The Lost World of John Kennedy
The country that elected him, watched him govern and mourned his death was a very different America
This religious split had roots in 17th-century religious wars. Many Protestants remembered that America was founded by settlers trying to gain their liberties from Catholic kings, and many liberals feared what they considered an "authoritarian minded" Catholic hierarchy. Anti-Catholic voters cost Al Smith several Southern and border states in the 1928 presidential election against Republican Herbert Hoover, but Smith also carried some heavily Catholic big cities that had previously been Republican. As the nation's Catholic percentage slowly rose, Joseph Kennedy noticed. "This country is not a private preserve for Protestants," he told his son John in 1956. "There's a whole new generation out there, and it's filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants and those people are going to be mighty proud that one of their own is running for president. And that pride will be your spur, it will give your campaign an intensity we've never seen in public life."
And so it did. Kennedy's support from Catholics made him a front-runner in polls before he declared. On the campaign trail, he was cheered by nuns and Catholic schoolchildren and greeted by heavily Catholic crowds that waited hours to throng him, like one in Waterbury, Conn., till 3 o'clock in the morning. But suspicions among Protestants remained. Kennedy had to win primaries in mostly Protestant Wisconsin and almost entirely Protestant West Virginia before the big-city bosses--almost all of them Catholic--would back him. In the fall, popular Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale questioned the loyalty of Catholics. In Houston, Kennedy faced down 300 Protestant ministers and assured them he would resign the presidency if he found any conflict between his public duties and religious faith.
But religion was still a critical issue. Bare majorities of Protestants and voters over 50 said they were willing to vote for a Catholic. Religious fears as well as enthusiasms swelled 1960 voter turnout to the highest levels since 1908, 64 percent of those eligible, compared with 55 percent in 1992. Kennedy won 78 percent of Catholics' votes but only 38 percent of Protestants'.
For many Catholics, Kennedy's victory was a symbol of their full acceptance. For all Americans, it narrowed the rift between Catholic and Protestant. Catholic rites, especially in the tragic majesty of the president's funeral, became familiar to all, even as American Catholics, influenced by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, began abandoning traits and customs--from eating fish on Fridays to having large families--that had once distinguished them from their fellow citizens.
The leadership issue. Kennedy's government, too, had a different role in the nation's life and in people's hearts than government has today. As a Democrat, he benefited from the popularity of government spending programs and by association with labor unions, which were near their peak enrollment--31 percent of the work force. Kennedy kicked off his 1960 fall campaign with a Labor Day rally before over 40,000 in the great auto-factory metropolis of Detroit; he named the United Steelworkers' lawyer as his labor secretary; he reaped political profit from the heavy-handed tactics, including predawn FBI interrogations, he used to roll back the big steel companies' price increases in April 1962.
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