John F. Kennedy's enduring fascination continues to generate an unending stream of literature, but recent trends in publishing have made much of it a victim of a kind of Gresham's law: the bad books – those that endlessly recycle the same often dubious stories of mob connections and extramarital affairs – crowd out the good. In The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960 Shaun Casey has managed to open up a window on a forgotten aspect of the era, and, astonishingly, to uncover some very significant new revelations about Kennedy, Nixon and mid-century America with the help of detailed archival research, much of it in the archives of religious organizations and leaders. Everyone knows, of course, that Kennedy's Catholicism was an important issue in 1960, but few now realize just how many millions of Protestant Americans still believed that the election of a Catholic would mean the end of the United States as they had known it. How Republicans (with, it turns out, the full knowledge and support of candidate Nixon) tried to mobilize these feelings, and how Kennedy and his supporters tried to counter them, is the subject of Casey's detailed, though relatively brief, narrative. It is a model of historical research.

Casey's introductory chapters deal, on the one hand, with the Kennedy team's early efforts (starting in 1956) to market his religion as a potential asset rather than a liability, and on the other with the rather sorry state of interfaith relations at the time. Kennedy staffer Ted Sorensen (himself a half-Jewish Unitarian) was the first to put the argument on paper: a Catholic candidate (either as vice president in 1956 or President in 1960) could win back millions of Catholic voters who had defected to Eisenhower, and who lived in critical Northeastern and Mid-western states. With typical finesse, the Kennedy team marketed the idea through Connecticut Democrat John Bailey, whom they eventually rewarded with the party's national chairmanship. It nearly managed to win him the vice presidential nomination in 1956 and positioned him well for 1960. Yet meanwhile, as Casey shows at length, many leading Protestants continued to believe that the Catholic church opposed religious pluralism and the separation of church and state. In support of these views they could draw both upon relatively recent pronouncements from the Vatican – which until Vatican II was still insisting rigidly that Catholicism represented the only true faith and path to heaven – and upon examples from some Catholic countries, especially Franco's Spain. (Catholic countries like France, where church and state were far more rigidly separated than in the United States, never seemed to figure in these discussions.) Such views were hardly confined to the heartland of America, either: their adherents included one Harold Ockenga, the pastor of one of New England's leading evangelical congregations, the Park Street church in JFK's own Boston. Kennedy's own efforts to distance himself from the church – for instance by voting against any government aid to parochial schools – cut little ice with much of Protestant opinion. Meanwhile, the hierarchy of certain liberal and mainline Protestant denominations continued to fear the rigid Catholic opposition to birth control. “As ideological pressures mounted within Protestantism through the sixties and into the seventies,” Casey writes (111), “it would be increasingly rare to find conservative and liberal Protestants united for anything. But in 1960, they were united in their anti-Catholicism.”

Casey's account of the Kennedy campaign's initial handling of the religious issue during the first half of 1960 breaks relatively little new ground. John and Robert Kennedy hoped they could put the issue to rest and more or less lock up the nomination by sweeping all the congressional districts in Wisconsin, but their worst fears were realized when Protestant districts generally went for Hubert Humphrey while they swept the Catholic ones. That in turn forced Kennedy into the West Virginia primary, unfriendly Protestant territory indeed, where, as Theodore White showed in his history of the campaign, Kennedy successfully turned the issue into one of tolerance rather than Catholicism, and defeated Humphrey with a mixture of better organization and vastly superior resources. Casey leaves out another fascinating aspect of the story entirely: the skepticism about Kennedy's candidacy among urban Catholic bosses such as David Lawrence of Pennsylvania and Mayor Daley of Chicago, who feared the local impact of a Catholic at the top of the Democratic ticket. All this, however, was only a warm-up. Richard Nixon, the most determined and skillful Republican politician of his generation, knew a potentially winning issue when he saw it, whether it was communism in 1946 or 1950 or Catholicism against JFK. The most extraordinary revelations of Casey's book show how Nixon tried covertly to ride bigotry, among other things, into the White House.

