; and Republican Protestants were being urged to vote for him to prove that they were not biased against Catholics!

Our meeting at the Waldorf went on into the early hours of Thursday morning. Arthur Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and a leading lay member of the Protestant Council of Churches, had prepared a draft of a speech on the subject. It was moderate in tone and reasonable in approach, calling on Protestants and Catholics alike to cast their votes on the basis of the real issues and not to be influenced in any way by the religion of the candidates—which had been, of course, my own consistent position.

Everyone in the room that night thought I should make such a speech. In the end, I voted “no”—and since I was the candidate, this was of course a “majority” vote. Kennedy and his supporters were
saying “don't vote against Kennedy just because he is a Catholic” and I simply could not see myself saying “don't vote
for
him just because of this fact either.” This might be as reasonable a position as his, but I felt it would open me to charges of bigotry and of deliberately inflaming the issue. Also, from a personal point of view, I could not dismiss from my mind the persistent thought that, in fact, Kennedy was a member of a minority religion to which the presidency had been denied throughout the history of our nation and that perhaps I, as a Protestant who had never felt the slings of discrimination, could not understand his feelings—that, in short, he had every right to speak out against even possible and potential bigotry. I felt a responsibility to keep the lid on the boiling cauldron of embittered anti-Catholicism. I still believed that this would probably be one of history's closest elections, and I reasoned that if I made a speech late in the campaign on the religious issue and then won the election, it would inevitably be charged that my victory was the result of my having deliberately injected the issue into the waning days of the campaign. The cause of religious tolerance, which had advanced slowly and painfully for so many years, would be substantially set back.

It was after two o'clock on Thursday morning, November 3, when my disappointed campaign associates filed out and I quite literally closed the door, once and for all, on any further discussion of the religious issue. As I look back on the campaign now, I can think of many things I should have done or might have done differently. But on this key decision, I have never had a moment's regret.

•  •  •

As we completed our last day in New York, there were but five days to go until November 8—the target we had been working toward for almost two years. In those five days we were to cram the most back-breaking traveling and speaking schedule in the history of American political campaigning. This was also the week of President Eisenhower's maximum effort. His wind-up in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, from every report, was a day to remember.

For all his reputation for finding politics distasteful, Eisenhower is a man of irresistible magnetism with great crowds and they, in turn, seem to trigger his own irrepressible vigor—especially when he has his dander up. And “up” it was on Friday, November 4, as a result of Kennedy's recklessly irresponsible charges about America's second-rate military posture, its second-class power status, and all the various “gaps”—from carbines to missiles.

Kennedy, as President, has had to retreat from these campaign charges—has, in fact, been eager to do so because now, with the responsibility on his own shoulders, he can begin to realize how damaging it is to America's negotiating position and to clear thinking about the world balance of power to so downgrade America. But in October and November of 1960, he seemed less concerned with responsibility than with campaign strategy and political advantage. Eisenhower took out after him with no holds barred.

He described Kennedy as “a player who knocks the team all season and then wants to become coach.” He referred to him scathingly as “this young genius” who thinks he knows more about defense and weaponry than “the joint chiefs of staff and the dedicated men, military and civilian, who have given their lives to this work.” “The White House,” he pointed out to a Cleveland luncheon audience, “is one place where we should not depend on on-the-job training of the occupant.” By contrast, he said he was “completely committed to the election of Dick Nixon. For eight years he has been immersed in the responsibilities of leadership. He is now prepared to take over national leadership in January.”