Kennedy (65 page)

Nevertheless the President fought on, urging those “members of Congress who support this [bill]…probably the most important piece of domestic legislation…[to] use those procedures which are available to them under the rules of the House to bring this to a vote.” There were only three doubtful routes of resurrecting on the House floor a bill the Rules Committee had killed: (1) discharge petitions signed by a majority of House members—which had produced legislation only twice in fifty years; (2) suspension of the rules to bring up a blocked bill—requiring a two-thirds vote, which this bill clearly lacked; and (3) bills called up by committee chairmen on “Calendar Wednesday”—these could be delayed and debated to death. Nevertheless this last route was pursued on a compromise bill sponsored by the House leadership.

It was a sorry ending to a sad story. Solid Republican opposition, joined not only by conservative Democrats but by those unwilling to face voting the bill up or down on its merits, overwhelmingly defeated a motion even to bring the bill up for consideration. Federal aid to education was dead.

Most Catholic members, including Delaney, voted to consider it. But only 6 out of 166 Republicans voted for it, compared to 44 the previous year, and nearly every Southern segregationist voted against it. The repeated headlines and editorials stating that it was the Catholics who had caused the bill’s defeat, said the President, were unfair. The bill’s House sponsor, he pointed out, was a Catholic. Of the three Catholics on the Rules Committee two had voted for it; of the ten Democrats seven had voted for it; but of the five Republicans not one had voted for it, when only one was needed to report it. In short, seven of the eight opponents—five Republicans and two Dixiecrats—had not supported Kennedy’s election and were not influenced by Kennedy’s wishes. “That’s who really killed the bill,” he said, “just as they’ve killed it for fifty years, not the Catholics.”

The death of his aid to education bill, however, was accompanied by one of the most far-reaching changes in American politics effected during the Kennedy years. To a much greater extent than had been true the previous November, the ban on Catholics in the White House was dead also. John Kennedy had demonstrated that a Catholic could with-stand
the full pressures of the hierarchy on a bill of real significance to both sides, and he was toasted from Protestant pulpits throughout the land. One of his most violent opponents in the campaign a few months earlier, for example, Dr. W. A. Criswell of Dallas, called upon his flock “to stand behind President Kennedy and the Constitution.” Even the POAU reported it was “extremely well pleased with President Kennedy” whose “strong stand…will reassure and inspire all who believe in the separation of Church and State…. We hope that the American people will support President Kennedy against the Bishops of his church.”

Many Catholic laymen, and a few Catholic publications such as
Commonweal
, supported the President’s position, and his friend Cardinal Cushing called upon Catholics to recognize the majority’s opposition to tax-supported parochial schools and “neither force such legislation through at the expense of national disunity or use their political influence in Congress to block other legislation of benefit to education because they do not get their own way.” But the President felt once again that most members of the hierarchy were opposed to both him and his program. At the 1961 Gridiron Dinner he referred to the old anti-Catholic legend that Al Smith, when his defeat in 1928 prevented the Pope from “taking over” America, had sent the Pontiff a one-word wire: “Unpack!” “Well,” Kennedy said, “after my stand on the school bill, I received a one-word wire from the Pope myself. It said ‘Pack!’”

At the 1963 Dinner, with no change in the situation in sight, it having been somewhat exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing compulsory prayers in the public schools, he summed up the measure’s chances with a realistic quip. “The Chief Justice,” he said, “has assured me that our school bill is clearly constitutional—because it hasn’t got a prayer.”

The Court’s decision on school prayers, and another on Bible-reading in the schools, threatened to raise new religious issues for the 1964 Presidential campaign. Many of the same conservative Protestants who in 1960 had denounced all Catholics—for supposedly seeking to break down the barrier between church and state, to upset the delicate constitutional balance on religious liberty and to threaten the secular nature of the public schools—were in 1963, with no sense of inconsistency, denouncing the Supreme Court for banning the recitation of formal prayers and Bible-reading in the public schools, and demanding a constitutional amendment to permit them. Most Catholic leaders, and many liberal Protestants, also attacked these decisions, as did the United States Governors’ Conference and many powerful members of Congress.

A new ugly battle loomed, with all the controversies over the Court, the school bill, the Catholic President and his re-election being twisted
together. The President, however, took much of the sting out of these decisions and much of the force out of any drive to amend the Constitution. He did it by his thoughtful response to a news conference question on the prayer case:

That answer to me symbolized Kennedy’s mastery of the religious issue throughout his stay in the White House. He disappointed all critics who had warned that he would weaken the Constitution and any Catholics who had hoped that he would. His administration made clear that this country is not officially Catholic, Protestant or even Christian, but a democratic republic in which neither religion in general nor any church in particular can be either established or curbed by public act.