Nixon, typically, had a foot in both camps. All through the 1950s, Father John Cronin, whose alliance with Nixon dated back to the Alger Hiss case of the late 1940s, helped write speeches for the vice president and gave him advice on appealing to Catholics and to the Catholic hierarchy. But Nixon also was cultivating close ties to Protestant luminaries such as Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, both of whom were friendly to him and at the same time hostile to the idea of a Catholic in the White House. The Nixon campaign initially delayed any contacts with leading Protestants until after the West Virginia primary, apparently because it did not believe until then that Kennedy would be the candidate – but at that point it sprung into action, accepting the offer of Orlando “O. K.” Armstrong, a journalist, former Missouri congressman, and Protestant activist, to become the covert liaison between the Nixon campaign on the one hand and anti-Catholic Protestant activists on the other. Casey is apparently the first historian to have discovered Armstrong's role, fully documented in Armstrong's papers in an obscure Missouri university library. Armstrong suggested that the campaign rely on well-organized Protestant networks, including the Southern Baptist Convention (which had already passed a resolution against a Catholic President), the National Association of evangelicals, and various other Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Baptist sects who were already on record against putting a Catholic in the White House. Masonic lodges were another important ally. A large organization, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU), played a key role, placing some articles questioning the idea of a Catholic President in some major publications. For the rest of the campaign Armstrong moved around the country organizing the troops, while the Republican National Committee picked up the tab for his travels. (Casey could not discover who paid for other aspects of his campaign.) Armstrong focussed on thirteen critical swing states in every region but the Northeast: Missouri, Arkansas, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, Illinois, California, Ohio, Indiana, and North Carolina. Of those thirteen, only Arkansas, North Carolina, Missouri, Texas, and Illinois went for Kennedy – the last three by margins ranging from narrow to microscopic.

One of Armstrong's key allies was Dr. Nelson Bell, the editor of a prominent evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, and the father-in-law of Billy Graham. Graham's whole role in the story is one of the most fascinating parts of Casey's book. In a successful attempt to maintain his new stature as a mainstream Protestant leader while increasing the anti-Catholic vote, Graham managed to keep his role entirely covert. In mid-August, while “crusading” in Europe, he convened a meeting in Montreux, Switzerland of twenty-five prominent Protestants to discuss the election. Both Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, who attended, wrote to Nixon glowingly of the results of the meeting, and Graham continued to advise the vice president on how to use, or not use, religion throughout the campaign, and informed him of the massive pro-Nixon campaign he was mounting in Protestant churches. (Graham also tried to recruit the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the cause, and thought he was being successful until the famous incident of King's Georgia arrest and release.)

The Republican–Protestant alliance came a public cropper in September thanks to two events in Washington, DC. First, a Scottish Presbyterian minister who attended a meeting of POAU in Washington tipped off the Kennedy campaign about its links to Nixon, including the key role of O. K. Armstrong, and added that Republican National Chairman Thruston Morton was coordinating Protestant anti-Kennedy activities in certain areas. On the very next day, Norman Vincent Peale presided over a closed meeting in Washington of an ad hoc organization, the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, at the Mayflower Hotel. The meeting handed out what amounted to the party line – that the church's traditional insistence that Catholic office-holders had to respect its doctrine trumped candidate Kennedy's insistence that he would continue to act only in the national interest without reference to his faith. The day's speeches, which Casey reports at length, make chilling reading. Unfortunately for the group, an enterprising young female reporter named Bonnie Angelo managed to break through the blackout and hear the proceedings, and she shared her account with an older reporter from the Washington Post. Their accounts raised a firestorm of criticism both from the press and from liberal Protestants, including Reinhold Niebuhr. Peale denied his role in organizing the group, while the more discreet Graham carefully allowed Peale to hang out to dry without any support whatever. Nixon himself had to disavow the meeting. But the Kennedy campaign found it more prudent to sit on the information they had received about O. K. Armstrong and his connections to the Nixon campaign and the Republican National Committee – another intriguing contrast with how things might be handled today.

The anti-Catholic campaign had now been forced underground but was no less effective for that. Tracts, Casey points out, were a staple of Protestant intellectual life in mid-century, and many thousands on the dangers of a Catholic presidency were widely distributed. Wisely, the Kennedy campaign focussed its counterattack on the Protestant state that it simply had to have, Texas, where Lyndon Johnson was an important source of information and support. The key event, of course, was Kennedy's meeting with Baptist ministers in September in Houston, including not only a speech but a lengthy and vigorous (sometimes even abusive) question-and-answer session. Kennedy's climactic statement is worth quoting, if only to show how much American attitudes towards religion and politics have changed in the last half-century:

The election on 8 November 1960 was the first one which I followed with intense interest, and that night remains the most exciting of my entire life. Raised in a Democratic family, I was thrilled as JFK swept most of the Northeast and his lead in the popular vote neared two million. The first shock came in Ohio, where Kennedy had campaigned heavily but which Nixon took rather easily. Nixon also took four southern states – Florida, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee – while Texas went Democratic by just 40,000 votes. Nixon took nearly the entire farm block and, in the end, every western state save Nevada – including California, which he won by just a few thousand votes thanks to absentee ballots. But Kennedy prevailed, with more than thirty electoral votes to spare, thanks to razor-thin victories in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and New Jersey. Thanks to Casey, I now understand those results far better than I ever did before.