Test of Religion

Jack Kennedy carefully chose his ground for his counterthrust on religion, and it was plainly hostile ground. Looking something like a parson himself, dressed in severe black suit and black tie, he strode purposefully into the ballroom of Houston's Rice Hotel last week to address and be questioned by the Greater Houston Ministerial Association under the eye of a statewide TV. Nervously he worked his thumbs together, rubbed his fists back and forth, sipped water several times as he waited through the introductions and opening prayer. "What's the mood of the ministers?" he asked his press chief, Pierre Salinger. Replied Salinger: "They're tired of being called bigots."

"I Would Resign." Once in command of the microphone, Kennedy wasted no time getting to his point. "I believe in an America," said he, reading word for word from a five-page statement drafted by himself and Speechwriter Ted Sorensen (a Unitarian), "where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President, should he be a Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote." He urged the clergymen to "judge me on the basis of my record of 14 years in 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 have attended myself . . . I do not speak for my church on public matters--and the church does not speak for me."

Then Kennedy came to a paragraph that would be cited for years to come. "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 even remotely possible--when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign from office, and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same."

"An Improper Action." When Kennedy had finished, the ministers applauded politely, then opened fire, often with complex questions. Kennedy fielded skillfully. Yes, he said, he would attend any non-Catholic religious service "that has any connection with my public office." No, he would not request Boston's Cardinal Gushing to ask the Vatican to "authorize" Kennedy's views on church-state separation because, just as Kennedy expected the church to keep out of his politics, so he intended to keep out of church matters. What if the Catholic Church used its "privilege and obligation," as white-haired Baptist Minister K.O. White called it, to direct Kennedy's political life? Kennedy stuck out his jaw: "I would reply to them that this was an improper action on their part, that it was one to which I could not subscribe. I am confident there would be no such interference."

Most of the ministers were impressed if not converted. "Martin Luther himself would have welcomed Senator Kennedy and cheered him," said a Lutheran, the Rev. George C. Reck. But some were unfazed. "Senator Kennedy is either a poor Catholic or he is stringing the people along," said Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the nation's largest Southern Baptist congregation, who believes that a Catholic President is only the first step, until finally comes the day when "religious history has also died in America as it has died in Spain." The Kennedy camp rated Kennedy's performance as highly successful--and highly important in a state where he and Nixon are thought to be running neck and neck. Kennedy men planned to send tapes of the show to TV stations throughout the South and Midwest.

Cutoff. Early in the week, Dick Nixon proposed that both candidates keep the religion issue out of the Page One headlines by agreeing to a "cutoff date on its discussion." For himself, Nixon intended to begin the cutoff immediately, although he acknowledged that it would be more difficult for Kennedy to do so, and he rested on his often-repeated position that "I disapprove of the religious issue being used in my behalf or against my opponent." But he resisted demands from Democratic quarters that he denounce the implied endorsement of the Citizens for Religious Freedom--including such prominent Protestant preachers as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Dr. Daniel A. Poling--which had questioned the Kennedy candidacy on religious grounds.

Hapless Dr. Peale, for once not seeming Everyman's best guide to Confident Living (one of his multimillion-selling titles), tried to separate himself from the movement he had made himself the spokesman for. The Philadelphia Inquirer dropped his weekly column. Dr. Peale emerged from a week-long "retreat," after offering to resign from the pulpit of Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church (refused), and submitting his resignation from the Citizens for Religious Freedom (accepted), and he declared that the people have a right to elect a man of any religion--or none at all--to the presidency. "I was not duped, I was just stupid," he told a New York Herald Tribune reporter.

"Magnificent." The so-called Citizens for Religious Freedom, which had set the whole fuss going the week before, praised Kennedy's Houston statement as "the most complete, unequivocal and reassuring statement which could be expected of any person in his position." "Magnificent," echoed Dr. Daniel A. Poling. In the October issue of the Christian Herald, which he edits, Dr. Poling explained why he got into the public controversy in the first place. "Religion is important in an election because it is important, or should be important, to the man who practices it. Anything that helps to make the man is important to voters when that man runs for public office and particularly for the highest office in the land."

Democratic National Chairman Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson hinted darkly that Republican moneybags were bankrolling the anti-Catholic campaign, and challenged the press to find out "who prepared the statement issued by Dr. Peale's group." He suggested that the issue was turning the whole campaign in Kennedy's favor. Ex-President Harry Truman charged that back home in Independence, Mo. "the Republicans are sending out all the dirty pamphlets they can find on the religious issue." Republican National Chairman Thruston Morton rebutted in the same vein: "The Democrats are deliberately keeping the religious issue alive for the purpose of exploiting it for their own political advantage. Former President Truman's statement that Republican headquarters are issuing anti-Catholic pamphlets is completely false and reprehensible."

Whose Gain? Candidate Kennedy, flying into Manhattan to accept the Liberal Party's endorsement, convulsed the dinner by declaring that the Republican platform should be entitled "The Power of Positive Thinking."* Invading heavily industrial New Jersey, he got one of the greatest receptions of any candidate in memory.

Politicians in both camps agreed that Kennedy stood to gain from the religion furor--so long as a counterreaction did not set in out of suspicion that he was deliberately exploiting it. Some Protestant Democrats might be roused to vote against him on the basis of religion alone in the farm belt and in the Deep South. But in the populous industrial states that he needs most of all--New York (35% Catholic), New Jersey (43%), Pennsylvania (31%), Illinois (33%), Michigan (24%), Ohio (21%), Wisconsin (32%)--Kennedy stands a good chance of winning, if he can solidify the Democratic Catholic vote that swung to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956./- Nixon, on the other hand, feels that if religion does not become the decisive point in a voter's mind, he has a good chance of carrying such predominantly Catholic groups as the Poles and Hungarians, on the issue of "standing up to the Russians." Nixon's hold on conservative Catholic Republicans is strong, but TIME correspondents last week detected some movement away from Nixon into the "undecided" sector, under the force of the religion debate.

Religion was a subject that, most everyone agreed, had to be talked out at some point in the campaign, and sincere men as well as bigots had brought it to the fore. And it was also a question that could be talked about too much, to the exclusion of other important matters in 1960.

* Other humor making the rounds in Catholic circles: Kennedy wins the presidency, and in the normal course of events the time comes to elect a new Pope. "How about America's Cardinal Spellman?" suggests one Italian cardinal. "Not on your life," snaps a second. "Do you want the Vatican to be run from the White House?"

/- Last week the Gallup Poll reported that 71% of U.S. Catholic voters lean toward Kennedy, 26% toward Nixon, with 3% undecided.

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