Kennedy: The Classic Biography (66 page)

When Congress dropped scholarships out of these bills, the President broadened student loans and scholarships under existing laws. When general Federal aid was defeated, he invented or expanded new means of specialized aid: quadrupling vocational education, allocating Presidential funds to stop dropouts, authorizing literacy training under Manpower Development, providing funds to teach the deaf and the handicapped and the retarded and the exceptional child, increasing funds for school lunches and libraries, working with schools on delinquency—in all these ways not only attacking serious educational problems but freeing local funds for use on general construction and salaries. Other enactments aided community libraries, college dormitories and educational television. An estimated one-third of all principal Kennedy programs made some form of education a central element, and the Office of Education called it the most significant legislative period in its hundred-year history.

Nevertheless his bill for general aid to elementary and secondary education failed, unable to survive a harsh combination of controversies of which religion was only the most conspicuous. For nearly fifty years similar bills had been the victim of arguments over civil rights, states’ rights, academic freedom, balanced budgets and financial equalization. Its supporters in the Congress could not agree among themselves, and most of its organizational backers were inept, uncooperative and inconsistent. “He’s simply against all Catholics, regardless of whether his position endangers an education bill,” Abe Ribicoff told us in summing up the views of one long-time school lobbyist.

On the other hand, said a Catholic cleric, some of his colleagues were simply against all Federal aid to education bills, regardless of whether they included constitutional aid to children attending parochial schools. Kennedy expressed no surprise at this. But he noted that a bill limited to public schools had nearly passed in 1960 with no major protest from the hierarchy, and he hoped that his church would be equally understanding of his campaign pledge to obtain such a bill.

His hopes were soon dashed. Even before inauguration, Cardinal Spellman denounced the Kennedy task force report on education as “unthinkable” for not including parochial schools equally. “He never said a word about any of Eisenhower’s bills for public schools only,” muttered the President, “and he didn’t go that far in 1949 either.” But he refused to duck the issue or alter his view, and he presented early in the year a massive Federal aid to education bill limited, as he emphasized, to public schools “in accordance with the clear prohibition of the Constitution.” The National Catholic Welfare Conference, representing the full hierarchy in America, immediately called for the Kennedy bill’s defeat unless loans to nonpublic schools were added. Pastoral letters in many churches urged parishioners to write their Congressmen.

The President, wondering once again why he had been singled out, pointedly referred in a press conference to the fact that there had been no similar agitation during the Republican administration. “The Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy are entitled to their views,” he added, but “they should not change their views merely because of the religion of the occupant of the White House.”

His campaign commitment and the Constitution were both clear on this matter, in his opinion, and a comprehensive brief by the Departments of Justice and Health, Education, and Welfare reinforced his view. He saw nothing discriminatory about helping local taxpayers of all faiths finance schools that were open to all faiths—and which, in fact, roughly half of all Catholic children attended, as he had. His continued reliance on the Constitution in messages and press conferences seemed to make some Catholics angrier; but no matter how many different versions of the question the President received, his answer always reflected his determination (1) to promote public school education
and
(2) to preserve church-state separation. The problem was to find some means of removing Catholic objections to the former without violating the latter.

Secretary Ribicoff and I met quietly and informally with a local Catholic cleric who in turn was in touch with officials of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. These discussions ultimately focused on possible amendments—to be proposed in the Congress, and not by the President—to the National Defense Education Act (NDEA).

The NDEA, enacted in 1958, already included loans for private school education in categories essential to defense. It thus provided the most convenient and constitutional vehicle for demonstrating that it was “across-the-board” aid to Catholic schools, not “categorical aid” to Catholic schoolchildren, which the Constitution forbade. While the President remained formally committed only to his original program, advocated no other and did not want it amended to cover parochial schools, he had no constitutional or policy objection to the Congress, by separate bill, removing Catholic opposition to his bill by broadening the NDEA’s categories and increasing its loan funds. As a young Congressman he had made a similar effort more than a decade earlier to bridge the gap between public and parochial aid adherents by introducing an auxiliary services “aid to the child” amendment in committee in keeping with the
Everson
school bus case.

But the public school advocates had been suspicious of his amendment then, and they were suspicious of widening NDEA in 1961. The Kennedy Federal Aid to Education Bill, having passed the Senate early in 1961, and having been reported out of committee in the House, ran afoul of his one-vote margin in the House Rules Committee. Democrat Jim Delaney sincerely believed, along with a majority of his constituents, that distinguishing between Catholic and other schoolchildren was unconstitutional and unfair. Having sensed the gathering Protestant storm over the NDEA amendments, he concluded—and no doubt rightly—that once he agreed to the public school bill, the NDEA bill would be mutilated or killed. As he waited until both bills reached the Rules Committee, religious feelings boiled up on both sides; and with no prospect of joining the two bills together or passing the NDEA bill first, Delaney joined Smith, Colmer and all five Republicans in voting the Kennedy bill down by 8-7. No amount of pleading or pressure by the President or Ribicoff could budge him. More adamant than many leaders of his church, he had no interest in bargains or trades on other subjects. “He didn’t want a thing,” said O’Brien. “I wish he had.” The more Delaney was attacked by editorials and Protestant spokesmen, the more he was applauded by his Catholic constituents and colleagues.

The battle lines were now drawn in Congress and the country. A new organization, Citizens for Educational Freedom, threatened to defeat any Congressmen opposed to aiding parochial schools. Legislators received an avalanche of letters on both sides, some accidentally including instructions on how to write your Congressman on parochial school aid. One bloc of House members vowed to oppose any bill that included parochial aid, another bloc vowed to oppose any bill that excluded parochial aid, and the rest, with divided constituencies, devoutly hoped no bill would ever be reported that would force them to take a stand. John McCormack came out for across-the-board loans to parochial schools. Sam Rayburn said opposition would be less without inclusion in the bill of teachers’ salaries. The education lobbies denounced any deletion of teachers’ salaries. House leaders agreed that no bill on this subject could pass without first obtaining Rules Committee approval, and that—in the atmosphere then prevailing—no bill could win the support of both Delaney and the Southerners to provide that Rules Committee approval.

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:

I think that it is important…that we support the Supreme Court decisions even when we may not agree with them. In addition, we have in this case a very easy remedy and that is to pray ourselves…. We can pray a good deal more at home, we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity, and we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of all of our children. That power is very much open to us.

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.