True to his word, he showed no religious favoritism in the selection of his appointees, no fear of ecclesiastical pressures and no divided loyalty of any kind. No ambassador was sent to the Vatican. With his support, the Federal Government quietly but extensively increased its activities in the area of birth and population control—increasing its research grants, supporting an expansion of UN efforts and offering to help make more information available to other countries requesting it. A 1962 bill providing for the censorship of obscene publications in the District of Columbia—the kind of bill his critics had assumed heavy clerical pressures would force him to sign regardless of merit—was vetoed, not because he favored such publications but because the bill had grave constitutional defects. Having told the Texas preachers that he would have no hesitancy in attending a Protestant service in his capacity as President, he flew in his first year to Texas for the funeral of Sam Rayburn.

He attended Protestant prayer breakfasts with a now very friendly Billy Graham, received various Protestant clergymen at the White House and met privately—in my office, so that even visitors in the White House could not know—with anti-Catholic pamphleteer Paul Blanshard, seeking his agreement to the inclusion of private colleges in the higher education bill, and he kept me in touch with Blanshard generally. He felt as free as any other President to visit the Pope (but did not, in
keeping with his own precedents as well as the protocol applicable to heads of state, kneel or kiss Pope Paul’s ring but simply shook hands).

Partly as a result of John Kennedy’s example—and the example of another John whose brief tenure as Pope overlapped Kennedy’s brief tenure as President, but who by tragic chance died before they could meet—the Catholic Church in this country became less subject to recriminations from without and more subject to reform from within.

But the President at no time changed or downgraded his Catholic faith; he did not reduce or conceal his church attendance; and he possessed with pride a set of military identification “dog tags” inscribed with the unprecedented combination: “Kennedy, John F.—Commander-in-Chief—O [for blood type]—Roman Catholic.”

J
OHN F. KENNEDY WAS A HAPPY PRESIDENT
. Happiness, he often said, paraphrasing Aristotle, is the full use of one’s faculties along lines of excellence, and to him the Presidency offered the ideal opportunity to pursue excellence.

He liked the job, he thrived on its pressures. Disappointments only made him more determined. Only once do I recall his speaking with any bitterness about his post. It was a few minutes before he was to go on the air with his Cuban missile speech, and the Congressional leaders whom he called in for a briefing had presented a thousand objections and no new suggestions. More weary from their wrangling than his own week of deliberations, he remarked to me in disgust as he changed clothes for TV, “If they want this——job, they can have it.”

But moments later he was once again full of determination and drive; and at all other times he made clear his pride of office. When I handed him a letter from my eight-year-old son Eric, who volunteered the information that he liked the White House and would like to live there someday, the President wrote on it in reply: “So do I…sorry, Eric, you’ll have to wait your turn.” When asked at a press conference, in reference to his brother Teddy’s comment on the unattractive burdens of the office, “whether, if you had to do it over again, you would work for the Presidency and whether you can recommend the job to others,” he replied, “Well, the answer…[to] the first is Yes, and [to] the second is No, I don’t recommend it to others—at least for a while.”

Without minimizing the difficulties of the office, he made clear in a variety of other press conferences and interviews that he was very happy in his work:

Life was not all satisfaction and happiness, even in a damned good job, but it was personal adversity that affected him more deeply than any political attack or policy setback. He wept over the death of his infant son Patrick, the first child born to the wife of a President in office in this century. The President, more at home and involved with his children in the White House than he had ever been before, had looked forward with special pleasure to the arrival of this child; and he seemed even more broken than Jacqueline when a lung ailment took Patrick less than two days after his premature birth in August, 1963. “He wouldn’t take his hands off that little coffin,” said Cardinal Cushing, who presided at the Mass. “I was afraid he’d carry it right out with him.”

For the grieving father, rushing in vain to reach his wife’s side before the baby was born, then flying back and forth between her hospital bed on Cape Cod and the Boston hospital to which Patrick had been taken for special treatment, those few days were like a grisly nightmare. But he was due to send to the Senate that week his special message on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty—a message of hope—and nearly every day during his ordeal it was necessary for him to discuss the message with me by telephone in a downcast but factual manner. Presidents have little time for formal mourning, and President Kennedy was soon back in the swirl of office. But he also took time out the following October for an unpublicized visit to Patrick’s grave.

Earlier in his term another family tragedy had struck, and this, too, temporarily broke his spirits but not his stride. On Thanksgiving, 1961, he expressed concern to me about his father’s health, and the following month he received word in the White House that the Ambassador had suffered a stroke in Palm Beach. Moving swiftly to the Presidential plane, “Air Force One,” he asked me to continue en route the review of the 1962 legislative planning we had barely begun.

It was with difficulty and incredible self-discipline that he engrossed himself in our work on that sorrowful flight. The mutual bonds of affection and admiration between father and son had not diminished
in the White House, and Joseph P. Kennedy’s subsequent Inability to communicate freely to his son removed a welcomed source of encouragement and cheer for the President. Saddened to see the old man suffering both physical and mental agony in his permanently crippled and virtually speechless condition, the President later wondered out loud about the decision facing doctors who work desperately to keep alive any man hovering between a peaceful death and a fraction of life. In the months that followed his father’s stroke, he continued to return in full all the love and loyalty his father had for so long lavished upon him, frequently talking to (not really with) the Ambassador by telephone, visiting him at Palm Beach and Cape Cod, and inviting him for long stays at the White House.