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The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960

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This 200 page book characterizes the 1960 presidential campaign between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon as a battle pitting Protestant personalities and institutions against what they perceived to be the threat of foreign hierarchical Catholic power infiltrating democratic Protestant America. The author, Shaun Casey, is an Associate Professor in Christian Ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary and director of an educational Washington Semester program for seminarians. He played some role as an advisor in President Obama's campaign. His book is a masterly blend of careful research and narrative that does not include his own political worldview, until the epilogue.

Any student of religion and politics or practitioner in the art of elections will benefit by studying Casey's assemblage of characters and primary sources. He does not impose the sensibilities of our own times on the picture he draws of a broad based Protestant animus against a Catholic president. Liberal Protestants (who preferred Adlai Stevenson), and popular preachers (Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale) joined the anti Catholic tract producing POAU (Protestants and other Americans United for Separation of Church and State) in mounting arguments against the ascendancy of a Roman Catholic as President. Understanding American republican institutions as the civic manifestation of the religious exodus of free Protestant churches in the role of Israel waging bloody war against the monarchical Babylon of Catholicism was not a story developed in the 1960s simply to fight off JFK. The American republic was a child of the newly formulated ecclesiastical communities of the Protestant reformation. To trust the command of the military of the most powerful Christian nation in history to a practicing Catholic would cause a deep foreboding in any man with a sense of God's work in history amidst the nations.

Casey never anachronistically labels such concerns as bigotry. There were plenty of Vatican and Catholic hierarchy statements about "error having no rights" and the undesirability of separation of church and state in states where the Catholics were a majority. If a Catholic candidate obeyed his bishop or the pope on national policy issues, then electing a Catholic was in effect electing a bishop or pope as president. These arguments were made by Protestant high clergy like Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam as well as Paul Blanshard, the general counsel for POAU. Bishop Oxnam ("America's Protestant cardinal") was president of American Methodist bishops as well as a founding member of POAU and the FCC-a precursor to the National Council of Churches. Blanshard was a tireless effective political organizer at state and federal levels in alerting free Protestant America to the steady rise of Catholic political power and their encroaching claims on portions of the public purse. POAU was founded to counter the rising power of Catholic immigrants in big city political machines. POAU enjoyed wide support across the Protestant spectrum.

Casey explains that a key strength of Kennedy was his willingness to meet face to face with his strongest opposition. Kennedy in fact met with both Blanshard and Bishop Oxnam. The Bishop introduced him in April 1959 to a meeting of 51 Methodist bishops a group no less hostile than the Houston Ministers Association who Kennedy would meet the next year in Texas. Kennedy met with the best of his opposition for dialogue and debate--this made him sharper in formulating his message and more formidable as a leader willing to defend himself in any environment however hostile. Like Kennedy himself, Houston ministers and Methodist bishops respected manly engagement with hostile groups. For all of them a decade after WWII, the character needed to initiate such engagement evidenced a necessary virtue for the Presidency. It may be hard for those younger than forty to appreciate the unusual nature of Kennedy's direct approach to his ideological foes who were not formal candidates and opposition. JFK's approach was actually more dramatic but still analogous to a black candidate representing the "godless Democrats" accepting a direct interview debate moderated by a white prolife evangelical Christian.

Casey paints the organized Protestant opposition to Kennedy as the real roots of the religious right and the birth of a Republican southern strategy. At the same time he relates the high tone civil discussion by Protestant "liberals' at Christianity and Crisis which could see contemporary American Catholics through a different lens than papal statements of the 1870's condemning democracy, liberalism, and the secularization of the nations. He concludes the story of the election with a fascinating tale of the heroic honesty of conservative Baptists in Texas. On Nov. 2, an editorial in the Baptist Standard advised that Baptists "vote your convictions" pointing out that it was Protestants Lodge and Nixon not the Roman Catholic Kennedy who were "evasive and ambiguous" about federal aid to parochial schools.

This book allows many unfiltered voices to be heard from 50 years ago. It will be a valuable resource in understanding the difficulty for Catholics or Mormons to win current presidential Republican primaries (Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindahl and Sam Brownback should all read this book). The book also marshals a beginning counter narrative to the neoconservative portrayal of JFK as the instigator of the naked public square. Kennedy, a man faithful to his religious obligations to worship and his civic obligation of military duty, was emphatic that the public policy statements of Catholic clergy would not bind him in performing the duties of his office. In another useful example of Casey's exploration of original sources he includes letters and insights from Kennedy's most important cleric confidant (more than the amiable and loyal Richard Cushing) Bishop John Wright. Bishop Wright, a religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal clergyman, shows a much more profound understanding of Kennedy as a "structural Catholic" than today's young "orthodox" Catholic critics.

