Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House Read Online Free PDF

two weeks after the traditional Labor Day start of the national contest, Kennedy felt compelled to defend his religious affiliation before a meeting of Protestant, mainly Baptist, ministers in Houston, Texas. Although some of his advisers urged against speaking to what they described as a hostile, pro-Republican group, Kennedy believed it essential to address the innuendoes and outright distortions about the likely impact of his religion on his capacity to serve as president. “I’m getting tired of these people who think I want to replace the gold in Fort Knox with a supply of holy water,” he told two of his aides.
    On September 12, before an audience of three hundred in the ballroom of Houston’s Rice Hotel, he respectfully dismissed concerns about his religion as a diversion from more essential considerations in the campaign. He emphasized his unqualified commitment to the separation of church and state: “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” he famously declared. “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.” He cautioned that 40 million Americans should not lose their chance of being president on the day they were baptized. If this were the case, he predicted, “the whole nation 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 people.” Although the religious issue by no means disappeared during the rest of the campaign, or stopped thousands of voters, especially across the South and in rural counties around the country, from casting anti-Catholic ballots, Kennedy’s speech muted suspicions and disarmed some of the anti-Catholic hostility toward him.
    It did not, however, make his campaign a model of constructive civic pronouncements on the substance of his future presidency. True, Kennedy felt compelled to offer generalizations about how he would get the country moving again, characterizing his future administration as leading the country on to “a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunity and perils—a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith told him that the speech was an impressive rhetorical exercise, which it “had to be,” safely negotiating “the delicate line that divides poetry from banality.” But what did it mean? No one, including Kennedy himself, could say.
    Kennedy and his advisers correctly believed that elections were generally won by voters coming to your side less out of convictions about how you would overcome current problems than from negative views of your opponent’s character and record of flawed leadership. Kennedy remembered Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign in 1932 against the hapless Herbert Hoover, whose failure to end the Depression spoke for itself, and Harry Truman’s successful upset victory in 1948 against New York’s Governor Thomas Dewey, whom Democrats characterized as the only man who could strut sitting down, and whom Truman tied to the “Do Nothing,” “Good-for-Nothing” Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress. During the 1960 West Virginia primary, the Kennedy campaign promoted discussion of Hubert Humphrey’s lack of World War II military service, implying that he had been a draft dodger, despite their understanding that medical problems had kept Humphrey out of the service.
    In 1960, Vice President Richard M. Nixon perfectly fit the role of an opponent with a controversial political history that could be turned against him. Nixon had a reputation as a political assassin who had won U.S. House and Senate seats in California by falsely tarring opponents as communist fellow travelers. In 1952, he had attacked Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee, as holding a Ph.D. from Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s “cowardly college of Communist