JFK

The View from Bay Ridge by Gerald Howard, a book editor in New York City.
As is well known, even notorious by now, the Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently stated that he “almost threw up” after reading John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 campaign speech on the proper relation between church and state in American politics. Santorum has become the most highly visible face of culturally and politically conservative Catholicism as a result of this and other statements. A cradle Catholic myself, I was moved to re-read that speech and as a result I didn’t “almost” cry, I flat out cried. Cried in gratitude to JFK and his speechwriter Ted Sorensen for being so transcendentally right and for erasing, with some 1,500 well-chosen words, a vile cloud of suspicion that had hung over our nation’s Catholics.
I was all of ten years old, an altar boy attending St. Anselm’s parochial school in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn on 12 September 1960, the day Kennedy entered the lion’s den of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association of Protestant clergymen to deliver his speech. I of course knew precisely nothing about politics at that age, but the nuns who taught us, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, were heavily recruited from the Boston area and the excitement that one of their own was running for president had been fully communicated to us.
Nor can I remember, five decades later, whether my parents discussed that speech at the breakfast or dinner table, or if the fifty-plus boys and girls in Sister Mary Othilia’s fifth-grade classroom were apprised in any way as to what Senator Kennedy had to say. But what I do retain from that period is a powerful sense that we Catholics were finally and completely coming into our own as Americans and that a last barrier to acceptance was about to fall.
The election of Jack Kennedy as president on 8 November 1960 was certainly the happiest day in the history of American Catholicism, in good part because it helped heal a deep historical wound we had suffered 32 years previously.
Both of my parents were the same age in 1928 that I was in 1960, and doubtless no more politically aware, when New York’s governor Al Smith, an Irish Catholic from the Lower East Side, ran as the Democratic candidate for president against the Republican Herbert Hoover. That campaign is considered by historians to be one of the dirtiest in American history, which is really saying something.
The Protestant religious establishment mobilized fully against Smith, and libels were spread that he would be nothing but the tool of the Vatican, aka the Whore of Babylon, a sort of Roman Candidate inserted into the American polity to turn the United States into a Catholic theocracy. It worked.
Al Smith went down to humiliating defeat, with only forty percent of the popular vote. And every American Catholic, particularly New York-based ones like my parents and their families, knew why this had happened. It rankled so badly that all those years later my parents would often bring it up in conversation.
Smith’s defeat was the uneasy subtext of the Kennedy campaign and the precise reason why the candidate had to make a speech, to Protestant ministers, and well below the Mason-Dixon line where anti-Catholic prejudice was still strongest, to defuse the issue of his religion.
Kennedy didn’t just disarm a ticking bomb that would have derailed his campaign; he provided the template for dealing with one of the trickiest issues in American governance, the proper coexistence of church and state. For more than fifty years that speech has stood as the essential guiding statement of right thinking on this matter.
More sophisticated political scientists and legal scholars than I can parse Kennedy’s speech with far greater acuity and pinpoint possible weak points in its argument, but there really are no permanent and definitive bright lines demarcating church and state in American society, try as we might to outline them. The boundaries of debate on politics and religion are ever shifting, as new issues arise, and our thinking as a result must evolve to suit circumstances. (And why, pray tell, have we not heard from the Irish Catholic Joe Biden on these matters? He is, after all, the first Catholic vice-president in American history and is on record as having been inspired by the Kennedy campaign.)
Still, I know that what Jack Kennedy had to say on 12 September 1960, to those ministers and its subsequent effect on his electoral fortunes was greeted with gratitude and pride in a culturally and politically conservative Catholic white ethnic urban enclave as an exorcism (if you’ll excuse the term) of the ghost of Al Smith’s defeat. For Rick Santorum, a white ethnic Catholic not to know all this or at least to appreciate it, well, it just makes me want to... cry.