John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism,
Book by Lawrence H. Fuchs; Meredith Press, 1967

INTRODUCTION

T HE psychology of each of us is shaped to a considerable extent by our religious inheritance. How could it be otherwise? Religion deals with the ways in which men approach the fundamental questions of human existence: the nature of man, the purpose of life, the meaning of death, the relationship of man to man, to nature, and to mystery.

Because in the West we have tended to agree with the psalmist that God made man "a little lower than the angels" and "put all things under his feet," we usually have seen man as an active, rational being, attempting to control his environment. There are many other essential unities in what is often called the JudaicChristian tradition. But there are differences, too, which are more than just nuances or subtleties in emphasis. There are differences over which men have denounced their brothers, fought their fathers, and bled their neighbors. In large measure, it was because of such differences that many of the earliest settlers came to America. Out of the turbulent, familicidal warfare of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, there developed increasingly distinctive Protestant and Catholic approaches to family life, economics, and politics. The cataclysmic rebellion called the Protestant Reformation gave birth to a new nation...

I A CITY UPON A HILL

I T was John F. Kennedy's finest moment. On the evening of September 12, 1960, before three hundred Protestant ministers in the Crystal Ballroom of the Rice Hotel in Houston, Texas, he delivered the clearest and most eloquent statement ever made by a presidential candidate on religion in American life. The audience, according to journalist Theodore White, was "sullen" and "almost hostile" when he began. Later, a minister who had been present reflected that the meeting had many of the characteristics of an "inquisition." To that group, it made little difference that Kennedy was a fourth-generation American, that his grandfather had been mayor of a large city, that his father had been ambassador to the Court of St. James, or that Kennedy himself had sworn allegiance to the American Constitution as a United States senator. As a Catholic, Kennedy had to prove that he was American enough to hold the presidency.

To understand fully the drama of the occasion, Kennedy and his listeners would have had to flash back to fourteenth-century English villages where yeomen listened receptively to John Wycliffe's criticisms of the Church of Rome. For whatever theological and doctrinal differences existed among the ministers in Kennedy's audience, they all were heirs to a tradition of rebellious individualism which began in England more than five hundred years before. And so, of course, was John F. Kennedy. PROTESTANTISM AND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISMThe Protestant revolution appealed to restless men anxious to justify a break with established authority and to discover...

II DEFENDING THE CITY

I T was in the spring of 1959. John F. Kennedy had come to Hawaii in search of that new state's votes in the 1960 Democratic National Convention. I was in the Islands completing research for a book on the social and political history of Hawaii. Kennedy knew me slightly, but he knew my politics well. I was a liberal, with political friends in New York City and New England.

We talked animatedly for more than a half hour in the senator's hotel room. He sat hunched over the edge of his bed, occasionally getting up to attend to a packing chore. He thrust questions at me like rifle shots. Why was so-and-so opposed to his candidacy? Why was a certain newspaper critical? What did the liberals want? Wasn't his voting record good enough? Didn't they believe his words? Did they think that because he was a Catholic, he was like (and here he named another politician)? Not satisfied with my demurs, he concluded (in an oversimplification, I think), "Why, that's prejudice!"

Kennedy wanted to be judged not as a Catholic or as the son of Joe Kennedy or by any label, but for himself only. He wanted to accomplish the impossible by eliminating historic memories of fear and distrust from the minds of Americans. Before his death, and perhaps even prior to his election, he was to do more to blunt the ancient mutual hatred of Catholics and non-Catholics than any American had ever done. But on that sunny afternoon in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel his characteristic impatience betrayed his own deeper understanding (to be proved later many times over) of the complexity of emotions that lay behind the historic American...

III HOPE AND FEAR

T HE soul of America was, torn by civil war in 1862 and 1863 when John F. Kennedy's grandfathers were born in the city of Boston. In Boston, home of reform and hotbed of abolitionism, the war was considered the supreme test of Americanism by the Congregationalist and Unitarian men and women who had made the city a center of intellectual, literary, and political activity. But Patrick J. Kennedy and John F. Fitzgerald, their red and wrinkled skin properly spanked and dried, bellowed their way into an Irish Boston more concerned about food and jobs than slavery. In the rough-and-tumble Irish enclave of East Boston, they scrambled to manhood and success. For them and hundreds of thousands from the ould sod, ideological reform was not worth bothering one's head about. There were mouths to feed, backs to clothe, deals to be made, and interests to defend.