Today's young Catholic critics of Kennedy have substituted a kind of Canadian Lutheran propositionalism for the lived orthodoxy of Catholic worship and civic duty which instructed the life of our first and only Catholic president. Kennedy's language from Houston to Berlin strikes the Roman cadence of duty and office invigorated by the Germanic oaths of warrior blood covenants. When he discusses being Catholic, it is not a voluntary choice but the liturgical fact of infant baptism. When he discusses American military obligations, it is not a choice but a watch duty assigned by history. His critics speak in the language of applied morality flowing from joint declarations of principles. As Bobby Kennedy once said of Eugene McCarthy (who nominated Stevenson in 1960) "he thinks because he quotes Thomas Aquinas, he is a better Catholic than us."

When Kennedy spoke against heeding the clerical line on narrow "Catholic issues" of sending an ambassador to the Vatican or granting federal aid to parochial schools he generally followed with overtly religious rhetoric. When he rejected Catholic sectarianism he never followed by rendering the public square naked but in fact fully clothed his deeper vision of "the real issues before the nation" in religious-military dress. After evoking the fortress of the Alamo and the bloody battles in the Pacific Ocean and German heartland, he ended his speech to Houston ministers with the presidential oath-"so help me God." Young intellectuals who read Kennedy with the neutered eyes of propositional morality have never really heard "so help me God" in the deep masculine voice of a free man representing a biblical nation in a life and death war with a godless foe.

Casey offers a rich selection of Kennedy's words and a careful recalling of theological nuances in different religious journals (the Protestant Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis as well as the Catholic Commonweal and America). All of these sources point to a very different interpretation of Kennedy as a warrior-chief of a nation under God. While Casey in his epilogue states his own doubt that such a civil religion is still possible, this does not stop him from presenting Kennedy in his own words and time. An honest reading of this book by conservative Catholics may help them reexamine the "structural religion" of imposed duties and high ritual which make Kennedy quite unlike modern Catholic Democrats. Understanding the fundamental religious difference between John Kennedy as the President and John Kerry as a candidate or Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House instructs both neoconservatives at First Things magazine and evangelical counselors to President Obama. This book's diligent gathering of sources is excellent history precisely because it can instruct men with very different sensibilities about the role of a direct forceful masculine personality willing to dialogue with friend and foe alike while articulating the obligations and aspirations of the American civic tradition.

A very interesting book. I had read "The making of a President " by Theodore White many years ago and he hardly mentioned the religious issue which according to this book was all consuming. It made me realize how mcuh Kennedy had to overcome and for the first time I realized his victory was bigger than Obama's. Also our country has come a long way since that election and because of Kennedy it is a better country. It also made clear that Kennedy never renounced his religion as so many conservative Catholic 's try to say today.

Shaun Casey is a friend of mine. Early in 2009, I heard that Shaun had a book published. I found a copy online. This is the type of book that I would never buy off the shelf in a bookstore. This, however, was a different situation. A friend had written the book - now the title and subject matter intrigued me. I ordered a copy and anxiously awaited for it to arrive.

I was two years old when Nixon and Kennedy faced one another in the general election of 1960. What I know I heard from movies (unreliable) and snippets of news coverage (only slightly more reliable). There was intrigue with the mafia, labor unions, and voter fraud in that election. Still, it was one of the most narrow victories in a Presidential election in our history.

Shaun didn't write about any of those matters. Instead, he wrote about the letters, meeting, "tracts" (some of us old south conservative Christians know what a tract is), small Bible colleges, and so on. These played roles in that close election. Shaun brings those stories and those people to life in his book. There is some serious research in here. When did Shaun have the time to do that. He was working inside the Obama campaign through 2008.

I liked this book. I am glad Shaun wrote it or I would have never read it. The stories are interesting. I recognize the names of some of the places, people, and publications. They all influenced the outcome of that election.

Nixon and Kennedy had religious backgrounds. That seems strange to write. Kennedy cheated on his wife, invaded Cuba unsuccessfully, and succeeded at involving the United States in Southeast Asia. Nixon pulled the U.S. out of Southeast Asia, cursed blue streaks in the Oval Office, and ordered illegal break-ins during a landslide campaign. Still, these two men had religions and understood how religion could influence the outcome of their race. Shaun Casey helps bring these two Presidents to life in a manner that I understood them.

Thanks, Shaun.