John Kennedy in Ireland: Photo JFK Library
Less than a half century ago, there were serious doubts in this country that an Irish Catholic could be elected President. A vicious undertow swept through America in 1960, a stealth and whispering campaign that threatened to drown American democracy in a sea of prejudice and innuendo that makes the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry seem mild in comparison.
People have forgotten what America was like in the year John F. Kennedy ran for President, but to understand the climate of that year you only need recall the name of Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon. Nixon had risen to the Vice Presidency by virtue of his red baiting, most notably in the 1950 California Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas. This was the campaign in which Nixon accused Douglas of being:
pink right down to her underwear.
That infamous color scheme also produced the “pink letter,” a flier distributed by the Nixon campaign that implied a connection between Douglas and the Communist Party. As the campaign became more contentious, Douglas referred to Nixon as “peewee.” Nixon responded with one of the most memorable and strange lines of the campaign:
Why, I’ll castrate her! (Quoted in Kerwin C. Swint, Mudslingers: The Top 25 Negative Campaigns of All Time, p. 166)
When Nixon and Kennedy met in 1960, the Kennedy campaign must have thought not only of Nixon’s tactics against Douglas but looked back to the Campaign of Al Smith, when the Ku Klux Klan played an active role in fanning prejudice. They also have to have looked back to Smith’s famous Oklahoma City speech as a model for the speech they knew Kennedy would have to give. [for more on the speech see “Anything un-American Cannot Live in the Sunlight.”
Every American knew that if John Kennedy were to stand any chance of winning the White House he would have to eventually directly confront the issue of his religion and his Irish background. Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and the Election of 1960: A Project of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers outlined the events leading up to the speech:
The campaign wanted to confront this perception in October but, when Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, the nation’s most prominent protestant columnist, opposed Kennedy’s candidacy on religious grounds in September, both Kennedy and his key aides felt “the floodgates of religious bigotry” had been opened and that immediate action must be taken to stem the tide.
The final decision was to give the speech in the heart of the Bible Belt, to the Houston Ministerial Association on September 12. Most people felt that Kennedy need only confront the issue and disavow any connection between his religion and his campaign, but the speech John Kennedy gave in 1960 goes far beyond that, which is why it is generally considered the greatest speech ever given by a Presidential candidate about religious and intellectual freedom.
Like Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.’s “I Have Dream” speech, Kennedy’s speech is sometimes seen today as an indication the problem has been solved. Yet even as we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the issue of religion persists. Today religion and politics have become so twisted that a Protestant President freely acknowledges his theology guides his decisions. Yet it is not hard to imagine the reaction if a Jewish, Muslim or even Catholic President were to make the same admission. Just recall the flames of hate that arose when a Muslim was elected to the House or the innuendos that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Meanwhile in Iraq we wonder why Sunni and Shiite cannot get along, forgetting it took us almost two centuries to elect a non-Protestant President
What Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her My Day column shortly after the election of John F. Kennedy still holds true:
He took the risks and he did not lose those states. It may well be that similar risks will have to be taken to save humanity from itself. If so, I hope they will be taken with the same background of principle and high purpose.
Below is the text of Kennedy’s speech in its entirety, for to cut it into a soundbite is to lose the full impact of its rhetoric. A copy of the text and an audio recording are available at the website of the Kennedy Library.
Reverend Meza, Reverend Reck, I’m grateful for your generous invitation to state my views.
While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that I believe that we have far more critical issues in the 1960 campaign; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers only 90 miles from the coast of Florida — the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power — the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctors bills, the families forced to give up their farms — an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues — for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barrier.
But because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again — not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in.
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.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been — and may someday be again — a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril.
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals, where every man has the same right to attend or not to attend the church of his choice, where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind, and where Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe, a great office that must be neither humbled by making it the instrument of any religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding it — its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so. And neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test, even by indirection. For if they disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it.
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none, who can attend any ceremony, service, or dinner his office may appropriately require of him to fulfill; and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation.
This is the kind of America I believe in — and this is the kind of America I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that we might have a divided loyalty, that we did not believe in liberty, or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened — I quote — “the freedoms for which our forefathers died.”
And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers did die when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches — when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom — and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died Fuentes, and McCafferty, and Bailey, and Badillo, and Carey — but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test there.
I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition — to judge me on the basis of 14 years in the Congress, on my declared stands against an Ambassador to the Vatican, against unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools — which I attended myself. And instead of doing this, do not judge me on the basis of these pamphlets and publications we all have seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the statements of Catholic church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other centuries, and rarely relevant to any situation here. And always omitting, of course, the statement of the American Bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed Church-State separation, and which more nearly reflects the views of almost every American Catholic.
I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts. Why should you?
But let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the State being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or prosecute the free exercise of any other religion. And that goes for any persecution, at any time, by anyone, in any country. And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which deny their Presidency to Protestants, and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would also cite the record of the Catholic Church in such nations as France and Ireland, and the independence of such statesmen as De Gaulle and Adenauer.
But let me stress again that these are my views.
For contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President.
I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic.
I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me. Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views — in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise.
But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or Protestant faith; nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win this election.
If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I’d tried my best and was fairly judged.
But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.
But if, on the other hand, I should win this election, then I shall devote every effort of mind and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the Presidency — practically identical, I might add, with the oath I have taken for 14 years in the Congress. For without reservation, I can, “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution — so help me God.
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