But John Kennedy's people were not afraid of encounter with the world outside of East Boston. Patrick Kennedy and "Honey Fitz" were optimistic, hopeful Irishmen whose success justified their disposition. In 1910, Fitzgerald became the first native-born son of Irish parents to be elected mayor of Boston. He even bought a home in the historic town of Concord, where he lived for a while near places made famous by the Minutemen and later by Emerson and Thoreau. Patrick Kennedy sent his boy, Joe, on a ferry ride

IV DEEPENING TENSIONS

JOHN KENNEDY was eleven years old when Herbert Hoover was elected President of the United States. His father, having already made several million dollars, had settled the family in fashionable non-Irish, non-Catholic Bronxville, north of New York City, where they lived in spacious affluence. Young Jack, an academically average but cheerful student at nearby Riverdale School, may have taken a special interest in the election campaign which had just passed, but it is far more likely that his most serious concerns focused on the upcoming football season. Not so for millions of Catholics who attributed Al Smith's defeat to bigotry, despite the fact that more Protestants voted for him than Catholics and Jews together against a popular hero of an incumbent party in a time of prosperity. The forces of encounter had received a severe disappointment. They had worked and fought on the side of non-Catholics in labor unions, business, and on the battlefields; yet (they thought) the country was unwilling to elect a Catholic to its highest office. During the almost seventy lean Democratic years after Appomattox, the Catholics in the big cities of the North and Middle West virtually kept the party alive. But with few exceptions, Catholics had not been appointed to high positions of the government, even when the Democrats were in power. Since the founding of the Republic, only four Catholics had served in

V NOT THE CATHOLIC CANDIDATE

WHEN Al Smith ran for President in 1928, approximately twenty million American Catholics constituted 16 percent of the population. By 1956, there were more than thirty-five million Catholics (at least 20 percent of the population) in the United States, and their strategic location in the big cities made their votes especially important under the American electoral college method of choosing Presidents. In that system the winner in one big state such as New York takes all of that state's electoral votes (based on the number of seats in the national House of Representatives plus two), more than compensating for the possibly larger numerical losses in a half-dozen small states. More than 80 percent of the Catholic voters lived in fewer than a dozen key industrial states including those with the largest electoral college vote.

By the spring of 1956, Democratic politicians talked of the possibility of a Catholic vice presidential candidate. Careful studies had shown that whenever a Catholic ran in a congressional contest, whether as a Republican or Democrat, he usually picked up 10 percent more of the Catholic vote. Such information was significant in light of the sharp decline in the Catholic vote for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 election.

VI PROMISES TO KEEP

JOHN F. KENNEDY served only slightly more than a thousand days as President; but he was well on his way toward becoming an American hero even before his assassination. Kennedy's appeal, as evidenced by the outpouring of grief in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and even in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, went far beyond the United States. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Gandhi, he was able to communicate to millions outside of his own country. Like them, he seemed to bring hope to the nearly hopeless. Probably his widespread appeal derived from a combination of a profound sense of tragedy and an equally strong sense of confidence that man could live with and transcend tragedy. So often he seemed to be saying: The condition of man is universally troubled; the blame cannot be easily placed; there are no simple formulas to rectify it; but, leaving behind slogans and self-righteousness, answers can be found day by day.

Kennedy was a hero to millions in the world, but he was a special hero in his own culture because he eloquently articulated and dramatically exemplified its dominant values: personal independence and achievement; American mission; and a belief in a benevolent God who looks favorably on the new Zion of the United States of America.

VII THE VALUE OF OUR TIME

T HE CULTURE-RELIGION of Americans is more than its Protestant inheritance but it cannot be understood apart from it. American Protestants have revealed a pronounced and distinctive unity (when compared to other world religions) in the belief that God must be experienced immediately and directly and that conceptualization of that experience is a task for the believer alone, checked only against the biblical text. This has been the central belief of most American Protestants regardless of whether they belong to the Lutheran, Reform, or other churches of the sixteenth-century Reformation, the churches of the seventeenth-century Puritan Revolution, such as Congregationalist and Quaker, the churches of the eighteenth-century Awakening, such as Methodist, Baptist, or Unitarian, or the churches of the nineteenth-century revivals, such as Disciples of Christ and Seventh-day Adventists. It has been a belief which, when mixed with other elements of the American environment, has affected the values, behavior, and psychological style of all Americans in contrast to Europeans and Asians; but it is originally and remains essentially a Protestant belief.